Yes, but... technology, no matter how advanced is a tool in the hands of humans. Human behaviors are governed by social norms and belief systems. While our technologies grew exponentially our social adaptations are still rooted in survival, our morals still lack ethical clarity, and our collective beliefs are so outdated I can't help but think of this situation as "the monkey with a blaster" scenario. Look at our political and economic systems! Who's controlling the tech, its development and application? We already have everything to make life on earth a paradise, but we don't because of the above.
Ooooh this is good pushback and food for thought. The only solution I see to this would be to use technology itself to transcend humanity. What would our morals look like if we were Human-AI hybrids?
We should always ask ourselves: "Who controls the technology"? If you're an "altered" human, who do you pay to get your gadgets serviced? Who has control over upgrades? Not you, obviously. Hence the leverage for the provider of those technologies. The more dependent we are on them the less say we have in everyday choices. Technology is not a solution to our social issues. Moral and ethical issues should be solved by applying ethics in everyday life. Yet our politicians want to remove even the mention of ethics in the government. Our Supreme Judges seem to be exempt from ethical standards. Who cares if you can get the new Apple VR and get lost in the virtual world if the world around us is dying?
You're right. The continual distillation of wealth into a few hands makes this leverage increasingly scary. These are big concepts I rarely think about because every time I do, I never have a solution other than socialism. Maybe I'm just not well-versed enough. What does "applying ethics in everyday life" look like for you? For the greater public? I'm curious.
FINALLY. Someone (and only you could have done this) has beautifully explained (with examples!!!) the type of awe I feel on a daily basis when I go "look at those machines." Yes. Among the doomer ideas that plague modern society, this piece stands out as the antidote. THIS is the techno-optimism I'm subscribed for, and THIS is what I hope you never stop writing about! Keep up the epic work, Packy (and Dan)!
This post makes a powerful and much-needed case for seeing the beauty in modern technological marvels, but I don’t think they are a sufficient replacement for actual physical beauty in the environment that humans experience daily. I think the human built environment has clearly become much uglier over the last century or so. I agree that we haven’t lost the ability to build beautiful things. On the contrary, industrialization makes it much easier to build whatever we choose, and we’ve chosen the new and the alien over the traditional. Our new powers have allowed us to make new mistakes.
There is much evidence that traditional urban design (of individual buildings and their agglomeration into cities) is not merely a temporal aesthetic preference but a reflection of human nature and serves to comfort human beings and to promote social virtue. It is in fact the environment that nurtured human civilization, the starting point for all that you describe. Human economics changes but human nature does not, and therefore a design that reflects human nature is not easily improved upon.
On the timescale of human evolution, what we call traditional design is actually a modern technology that emerged from the same kind of compounding innovation and trial-and-error process that you describe so well. As the Dutch architect Mieke Bosse said, “Tradition is the sum of successful innovations.”
I suspect, though I cannot prove, that the more modern technology evolves and improves human life by dragging it away from its natural conditions, the more humans will feel the need to be surrounded by a physical beauty that appeals to their unchanging nature. I think a lack of such beauty is one of the reasons for the unease and unhappiness we see in the modern world.
Really love how you explained the intricacies of each of these technologies and the people/will power that went into making them - I feel the exact same wonder when I think about both human, technological creations and natural creations too. I will say I'm confused about the link between these and the idea of degrowth though. I think both realities can exist where we can create beautifully complex (and useful!) things, while also being conscious of what's being made and how it's made. My take on degrowth is that we should focus on removing both the many excessive luxuries, and the pointless mass produced 'stuff', and therefore all of the (arguably wasted) people power that goes into making them, allowing us to focus on building the things that matter. All of the technologies you mentioned aren't considered excessive or luxuries (perhaps they were at the time), most people can see the inherent benefit to them. Perhaps degrowth ideals, removing the mass-produced, mass-advertised stuff from the world, would allow us to focus on building more beautiful things.
Funny I just visited La Sagrada Familia a couple of days before... And was beyond amazed to see the architecture we are still capable of building. We don't have many incentives as a society to build beautiful or even crazy things like the ones Gaudí envisioned, but I am glad we still have some incentive to apply technology for art as well!!! I wished the place wasn't so costly to visit, I would love to go there for just reading, just writing, just appreciating it... and thinking "what else can I do to advance humanity?" Even if its just a tiny bit of a contribution, am I in the right track?
Time will tell, I hope. Thanks Patrick for another amazing and definitely not boring overview of how the world around us works.
yes all these things are beautiful bc of the coordination and intellectual power involved (high complex) systems ... however none of these things address man’s spiritual needs, cathedrals were built drawing from a rich cultural reservoir of religious stories, myths, and hymns to fuel an understanding of beauty that simply can’t be “scienced”. the the materialist vs the spiritualist ... so i will say I am begging tech bros to take just one humanities course.
This isn't my first exposure to exponentials or the various laws, and I still found it interesting. It's easy to think that these "laws" have happened and so they will continue to do so and therefore we should think about abundance. It's another, which I think was your point: to stand in awe of how a collective of humans have across time and geography without knowing each other made these things happen. Even if we don't agree on what "growth" means or should be (I don't think it should be GDP or even population), these trends are important to retell.
Few additional thoughts:
1) I was not aware of the history of PV going back to the 1800's with selenium, nor the serendipitous error of a cracked silicon rod in a radio prototype that led to even thinking about silicon as a semi-conductor.
It's fascinating, and I think it highlights that if curiosity and luck are so important, we need more experiments, more luck surface area, more sharing of the data. There are probably a hundred other examples like this in various domains.
I don't have a solution either. I have an idea of what it would take for the world to change: a majority of the population realizing what we're doing and deciding not to do it. But... how to make this happen, I don't know.
