- 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".
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.
There is an underlying natural law to IC's being cheap without any government involvement because printing out circuits with chemicals and light like a photocopier is inherently cheaper than the alternatives of vacuum tubes or discrete components mounted on a board. (For non-trivial circuits where the count/complexity of components exceed the capital cost of lithography etc equipment.)
The privately funded researchers of Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor already knew integrated circuits would be more cost-effective before the inventions were finally solved. Eliminating the rising labor costs of wiring up old-style discrete components was the motivation to invent integrated circuits.
Therefore, it's not realistic to ponder an alternate history where a government bureaucrat in charge of military spending would have ignored the intrinsic physical properties of ICs and kept choosing vacuum tubes for 1970s F-15 and F-16 fighter jets because he believed "ICs are not inevitable because I have agency to make them not inevitable". Every other rational military on the globe would have chosen ICs which would make American equipment uncompetitive.
What government military contracts did was take intrinsically cheaper technology and fund more iterations to help make it even cheaper.
Yes, history would be different, but that doesn't mean ICs and PCs weren't inevitable. As technology improves the capital required to innovate drops. At some point hobbyists can start making ICs at home. I think something like this happened with 3D printing.
> 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?).
I disagree. Inevitability means that something will manifest at some point on a long enough timeline, not that it will necessarily manifest nearly concurrently on that timeline. Concurrent invention happens a lot and is a strong argument for inevitability, but isn't strictly necessary for inevitability.
For example, death is inevitable, even if we solve aging; we know you won't involuntarily die of old age in such a world, but you will die of something else, even if it's the heat death of the universe.
Making things is _hard_, and embodied expertise is critical.
To your overall point though, and to the contrary of the type of thinking you're critiquing, the timing of these things is not inevitable. Computers didn't have to happen in the 50s, they could easily have waited 50 or 100 years if we didn't have things like wars or other technological breakthroughs that enabled them. For AI we might be stuck on incremental improvements on LLMs for a generation, or they might be obsolete in 5 years. They will be replaced by something better at some point, but confusing (intentionally or not) inevitable with soon is where the hype proves itself hollow.
I don't think there is any reason to think that " a technology was inevitable" implies that the technology would be invented simultaneously in multiple places
- 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.
Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality.
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.
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.
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
Well. If you look at the previous examples of sudden technological breakthroughs, it's kind of amazing how many things were suddenly invented almost simultaneously yet independently.
But then, of course, some things just straight up failed to be invented e.g. Chinese-style wheelbarrow in the West.
Thanks for this remark. This was really interesting: "How to Downsize a Transport Network: The Chinese Wheelbarrow"
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/how-to-downsize-a-...
And it's very unlikely that we can know where any invention falls on that distribution before it's made. We may not even be certain about some after they are made.
Anybody talking about tech inevitability or some universal version of the Great Men theory (in support or rejection) is wrong.
That being said, regarding game theory and coordination: Wars DO end when people change the game's parameters. WWI's Christmas Truce happened despite every incentive against it. Catalonia chose not to pursue independence despite having voted for it. The Montreal Protocol solved ozone depletion despite classic tragedy of the commons dynamics.
My point isn't that coordination is easy - it's that treating it as impossible becomes self-fulfilling. When tech leaders invoke inevitability via game theory, they're choosing to accept those constraints rather than working to change them.
While I see what you are getting at, and I think its super important we come up with philosophical frameworks to push back on the central idea in question (ie, the moral hazard of "its gonna happen anyway so why not pour a little more into the river").... I think your writing/responses miss the central point.
As I see it, the fundamental issue with this essay, and your responses, is you keep conflating impossible with probability zero. People are saying "this is inevitable" to mean this has probability 1 of occurring, with basic game theory reasoning (its a giant iterative prisoners dilemna), and your response "but it's possible". Yes, with measure zero.
Telling us that such a path surely exists isn't useful. If you want to push back on "inevitability" you need to find a credible path with probability > 0 (which is not the same as impossible).
Things only happen if we make them happen. Game theory can make it hard to keep everyone from taking some action, but we can change the rules of the game to punish defectors more.
https://rys.io/en/180.html#hype-is-the-product
> In fact, increasingly, hype is the only thing that counts, as larger and larger chunk of investment money is chasing it – to the detriment of everything else that happens not to bolt the hyped tech onto its unrelated but otherwise solid product or service.
> The bubble grows. The line goes up.
> Because the hype is the product.
It kind of reminds me of the money-manking strategy where someone buys a business with a good reputation, debases its products, then profits from the (temporary) price premium it can still charge due to is prior reputation.
These people are well on the way to ruining tech's reputation, but they don't care because they hope to get rich(er) in the process.
