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People had to be convinced of the usefulness of electricity

293 points by olalonde 4y ago

shivbhadragohil 4y ago
[dead]
ithkuil 4y ago
"Electricity will steal all your jobs! " "You don't need to worry about electricity, but about other people knowing to harness electricity better than you!" Ridiculous and at the same time actually true.
- tgv 4y ago
  It did make many jobs and people redundant, though. But because the world was growing, the economy grew with it and replaced that with other jobs. If growth stagnates, there's no guarantee for job replacement. And any parallel with AI/GPT is completely absurd, even though it's the reason why this is upvoted.
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    The parallel may well be wrong, but I would go as far as calling it absurd.
    - arlcode 4y ago
      It's unfounded regardless of what you believe will happen. We are still months / years too early to see how transformative exactly GPT based AI opportunities will be. We are clearly beyond the "Neat academic resarch" phase and well into the product building phase of this new technology but some things are only clear in hindsight. The spectrum goes from "useful niche tools" to "industrial revolution" and we must not forget that even very successful technological breakthroughs are usually marketed way beyond their actual capabilities. People in the second row who are now betting hard on AI may as well be the billionaires of tomorrow or they will be forgotten and swallowed up by confirmation bias.
  - dalbasal 4y ago
    >>If growth stagnates, there's no guarantee for job replacement. No guarantees, but no hard rules euther. PCs are the ultimate clerical and administrative machines. You don't need secretaries or typists. Don't need memos and mailrooms. Stuff gets filed automatically. We put one on every desk. Typists and secretaries went away, but administration went on a growth spurt. Whether it's school admin, corporate HR or hospital billing.. Administrative work became much more plentiful once PCs proliferated. We write, more letters, file more forms, sign more agreements. Maybe that stuff is valuable, and since we can do more of it with computers, we do. Maybe it has nothing to do with efficiency or value. Whatever the case, it demonstrates that the "progress Vs luddites" debate can't be solved with a simple model. Absurdity assume a reasonable world. Sometimes the world is weird.
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      Could be a case of Jevons paradox? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Sometimes when things look weird to us, it just means that it's counterintuitive and necessarily irrational
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- notahacker 4y ago
  I'd say the opposite: electricity actually did see fantastical predictions of automation ending work altogether which despite it being an enormously useful enabling technology still haven't come to pass, it enabled people to get jobs more than it cost them jobs
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    Your not saying the opposite of what I said :-) I literally said that indeed electricity did cause many jobs to go away. My point was more about the way these predictions are phrased and that they may sound absurd, regardless of how they would pan out
    - notahacker 4y ago
      No, I'm saying electricity didn't "steal people's jobs" even taking into account roles that ceased to exist altogether, because it phased in slowly, created far more jobs than it took away and people whose roles were "replaced" by it simply adapted to different (usually better) jobs, and the absurd predictions of the time were all wrong not because of how they were phrased but because as a simple matter of fact electricity neither heralded a post-work utopia nor forced workers wages to stay at subsistence level.
      - ithkuil 4y ago
        Ah I see what you mean. I don't think "stealing jobs" means that there will be less jobs in absolute. It usually means (at least that's how I usually see it used) that people who current have a job and are trained to do that, will no longer be able to do it, and switching to another job is not easy: it's not just skills, but often also you need to relocate somewhere else etc. The problems with coal miners losing their jobs is not because we don't have other jobs available. It's that the lives of those people will be upended and it's not surprising that people resist that.
api 4y ago
It probably wasn’t that useful on day one. Took a while to get a lot of products out there that required electricity.
- jonplackett 4y ago
  I mean, lighting was kind of a killer app
  - lbebber 4y ago
    We still refer to the electricity bill as the “light bill” in Brazil.
    - Claude_Shannon 4y ago
      Same in Poland
    - martinjacobd 4y ago
      I'm an American, and this is what my mother calls it, though I call it the electric bill.
  - gpm 4y ago
    If I think of everything I use electricity for these days, lighting* is pretty far down the list of usefulness. The sun can fill 80% of my lighting needs, giving up on the 20% really doesn't seem like it would be that painful. I actually thought the list of items in the ad in the article was far more convincing than lighting as a use case. Today my list of more important use cases would include things like long distance communication, refrigeration, transportation*, cooking/manufacturing, computing, data storage, small cameras, medical uses*... except in so far as light is how I use electricity to make light for information transfer purposes. Something like e-ink would be an adequate substitute though. * ICE engines do fill a lot of this niche, but not all of it. Subways, elevators, and the like are made much better via electricity. ** Imaging devices especially come to mind
    - 4y ago
wincy 4y ago
Fun fact, might be off on the details, but Triscuits were called that because they were marketed as being cooked by “elecTric” ovens which meant uniform heating and no burned Triscuits! Electric Biscuits! Try Triscuits! Edit: since people like my fun fact here’s the Twitter thread where a guy talks about it. https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968530250870786?s=46&t=HcbqnL95wul9mz0PQAAxbg https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968530250870786?s=4...
- pmalynin 4y ago
  Neat, I guess similar to Panko? But that was more of a military time necessity
  - QuercusMax 4y ago
    I assume that the tricuits were cooked by a fairly conventional electric oven, not like panko, which was cooked by putting electrodes into the dough.
    - NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
      "was"? Has something changed that they do not use this process anymore?
      - torstenvl 4y ago
        Yes. They're done. Triscuits and panko both refer to the finished products. For the set of all Triscuits, there does not exist any element which will ever again be baked. Ditto for panko.
        NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
