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Taleb: The future will not be cool
- russell 14y agoTaleb of Black Swans fame says that predictions of future technology dont pan out, flying cars for example. He says that the predictable new technology is a replacement of older less capable or less adapted technology. I suppose your could have predicted cell phones, having see analog wireless phones. What he doesnt say in this book excerpt is that truly disruptive technology is usually around in the labs or experimental form 15 or so years before its disruptive phase. Could you have predicted today's internet from the early ARPANET? I was there and I didnt. Or the iPad from the integrated circuit? Good grief, Ted Nelson demoed Xanadu of a group of us in the 1980's and I didnt see the social implications of the Web.
- don_draper 14y agoHas technology really made your life significantly better? How many of us still get in cars and commute to work, sit in an office, as we are monitored by our boss, drive home through some awful commute. Then eat some processed food because we didn't have time to go to the grocery store and get some fresh food. I'm sure there are plenty on this site who telecommute and bike, but that's not the norm. A lot of what is If talked about on this site is really not a big deal: some new library to make some flashy display; or some new iphone/app thingy; or some new way to get eyeballs to look at a web page.
- pjscott 14y agoIf you want to talk non-flashy technology, I use some: * Electricity keeps me warm in winter, and lets me see things in the dark without flame or moonlight. * Artificial fertilizers produced with the Haber-Bosch process are currently necessary for food cost to be a minor concern, rather than one of the great overriding imperatives of my life. * I got the knowledge-equivalent of a CS degree in high school, thanks to having a lot of spare time and an internet connection. * Books, once outlandishly expensive, were dirt cheap to print by the time I was a child. Reading a lot of them was one of the major influences on my life. I could name some more -- fast global travel, ubiquitous access to clean water, higher effective wealth because of cheap worldwide shipping, eyeglasses so I can see clearly -- but hopefully I've made my point.
- michaelochurch 14y agoHow many of us still get in cars and commute to work, sit in an office, as we are monitored by our boss, drive home through some awful commute. Then eat some processed food because we didn't have time to go to the grocery store and get some fresh food. I'm sure there are plenty on this site who telecommute and bike, but that's not the norm. I hate to tell you this, but if you're in a developed country like the US, then take your socioeconomic percentile and call it X. You have a better life in 2012 than the Xth-percentile person of 1950, 1900, 1800, 1600, and on back. There's a strong tendency to compare the average person's life (which, compared to the expectations of a high-IQ person with access to technology and therefore superior alternatives, is admittedly quite shitty) now to the life of an aristocrat in the past, and therefore conclude that things were better, but that's wildly inaccurate. The malaise comes from a couple factors. First, most peoples' lives are still shitty, and what's becoming more clear is that this is unnecessarily so, thus showcasing the rottenness of human nature. It's no longer the fault of "scarcity". People just fucking suck-- they're greedy, petty, and would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. The useless and counterproductive power structures remain because there are assholes who really like holding power and don't care if they're playing a negative-sum game. We probably have one more violent class revolution (possibly worldwide) in our human story before we make it to the post-scarcity (ca. 2100?) world. Second, technological and economic growth have slowed down (not stopped, but slowed) over the past 30 years due to a lack of investment in basic research. Rather than accelerating toward a singularity, we've gone from 6% growth per year to about 4%. This is a slow patch, no doubt, but at least it's not decline.
- philwelch 14y agoI'd say an Xth percentile person in 2012 has a better life than an X+30th percentile person in 1950 at the very least. Most people haven't fully explored all the consequences of everything that's changed in the last 62 years, but they would be outraged to go back.
- pjscott 14y agoWhat would it mean for a 79th percentile person in 2012 to have a better life than a 109th percentile person in 1950? Percentiles don't actually go that high.
- thenomad 14y ago"Has technology really made your life significantly better?" I'm a professional filmmaker. It's what I've always wanted to do. I've also always wanted to make epic fantasy/sci-fi films. Currently, thanks to 3D animation, Machinima, motion capture, and a bunch of other things, I get to make movies in my bedroom that would have been flat-out impossible 25 years ago, and would have cost in excess of $10,000,000 15 years ago. So, yeah. Tech has made my life better.
- dmpk2k 14y agoI'd say vaccines and antibiotics have made my life vastly better. Let's compare: WW2 was the worst war we've ever had; it killed about 60 million people, or about 2% of the world population. The Spanish Flu in 1918 killed 3%. Smallpox killed 3-500 million people in the 20th century, or about 5-8x as many as WW2. Or how about the Black Death a few centuries before? Half the European population gone. It wiped out entire Asian cities too. Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would think us mad.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago> Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would think us mad. And we damn need to speed up the development, as antibiotics are starting to fail due to their overuse. We take the life without major pandemics for granted, but we will get a cold wake-up soon if we don't fight to maintain this.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoWait; have you been reading the news? Several epidemics have swept the globe in recent years already. Did somebody wake up, and I missed it?
- TeMPOraL 14y agoI meant serious pandemics like the ones dmpk2k mentioned. Most of the first worlders didn't fear any serious contagion for decades.
- russell 14y agoIt sure has. I was born during WWII and grew up in the 50's and 60's in rural Maine. We did not have indoor plumbing or central heating. Our TV was black and white. Our phone was 8 party non-dial and I think transcontinental phone calls were something like $2 per minute. The first car I drove got 8 miles to the gallon. Our life was a little better than that of my great-grandparents. I am in good health in spite of diabetes and 3 minor heart attacks, because of advances in medical technology. I use insulin that was made available the year after my grandfather died from diabetes. I monitor my blood sugar with an instrument that wasn available a couple of decades ago. I have a pacemaker that wasnt available 50 years ago. I'm alive which is significantly beater than dead.
