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Technology is inevitable if a lot of people can independently do it without huge resources, and the result is useful. - Personal computing - inevitable. Once I

Technology is inevitable if a lot of people can independently do it without huge resources, and the result is useful. - Personal computing - inevitable. Once ICs became cheap, it started happening, with no one effort dominating. - Moon landing - not inevitable. Huge resource commitment required, and not repeated since. - Internal combustion engine - inevitable. Once fuels and steel were available, it was possible to contain the explosion of an IC engine, and many people started making them. - Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work. - Radio - inevitable. Once something with gain and something that rectifies were invented, radio was something many people could work upon. - Steel - interesting case. Steel is thousands of years old, but mass production of steel only dates to 1880. It took considerable metallurgical research to get it right, with about 10,000 tries before the Bessemer converter worked reliably. No one had done that before, and one person did it. - "AI", via the machine learning route - inevitable. The concepts date from the 1960s, but it took half a century of IC development to make them feasible. Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality. Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat".

ttoinou 1y ago
- Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work. The mainstream explanation is that the threat that someone else could be researching and investing is enough of push to try yourself Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality. I would say moving from rhetoric to a simple 3 parameters model ("how many people can research this, how much resources it takes, how useful the promised result it")
CGMthrowaway 1y ago
>Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat". Ironically, despite not having a moat, the inevitable technologies have been however far more lucrative. With a few more examples I can make the point stronger. Inevitable: printing press, vaccines, refrigeration, social media Not inevitable: reusable rockets, CRISPR, GPS, high speed rail
worldsayshi 1y ago
> Internal combustion engine - inevitable This fails to account for competing technologies. If batteries were good enough at the time when we sought to build cars we might've skipped ICE entirely and gone all in on electric cars. At any point in time there are multiple possible outcomes. The one that ends up being dominant seems so in retrospect because it has been refined and we can follow all the events leading up to it. But we don't see all the paths that failed selection because they weren't competitive enough at that point in time compared to the alternative.
- WorkerBee28474 1y ago
  You seem to link cars and ICEs, while ICEs predated cars by a century.
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    Ok sure but electric cars predated ice cars. That's what I was thinking of. We could've skipped ice cars entirely if other enabler technologies were mature enough at the time. So the ice car wasn't inevitable. It was the car that we could build at that time given the technology we had. So it was only inevitable given the context. Change the context, change the outcome.
conception 1y ago
I would only note that having fuel available was not inevitable and we just happen to be lucky that we have lots of plant matter that got changed into easily accessible oil. This is one of the reasons why humanity is kind of cooked if there is a major war or collapse of civilization. That easy energy is gone
top256 1y ago
Thank you for the comment and engaging with my thinking. You're using hindsight to define inevitability, which is exactly the circular reasoning my essay critiques. "It happened widely, therefore it was inevitable" isn't a useful framework, it's survivorship bias. Using your IC example: they became cheap because of massive government investment in the space program and military procurement, not natural law. The Apollo Guidance Computer alone drove early IC demand. Different policy choices = different outcome. Personal computing almost died multiple times. Xerox PARC had it all in 1973 but management killed it. IBM thought the market was ~5 computers total. The Homebrew Computer Club was nearly shut down for copyright infringement. Any of these inflection points going differently changes history. Your "no moat" observation is telling - you're really describing business strategy (technologies that spread can't be monopolized) not philosophical inevitability. But even that's questionable: TCP/IP could have lost to OSI, the Web to Gopher or AOL's walled garden. The counterfactual test: if these were truly inevitable, we'd see simultaneous independent invention everywhere. Instead we see: singular inventors, path dependence, and technologies that almost weren't (or actually weren't: where's our supersonic passenger travel?). Calling only successes "inevitable" while ignoring what didn't happen or was actively prevented (nuclear proliferation, human cloning, various chemicals/drugs) demonstrates the selection bias in this thinking.
- MengerSponge 1y ago
  An interesting counterpoint to the inevitability of ICs: Consider East Germany's semiconductor industry. They had state backing and proof of viability but they still couldn't generate a competitive product. Making things is _hard_, and embodied expertise is critical.
  - top256 1y ago
    Great example. Thanks a lot! Can I add it my essay?
    - MengerSponge 1y ago
      Sure! I'd recommend you use a more reliable reference than some dude online vaguely recalling a something he read four+ years ago :)
lesuorac 1y ago
What's your definition of a moat? There's a reason Norway makes a lot of money from oil while Greenland doesn't. I'm not sure why the word moat doesn't apply here? Sure, with enough money you can overcome any moat but to me that's the whole argument behind a moat. We have something right now that a competitor would need to spend a lot to reach and during that time we can just get ahead of them. If you have an existing iron mine and coal, to me you have a moat over generic competitor in creating steel because you already have suppliers for your steel mill lined up. Although some may argue that those are actually anchors and that you could import both of them for cheaper and then supply your mill that way.
myfavoritetings 1y ago
After reading “The Making Of The Atomic Bomb” I came away with the impression that development of nuclear bombs was 100% inevitable after 1938 when the German scientists proved splitting uranium isotope could sustain a chain reaction. All of the top physicists in the world instantly knew this could be used to create a super weapon. Every power in WWII had a nuclear program but only 1 had the resources to execute on it. Being the only country with a nuke is basically a checkmate on the world order and game theory demands it be created once it was known it was possible