        In English, we use the habitual aspect for things that have been, and are still, done on a regular basis. If you wish to speak about a currently-implemented process for making food, for instance, you say "panko is baked by passing an electrical current through it". If you have a small bag of panko on the counter, you may point to it and say "an electrical current was passed through this panko to bake it", but you could also construct the former sentence and be completely correct. But your use of the past tense in a general statement about panko implies that it is no longer made by that process, which leads those of us who speak English to incorrect conclusions. This confusion can be further compounded by the fact that we were discussing events of many decades past, so Triscuits, for example, may no longer be baked in electric ovens, although they certainly could still be. https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968548949004288/photo/2 https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968548949004288/pho... Thanks.
GalenErso 4y ago
Note to crypto bros: This doesn't apply to cryptocurrency or blockchains. If cryptocurrency or blockchains could be more useful for most people than what already exists (fiat currency, traditional banks and payment systems), we would know it by now.
- k__ 4y ago
  Good that you are able to declare that unilaterally.
  - GalenErso 4y ago
    I had to get it out of the way because crypto bros rarely miss a chance of interjecting their fad into any conversation. I realize the irony of my comment. I embrace that irony.
- jondwillis 4y ago
  Funny enough, with the current financial meltdown, we might find out very soon if BTC will live up to a large part of its original intended purpose.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    As long as BTC has tons of "price action," it can't live up to the dream of a stable non-central-bank-backed currency. It will continue to be a speculative asset. At this point, the only actual "inflation hedge" in the cryptocurrency space seems to be Monero. Everything else has "price action" like levered NASDAQ.
    - jondwillis 4y ago
      I hear you and agree that it has always been speculative, and has been trading in sympathy/speculative bubble with US tech for quite some time. However, it did de-couple from the NASDAQ after the SVB dust began to settle.
- jdminhbg 4y ago
Denvercoder9 4y ago
> the city of New York City now uses about 100,000 kilowatt-hours per minute. Also known as 6 GW.
- deleted 4y ago
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- s0rce 4y ago
  kWh per time is a terrible unit and we should stop using it. Also kilowatts hours isn't great either, although I guess its convenient.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Disagree. kWh is a unit most households would be familiar with. I bet the average budget-conscious jo knows their price per kWh and how many kWh a washing machine run would use up. So for a lay audience it is a good term.
  - adrianmsmith 4y ago
    Honestly I reckon they went for the wrong unit with Watts. Most things measure absolute values (e.g. miles) and then the speed is the derivative unit (miles/hour). Whereas Watts they went the other way. I reckon that's why everyone's confused and people expect to see "I use this much [stuff] in total", "this appliance uses this much [stuff per unit time] while it's on", because that's the way every other unit works.
    - Denvercoder9 4y ago
      The SI system has the Joule for that. The real "problem" is that 1 Joule of energy is just too small to be practical in most situations, so we often resort to larger units such as a kWh (equal to 3.6 MJ).
    - bearbin 4y ago
      At least for mains electricity, there is a good argument for using the derived W and the doubly-derived Wh (J / s derives W, W * s, derives Wh). It makes sense because electricity is not (for practical purposes, historically) stored by consumers, only consumed at the time of use. For virtually all applications, the instant power is of overriding utility: power is how bright your light bulb is, how fast your hairdryer dries, how large a wire is required when building your house. (Since Voltage is constant, this could even be given as Amps!). In addition, most home appliances don't have a meterable output aside from operation time: if your run your lightbulb for an hour, you get an hour of light but that's not really something you can measure. If you run your bicycle for an hour, you've gone somewhere which is a distance you can measure! Accumulative consumption of electricity is not really important for anything save for billing, so if you all you know is Watts and hours, Wh is a useful unit. For transmission and distribution networks, even the Watt and Wh are relegated to secondary position, the VA (volt-amp) and VAh are more useful (since Vrms x Arms != Wrms, due to power factor/phase shift). For one bit of infrastructure, the Amps are the most important operational consideration (as V is approximately constant) and reporting as VA is useful to compare with other equipment running at a different voltage.
0x0 4y ago
"...a brand new power generation facility that could generate 770,000 kilowatt-hours" - what does this even mean? Did the facility produce a certain amount of electricity and then it had to be shut down, after it had produced 770MWh ? Can't produce any more kWh so just fire everyone and demolish the facility?
- ulber 4y ago
  I bet they forgot to include that it can generate that 770MWh every hour.
  - varenc 4y ago
    770MWh every hour is just 770MW The hours cancel outs!
    - rzzzt 4y ago
      But then the next sentence goes like this: "For reference, the city of New York City now uses about 100,000 kilowatt-hours per minute." So...
      - stametseater 4y ago
        minutes and hours still cancel out, you just have to do a little bit more arithmetic in the process.
        rzzzt 4y ago
        I forgot for a moment where I was going with this, but now back on track: if they wanted to make the two values comparable, Edison's plant should also produce 770 MWh every minute.
        marcosdumay 4y ago
        > if they wanted to make the two values comparable When was the last time you saw a journalism piece try to make units comparable? That number can mean absolutely anything, there is no telling what the people could be thinking on the telephone game from transcribing the source all the way into a finished and edited design.
plaidfuji 4y ago
I know the analogy of the day is AI, but I’ll make the case for cryptocurrency as the better analogy. I think everybody sees potential use for AI - probably more than it can actually do. The technology that I hear being called “useless”, “pure speculative hype” etc is crypto and defi. Maybe today, because of lack of infrastructure, network effects, productized apps, etc it’s not as useful as traditional banking and fiat currency, but the reality is that there’s a future where we don’t need banks and nationalized currencies, and that is an enormous value-add for society as a whole. It may not happen today, 10 or even 100 years from now, but we will look back and find the idea that people had to be convinced of this absurd.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The thing is - AI is a very apt analogy today. People outside the tech sphere often think it's a toy, but don't see the real productive uses of LLMs, for example. In contrast, today's version of crypto has had its popular moment. Like the dirigible, it got a lot of mainstream coverage as a "promising" "revolutionary" technology, and it has made its millionaires and billionaires. Like the dirigible, it has been found wanting. There is some chance that the future will involve CBDCs, but I think most people agree that the ship has sailed on the Bitcoin-Ethereum-NFT-based "metaverse" that crypto entrepreneurs wanted to create.
  - junofan 4y ago