- Vivtek 14y agoAre you serious? Technology makes my life incomparably better. Let's just set a baseline that both of my children, 13 and 18, are alive due to medicine that didn't even exist a hundred years ago. But that's boring. I'm a translation freelancer whose customers are located in various places around the world; I get my work by email every day, process it using a translation memory that permits me to look up previous translations instantaneously and with the Internet available for instantaneous glossary searches (I no longer even own a paper dictionary - it takes too long to consult it), then send the work back, invoice by email, and receive money into my bank account in Indiana which I access from ATMs here in Budapest. I do all that right from my home, so I can work four hours a day and walk the dog whenever the weather is good, help my kids with their homework when they need it, and in general enjoy my time. Although I live in Budapest this year (and Puerto Rico for five years, Indiana for three), I talked to my father in Indiana face to face yesterday - I had to cut it off because we were going shopping, but that's fine because I can talk to him any time I want. The week before that I was able to talk to my mom, who just had a hip replacement; fifty years ago she'd simply be an invalid due to inflammatory disease, but with metal joints she's still active and able to walk. All that against the backdrop of the fact that I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a farm in Indiana. My life then was already incredibly blessed by technology - my grandparents lived twenty miles away, but we still saw them on a weekly basis, which wouldn't have been possible fifty years before that. I was able to go to school because agricultural productivity permitted me that free time. So yes. Technology has made my life better. It boggles the mind to imagine that people can believe it doesn't.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoAll good examples. But somebody made the observation that the most significant technology innovation to ever hit agriculture was the rubber boot. It let academics visit/study farms without getting dirty, starting the whole discipline on a road to modernization.
- Vivtek 14y agoYour use of "but" is confusing me.
- msrpotus 14y agoInteresting but very over the top. An iPad might be called a tablet but it's very different than what Babylonians used (except in shape and sometimes purpose), contrary to Taleb's assertion.
- smalter 14y agoVenkat Rao at Ribbon Farm has a great post on this topic: "Welcome to the Future Nauseous" (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-n...).
- zem 14y agonow that was an excellent article. thanks for the pointer.
- josephlord 14y agoHe doesn't mention the smartphone, a pocket computer connected to the Internet that may settle an argument at his dinner without recourse to the library the next day. It may also enable finding out where the friends who are running late are and guide him to the address if it isn't familiar. The smartphone was probably predictable from the early 2000's at the very least. Having said that I'm not that I currently see any similar major leaps coming in the next decade. More accurate and indoor location data could bring useful (and in some ways almost invisible) functionality to the smartphone.
- dkarl 14y agoThe smartphone was probably predictable from the early 2000's at the very least. Thinking about smartphone predictability reveals a pattern that might apply to other technologies: an actual dip in predictability caused by technological progress. If you leave out the always-internet-connected aspects of the smartphone, you still have a very small and portable device with books, amusements, up-to-date reference materials such as maps and encyclopedias, current periodicals, and real time voice and video communication. If the Internet did not exist, the iPhone would still have been a breakthrough product. A web-ignorant but otherwise capable iPhone was theoretically predictable half a century ago, but the technological reality of the intervening decades (ugly low-res screens, huge devices with pathetic capabilities, painfully clumsy input methods) depressed our expectations to the point that when it finally happened, it was something of a surprise. AI may be another area where decades of technological disappointment have narrowed our expectations and reduced our ability to imagine what the future will bring. Someone transported from the 1960s might be better at predicting the future of AI than anyone who lived through the intervening decades.
- eric_bullington 14y agoThis is a really insightful comment. What's slightly disconcerting is thinking of what might be the present day analogue of AI in the 60s. What promising new technology, that we believe to be on the cusp of success, is about to flounder for about 40-50 years, or more, before it takes off? EDIT: Corrected 20-30 years to a more realistic time span with respect to AI.
- 001sky 14y agoAntifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder [Hardcover] Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Author) -- You Save: $13.01 (43%) I thought the Amazon-affiliate link was a bit Ironic.
- notJim 14y agoWhy is it ironic?
- 001sky 14y agoTaleb: The future will not be cool -- but it will be 43% off ! [1] _________ [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Situational_irony http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Situational_irony
- notJim 14y agoUh... did you read the article?
- 001sky 14y agoedit: footnoted for future reference.
- notJim 14y agoIf I understood it in this circumstance, I wouldn't have asked you to explain it. -- Edit: link added for future reference: http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/
- 001sky 14y agoYou seem to be reading condescension into where it is/was non-existent or trying to throw it around where it is not warranted.
- ddw 14y agoHe picked the perfect example of his point.
- lolcraft 14y agoThis is, surprisingly, a warning for entrepreneurs worldwide. You should read it. "After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by he new class of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as I used to live among tie-wearing abhorred bankers." "But these conferences felt depressing. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance." Take its message as a humbling lesson: "Technology is at its best when it is invisible."
- michaelochurch 14y agoI moved back into a conservative industry and have started wearing a jacket and tie. Honestly, I quite like it. It's a couple hundred bucks worth of clothing to have the image of being "serious" about my job, and to get the benefit of the doubt in all sorts of social interactions. With the rewards considered, it's extremely cheap. I don't know that I'll continue to wear a tie for the rest of my life, and I certainly won't expect other people to do so when I become a "higher-up", but I'm not going to dress like a college student for work anymore, no matter what I do. When you go to work the unfortunate reality is that you need to subtly tell other people what they think of you, and dressing well is one of the most time- and energy-efficient ways to do it.
