I wrote an essay critiquing Silicon Valley’s obsession with calling technologies “inevitable.” I argue that inevitability isn’t a fact but a rhetorical move that erases agency and responsibility. What if we treated predictions not as destiny, but as challenges?
> I wrote an essay critiquing Silicon Valley’s obsession with calling technologies “inevitable.” I argue that inevitability isn’t a fact but a rhetorical move that erases agency and responsibility. What if we treated predictions not as destiny, but as challenges?
> 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.
Manifestations of the inevitable are older than what sillyvalley is cooking with (or coked up on), even older than the Manifest Destiny. Some pin it to the Renaissance, as opposed to the "dark ages" prior. Tagging the prior age dark (dark... that must be bad, right? We don't want to be on the bad team, right?) of course is a rhetorical move.
> You’ll say, “They got lucky, it had to happen, if not them someone else.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
"Supersonic flight once looked inevitable until people stopped it."
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.
This is shallow. Game theory and coordination is the answer. Otherwise it's the same depth level as "if only the soldiers just stopped shooting at each other, the war would end".
Interesting, beautifully written; I especially like the ending:
"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."
20 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 36.7 ms ] threadThis 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.
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.
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.
- 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".
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.
> ... 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.
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.
"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?
e.g. RISC-V is inevitable.