    There are billboards everywhere touting AI. My mom talks about it.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      I see you live in the San Francisco bay. If you go outside that little bubble, you won't see very many billboards advertising anything other than personal injury lawyers, restaurants, and casinos.
      - localplume 4y ago
zabzonk 4y ago
And one of the first things they did with it was use it as an inefficient means of execution. Marvin the Paranoid Android: "Humans; you've just got to hate them"
photochemsyn 4y ago
Lightbulbs powered by electricity were a convincing app, and so was the electricity-powered washing machine and similar labor-saving appliances: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-more-women-workforce https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-mo... Notably, electrification of rural areas lagged well behind that of cities and towns until the Rural Electrification Administration was created in 1935: https://livingnewdeal.org/a-light-went-on-new-deal-rural-electrification-act/ https://livingnewdeal.org/a-light-went-on-new-deal-rural-ele... > "The REA continued into the postwar era and helped the percentage of electrified farms in the United States rise from 11 percent [1935] to almost 97 percent by 1960. The New Deal had helped rural America achieve near-total electrification." This is comparable to the situation with high-speed internet in the US at present: > "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a New Deal agency established in 1934, estimates that today a quarter of rural Americans and a third on tribal lands do not have access to broadband internet, defined as download speeds of at least 25 megabytes a second. Fewer than 2 percent of urban dwellers have this same problem." This is what you get if you privatize and deregulate basic infrastructure services: huge holes in coverage and overpriced monopolistic control of the rest of it.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  How is 11% having electricity comparably to 75% having broadband? Feels like you’re really reaching to make this segway to politics.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    Because the 11% became 97% via the New Deal and government investment, not through market forces. That's not reaching to bring up politics, that's the history of what happened. Rural areas are more expensive to run physical infrastructure for, for fewer people, compared to an urban or suburban environment; that underlying fact hasn't changed since the 1920's when electricity was being run. How it immediately becomes political is the question of who pays for what, and how much of my taxes are going towards something that doesn't direct benefit me.
    - 4y ago
fnord77 4y ago
People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of Cars People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of Computers People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of the Internet People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of LLMs
- jstx1 4y ago
  The thing that's missing from the list are the tools and inventions which people had to be conviced of the usefulness of and ended up being useless. "This happened for X so it will happen for Y" isn't an argument on its own - you either need to make a connection between X and Y, or say something fundamental about Y which makes the statement true.
- HervalFreire 4y ago
  Not all people. There is a division of people here. People able to rationally see the consequences of a new technology. And people who have to bend their perception of reality to protect a vested interest. For software engineers the skills and attributes we take pride in are our software craft and our intelligence. So it's normal to see that the attacks on AI are especially vicious on HN. I'd say the division is about 50 50. Gpt4 will not replace us. But it's a herald for something that will. That is reality.
  - geraneum 4y ago
    > But it's a herald for something that will. That is reality. This is mostly what the people who described as “rational” say all the time, but there’s no rationality or even a deep conversation about what to do if this happens. I can flip a coin and it will half of the times tell me that it’s the end! Both of this camps are arguing like political sides and the conversation is usually a repeated instance of some beliefs on both sides. I believe, instead, we can talk about the practical ways we can deal with this change. For example we can start with looking at what other fields that got automated did. Unions? Regulations? Wild west? Free market capitalism? Monopolies? What? Or we can discuss how to take advantage of this new change. Just sayin…
    - 4y ago
stametseater 4y ago
Rightfully so. If you want people to get hyped about a thing, explaining what the thing can do for them should be an obvious necessity. But I guess that's an outdated mode of thinking, modern advertising campaigns rely more on emotional manipulation than a rational exposition of product features and benefits. Instead of promoting electricity by showing people light bulbs and electric appliances, I expect a modern advertiser would instead tell you that popular people all like electricity and that if you like electricity too, you might also become popular. Instead of showing people electric lights, you could just show some young attractive models having a picnicking in a lush city park with a narrator saying something about 'trailblazers and innovators', maybe referencing famous popular figures like Gandhi for no apparent reason.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  > explaining what the thing can do for them should be an obvious necessity. Obvious?? You are taking too much of American way of life and values for granted. The Party can just order something progressive and the people will jump with enthusiasm. You just need to train them that not jumping with enthusiasm when the Party orders something is dangerous for their career or, more effectively - for their life. At the same 1920 time on our side of the ocean, the State Plan of Electrification of Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO. Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. — Vladimir Lenin Works like a charm. The only drawback of this approach is that you’ll get not the American way of life but the Soviet way life and the progressive will mean not what is really progressive, but what the Party orders. But well, is it that important?
  - LBJsPNS 4y ago
    COMMIES!!! COMMIES EVERYWHERE!!! Seriously, is it 1953 where some of you live?
    - MikePlacid 4y ago
      My comment describes the presence and practices of communists in Russia in 1920. If something after reading it makes you think that communists are somewhere else - this “something” is not my comment. I can only guess, but may be this “something” is you own living experience. No?
justin66 4y ago
My great-grandfather, when he built his suburban house after emigrating to the US from Scotland via Canada, included gas lines in the walls for gaslights in spite of the easy availability of electricity. Just in case.
antoniuschan99 4y ago
This is classic Ted talk by Jeff Bezos is a good one that references electricity if you haven’t watched it before https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ
- ayewo 4y ago
  Never seen this one before. Thanks for linking to it!
1970-01-01 4y ago
“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” Howard H. Aiken
Isamu 4y ago
Early electric service was less reliable than gas. My house had mixed gas lighting and electric, and there were even fixtures that were both. Not sure how long this transitional period lasted. Adoption of phone service was even slower. First and second generation systems were pretty crappy by today’s expectations.
