15 ms·

Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot (2015)

119 points by dnetesn 8y ago

rayiner 8y ago
> And yet zeppelins were flying in 1900; a year before, in New York City, the first pedestrian had already been killed by an automobile. Was the notion of air travel, or the thought that the car was going to change life on the street, really so beyond envisioning—or is it merely the chauvinism of the present, peering with faint condescension at our hopelessly primitive predecessors? I heartily recommend doing the Carousel of Progress ride at Disney World. It’s a quite eye-opening look at how little life has changed in the last 150 years.
- tomjen3 8y ago
  I could not disagree with you more about that, but anyway this seems to be a good video showing the ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKz6qdexetY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKz6qdexetY
- theoh 8y ago
  I think this conclusion results from the form of projection discussed in the article, except that you're applying it to the past. The risk is of overemphasizing even slight similarities (projecting your own circumstances onto past conditions) rather than acknowledging those things that have changed beyond all recognition.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    The article actually makes the opposite assertion: that people over-emphasize the differences between the past and today, and assume that the present would be unrecognizable to people in the past. That’s one reason I mention the Disney ride. When did we get electricity, refrigerated food, inter-continental communications? It was earlier than people assume.
    - jhbadger 8y ago
      Although, as William Gibson once said, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". And this has always been the case. There is a difference between when something is available and when it is commonplace. While electricity was technically available in the late 19th century, even in 1930s America it wasn't available in most rural areas yet -- hence the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. And of course there are places, mainly in Africa which still don't have electricity.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > I heartily recommend doing the Carousel of Progress ride at Disney World. It’s a quite eye-opening look at how little life has changed in the last 150 years. I just say: "Internet".
  - rayiner 8y ago
    For the most part, people use the internet to do things they were doing anyway. Netflix is better than cable, but not fundamentally different. (You can tell, because people don’t even use a lot of the advances enabled by the internet. Business people still use phone calls more than video conferencing for example.) Refrigerators or industrial farming had a bigger impact on fundamentally restructuring peoples’ lives than the internet. You could still run most of the modern world without the internet, replacing it with fax and telephone (century old technology at this point). It would be painful but doable. Without refrigerators society as currently structured would collapse.
    - arkh 8y ago
      > For the most part, people use the internet to do things they were doing anyway. More than Internet the combination of internet and smartphones. Someone in Africa could get the advice of a doctor in the USA just with the push of a button. People have access to the biggest encyclopedia thanks to a less than a pound item. The fact we can easily have a calculator, GPS system, access to most information in the world, have an audio and video conference with people from all around the world thanks to some small item we carry in our pockets is now taken for granted but it was missed by most scifi writers until the 90s.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        >More than Internet the combination of internet and smartphones. Someone in Africa could get the advice of a doctor in the USA just with the push of a button Not like they can afford that advice. Or that it would do them much without treatment. Outside of special upper class cases this just doesn't happen. >People have access to the biggest encyclopedia thanks to a less than a pound item Which they mainly use to settle BS quarrels about who did what, and to serve as a replacement from actually studying something...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ivanbakel 8y ago
I think futurists with a progressive bent can also be guilty of the opposite: assuming the cultural future somehow won't follow the present. The age of technological advancement will inevitably be good, because it will also miraculously be missing all our current bugbears like prejudice and inequality, which technology might otherwise worsen, rather than eliminate. If we like to think that we're far more advanced than our predecessors, the conclusion is that our descendants will leave us in the dust. Maybe misplaced faith in the former encourages our hope for the latter over a dystopia where everything is as bad as it already is, only worse.
- gedy 8y ago
  A lot of that is due to this "blank slate" idea of humans. All bias, instincts, gut reactions, etc is all learned behaviour, and if we just changed culture it would all go away. (Not that I agree with that)
  - freshhawk 8y ago
    But they also assume culture will just change in the way they want as opposed to having to be changed. That is probably the larger mistake.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Really you can't assume culture one way or another. Conservative futurists assume that the social norms and traditions will stay forever when that wasn't the case even centuries ago. It brings to mind science fiction from the 50s which assumes their values will remain. Living cultures are fundamentally a Ship of Theseus - while some aspects may remain you can't assume - even what they hold most sacred.
- philwelch 8y ago
  There are a few things that give me pause about progressive visions of the future, but the biggest one is just the sheer terrifying demographics of it. The predominant culture of the developed world is catastrophically infertile. The more progressive parts of these cultures are often the least fertile, while the more conservative and traditional parts are more fertile. But the offspring of these traditional subcultures often convert into the progressive culture, at least where that culture is more prosperous and holds higher perceived status. Part of what makes religions so persistent is their evolutionary fitness from a memetic perspective. “Tell everyone you know to worship $DEITY, have lots of babies, and also kill/shun anyone who tries to stop worshipping $DEITY” is a great algorithm for maximizing the number of $DEITY-worshippers. “Never have sex or try to convert anyone” is a shitty algorithm, which is why the Shakers are practically extinct while Islam is on course to become the world’s largest religion (and may already be, if you subtract the plurality of western Christians who are behaviorally secular anyway). I suspect some memetic program that survives contact with science, prosperity, and progressivism without turning infertile, if it ever evolves, will be the foundation of the future of human culture.
nikhizzle 8y ago
One prominent counterpoint to this article is the school of Afrofuturism. Lately, we have seen a resurgence in this thought line ranging from Black Panther to Janelle Monae. But those of us in technology often are not aware of this very important, visionary futuristic movement. I'll also add if you haven't seen Black Panther, go and see it. Most science fiction reminds me of Kowloon by day, Tokyo by night. It is so refreshing to see a different, Africa-centric view of the future. Think Nairobi 2080.