- lolcraft 14y agoI guess we, in our youthful arrogance, dismiss our seniors as enterprise relics of a lost age, without considering what led them to that place before. Things don't seem to change that much, after all. Sadly. Which is coincidentally the theme of this article.
- pjscott 14y agoI guess we, in our youthful arrogance, dismiss our seniors as enterprise relics of a lost age, without considering what led them to that place before. This is a maddeningly vague statement. It sounds like something I'm supposed to agree with, but without at least one concrete example, it could be total bullshit and still sound wise.
- zerostar07 14y agoIt's true that our basic needs haven't changed much. We 've become a little more brainy but our basic needs are served by relatively little technology. That's because humans haven't evolved visibly since ancient times. Our way of life will truly change once we start altering ourselves in substantial ways. The future will be very cool in a world where people can grow wings at will.
- jamesjporter 14y agoUnfortunately, this future is still very, very far away. We're not even close to understanding how a single eukaryotic cell works, much less an entire organism as complex as a human being or a bird.
- zerostar07 14y agoWe don't necessarily need to know all the inner workings, just the important things to do our job. Cavemen didn't know about torques, loads and angular velocities when they invented the wheel. Thus i am hopeful that i will live to see the major breakthroughs in genetics and neuroscience.
- jamesjporter 14y agoI suppose that's true; its also a good summary of how molecular biology has been done thus far and we've managed to learn quite a bit. Translating it into practical applications has been more of a challenge. I'm skeptical that we'll see any breakthroughs in transhumanism in our lifetime, although naysayers are always being proven wrong— I sure hope I am as well.
- bozho 14y agoArthur Clarke is one of the futurists that has imagined things right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxYgdX2PxyQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxYgdX2PxyQ
- NoPiece 14y agoI think he's also a good example of what Taleb is pointing out - the problems with taking a snapshot of the present and projecting. 2001 was published in 1968, with a moon landing imminent. Projecting ahead, it seemed reasonable that by 2001 we would have had moon bases, commercial flights to large space stations, and ships ready to explore Jupiter and Saturn. I wish he had been right!
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI always find these sorts of essays curious, here is a guy who is eating lamb and noting that the fork is an old invention. Except that the lamb he is eating is probably from New Zealand, a country that is mesopotamian ancestors couldn't even imagine existed, much less imagine trading with. He might as well remark that his sperm is using the same sort of gamete structure that was fashionable in the neolithic period. That isn't the point. The future is going to be new, and different, and it is hard to predict. Your phone (for some definition of phone) can give you answer to nearly any fact based question you can imagine. Right now, in under 500 mSec. The future doesn't look different when its entered into gradually, it looks hugely different when it is punctuated. So if Taleb really wanted to 'check' on his futurist mantra, he should pick a number, 10 years, 25 years, 50 years. And then 'spend a day' in that time by removing everything in his possessions, environment, and activities that were not created or possible at that previous time. I would predict that its a matter of opinion as to whether the future is or is not 'cool', most people would agree that the past sucks. :-)
- bloaf 14y agoI find the most interesting thing about WW2 museums are the displays of everyday items. Why? Because there are never (or almost never) any plastic items. There is lots of metal, wood, and some ivory, but no plastic. It wasn't that long ago that people didn't have plastic. The author seems to think science is 100% computers and space travel; if he is only listening to pop-futurists, this is perhaps understandable. But if you consider the more humble applications of technology, you really see the changes technology brings to our lives. Refrigeration is another good example, and I bet the author has not been to a hospital in a while if he thinks that the way we do medicine hasn't drastically changed since ancient times. Edit, I should also point out that the main sources of entertainment in the US (TV/Internet/Radio) are all less than 100 years old.
- notJim 14y agoI think you're missing the point, but also I admit I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say. So please forgive me if I get it wrong. The point is not that the future will be like the past, or that things which exist now simply should not. It's that in Taleb's future, technologists will have recognized that technology should eliminate bullshit (think about the toilet and sewers, some of the best technology that could ever exist!) and make it easier to live a life full of the basic good parts of being human: companionship/sex, food, discovery and knowledge. So the smartphone is not incongruous with his vision of the future at all. It enables you to seek all of those things, and adds relatively little in terms of shitty things (I mean, you have to pay for it and keep it charged, but beyond that it doesn't add a lot hardship.) When he talks about the lack of literacy in technology circles, I believe he's thinking of literature as a tool for looking at human motivations. So, his theory is that if technologists were to read literature (or were of a mindset to be already interested in literature), they would recognize these motivations, and it would provide a path for changing their focus from stupid social widgets to something that will actually create the future.