- analog31 4y ago
  When I was in grad school, my cheap old rental house had light fixtures that allowed you to choose between electric and gas in one fixture. The gas pipe had long ago been disconnected, but the electric bulb sockets were stamped "Edison Patent." What I imagine was that electric lighting could have started out in commercial or municipal use, and spread out into the general population as it got cheaper and more reliable. The same thing happened with cell phones and the Internet.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Also think of process of wiring a house. And because you are well enough to do it in first place having it done to look nicely. I don't think that is exactly cheap process, back then. It is still not. The amount of cabling even for basic lights is not that small.
    - analog31 4y ago
      Indeed, and it's something that greatly benefits from being done before the house is finished. When I lived in Texas during a housing boom, we had an electrician on call for our factory. He told me that he would often stop at a construction site on his way home in the evening, and quickly make some extra money by completely wiring a house.
pmarreck 4y ago
Somehow this doesn't surprise me. And if I lived then, I'd be the crazy one talking about all the possibilities while people look at me dumbfounded. Same as today. >..<
comment_ran 4y ago
“To the electron: May it never be of use to anyone” ― J.J. Thompson
tzm 4y ago
Electric cars are also viewed this way.
KingLancelot 4y ago
[dead]
stackedinserter 4y ago
Well, people have to be convinced of the usefulness of anything. You can't just approach a person with "trust me, it's good for you".
skeltoac 4y ago
Useful electricity was not born suddenly into a world that had never heard of electricity. People had been playing with electrical toys and scientific equipment for generations before advances made industrial electricity possible. Electricity may have earned any number of different cultural reputations for its associations with aristocrats, magicians and quacks. Just yesterday I rewatched James Burke’s Connections, episode 3, Distant Voices, which vividly illustrates some of the ways people tried using electricity.
mkoubaa 4y ago
Even a new consumer of heroin needs to be sold it the first time
PHPIsKing 4y ago
Well, it's obvious that people back then were simply too short-sighted to comprehend the revolutionary potential of electricity. As usual, it took the genius of a few forward-thinking entrepreneurs and engineers to drag society, kicking and screaming, into the modern age. Looking back, the skepticism seems laughable, but it underscores a recurring theme throughout history: people's irrational resistance to change, even when the benefits are as clear as day. It takes those with true vision to push past the naysayers and bring transformative technologies into the mainstream. I mean, just look at the internet or smartphones. The masses were skeptical, but visionaries like Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee paved the way for the indispensable tech we enjoy today. It's almost too easy to predict that many of the technologies we doubt today will become cornerstones of tomorrow's society. But, of course, only a select few have the foresight to see that.
not_enoch_wise 4y ago
Thankfully no one followed with the potentials risks and costs. So a century later when the planet is baking & sinking, no one could possibly imagine giving up the new "necessity." Thank you, marketing & public relations. Now to do it all again, with AI!
- deleted 4y ago
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tecc501 4y ago
Crypto dudes be like "this proves that Web 3 ect ect ect"
- k__ 4y ago
  It obviously doesn't prove anything. However: History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes
  - ninepoints 4y ago
    "It rhymes with this specific instance of an event in history I cherry-picked to suit my narrative"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
simonh 4y ago
"Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country!" - V Lenin Russian Joke: "Consequently, Soviet power is communism minus electrification, and electrification is communism minus Soviet power."
robbywashere_ 4y ago
Curious about how the blogs and aggregators of the yesteryear referred to these proponents of this new technology, was it A/C-bros or D/C-bros?
slyall 4y ago
FYI the author of the article is Rose Eveleth and she did the excellent "Flash Forward" podcast. She's recently wound it up but I'd recommend the old episodes (probably don't start with the final season though). https://roseveleth.com/ https://roseveleth.com/
quietbritishjim 4y ago
> In 1920, New York Edison built a brand new power generation facility that could generate 770,000 kilowatt-hours. For reference, the city of New York City now uses about 100,000 kilowatt-hours per minute. There must be some units confusion here. Surely they didn't quote the lifetime energy output of Edison's power plant? Maybe they mean that could generate at a power of 770,000 kilowatts? But then they say NYC consumes a power of 6,000,000 kilowatts, and it seems unlike Edison's power plant was already running at more than 10% of today's NYC needs. Maybe they meant 770,000 kilowatt-hours per day (i.e. 32,000 kilowatts)?
stocknoob 4y ago
It's ok if people want to be behind the curve. No skin off my back if they want to delay their personal use of a transformative technology. Progress will happen with or without them.
gumby 4y ago
Edison used a clever adoption hack which is still worth learning from today. The gas companies of course fought the adoption of electricity. They would send people to electricity demonstrations. These people would have metal bars sewn into their sleeves and they would lean them against the bus are causing frightening sparks, fires, etc. In response, Edison suggested putting the wires in “conduits” — the gas lines already in the house! This both addressed the fear and kicked gas out. (This anecdote is in Utterbach’s “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation”)
p0pcult 4y ago
ITT: the libertarians of HN, having just gottent their bailouts, pivot back to their boostraps narratives and objectivism.
d--b 4y ago
people had to be convinced that the investment was worth it. In more recent examples, people didn’t have to be convinced that mobile phones were useful, they had to be convinced that it was worth paying 100€ upfront + €30/month to use one of these. One area where the usefulness of the technology vs investment is abundantly clear is EVs. Everybody knows they’re better for the environment, way cheaper to recharge, less vibrating, noiseless and gearless. But they’re almost three times as expensive than non-EV!
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Sure? Electricity is about means, not ways. There are many alternative ways to generate force, or lighting, or heating, or cooling, or food supplies. Where electricity won out, it was a gradual process of being superior in the particular application and long process of gradual production refinement to deliver on theoretical promise. Plus we all have to make concessions to new tech not replacing every single use case of old tech, and that's Ok. BBQ grills are fun in a way that electric stoves or microwaves are not.
EricE 4y ago
This is nothing new. Cue the old joke about when cars were new customers wanting faster horses instead.