- tristo 8y ago
  So you think futurism should be based around black people? Congrats that's racist and ethnocentric. Maybe this scenario is unlikely to happen given the present situation? Most African countries have barely enough water and you expect them to become tech leaders tomorrow?
  - kienankb 8y ago
    That's...not at all what they said...
  - dang 8y ago
    We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
- djpr 8y ago
  I agree with and excited about this development. I'm an academically trained futurist and I'm continually frustrated by the future as being techno-solutionist-driven and mostly Western or some Hong Kong/Tokyo future. Black Panther, I hope, will help people to be inspired by other ideas of what the future can be - from different cultural lenses, changes in view of technology, changes in ways of doing etc. It's about decolonizing the future and opening the door to other ways of being. Here's one of my favorite piece of futures work that I like to talk about. It's about the future of human relationships: https://jfsdigital.org/2017/09/22/the-future-of-marriage/ https://jfsdigital.org/2017/09/22/the-future-of-marriage/ Yes, it's still techno-driven and still very San Francisco, but at least its not about flying cars or fancy tech, just different ways of being.
danidiaz 8y ago
I'm reminded of Gerard O'Neill's seventies vision of space habitats https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-lagrange/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-lagrange/ The artistic depictions tend to have a "suburb in a bottle" feel.
chewz 8y ago
Ain't futurism dead? Unfortunately? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(disambiguation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(disambiguation)
- cyberpunk0 8y ago
  Far from it
- leoc 8y ago
  Futurism isn't dead, it just smells retro.
wisty 8y ago
It seems like the article is just beating up a straw man. It doesn't define futurism, name any major futurologists, and seems to just rely on the stereotype that it's "flying cars" and "the Jetsons". It does mention The Net, and notes that ordering a pizza online is not so different to ordering a pizza on the phone. It conveniently misses the main story - that the main character has essentially no IRL social connections at all (as she telecommutes to work, only socialises online, and doesn't even know her neighbors) which is what allows her to be made a complete unperson when her online records are attacked. Maybe it's not Utopia (another futurist work) but it hardly ignores the cultural impact of technology. Some science fiction (e.g. The Jetsons) is just a contemporary drama or comedy with fantastical sets and props. But even something as soft as Doctor Who (let alone the likes of Asimov, AC Clarke) often looks at culture (either how radically different it is, or how age-old problems remain). Then there's works like 1984 and Brave New World which were almost entirely about culture. And it's not like The Jetsons ignored culture. It was deliberately a 1950s sit-com set in the far future, and was a follow-up to The Flintstones which was a 1950s sit-com set in the distant past. The fact that the original was a little conservative in its portrayal of culture might have had something to do with political environment (the Cuban missile crisis was just before it was written). I don't think it entirely ignored the possibility of social change, but was possibly trying to make some kind of statement about which economic system was really on the right side of history.
- posterboy 8y ago
  > Some science fiction (e.g. The Jetsons) is just a contemporary drama or comedy with fantastical sets and props. Or even modeled after age old stories. Like most writing recycles and reinterprets old material. I started to wonder what historic metaphors the Expanse relies on, what with ship travel taking months, pirates, colonies, the plague - but the opposite of slavery, with unconditional basic income. The gang "the Golden Bough" is a hint at Virgil's Aeneid, I learned today by coincident. It's not hard sci-fi at all. The sci-fi is kept to a minimum as much as the fantasy. That is, the fantastic elements should be kept to a minimum. Now I wonder what that thing (not to spoiler) represents. Just a deus ex machina for sake of the story or a ring of ancient overlords?
  - 8y ago
Animats 8y ago
Can this article be read without enabling tracking?
mncharity 8y ago
> Was [...] the thought that the car was going to change life on the street, really so beyond envisioning "Prediction #6: Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today." Dec 1900 [1] I enjoy reading commentary about this set of predictions... to see how people misunderstand the past. Or why something didn't happen. Take horses. One commentary says, 'no, wrong, horses were cheaper than cars are today'... and compares only purchase price, being unfamiliar with stabling. Another claims horses were more environmentally friendly than cars... forgetting that horse fodder was once a primary import of cities, their waste a primary export, and that it and carcasses once decorated streets. A major use of horses was... shipping fodder for horses. And I fuzzily recall an SV person giving a talk at Stanford, arguing you can't predict the future (sigh), and dissing the article in general, and the horse prediction as 'they thought horses will become extinct - silly them'. When they didn't say extinct; and some commercial breeds are; and given the change of urban horse populations (from like cars, to like giraffes), a non-technical "extinct" wouldn't have been wrong. Unfamiliar with the past; inattentive to the present; and lackadaisical in thought; we watch the future arrive, and find it unexpected. There's a surprise. Perhaps VR ("so this is what it was like... oh, that's weird"), and AR ("overlay the past on the present"[2]) will help. [1] "What may happen in the next hundred years" (Watkins; 1900; The Ladies Home Journal) as jpeg: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/John_Elfreth_Watkins_Ladies_Home_Journal_Predictions_1900.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/John_Elf... ; as text: http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/1900_predictions.htm http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/190... [2] Old photos overlaid on new: Zoltán https://www.facebook.com/ablakamultra https://www.facebook.com/ablakamultra https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsultan/sets/72157626149118210/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsultan/sets/7215762614911821... ; assorted https://www.google.com/search?q=then+and+now+composite&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=then+and+now+composite&tbm=i...
mncharity 8y ago
> Ideas, not technology, have driven the biggest historical changes. A Radcliffe outreach symposium about genetics research included a sketch of the history of the field. Someone asked where the dramatic innovation was coming from. It was clear they really wanted an answer of Kuhn-revolution changes in perspective leading to better questions. They were notably unhappy with the answer that, no, it was mostly technological economics. Advancing tech (sequencing, PCR), dropping costs by orders of magnitude, changed the questions we could afford to pursue.