- michaelochurch 14y agoFirst of all, I disagree. The future will be cool, at least in the long term. What it won't be is weird, in the sense of people wearing spacesuits in their living rooms. The bizarre visions people have traditionally had of the future (and which, demonstrably, haven't come true) seemed to focus largely on superficial stuff (clothing fashions, which are highly unpredictable but have a long-term mean-reversion) and to exaggerate. That doesn't mean that the world hasn't changed, and won't change, in profound ways. Yes, the pleasures of life (wine, music, books, sex, spiritual experience) don't change all that much and therefore we use a lot of old technologies in daily life, so it can appear like there's nothing new... but there will be more people able to afford them, and they will be much less impeded by the stupid shit that clogged up peoples' lives in pre-technological times. Just to continue Taleb's example: in the 21st century, a lot of people get to drink wine of (by historical standards) exceedingly high quality. Three millennia ago, wine existed but the vast majority of people never got to drink any. Many of the modern applications that have managed to survive today came to disrupt the deleterious effect of the philistinism of modernity, particularly the 20th century: the large multinational bureaucratic corporation with “empty suits” at the top; the isolated family (nuclear) in a one-way relationship with the television set, even more isolated thanks to car-designed suburban society [...] I'm going to stop there with the quote. His point is valid, but I think there's something missed when people rip on suburbia. Yes, it's outmoded and wasteful and somewhat ugly, but the Levittowns were a lot better than the "company towns" of early-industrial hell, and those were a lot better than being a serf on a medieval enclosure, in a time when it wasn't uncommon for a peasant to have his head cut off by a knight (knights were more like warlords than the noble paladins of romance). People tend to compare the experiences of average people now against those of an elite in the past and conclude that things were better, but that's not fair. The 1800-era analogue of a bored suburbanite of 50th-percentile social status (only one car!) was not an English baron, but someone who started work at seven in the coal mines. People rip on suburbia now because it's outmoded, but it wasn't always this way. Urban freeways are called "parkways" because the vision of Robert Moses (in hindsight we say, "That fucker!", but he was very respected in his time) was for them to be park-like roads for an automotive elite. In the 1920s, suburbia was very much in. The suburban lifestyle, with lots of driving, was designed for the rich and handed down, over a couple of decades, to the working classes in a watered-down form. The result now, almost a century later, is that "suburbia" is no longer cool because the low-quality suburbs of the poor have killed the image of the concept. Oddly enough, has anyone ever noticed how rich people suburbs aren't called that? The Hamptons isn't "suburbia". The Woodbury towns out there are "charming little towns" rather than suburbs, because the rich people who live there have enough time to make zoning rules that keep a quaint little street or two alive. These people aren't morally superior for having houses in high-price towns that still have walkable main streets as opposed to "suburbs". They're just richer. One thing I find interesting is that Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) wrote an essay about technology and alienation, while most of his complaints were of the industrial-era society, not the technological society we evolved into. He was miserable because, in spite of his extreme intelligence and adept writing, he had no real influence in a world run by corrupt corporate institutions. So he went out and killed people in order to effectively force the New York Times to publish his rant. If he had waited 15 years and not killed people, he would have had the public access and attention he craved. He might have trolled a bit, but no one would have died. Technology was just about to solve many of the problems that had him so upset-- that he blamed on industrial society. My view of technology and progress is that it's nearly monotonic in "goodness", but that the old humanity we're now trying to distance ourselves from is quite tenacious and willing to use technology toward pre-technological purposes, and so the long-term convergence toward democracy that we'd like to see doesn't come nearly as fast as we'd like. For example, one might like to believe that, in an electronic world, old-style industrial pressures like taking orders from managers, showing up in an uninspiring white-box office during certain hours, and writing TPS reports would vanish... but human nature is a certain way and power likes to maintain position, so the transition is actually taking decades rather than the hours that it "should". The result of this is that the technological push toward a better world appears to collapse into an unsatisfying half measure and people end up having to use technology in uninspiring ways (e.g. getting to write code, but still having to take orders from non-technical executives or "product managers"). That's not technology's fault. That's an artifact of humans being slow to improve themselves.
- breckinloggins 14y agoI believe that the future will look more like the past. One thing I'm almost certain we'll see less and less of is gadgets. Smartphones, computers, things like that will all go inside your head (if you're willing, and most everyone will be). Soon we will become tired of living in houses with blank walls upon which are projected whatever we want and, because we can do so, will revert back to more ancient styles of architecture and furnishings (with a couple of blank walls or two). Your stove may look like a wood burning stove, and your fridge may look like a 50's model. Why? Because when almost EVERYTHING is 3D printed to your specifications, people are free to make things that function in a modern way but look like what they want them to look, rather than how the manufacturer's marketing department deems they should look. I think transport will be dominated by self-driving vehicles, but again: think of individual styles. I predict quite a few autonomous "horseless coaches" driving around our cities. Speaking of cities... My hope is that high speed network access will be everywhere, and population densities will equalize as more and more people prefer to live a rural life even while they do cutting edge professional or academic work. There will still be slums and there will still be poor people, but I think that the majority of people who live in cities will do so because they really want to. Further out, I can see even things like traditional healthcare completely disappear. Sure, we may always have emergency trauma centers and doctors, but it's not to hard to fathom a time where a colony of self-replicating bio-robots and ongoing genetic engineering work 24 hours a day inside your body to keep it healthy and let you know of any real trouble before it becomes serious. This is not to say that all these predictions will come true, only that the disappearance of electronic gadgets into the mind and into fabrics, paint, and the air seems inevitable, as does the radical differentiation of physical things like furniture, houses, and vehicles that will certainly come from the 3D printing/replication revolution (if that occurs).
- lmg643 14y agoI used to be impressed by Taleb (when I was younger and more clueless) but having read two of his books and many articles I find the negativity tiresome and petulant, and his finance theories questionable. Eric Falkenstein: "Another key to understanding Taleb is that he has a French post-modern tendency to write to impress rather than explain. He provides hundreds of loosely related anecdotes, reminding me of the Talmud quote that 'when a debater’s point is not impressive, he brings forth many arguments.' I actually agree with a lot of Taleb, such as the intractability of risk because it is endogenous, and I think he's vaguely libertarian, but he says so many inconsistent things that doesn't mean much (when he's right it's probably a good example of the Gettier problem)." Gettier problem = whether being right by accident still counts as being right. http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/taleb-mishandles-fragility.html http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/taleb-mishandles-frag...