293 points by olalonde 4y ago

[dead]

"Electricity will steal all your jobs! " "You don't need to worry about electricity, but about other people knowing to harness electricity better than you!" Ridiculous and at the same time actually true.

tgv 4y ago
It did make many jobs and people redundant, though. But because the world was growing, the economy grew with it and replaced that with other jobs. If growth stagnates, there's no guarantee for job replacement. And any parallel with AI/GPT is completely absurd, even though it's the reason why this is upvoted.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  The parallel may well be wrong, but I would go as far as calling it absurd.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    It's unfounded regardless of what you believe will happen. We are still months / years too early to see how transformative exactly GPT based AI opportunities will be. We are clearly beyond the "Neat academic resarch" phase and well into the product building phase of this new technology but some things are only clear in hindsight. The spectrum goes from "useful niche tools" to "industrial revolution" and we must not forget that even very successful technological breakthroughs are usually marketed way beyond their actual capabilities. People in the second row who are now betting hard on AI may as well be the billionaires of tomorrow or they will be forgotten and swallowed up by confirmation bias.
- dalbasal 4y ago
  >>If growth stagnates, there's no guarantee for job replacement. No guarantees, but no hard rules euther. PCs are the ultimate clerical and administrative machines. You don't need secretaries or typists. Don't need memos and mailrooms. Stuff gets filed automatically. We put one on every desk. Typists and secretaries went away, but administration went on a growth spurt. Whether it's school admin, corporate HR or hospital billing.. Administrative work became much more plentiful once PCs proliferated. We write, more letters, file more forms, sign more agreements. Maybe that stuff is valuable, and since we can do more of it with computers, we do. Maybe it has nothing to do with efficiency or value. Whatever the case, it demonstrates that the "progress Vs luddites" debate can't be solved with a simple model. Absurdity assume a reasonable world. Sometimes the world is weird.
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    Could be a case of Jevons paradox? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Sometimes when things look weird to us, it just means that it's counterintuitive and necessarily irrational
deleted 4y ago
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notahacker 4y ago
I'd say the opposite: electricity actually did see fantastical predictions of automation ending work altogether which despite it being an enormously useful enabling technology still haven't come to pass, it enabled people to get jobs more than it cost them jobs
- ithkuil 4y ago
  Your not saying the opposite of what I said :-) I literally said that indeed electricity did cause many jobs to go away. My point was more about the way these predictions are phrased and that they may sound absurd, regardless of how they would pan out
  - notahacker 4y ago
    No, I'm saying electricity didn't "steal people's jobs" even taking into account roles that ceased to exist altogether, because it phased in slowly, created far more jobs than it took away and people whose roles were "replaced" by it simply adapted to different (usually better) jobs, and the absurd predictions of the time were all wrong not because of how they were phrased but because as a simple matter of fact electricity neither heralded a post-work utopia nor forced workers wages to stay at subsistence level.
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      Ah I see what you mean. I don't think "stealing jobs" means that there will be less jobs in absolute. It usually means (at least that's how I usually see it used) that people who current have a job and are trained to do that, will no longer be able to do it, and switching to another job is not easy: it's not just skills, but often also you need to relocate somewhere else etc. The problems with coal miners losing their jobs is not because we don't have other jobs available. It's that the lives of those people will be upended and it's not surprising that people resist that.

api 4y ago

It probably wasn’t that useful on day one. Took a while to get a lot of products out there that required electricity.

jonplackett 4y ago
I mean, lighting was kind of a killer app
- lbebber 4y ago
  We still refer to the electricity bill as the “light bill” in Brazil.
  - Claude_Shannon 4y ago
    Same in Poland
  - martinjacobd 4y ago
    I'm an American, and this is what my mother calls it, though I call it the electric bill.
- gpm 4y ago
  If I think of everything I use electricity for these days, lighting* is pretty far down the list of usefulness. The sun can fill 80% of my lighting needs, giving up on the 20% really doesn't seem like it would be that painful. I actually thought the list of items in the ad in the article was far more convincing than lighting as a use case. Today my list of more important use cases would include things like long distance communication, refrigeration, transportation*, cooking/manufacturing, computing, data storage, small cameras, medical uses*... except in so far as light is how I use electricity to make light for information transfer purposes. Something like e-ink would be an adequate substitute though. * ICE engines do fill a lot of this niche, but not all of it. Subways, elevators, and the like are made much better via electricity. ** Imaging devices especially come to mind
  - 4y ago

wincy 4y ago

Fun fact, might be off on the details, but Triscuits were called that because they were marketed as being cooked by “elecTric” ovens which meant uniform heating and no burned Triscuits! Electric Biscuits! Try Triscuits! Edit: since people like my fun fact here’s the Twitter thread where a guy talks about it. https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968530250870786?s=46&t=HcbqnL95wul9mz0PQAAxbg https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968530250870786?s=4...

pmalynin 4y ago
Neat, I guess similar to Panko? But that was more of a military time necessity
- QuercusMax 4y ago
  I assume that the tricuits were cooked by a fairly conventional electric oven, not like panko, which was cooked by putting electrodes into the dough.
  - NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
    "was"? Has something changed that they do not use this process anymore?
    - torstenvl 4y ago
      Yes. They're done. Triscuits and panko both refer to the finished products. For the set of all Triscuits, there does not exist any element which will ever again be baked. Ditto for panko.
      - NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
        In English, we use the habitual aspect for things that have been, and are still, done on a regular basis. If you wish to speak about a currently-implemented process for making food, for instance, you say "panko is baked by passing an electrical current through it". If you have a small bag of panko on the counter, you may point to it and say "an electrical current was passed through this panko to bake it", but you could also construct the former sentence and be completely correct. But your use of the past tense in a general statement about panko implies that it is no longer made by that process, which leads those of us who speak English to incorrect conclusions. This confusion can be further compounded by the fact that we were discussing events of many decades past, so Triscuits, for example, may no longer be baked in electric ovens, although they certainly could still be. https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968548949004288/photo/2 https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968548949004288/pho... Thanks.