119 points by dnetesn 8y ago

> And yet zeppelins were flying in 1900; a year before, in New York City, the first pedestrian had already been killed by an automobile. Was the notion of air travel, or the thought that the car was going to change life on the street, really so beyond envisioning—or is it merely the chauvinism of the present, peering with faint condescension at our hopelessly primitive predecessors? I heartily recommend doing the Carousel of Progress ride at Disney World. It’s a quite eye-opening look at how little life has changed in the last 150 years.

tomjen3 8y ago
I could not disagree with you more about that, but anyway this seems to be a good video showing the ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKz6qdexetY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKz6qdexetY
theoh 8y ago
I think this conclusion results from the form of projection discussed in the article, except that you're applying it to the past. The risk is of overemphasizing even slight similarities (projecting your own circumstances onto past conditions) rather than acknowledging those things that have changed beyond all recognition.
- rayiner 8y ago
  The article actually makes the opposite assertion: that people over-emphasize the differences between the past and today, and assume that the present would be unrecognizable to people in the past. That’s one reason I mention the Disney ride. When did we get electricity, refrigerated food, inter-continental communications? It was earlier than people assume.
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    Although, as William Gibson once said, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". And this has always been the case. There is a difference between when something is available and when it is commonplace. While electricity was technically available in the late 19th century, even in 1930s America it wasn't available in most rural areas yet -- hence the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. And of course there are places, mainly in Africa which still don't have electricity.
wolfgke 8y ago
> I heartily recommend doing the Carousel of Progress ride at Disney World. It’s a quite eye-opening look at how little life has changed in the last 150 years. I just say: "Internet".
- rayiner 8y ago
  For the most part, people use the internet to do things they were doing anyway. Netflix is better than cable, but not fundamentally different. (You can tell, because people don’t even use a lot of the advances enabled by the internet. Business people still use phone calls more than video conferencing for example.) Refrigerators or industrial farming had a bigger impact on fundamentally restructuring peoples’ lives than the internet. You could still run most of the modern world without the internet, replacing it with fax and telephone (century old technology at this point). It would be painful but doable. Without refrigerators society as currently structured would collapse.
  - arkh 8y ago
    > For the most part, people use the internet to do things they were doing anyway. More than Internet the combination of internet and smartphones. Someone in Africa could get the advice of a doctor in the USA just with the push of a button. People have access to the biggest encyclopedia thanks to a less than a pound item. The fact we can easily have a calculator, GPS system, access to most information in the world, have an audio and video conference with people from all around the world thanks to some small item we carry in our pockets is now taken for granted but it was missed by most scifi writers until the 90s.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >More than Internet the combination of internet and smartphones. Someone in Africa could get the advice of a doctor in the USA just with the push of a button Not like they can afford that advice. Or that it would do them much without treatment. Outside of special upper class cases this just doesn't happen. >People have access to the biggest encyclopedia thanks to a less than a pound item Which they mainly use to settle BS quarrels about who did what, and to serve as a replacement from actually studying something...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ivanbakel 8y ago