- fusiongyro 14y agoI continue to be impressed by Taleb, but I will read the linked blog article. I don't read him for the financial advice per se so much as for enjoyably-written reminders to avoid the fundamental attribution error and pay attention to the expected value as well as the extremes when weighing probabilistic outcomes. I wouldn't characterize him as negative—he strikes me as about as positive as you can get with an acute awareness of human ignorance as an incurable situation that leads to a great deal of needless suffering. A lot of the anti-Taleb angst seems to derive from him not delivering facts in a sufficiently rigorous and drab manner, but I don't think there's anything wrong with entertaining non-fiction.
- fusiongyro 14y agoThat was a great article. I wish I understood more of the math. It is making me question my attitude towards Taleb and his work, which has been pretty fawning up until now.
- georgeorwell 14y agoI'd like to see a news aggregator where all of the submissions were as well-written and thoughtful as this one. It doesn't matter whether his perspective is wrong or right, the fact is that the writing here simply makes reading it a pleasure. I'd say that 1% or less of articles have this quality.
- rizzom5000 14y agoThis was actually little more than an advertisement for his book. I agree it is well written, which is not entirely surprising as the author has been on the NYT best selling list before. With that being said, the NYT might be the aggregator you're looking for - that is, if you're looking for high quality literature.
- Millennium 14y agoThe future will be plenty cool. What it won't be is what the cool people (or, indeed, anyone at all) thinks it will be. It will be, as it has always been, the cool future that nobody thought of.
- allenwlee 14y agoI'd really like to know if people on HN "share an absence of literary culture" as Taleb suggests. Can you please respond if you read literature other than science fiction?
- Tycho 14y agoMy undergraduate degree was in Literature. I've read lots of classic novels, poetry etc. I also like sci-fi.
- joe-mccann 14y agoI read Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and of course, Taleb...
- pjscott 14y agoThat has got to be the most biased statistical sampling technique ever. If you want to know about "literary culture" among HN readers, asking for replies from people who read non-SF is not going to answer your question. At worst, it'll give you the illusion of knowledge. (Maybe a more interesting question would be: what's so ontologically distinct about science fiction? Why is it specifically excluded from Literature?)
- jhales 14y agoI think Taleb's distinction is that sci-fi was about the future, while the rest was about the past.
- jhales 14y agoI'm rather 'well read.' I don't say this boastfully as I feel a lot of it was a waste of time (although I also found a lot of philosphy/literature etc. very insightful).
- mindcrime 14y agoI don't say this boastfully as I feel a lot of it was a waste of time I try to read a few "classics" now and then, and I definitely read more than just sci-fi. I like history, philosophy, biographies, etc., as well. But you touch on something we all have to struggle with: Time. There are only so many hours in the day to read, and every time I sit down to read, I have to make a decision on whether or not what I'm thinking about reading is a good use of my time. So... I'm going to get a certain amount of raw "escapism", pop-fiction stuff, that I need just to stay sane. That's a given. Now, how much time do I have left to read Homer, or obscure French and Russian "literature"? And to what end? Just to impress hipster douche-bags and self-appointed "intellectuals"? Or because reading that stuff is actually going to add value to my life? Is reading Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina going to do more for me than reading Teach Yourself Haskell in 21 Days or Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" books, or whatever? The last few books I've read (other than technical books) include Run by Dean Karnazes, Born to Run by McDougal, The Belgian Hammer by Lee, Eat & Run by Scott Jurek, Racing Through the Dark by David Millar, Slaying the Badger by Moore, Running on Empty by Marshall Ulrich and The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton. Would I be better off if I'd spent that time reading "literature" instead? I don't know, but I'm sceptical. OTOH, I have a whole pile of stuff lying here by Nietzsche, Kieerkegard, Hume, Foucalt, etc., that I'm planning to work through. But I'm reading it just because I find it interesting, not because I see it as having any more inherent value than "low brow" literature.
- marquis 14y ago"It is remarkable that the tools that seem to currently dominate the world, such as the Internet, or more mundane matters such as the wheel on the suitcase of Book IV, were completely missing from these forecasts." This is completely wrong. I can think of at least 2 victorian examples imagining the internet: 1, a series of drawings where video telecommunications is imagined, and the other a story I cannot find, written over 100 years ago I believe, about a son and mother communicating from their pods where all the worlds knowledge is accessible, and the son chooses to go "offline".
- gnosis 14y agoThe story is called "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
- marquis 14y agoThanks! It's also far out of copyright, here's the story itself. http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
- astine 14y agoI was going to say something to the effect of "Who is this guy and why do we care what he thinks? He seems like an idiot." But it turns out that he's actually a respected thinker and has published some respected books so maybe I'm not allowed to say that. However, I still think this particular essay is insulting drivel. Taleb uses a lot of 10 dollar words to mast his 10 cent thoughts. He wears his vocabulary and enculturation on his sleeve like a badge so that he can pour scorn on neophiles and other people he doesn't like. Now, this may merely be the predjudice of an "autistic" technophile, but I prefer reasoned arguments to intellectual muscle flexing. He makes a few good points. As the old saying goes: "The more things change the more they stay the same." Some things about society will possibly never change. But his actual argument is so vapid: We still use glasses to hold liquids that we intend to drink? Just like the Mesopotamians? No kidding. But chances are that glass he was drinking out of was manufactured in China hundreds of miles away with techniques wholly unavailable to Mesopotamia and shipped across a distance, inconcievable to a Mesopotamian, and at a price, proportionally less that the price of the rudimentary earthenware mug that a Mesopotamian would use. Taleb accuses technophiles of not studying history, but I have studied history, and the world has changed, quite a bit.