GalenErso 4y ago

Note to crypto bros: This doesn't apply to cryptocurrency or blockchains. If cryptocurrency or blockchains could be more useful for most people than what already exists (fiat currency, traditional banks and payment systems), we would know it by now.

k__ 4y ago
Good that you are able to declare that unilaterally.
- GalenErso 4y ago
  I had to get it out of the way because crypto bros rarely miss a chance of interjecting their fad into any conversation. I realize the irony of my comment. I embrace that irony.
jondwillis 4y ago
Funny enough, with the current financial meltdown, we might find out very soon if BTC will live up to a large part of its original intended purpose.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  As long as BTC has tons of "price action," it can't live up to the dream of a stable non-central-bank-backed currency. It will continue to be a speculative asset. At this point, the only actual "inflation hedge" in the cryptocurrency space seems to be Monero. Everything else has "price action" like levered NASDAQ.
  - jondwillis 4y ago
    I hear you and agree that it has always been speculative, and has been trading in sympathy/speculative bubble with US tech for quite some time. However, it did de-couple from the NASDAQ after the SVB dust began to settle.
jdminhbg 4y ago

Denvercoder9 4y ago

> the city of New York City now uses about 100,000 kilowatt-hours per minute. Also known as 6 GW.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
s0rce 4y ago
kWh per time is a terrible unit and we should stop using it. Also kilowatts hours isn't great either, although I guess its convenient.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Disagree. kWh is a unit most households would be familiar with. I bet the average budget-conscious jo knows their price per kWh and how many kWh a washing machine run would use up. So for a lay audience it is a good term.
- adrianmsmith 4y ago
  Honestly I reckon they went for the wrong unit with Watts. Most things measure absolute values (e.g. miles) and then the speed is the derivative unit (miles/hour). Whereas Watts they went the other way. I reckon that's why everyone's confused and people expect to see "I use this much [stuff] in total", "this appliance uses this much [stuff per unit time] while it's on", because that's the way every other unit works.
  - Denvercoder9 4y ago
    The SI system has the Joule for that. The real "problem" is that 1 Joule of energy is just too small to be practical in most situations, so we often resort to larger units such as a kWh (equal to 3.6 MJ).
  - bearbin 4y ago
    At least for mains electricity, there is a good argument for using the derived W and the doubly-derived Wh (J / s derives W, W * s, derives Wh). It makes sense because electricity is not (for practical purposes, historically) stored by consumers, only consumed at the time of use. For virtually all applications, the instant power is of overriding utility: power is how bright your light bulb is, how fast your hairdryer dries, how large a wire is required when building your house. (Since Voltage is constant, this could even be given as Amps!). In addition, most home appliances don't have a meterable output aside from operation time: if your run your lightbulb for an hour, you get an hour of light but that's not really something you can measure. If you run your bicycle for an hour, you've gone somewhere which is a distance you can measure! Accumulative consumption of electricity is not really important for anything save for billing, so if you all you know is Watts and hours, Wh is a useful unit. For transmission and distribution networks, even the Watt and Wh are relegated to secondary position, the VA (volt-amp) and VAh are more useful (since Vrms x Arms != Wrms, due to power factor/phase shift). For one bit of infrastructure, the Amps are the most important operational consideration (as V is approximately constant) and reporting as VA is useful to compare with other equipment running at a different voltage.

0x0 4y ago

"...a brand new power generation facility that could generate 770,000 kilowatt-hours" - what does this even mean? Did the facility produce a certain amount of electricity and then it had to be shut down, after it had produced 770MWh ? Can't produce any more kWh so just fire everyone and demolish the facility?

ulber 4y ago
I bet they forgot to include that it can generate that 770MWh every hour.
- varenc 4y ago
  770MWh every hour is just 770MW The hours cancel outs!
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    But then the next sentence goes like this: "For reference, the city of New York City now uses about 100,000 kilowatt-hours per minute." So...
    - stametseater 4y ago
      minutes and hours still cancel out, you just have to do a little bit more arithmetic in the process.
      - rzzzt 4y ago
        I forgot for a moment where I was going with this, but now back on track: if they wanted to make the two values comparable, Edison's plant should also produce 770 MWh every minute.
        marcosdumay 4y ago
        > if they wanted to make the two values comparable When was the last time you saw a journalism piece try to make units comparable? That number can mean absolutely anything, there is no telling what the people could be thinking on the telephone game from transcribing the source all the way into a finished and edited design.

plaidfuji 4y ago

I know the analogy of the day is AI, but I’ll make the case for cryptocurrency as the better analogy. I think everybody sees potential use for AI - probably more than it can actually do. The technology that I hear being called “useless”, “pure speculative hype” etc is crypto and defi. Maybe today, because of lack of infrastructure, network effects, productized apps, etc it’s not as useful as traditional banking and fiat currency, but the reality is that there’s a future where we don’t need banks and nationalized currencies, and that is an enormous value-add for society as a whole. It may not happen today, 10 or even 100 years from now, but we will look back and find the idea that people had to be convinced of this absurd.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
The thing is - AI is a very apt analogy today. People outside the tech sphere often think it's a toy, but don't see the real productive uses of LLMs, for example. In contrast, today's version of crypto has had its popular moment. Like the dirigible, it got a lot of mainstream coverage as a "promising" "revolutionary" technology, and it has made its millionaires and billionaires. Like the dirigible, it has been found wanting. There is some chance that the future will involve CBDCs, but I think most people agree that the ship has sailed on the Bitcoin-Ethereum-NFT-based "metaverse" that crypto entrepreneurs wanted to create.
- junofan 4y ago
  There are billboards everywhere touting AI. My mom talks about it.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    I see you live in the San Francisco bay. If you go outside that little bubble, you won't see very many billboards advertising anything other than personal injury lawyers, restaurants, and casinos.
    - localplume 4y ago