> ... it’s impossible for us to know if a prediction is inevitable or not.
But I think that ignores that some predictions are more likely to happen than others. For example, here are two predictions:
1. ASI will be achieved in the next ten years.
2. LLMs will have a large impact on the economy in the next ten years.
I'm sure it's debatable, but I think prediction #2 is very likely to be true--I would say it's almost inevitable. But I don't think #1 is inevitable.
That being said, it doesn't change my point about agency. Your prediction #2 (LLMs impacting the economy) seems "almost inevitable" precisely because thousands of people are actively working to make it true. If everyone stopped tomorrow - if OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc., all pivoted to other projects - would it still be inevitable?
The appearance of inevitability comes from observing massive coordinated human effort toward a goal, then mistaking that effort for natural law. It's like watching a thousand people pushing a boulder uphill and concluding "that boulder inevitably goes up."
It reminds me of the time a Scientific American columnist ran a contest. The idea was to submit a number on a postcard. The person who submitted the highest number would win $1 million divided by the winning number.
The publishers almost nixed the contest. They didn't actually have $1 million to give away and they were worried. But the columnist assured them that there was no chance the prize would be even one dollar. As you might expect, the winning number was so ridiculously large that no money had to be sent.
As for LLMs affecting the economy, I think my only uncertainty is in how long it will take for them to be integrated. I think we all agree that even in their current state, they are valuable for certain tasks (e.g., language translation). I'm pretty sure they are economically viable for 90% of support calls. Are they going to displace software developers? Lawyers? Doctors? Even if they don't, the effects will still be large.
If we agree that they are economically viable, then I don't see how they don't have an impact. If a technology saves businesses money, it is going to get deployed. The only wildcard would be regulatory blocks or legislative bans. But you know China is not going to give up on the technology, so any bans will be reversed or circumvented (we'll import products/services from China).
Now, if you don't think LLMs in their current state are economically viable/valuable, then none of that will happen. But (a) that's a different argument, and (b) then people will inevitably choose NOT to deploy LLMs.
I get the desire for agency. I certainly wish I had more control over the course of the future. But people's behavior (in large groups) is almost always downstream of external events. Fukushima has an accident and Germany chooses to give up nuclear power. Inflation in the US goes up and people vote for Donald fraking Trump.
Maybe there will be some event--a Fukushima for AI--that causes a mass change. But absent that, I think LLMs are here to stay.
"Inevitability is rhetoric, not truth. Predictions aren’t laws of nature, they are acts of persuasion. And because no one can ever know how much is determined and how much is open, the only rational stance is to live as agents. Supersonic flight once looked inevitable until people stopped it. You, too, have already reshaped the world once; you can do it again. Don’t give away your power."
This is the logic flaw that got my attention.
If you’re told something’s inevitable, ask who’s claiming that and why.
Are they trying to beat you to the punch?
Do they want you to give in and buy their thing?
This essay?
You are right. And I'd bet Silicon Valley is aping this bit of neoliberal rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative.
> TINA (as characterized by explicit use of "there is no alternative" and declarations of necessity, inevitability, and irrefutability of certain policies) can be considered a political strategy in both democratic and autocratic regimes. Its rhetoric allows politicians to reduce the scope of available policy choices, limiting the expectations of their electorate and avoiding the blame for bad, but "unescapable" policies.
> TINA allows decisions to appear not as a political choice, but as a matter of adherence to universal truth and common sense. Due to the switch from public deliberations to following the expert opinions, debates are shortened, and therefore input of an individual voter is diminished, so TINA is politically paternalistic.
Tech salesmen want you to think you have no choice but buy what they are selling and that you cannot resist a world where they sell more.
e.g. RISC-V is inevitable.
Sam, Elon, Zuck are conmen, husks of people, empty inside and not knowing what to do with themselves but hoard money. In their pointless quest to become the proverbial dragon on a mountain of gold, they are trying to control, bully and manipulate the world to their vision of how it should be.
We know how this goes:
- Facebook contributed to multiple atrocities and genocides, actively promoted warlords and dictators
- Twitter after being acquired from Musk is just an echo chamber of fascism and white supremacy and misinformation
- Sam...is just..a slimy dude. He made a coup in something that was supposed to be free and open, and made it ugly and about money and profits, riding on the work of idealists and forgetting all his pledges and manifestos just in the pursuit of money
Those people rising to power and prominence is not inevitable. If only they had childhood validation, I think they might have turned out to be normal people and done less harm to the world. Sadly, they were probably neglected as children or dropped on their head repeatedly. I blame the parents.
I wrote this essay to convince "unbelievers" that's why I tried to be as rigorous as I could