- JackFr 14y agoYour first instinct was right.
- notJim 14y agoYou spend a lot of time insulting Taleb, and relatively little time actually addressing the problems with his arguments.
- akaru 14y agoIt's a 50/50 split. In an article, 5/95 would suffice? Must a retort require so much more?
- michaelochurch 14y agoIf there's an irony here, it's that Taleb's most famous book is entitled Black Swan, hence the phrase for an out-of-context, low-probability event. Yet here he is downplaying the possibility of future black swans.
- JDSD 14y agoI can't believe I just read that entire thing... I feel as though the trajectory of technological advancement and "Taleb's" personal vision of the future are two seperate things and he is unable to acknowledge that fact. He is let down because reality isn't living up to his idea of what he thinks reality should be... There are far too many points to refute.. Shoes look no different than they did 3500 years ago because they serve a purpose. Once a technology serves a purpose, there is no need to improve that purpose, unless said technology is to be used in another setting which requires change or improvement... Hence sandals, flip-flops, sneakers, skateboarding shoes, high heels, rollerblades, iceskates, snowshoes. I think author touched on this, kind of... You get my point... Chairs are the same as they were because panda's aren't sitting in chairs. People are sitting in chairs, and people haven't physically changed since the inception of chairs. So a device that humans use for sitting is not likely to change... But wait, what about lounging chairs, or baby chairs, or high chairs, or stools? I'm sure if a fish needed a chair, it would look like a bed... Technology is the instantiation of idea's into physicality. This is done for any number of reasons, most of which to solve some type of rudimentary problem. Some become extrusions of ourselves. Human beings are limited in MANY ways, but we are able to identify the limitations and problem solve through technological means. For example, an iPhone is an extreme technological extrusion, not just a device. Think about a text message. Bear with me here... A thought you have makes it's way from being a mere THOUGHT, to then being processed by LANGUAGE, which is processed to WRITTEN LANGUAGE, which is expressed through typing on a KEYBOARD, on a TOUCH SCREEN DISPLAY, on a WIRELESS MOBILE DEVICE, and then SENT THROUGH THE AIR to someone else's WIRELESS MOBILE DEVICE, to be READ, PROCESSED, and your thought implanted in that persons mind. No words were used here. Just transference of thoughts through technological means. Look at a car... Metal exoskeleton with wheels that can change it's rate of speed at will. Another technological extrusion of yourself. Without you driving, the car doesn't do shit. Try explaining that to the shoe person 3500 years ago, or your fork friend, or someone even a mere 150 years ago... "Yeah man, instead of walking in 3500 years you'll get into a 2500lb metal box with rubber wrapped wheels filled with air that burns a a flammable liquid in another metal box of moving parts and listens to commands your right foot gives it!" The internet has allowed people to have access to a network of information no other period in known history has ever had. The library of Alexandria MAY have contained similar amounts of knowledge, but it was in a centralized location that required your physical presence. The internet itself isn't changing the technological landscape, but the access to information the internet provides is. The rate at which thoughts/ideas are physically instantiated is increasing rapidly, as more tools are created by more people having more access to other tools, etc... In short, what I gathered from this piece is that people should give up looking forward, and be happy right where they are, because our prediction skills suck and change is scary and doesn't always have the best outcome... I'm sure glad pre-bigbang conditions didn't feel the same way. Or the primordial soup. Or Einstein. Or Edwin Hubble. Or Carl Sagan. Or Nikola Tesla. Or anyone who's ever had an idea and executed it for that matter. =============================== TL;DR Technologies are idea's that solve problems. The future is unpredictable. Problems of an unpredictable future are also unpredictable. Hence, why people are shit predictors of the future technological climate. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
- sabj 14y agoA fun article whose real value will likely be missed by many here who will be rushing, misguided, to defend their ideas of 'technology' or 'progress' from attack. The points that Taleb is making here are best discussed, not by considering technology as artifact alone, but technology for what it really is - a set of artifacts, systems, processes, and artifices that take place in a social milieu and as a two-way relationship with society and civilization. To think otherwise is naive folly, from my perspective. (Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technolo... for a primer on this, it's fun reading if you're unfamiliar). Technophiles (myself included!) will often project things out because they fail to understand that technology does NOT just show up and leave an imprint on the world, deus ex machina style. Instead the world shapes technology back. You can see this for any kind of technology, from the bicycle (Bijker's famous example, shown in the wikipedia article) to the Internet, which has its present design because of the real fears / threats / motivations that abounded during its establishment. It's the (mostly) impossible nature of this dis-entanglement that throws people off track. In some world of scientist-kings of technocratic technophile dictatorships, yes, we'd have moon bases by now. But that's not how it works, and as a result people - messy, annoying humanity - get in the way. For better or, for often, worse. The future WILL be cool - I'm still an optimist. But it will be cool in different ways, and maybe for different reasons, than many here on HN might imagine. Since this thread is already a bit long let me instead just close with a great quote that I reference often. Relevant here. The plain message physical science has for the world at large is this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic operating plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment be no appreciate toil in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful in its value. There is more than enough for everyone alive. Science stands, a too competent servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use. – H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1904)
- TeMPOraL 14y agoTo quote from the Wikipedia article: "Advocates of SCOT—that is, social constructivists -- argue that technology does not determine human action, but that rather, human action shapes technology." Sounds like another case of people not understanding feedback loops - that A can both determine, and be determined by B.