zabzonk 4y ago

And one of the first things they did with it was use it as an inefficient means of execution. Marvin the Paranoid Android: "Humans; you've just got to hate them"

photochemsyn 4y ago

Lightbulbs powered by electricity were a convincing app, and so was the electricity-powered washing machine and similar labor-saving appliances: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-more-women-workforce https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-mo... Notably, electrification of rural areas lagged well behind that of cities and towns until the Rural Electrification Administration was created in 1935: https://livingnewdeal.org/a-light-went-on-new-deal-rural-electrification-act/ https://livingnewdeal.org/a-light-went-on-new-deal-rural-ele... > "The REA continued into the postwar era and helped the percentage of electrified farms in the United States rise from 11 percent [1935] to almost 97 percent by 1960. The New Deal had helped rural America achieve near-total electrification." This is comparable to the situation with high-speed internet in the US at present: > "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a New Deal agency established in 1934, estimates that today a quarter of rural Americans and a third on tribal lands do not have access to broadband internet, defined as download speeds of at least 25 megabytes a second. Fewer than 2 percent of urban dwellers have this same problem." This is what you get if you privatize and deregulate basic infrastructure services: huge holes in coverage and overpriced monopolistic control of the rest of it.

nonethewiser 4y ago
How is 11% having electricity comparably to 75% having broadband? Feels like you’re really reaching to make this segway to politics.
- zamnos 4y ago
  Because the 11% became 97% via the New Deal and government investment, not through market forces. That's not reaching to bring up politics, that's the history of what happened. Rural areas are more expensive to run physical infrastructure for, for fewer people, compared to an urban or suburban environment; that underlying fact hasn't changed since the 1920's when electricity was being run. How it immediately becomes political is the question of who pays for what, and how much of my taxes are going towards something that doesn't direct benefit me.
  - 4y ago

fnord77 4y ago

People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of Cars People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of Computers People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of the Internet People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of LLMs

jstx1 4y ago
The thing that's missing from the list are the tools and inventions which people had to be conviced of the usefulness of and ended up being useless. "This happened for X so it will happen for Y" isn't an argument on its own - you either need to make a connection between X and Y, or say something fundamental about Y which makes the statement true.
HervalFreire 4y ago
Not all people. There is a division of people here. People able to rationally see the consequences of a new technology. And people who have to bend their perception of reality to protect a vested interest. For software engineers the skills and attributes we take pride in are our software craft and our intelligence. So it's normal to see that the attacks on AI are especially vicious on HN. I'd say the division is about 50 50. Gpt4 will not replace us. But it's a herald for something that will. That is reality.
- geraneum 4y ago
  > But it's a herald for something that will. That is reality. This is mostly what the people who described as “rational” say all the time, but there’s no rationality or even a deep conversation about what to do if this happens. I can flip a coin and it will half of the times tell me that it’s the end! Both of this camps are arguing like political sides and the conversation is usually a repeated instance of some beliefs on both sides. I believe, instead, we can talk about the practical ways we can deal with this change. For example we can start with looking at what other fields that got automated did. Unions? Regulations? Wild west? Free market capitalism? Monopolies? What? Or we can discuss how to take advantage of this new change. Just sayin…
  - 4y ago

stametseater 4y ago

Rightfully so. If you want people to get hyped about a thing, explaining what the thing can do for them should be an obvious necessity. But I guess that's an outdated mode of thinking, modern advertising campaigns rely more on emotional manipulation than a rational exposition of product features and benefits. Instead of promoting electricity by showing people light bulbs and electric appliances, I expect a modern advertiser would instead tell you that popular people all like electricity and that if you like electricity too, you might also become popular. Instead of showing people electric lights, you could just show some young attractive models having a picnicking in a lush city park with a narrator saying something about 'trailblazers and innovators', maybe referencing famous popular figures like Gandhi for no apparent reason.

MikePlacid 4y ago
> explaining what the thing can do for them should be an obvious necessity. Obvious?? You are taking too much of American way of life and values for granted. The Party can just order something progressive and the people will jump with enthusiasm. You just need to train them that not jumping with enthusiasm when the Party orders something is dangerous for their career or, more effectively - for their life. At the same 1920 time on our side of the ocean, the State Plan of Electrification of Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO. Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. — Vladimir Lenin Works like a charm. The only drawback of this approach is that you’ll get not the American way of life but the Soviet way life and the progressive will mean not what is really progressive, but what the Party orders. But well, is it that important?
- LBJsPNS 4y ago
  COMMIES!!! COMMIES EVERYWHERE!!! Seriously, is it 1953 where some of you live?
  - MikePlacid 4y ago
    My comment describes the presence and practices of communists in Russia in 1920. If something after reading it makes you think that communists are somewhere else - this “something” is not my comment. I can only guess, but may be this “something” is you own living experience. No?

justin66 4y ago

My great-grandfather, when he built his suburban house after emigrating to the US from Scotland via Canada, included gas lines in the walls for gaslights in spite of the easy availability of electricity. Just in case.

antoniuschan99 4y ago

This is classic Ted talk by Jeff Bezos is a good one that references electricity if you haven’t watched it before https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ

ayewo 4y ago
Never seen this one before. Thanks for linking to it!