I think futurists with a progressive bent can also be guilty of the opposite: assuming the cultural future somehow won't follow the present. The age of technological advancement will inevitably be good, because it will also miraculously be missing all our current bugbears like prejudice and inequality, which technology might otherwise worsen, rather than eliminate. If we like to think that we're far more advanced than our predecessors, the conclusion is that our descendants will leave us in the dust. Maybe misplaced faith in the former encourages our hope for the latter over a dystopia where everything is as bad as it already is, only worse.

gedy 8y ago
A lot of that is due to this "blank slate" idea of humans. All bias, instincts, gut reactions, etc is all learned behaviour, and if we just changed culture it would all go away. (Not that I agree with that)
- freshhawk 8y ago
  But they also assume culture will just change in the way they want as opposed to having to be changed. That is probably the larger mistake.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Really you can't assume culture one way or another. Conservative futurists assume that the social norms and traditions will stay forever when that wasn't the case even centuries ago. It brings to mind science fiction from the 50s which assumes their values will remain. Living cultures are fundamentally a Ship of Theseus - while some aspects may remain you can't assume - even what they hold most sacred.
philwelch 8y ago
There are a few things that give me pause about progressive visions of the future, but the biggest one is just the sheer terrifying demographics of it. The predominant culture of the developed world is catastrophically infertile. The more progressive parts of these cultures are often the least fertile, while the more conservative and traditional parts are more fertile. But the offspring of these traditional subcultures often convert into the progressive culture, at least where that culture is more prosperous and holds higher perceived status. Part of what makes religions so persistent is their evolutionary fitness from a memetic perspective. “Tell everyone you know to worship $DEITY, have lots of babies, and also kill/shun anyone who tries to stop worshipping $DEITY” is a great algorithm for maximizing the number of $DEITY-worshippers. “Never have sex or try to convert anyone” is a shitty algorithm, which is why the Shakers are practically extinct while Islam is on course to become the world’s largest religion (and may already be, if you subtract the plurality of western Christians who are behaviorally secular anyway). I suspect some memetic program that survives contact with science, prosperity, and progressivism without turning infertile, if it ever evolves, will be the foundation of the future of human culture.

nikhizzle 8y ago

One prominent counterpoint to this article is the school of Afrofuturism. Lately, we have seen a resurgence in this thought line ranging from Black Panther to Janelle Monae. But those of us in technology often are not aware of this very important, visionary futuristic movement. I'll also add if you haven't seen Black Panther, go and see it. Most science fiction reminds me of Kowloon by day, Tokyo by night. It is so refreshing to see a different, Africa-centric view of the future. Think Nairobi 2080.

tristo 8y ago
So you think futurism should be based around black people? Congrats that's racist and ethnocentric. Maybe this scenario is unlikely to happen given the present situation? Most African countries have barely enough water and you expect them to become tech leaders tomorrow?
- kienankb 8y ago
  That's...not at all what they said...
- dang 8y ago
  We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
djpr 8y ago
I agree with and excited about this development. I'm an academically trained futurist and I'm continually frustrated by the future as being techno-solutionist-driven and mostly Western or some Hong Kong/Tokyo future. Black Panther, I hope, will help people to be inspired by other ideas of what the future can be - from different cultural lenses, changes in view of technology, changes in ways of doing etc. It's about decolonizing the future and opening the door to other ways of being. Here's one of my favorite piece of futures work that I like to talk about. It's about the future of human relationships: https://jfsdigital.org/2017/09/22/the-future-of-marriage/ https://jfsdigital.org/2017/09/22/the-future-of-marriage/ Yes, it's still techno-driven and still very San Francisco, but at least its not about flying cars or fancy tech, just different ways of being.

danidiaz 8y ago

I'm reminded of Gerard O'Neill's seventies vision of space habitats https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-lagrange/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-lagrange/ The artistic depictions tend to have a "suburb in a bottle" feel.