- JulianMorrison 14y agoA simple way to predict the future is to step back into the past. 5 years ago? Aside from the whole tablet/smartphone revolution, not much. 10 years? Much faster computers, web 2.0, Facebook, Gmail, the whole social media thing. 20 years? The entirety of the modern web. MMO games. Global warming. Cloning. Cell phones. Basically technical progress moves quite fast in the medium term but slower than you'd expect in the short term, except with surprises. (Nobody saw tablets coming. A move away from the web, to native apps? In this day and age?)
- kenjackson 14y agoTaleb is wrong. There's a much better analysis on why futurists predict the future wrong by an author who I forget. This authors central thesis is that technology moves in spurts along any given dimension. For example building were getting taller and taller. Every year a new "talltest building" was built. People began imagining buildings to the moon or at least out of the atmosphere. This eventually stopped. Similarly, planes got faster and faster. In the midst of the increase in plane speeds not many would have thought that we'd have the amount of commercial flights at the current "slow" speeds we have. But people tend to miss a lot of other things. Most futurists wouldn't have predicted that computers 1000x more powerful than ENIAC would fit in our pocket. I recall one prediction about a computer the size of ENIAC might fit in a small room. Notice the low resolution displays in most old sci-fi movies. Or how ubiquitous wireless communication would be. Many sci-fi movies with tethered phones, or data transfer with USB-key like gadgets. It's not that things are subtractive (that's just wishful luddite-like thinking). It's just that things aren't necessarily additive where we think they may be. It may be that in 50 years the web is a lot like how it is today, but nutrition technology has drastically changed so that nutrituous food is tasty and cheap. Or we discover technology to communicate with animals much more effectively. Technology keeps moving forward. And I think his comment about literary culture reveals his bias.
- rizzom5000 14y agoI enjoyed this excerpt, but I was surprised that he used Orwell as one of his examples of someone whose imagination failed to predict the future. As much as Taleb swoons over literary culture in this excerpt, and as much of cultural force as Orwell was as a writer; I'm surprised that that Taleb doesn't view Orwell's imagination as a remarkably accurate, in a literary, if not literal, sense, prognosticator. After all, Orwell's imagination predicted the surveillance society, death of individual privacy, the use of propaganda for social engineering among other things. I may be misinterpreting Taleb's words, "The problem is that almost everything that was imagined never took place, except for a few over-exploited anecdotes...", because it strikes me that he would miss the obvious current reality of Orwell's 'literary predictions' which mostly are very much based on technological achievements such as ubiquitous networks, cheap cameras, cheap and ubiquitous data storage, and so on.
- jval 14y agoI can agree with a lot of the criticisms in these comments, because the future will definitely be cool, and Taleb has selectively forgotten about a lot of the great technological advancements and focussed on things that haven't advanced. That said, Taleb makes a good point when he is talking about the tendency for 'futurists' to get it all wrong. He is touching on one of the major problems of design which is that bad design is always additive, and constantly bolts on extra useless features in order to strive for something 'newer', whereas good design demands subtraction. The iPhone was released in an era where most nerds still got excited about what Intel was planning to release next year, and yet the most influential computer of the decade didn't even have an Intel processor. By subtracting away the unnecessary, Jobs delivered something that was far greater than the sum of its parts. Most notably, the iOS touch interface was a huge innovation from a human-computer interaction perspective, yet viewed from another perspective all it did was bring us back to an interface that had been used for centuries (I think Taleb can realise the difference between a Phoenician tablet and an iPad, he is referring to the interface). I think ultimately Taleb is touching on something that Steve Jobs would often repeat, which is that the best objects exist at an intersection of the arts and the sciences. Human nature does not fundamentally change as the years pass, and this is ultimately the limiting factor on successful technologies, and the driving force behind the process of disruptive innovation which continues to favour the less technologically advanced yet more customer-centric (or human-centric) technologies. This is something that is often forgotten in the technology world where it took a completely non-technical liberal arts drop-out in the form of Jobs to help technologists realise that computers ultimately have to be made for real people. That said, Taleb is writing outside his domain and therefore this piece could have been much better written.
- JVIDEL 14y agoI would like to point out that the Space Age futurism the author rants so much about wasn't made by the, and I quote, "techno-autistic" guys. Most of the futuristic crap from 50 and 60 years ago was the product of some uninformed scifi authors who mixed fantasy with technology, marketers creating products of the future to create more brand-awareness (with the ironic consequence that some of those companies disappeared decades ago) and many charlatans who simply had no idea what they were talking about. For example, food pills wasn't about a rosy cool future, the whole idea started as a theoretical last-ditch effort to curve a future global famine of catastrophic proportions caused by the at the time unprecedented increase in population. Fortunately other "techno-autistics" were able to find a way to increase crop yields (Green Revolution) which is why we still have real food instead of something closer to dry dogfood pellets.
- akaru 14y ago'I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a “killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns.' Lost me there. Doesn't even make sense. At a time when people were still hungrily eating meat fresh from the coals, silverware was the least of their worries.