ttoinou 1y ago

- Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work. The mainstream explanation is that the threat that someone else could be researching and investing is enough of push to try yourself Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality. I would say moving from rhetoric to a simple 3 parameters model ("how many people can research this, how much resources it takes, how useful the promised result it")

CGMthrowaway 1y ago

>Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat". Ironically, despite not having a moat, the inevitable technologies have been however far more lucrative. With a few more examples I can make the point stronger. Inevitable: printing press, vaccines, refrigeration, social media Not inevitable: reusable rockets, CRISPR, GPS, high speed rail

worldsayshi 1y ago

> Internal combustion engine - inevitable This fails to account for competing technologies. If batteries were good enough at the time when we sought to build cars we might've skipped ICE entirely and gone all in on electric cars. At any point in time there are multiple possible outcomes. The one that ends up being dominant seems so in retrospect because it has been refined and we can follow all the events leading up to it. But we don't see all the paths that failed selection because they weren't competitive enough at that point in time compared to the alternative.

WorkerBee28474 1y ago
You seem to link cars and ICEs, while ICEs predated cars by a century.
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  Ok sure but electric cars predated ice cars. That's what I was thinking of. We could've skipped ice cars entirely if other enabler technologies were mature enough at the time. So the ice car wasn't inevitable. It was the car that we could build at that time given the technology we had. So it was only inevitable given the context. Change the context, change the outcome.

conception 1y ago

I would only note that having fuel available was not inevitable and we just happen to be lucky that we have lots of plant matter that got changed into easily accessible oil. This is one of the reasons why humanity is kind of cooked if there is a major war or collapse of civilization. That easy energy is gone

top256 1y ago

Thank you for the comment and engaging with my thinking. You're using hindsight to define inevitability, which is exactly the circular reasoning my essay critiques. "It happened widely, therefore it was inevitable" isn't a useful framework, it's survivorship bias. Using your IC example: they became cheap because of massive government investment in the space program and military procurement, not natural law. The Apollo Guidance Computer alone drove early IC demand. Different policy choices = different outcome. Personal computing almost died multiple times. Xerox PARC had it all in 1973 but management killed it. IBM thought the market was ~5 computers total. The Homebrew Computer Club was nearly shut down for copyright infringement. Any of these inflection points going differently changes history. Your "no moat" observation is telling - you're really describing business strategy (technologies that spread can't be monopolized) not philosophical inevitability. But even that's questionable: TCP/IP could have lost to OSI, the Web to Gopher or AOL's walled garden. The counterfactual test: if these were truly inevitable, we'd see simultaneous independent invention everywhere. Instead we see: singular inventors, path dependence, and technologies that almost weren't (or actually weren't: where's our supersonic passenger travel?). Calling only successes "inevitable" while ignoring what didn't happen or was actively prevented (nuclear proliferation, human cloning, various chemicals/drugs) demonstrates the selection bias in this thinking.

MengerSponge 1y ago
An interesting counterpoint to the inevitability of ICs: Consider East Germany's semiconductor industry. They had state backing and proof of viability but they still couldn't generate a competitive product. Making things is _hard_, and embodied expertise is critical.
- top256 1y ago
  Great example. Thanks a lot! Can I add it my essay?
  - MengerSponge 1y ago
    Sure! I'd recommend you use a more reliable reference than some dude online vaguely recalling a something he read four+ years ago :)

lesuorac 1y ago

What's your definition of a moat? There's a reason Norway makes a lot of money from oil while Greenland doesn't. I'm not sure why the word moat doesn't apply here? Sure, with enough money you can overcome any moat but to me that's the whole argument behind a moat. We have something right now that a competitor would need to spend a lot to reach and during that time we can just get ahead of them. If you have an existing iron mine and coal, to me you have a moat over generic competitor in creating steel because you already have suppliers for your steel mill lined up. Although some may argue that those are actually anchors and that you could import both of them for cheaper and then supply your mill that way.

myfavoritetings 1y ago

After reading “The Making Of The Atomic Bomb” I came away with the impression that development of nuclear bombs was 100% inevitable after 1938 when the German scientists proved splitting uranium isotope could sustain a chain reaction. All of the top physicists in the world instantly knew this could be used to create a super weapon. Every power in WWII had a nuclear program but only 1 had the resources to execute on it. Being the only country with a nuke is basically a checkmate on the world order and game theory demands it be created once it was known it was possible