chewz 8y ago

Ain't futurism dead? Unfortunately? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(disambiguation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(disambiguation)

cyberpunk0 8y ago
Far from it
leoc 8y ago
Futurism isn't dead, it just smells retro.

wisty 8y ago

It seems like the article is just beating up a straw man. It doesn't define futurism, name any major futurologists, and seems to just rely on the stereotype that it's "flying cars" and "the Jetsons". It does mention The Net, and notes that ordering a pizza online is not so different to ordering a pizza on the phone. It conveniently misses the main story - that the main character has essentially no IRL social connections at all (as she telecommutes to work, only socialises online, and doesn't even know her neighbors) which is what allows her to be made a complete unperson when her online records are attacked. Maybe it's not Utopia (another futurist work) but it hardly ignores the cultural impact of technology. Some science fiction (e.g. The Jetsons) is just a contemporary drama or comedy with fantastical sets and props. But even something as soft as Doctor Who (let alone the likes of Asimov, AC Clarke) often looks at culture (either how radically different it is, or how age-old problems remain). Then there's works like 1984 and Brave New World which were almost entirely about culture. And it's not like The Jetsons ignored culture. It was deliberately a 1950s sit-com set in the far future, and was a follow-up to The Flintstones which was a 1950s sit-com set in the distant past. The fact that the original was a little conservative in its portrayal of culture might have had something to do with political environment (the Cuban missile crisis was just before it was written). I don't think it entirely ignored the possibility of social change, but was possibly trying to make some kind of statement about which economic system was really on the right side of history.

posterboy 8y ago
> Some science fiction (e.g. The Jetsons) is just a contemporary drama or comedy with fantastical sets and props. Or even modeled after age old stories. Like most writing recycles and reinterprets old material. I started to wonder what historic metaphors the Expanse relies on, what with ship travel taking months, pirates, colonies, the plague - but the opposite of slavery, with unconditional basic income. The gang "the Golden Bough" is a hint at Virgil's Aeneid, I learned today by coincident. It's not hard sci-fi at all. The sci-fi is kept to a minimum as much as the fantasy. That is, the fantastic elements should be kept to a minimum. Now I wonder what that thing (not to spoiler) represents. Just a deus ex machina for sake of the story or a ring of ancient overlords?
- 8y ago

Animats 8y ago

Can this article be read without enabling tracking?

mncharity 8y ago

> Was [...] the thought that the car was going to change life on the street, really so beyond envisioning "Prediction #6: Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today." Dec 1900 [1] I enjoy reading commentary about this set of predictions... to see how people misunderstand the past. Or why something didn't happen. Take horses. One commentary says, 'no, wrong, horses were cheaper than cars are today'... and compares only purchase price, being unfamiliar with stabling. Another claims horses were more environmentally friendly than cars... forgetting that horse fodder was once a primary import of cities, their waste a primary export, and that it and carcasses once decorated streets. A major use of horses was... shipping fodder for horses. And I fuzzily recall an SV person giving a talk at Stanford, arguing you can't predict the future (sigh), and dissing the article in general, and the horse prediction as 'they thought horses will become extinct - silly them'. When they didn't say extinct; and some commercial breeds are; and given the change of urban horse populations (from like cars, to like giraffes), a non-technical "extinct" wouldn't have been wrong. Unfamiliar with the past; inattentive to the present; and lackadaisical in thought; we watch the future arrive, and find it unexpected. There's a surprise. Perhaps VR ("so this is what it was like... oh, that's weird"), and AR ("overlay the past on the present"[2]) will help. [1] "What may happen in the next hundred years" (Watkins; 1900; The Ladies Home Journal) as jpeg: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/John_Elfreth_Watkins_Ladies_Home_Journal_Predictions_1900.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/John_Elf... ; as text: http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/1900_predictions.htm http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/190... [2] Old photos overlaid on new: Zoltán https://www.facebook.com/ablakamultra https://www.facebook.com/ablakamultra https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsultan/sets/72157626149118210/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsultan/sets/7215762614911821... ; assorted https://www.google.com/search?q=then+and+now+composite&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=then+and+now+composite&tbm=i...

mncharity 8y ago

> Ideas, not technology, have driven the biggest historical changes. A Radcliffe outreach symposium about genetics research included a sketch of the history of the field. Someone asked where the dramatic innovation was coming from. It was clear they really wanted an answer of Kuhn-revolution changes in perspective leading to better questions. They were notably unhappy with the answer that, no, it was mostly technological economics. Advancing tech (sequencing, PCR), dropping costs by orders of magnitude, changed the questions we could afford to pursue.