- tubelite 14y agoTaleb is a Soup Nazi. He (volubly) suffers for his soup. He treats customers with disdain. And yet people line up for the soup, because it's pretty good, actually. I find Taleb's opinionated eccentricity very useful, especially when it consists of a mixture of ideas, some of which you totally agree with and some which you totally disagree. Keeps you alert and thinking, instead of blindly swallowing or blindly rejecting everything depending on religious preferences (e.g. iOS vs Android) Antifragility is perhaps the most important perception-refactoring concept since the selfish gene, and the book deserves to be read purely for that reason. The book is pretty laudatory of engineers and the tinkering mentality, crediting them for most of the inventions of the past age, rather than top-down science. Erudition is great. But it is far easier for the engineer to become erudite than for a liberal arts major to become an engineer. Where Taleb is wrong is that (good) science fiction is not about predicting the future. It is really speculative economics fiction - how would a mix of this kind of intelligent agents and this kind of resource environment work out? The science, futurism and the aliens are merely literary tools to help you get out of a human/today-centric point of view. They are thought experiments which can be sold to the public (at least, the engineering public). And God, I hate longhand as the primary mode of input. Connecting the iPad to ancient tablets is the kind of wankery one gets from the erudite, I guess :) (I'm picking very small nits here; "Antifragile" is overall very thought provoking. Highly recommended.)
- venus 14y agoI want to be contrarian here and say I actually liked this article, whose main thrust I might summarise thusly: The future will not be as cool as technologists imagine because in the contest of being what it could be, and being what its current inhabits want it to be (especially those in power), the latter wins It's nothing profound, but it's worth hearing again, and the arguments here underline that. Technology exists to serve humans, and humans haven't changed for a very long time, for better or worse. Any prediction that fails to take this into account will fail. It's an old lesson, but it seems we need to hear these old lessons again, and again, and again.
- egypturnash 14y agoI think he's missing an important thing about SF and futurism. The point of them is not to predict. The point is to say "What if...?" and proceed from there. Every now and then someone nails something. And every now and then someone building a device is inspired by something they read or saw; the form of the once-ubiquitous flip cellphone came from Star Trek's tricorders. Taleb's theoretical dinner might be woven through with the Internet: did he and his friends decide to have this dinner by making appointments on the phone? Or did they use email? Or Facebook, or even just kinda hooked up via Twitter when one of them tweeted "hey who wants to go to The Grinning Wok with me tonight #omnomnomsogood". And maybe that choice of restaurant came in part from reviews online? The Internet is no longer cool, this is true. This is because we're used to it. Hell, the tablet I'm typing this on was cool for like a month after I got it; now it's normal. Maybe a little annoying because the onscreen keyboard sucks and the autocorrect is aggressive and occasionally wrong. The real parts of the future go from "cool" to "normal" very quickly. Impractical stuff stays "cool" in imagination forever.
- xiaoma 14y agoSadly, Taleb failed to address the predictions of one of the biggest "neophiles" of them all-- Kurzweil http://www.techi.com/2011/01/ray-kurzweils-tech-predictions-have-been-eerily-accurate/ http://www.techi.com/2011/01/ray-kurzweils-tech-predictions-...
- wladimir 14y agoLuckily we have Mr Carrico to address those (warning: he is very rude) http://amormundi.blogspot.nl/2009/01/condensed-critique-of-transhumanism.html http://amormundi.blogspot.nl/2009/01/condensed-critique-of-t... Techno-utopianism and futurism does have quite a few critics. Anyway, I've read two of Taleb's books (Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan). Taleb seems to be filled with nostalgia at times. He dreams of a simple, slow life. He regards the news and up-to-dateness of modern mediums mostly as 'noise', and even takes a stab at people that read the newspaper in transit every day. What is also interesting is that he rails against people that try to predict the future because of black swans, the unknown unknowns. Still, this is the second article by him about the future that I read. And it's just as boring as the last one. Technophiles have the tendency to exaggerate what change the future will bring, but conservatives like him fill the predictions with good-old-timesness. It's wishful thinking just as much.
- xiaoma 14y agoBe that as it may, Kurzweil has a decades long history of making predictions, often considered absolutely nuts by the press and in some very high profile cases, technology even beat his predictions. I don't think there's anyone else with as good of a track record when it comes to predicting far off technical advances. (e.g. saying in the 80s that a chess AI beating the top ranked human by 1998 or that the human genome would be sequenced by the year 2000).
- marze 14y agoReminds me a lot of a 120 year ago prediction that all the good stuff had been invented/discovered. So wrong...
- TeMPOraL 14y agoObligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/728/ http://xkcd.com/728/
- Vivtek 14y agoY'know, this is a cute article, but as facilely as he refuses to accept that the present is not as weird as people thought - I'm wearing a flannel button-down right now as I type this in 2012 - the fact remains that I had a nice face-to-face chat with my dad yesterday, even though he's still on the farm in Indiana and I live in Budapest this year.
- zb 14y agoI have long thought that the highest purpose of engineering is to reduce entropy. Although he doesn't express it in those terms, I think Taleb is advocating something similar here. It's not anti-technology in the way that a lot of comments here seem to be interpreting it, but it probably is incompatible with the sort of techno-utopianism that is in vogue at the moment.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoParadoxically, Engineering practice is almost entirely entropy-positive. Turning electricity into heat and light (and minute electro-magnetic patterns, but that's insignificant).
- eli_gottlieb 14y agoEverything is entropy-positive. Some things, though, are less entropy-positive than others.
- corporalagumbo 14y agoThis post is so poorly argued and sloppy it is unbelievable. Intellectual trash.