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There seem to be three main hypotheses in this article, and all seem wrong to me. The first, raised in the context of development of the transistor and how it
by PeterWhittaker 6y ago
There seem to be three main hypotheses in this article, and all seem wrong to me.
The first, raised in the context of development of the transistor and how it was stalled by WW2, is some notion of “future improvement motivation”. The author suggests that the transistor came about because the people involved wanted to improve the future.
I’d assert that the people involved wanted to improve switching speeds and reduce power requirements, and were driven by curiosity. That they changed the world was a side effect. A big one, but unintentional.
The second notion is bound into the idea of people being optimistic about the future and taking as its evidence that people are “investing” for future growth.
My take? A lot of people are afraid and uncertain and are looking desperately for a short term windfall, and some people fear they won’t have a job in X years so they might as well plow their money into whatever is rising.
The author’s position requires rational investors. We know the rational agent model is bunk.
The third questionable idea is that somehow the plague gave us usable time and that people are using this to their advantage. Sure, some may be, but most of us got anxiety, longer hours because work was more accessible (just down the hall) AND a refuge from plague fear and future fear and bad news, et al, etc.
What the author writes may be true for a small fraction of us. But not for most/all.
The term bubble may best describe where the author lives: in an optimistic, future-looking, rational place. Many of us may hope to live there, few of us do.
- TomMasz 6y agoPost-WWII R&D was vastly different from what R&D is like now. No one is funding research that isn't directly product-related or with an unclear or long-term ROI like that anymore. There never will be a Bell Labs or PARC every again. Incremental improvements are the future now.
- ianai 6y agoI sometimes wonder how different human culture would have developed without fossil fuels of any kind - it would likely mean no industrial revolution, right? No coal, no gas, etc. I think fossil fuels essentially moved us so far up in a Kardeshev type energy utilization that technological breakthroughs could really snowball exponentially. And fossil fuels only exist because for a hundreds of millions of years bacteria didn’t exist to break down trees or fiber. I could see that being an evolutionary tick being answered as a result of random processes possible to happen much faster. Anyway, without fossil fuels we may still be where we were before them - so dark ages, I think. Without fossil fuels I don’t know whether we’d ever have even the conception to seek out higher concentrations of energy. And it’s that energy concentration that still powers most of our civilization. All of which is to say, we could be on the verge to reduce ourselves to only marginal increments on what is currently available at that sort of power concentration, or worse. Or we could realize things like nuclear power open up still more exponential power concentrations.
- ido 6y agoThe first industrial revolution (which btw happened long after the dark ages and well into the early modern era) was marked by a transition to waterpower & steam (which can also be generated by burning wood) and of course windmills are even older, so it's possible to have happened without fossil fuels - it would just develop differently. Maybe we'd have massive build out of hydroelectric dams, wind turbines, steam engines powered by wood harvested from artificial forests optimized for fast growth/hot burning trees. You could still have air travel by airships & trains will still be workable albeit slower than our trains. Maybe Iceland would be contentious territory due to geothermal resources, like the middle eastern petrostates in the 20th/21st centuries.
- hyperman1 6y agoI read somewhere how the industrial revolution was a consequence of disallowing slave labour/inhumanly hard labour. The greek had invented steam powered machines, but considered them a curiosity,or a way to push open doors 'by the gods' without human labour. The industrial revolution, in that vision, happened when mines still needed a way to push the ore up, but humans didn't do it anymore for a price that made it worthwile. So there was a clear need for an alternative, and that made people look around. steam power was already known, but started to make economic sense. Hence, it got perfected.
- SahAssar 6y agoIsn't Alphabet X somewhat similar?