1970-01-01 4y ago

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” Howard H. Aiken

Isamu 4y ago

Early electric service was less reliable than gas. My house had mixed gas lighting and electric, and there were even fixtures that were both. Not sure how long this transitional period lasted. Adoption of phone service was even slower. First and second generation systems were pretty crappy by today’s expectations.

analog31 4y ago
When I was in grad school, my cheap old rental house had light fixtures that allowed you to choose between electric and gas in one fixture. The gas pipe had long ago been disconnected, but the electric bulb sockets were stamped "Edison Patent." What I imagine was that electric lighting could have started out in commercial or municipal use, and spread out into the general population as it got cheaper and more reliable. The same thing happened with cell phones and the Internet.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Also think of process of wiring a house. And because you are well enough to do it in first place having it done to look nicely. I don't think that is exactly cheap process, back then. It is still not. The amount of cabling even for basic lights is not that small.
  - analog31 4y ago
    Indeed, and it's something that greatly benefits from being done before the house is finished. When I lived in Texas during a housing boom, we had an electrician on call for our factory. He told me that he would often stop at a construction site on his way home in the evening, and quickly make some extra money by completely wiring a house.

pmarreck 4y ago

Somehow this doesn't surprise me. And if I lived then, I'd be the crazy one talking about all the possibilities while people look at me dumbfounded. Same as today. >..<

comment_ran 4y ago

“To the electron: May it never be of use to anyone” ― J.J. Thompson

tzm 4y ago

Electric cars are also viewed this way.

KingLancelot 4y ago

[dead]

stackedinserter 4y ago

Well, people have to be convinced of the usefulness of anything. You can't just approach a person with "trust me, it's good for you".

skeltoac 4y ago

Useful electricity was not born suddenly into a world that had never heard of electricity. People had been playing with electrical toys and scientific equipment for generations before advances made industrial electricity possible. Electricity may have earned any number of different cultural reputations for its associations with aristocrats, magicians and quacks. Just yesterday I rewatched James Burke’s Connections, episode 3, Distant Voices, which vividly illustrates some of the ways people tried using electricity.

mkoubaa 4y ago

Even a new consumer of heroin needs to be sold it the first time

PHPIsKing 4y ago

Well, it's obvious that people back then were simply too short-sighted to comprehend the revolutionary potential of electricity. As usual, it took the genius of a few forward-thinking entrepreneurs and engineers to drag society, kicking and screaming, into the modern age. Looking back, the skepticism seems laughable, but it underscores a recurring theme throughout history: people's irrational resistance to change, even when the benefits are as clear as day. It takes those with true vision to push past the naysayers and bring transformative technologies into the mainstream. I mean, just look at the internet or smartphones. The masses were skeptical, but visionaries like Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee paved the way for the indispensable tech we enjoy today. It's almost too easy to predict that many of the technologies we doubt today will become cornerstones of tomorrow's society. But, of course, only a select few have the foresight to see that.

not_enoch_wise 4y ago

Thankfully no one followed with the potentials risks and costs. So a century later when the planet is baking & sinking, no one could possibly imagine giving up the new "necessity." Thank you, marketing & public relations. Now to do it all again, with AI!

deleted 4y ago
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tecc501 4y ago

Crypto dudes be like "this proves that Web 3 ect ect ect"

k__ 4y ago
It obviously doesn't prove anything. However: History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes
- ninepoints 4y ago
  "It rhymes with this specific instance of an event in history I cherry-picked to suit my narrative"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

simonh 4y ago

"Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country!" - V Lenin Russian Joke: "Consequently, Soviet power is communism minus electrification, and electrification is communism minus Soviet power."

robbywashere_ 4y ago

Curious about how the blogs and aggregators of the yesteryear referred to these proponents of this new technology, was it A/C-bros or D/C-bros?

slyall 4y ago

FYI the author of the article is Rose Eveleth and she did the excellent "Flash Forward" podcast. She's recently wound it up but I'd recommend the old episodes (probably don't start with the final season though). https://roseveleth.com/ https://roseveleth.com/

quietbritishjim 4y ago

> In 1920, New York Edison built a brand new power generation facility that could generate 770,000 kilowatt-hours. For reference, the city of New York City now uses about 100,000 kilowatt-hours per minute. There must be some units confusion here. Surely they didn't quote the lifetime energy output of Edison's power plant? Maybe they mean that could generate at a power of 770,000 kilowatts? But then they say NYC consumes a power of 6,000,000 kilowatts, and it seems unlike Edison's power plant was already running at more than 10% of today's NYC needs. Maybe they meant 770,000 kilowatt-hours per day (i.e. 32,000 kilowatts)?

stocknoob 4y ago

It's ok if people want to be behind the curve. No skin off my back if they want to delay their personal use of a transformative technology. Progress will happen with or without them.

gumby 4y ago

Edison used a clever adoption hack which is still worth learning from today. The gas companies of course fought the adoption of electricity. They would send people to electricity demonstrations. These people would have metal bars sewn into their sleeves and they would lean them against the bus are causing frightening sparks, fires, etc. In response, Edison suggested putting the wires in “conduits” — the gas lines already in the house! This both addressed the fear and kicked gas out. (This anecdote is in Utterbach’s “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation”)

p0pcult 4y ago

ITT: the libertarians of HN, having just gottent their bailouts, pivot back to their boostraps narratives and objectivism.

d--b 4y ago

people had to be convinced that the investment was worth it. In more recent examples, people didn’t have to be convinced that mobile phones were useful, they had to be convinced that it was worth paying 100€ upfront + €30/month to use one of these. One area where the usefulness of the technology vs investment is abundantly clear is EVs. Everybody knows they’re better for the environment, way cheaper to recharge, less vibrating, noiseless and gearless. But they’re almost three times as expensive than non-EV!

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Sure? Electricity is about means, not ways. There are many alternative ways to generate force, or lighting, or heating, or cooling, or food supplies. Where electricity won out, it was a gradual process of being superior in the particular application and long process of gradual production refinement to deliver on theoretical promise. Plus we all have to make concessions to new tech not replacing every single use case of old tech, and that's Ok. BBQ grills are fun in a way that electric stoves or microwaves are not.

EricE 4y ago

This is nothing new. Cue the old joke about when cars were new customers wanting faster horses instead.