As to socialism, that's not a solution. Because it still exists within the framework of exploitative domineering culture/money based economy/limiting and archaic belief systems.
"Applying ethics in everyday life" looks like not consuming more than I need, recycling and upcycling stuff I have, shopping at thrift stores, etc., - doing everything to reduce one's footprint. Since I can't live outside the modern society (lack of wilderness survival skills and constant reduction of wilderness), I have to do what I can to do less damage by reducing my consumption.
This is the worst post I have seen - in a long line of techno utopian ones.
Let's start with Moore's law. People still don't seem to understand that semiconductors deal with information - information is literally zero mass and energy. Furthermore, the reality is that these latest stages of Moore's law are being "met" mostly by handwaving and chart manipulation.
But the key here is that anything else - is not massless and zero energy cost.
The next: solar panels. I am sick and tired of bullshit graphs trying to show solar panels are on the path of Moore's law. They are not.
First of all, Moore's law is a PERFORMANCE metric, not a PRICE metric.
A doubling of performance every generation is NOT the same as a halving of price. What is a "generation" from a solar panel perspective? There are none.
Secondly, a doubling every generation is a geometric curve - not a linear one.
Lastly, the graph is complete bullshit because the start of the curve is completely arbitrarily chosen as are the increments. Note the spike in cost around 2002 - there is no such thing as a plateauing in Moore's law.
All we are seeing here is a marketing at work.
DNA sequencing: the same nonsense at work. As I already noted above: Moore's law is about performance - it is NOT about cost. Again, we see the lack of any form of performance metric in favor of a price one - and even the price one is bullshit.
Did anyone sequence anything at $100M?
I doubt it. The HGP cost $2.7 billion to sequence the first human genome but this was R & D cost, not the actual sequencing cost and it was declared complete in 2003. The actual data starts in 2001 - so before HGP completion and thus the $100M is not applicable. Then there's the machinery. When was the first actual commercial human sequencing machine made? It was certainly not 2004. In fact, the first sequencing machines were created in 1987. And there are a raft of sequencing machines that came out around 2006-2007.
Net net: more marketing nonsense even if this came from NIH.
Next: "That just leaves the question of will and economics. One of the reasons we don’t build churches and stone buildings like we used to is that they just don’t make financial sense. "
No, we don't make churches any more because religion is no longer a dominant social force. Unless you believe the "advanced early civilizations that left zero evidence" crowd - the pyramids were built by tens of thousands of people over decades; medieval churches were built by thousands over hundreds of years. That's real commitment. Sagrada Familia is probably the last gasp of Christianity in terms of religious construction barring an unforeseen massive resurgence.
Robot cost decline: more graph games. The numbers aren't doubling and the focus is again on cost as opposed to performance. And the source is ARK LOL.
Internet speeds: this also looks like nonsense.
Yes, gigabit speed internet does exist. What percent of people outside of a major city in the first world have access to gigabit internet speed? The actual speeds are also nowhere near 1 gigabit even for people who supposedly have it.
Why not measure the # of pixels capability of the most expensive iPhone - it would be the same appearance.
In any case, the next step is obviously not going to happen for a long, long time if ever: home petabit internet access.
I read it because you provide a valuable techno-utopian viewpoint and furthermore are a great barometer for the likely areas in which the Uber/Theranos scam marketing model is likely to get deployed next.
The true great innovation of this latest expiring liquidity fueled tech bubble is the deployment of political campaign types into marketing and communications for fundamentally crap business model (or outright scam) startups kicking off with Plouffe's stint at Uber.
From my perspective: when techno-utopians start talking about what matters - then a Western resurgence has a chance to occur.
What matters is not the new - it is the old; the tools to make the tools to make the machines. The chemicals, raw and intermediate processed materials, the skilled labor and industrial focus that go into the machines.
One of the more egregious examples: Several states are mandating EV only sales in under a decade. Yet the US power grid is in a sad state - literally 2 generation old power lines are more the rule than the exception. The US also only produces 1/3 of the grid scale electricity transformers consumed each year (note this is with a massive under maintenance regime on par with overall US infrastructure) and is clearly setting out to get into some type of economic/kinetic conflict with China.
Guess where most of the 2/3rds of imported grid scale transformers come from?
So the possibility of loss of access to well over half of existing grid scale transformer capacity is significant - this in turn is compared with and end-state of 40% to 80% more electricity consumption from 2030 to 2045 in states with EV mandates (I'll guess average age of car on the road goes from 12.5 to AT LEAST 15 by 2045) - not gonna be pretty.
The good news is that there are enough transformer companies and engineers still because of that 1/3 - the bad news is that gigantic grid scale transformers need all manner of materials in the 2 and 3 digit ton range each: steel and various fluids which I'd bet money are also imported.
Thing is - this setup is "better" than most of the other industries of the needed inputs for import substitution. Remember the late COVID/early post COVID shortages? That exposed an enormous range of "made in America" that was actually the US equivalent of India's pharma industry - that is, 80% of inputs come from China.
So thank you for being a representative of the techno-utopians.
I think we're close on this one: "What matters is not the new - it is the old; the tools to make the tools to make the machines. The chemicals, raw and intermediate processed materials, the skilled labor and industrial focus that go into the machines." I think new and old both matter, and the extent to which old matters is underdiscussed (by me certainly).
Agreed - I've never said that all things new are bad.
What I greatly dislike are overhyped garbage.
The sad reality is that there has been an enormous misallocation of capital in the startup space in this bubble - far more so than in past ones. At least we got a bunch of working and dark fiber lines in the Y2K bubble...
That’s where we’ll disagree. Obviously some misallocation, but venture still a relatively small asset class and I think in a decade we’ll see what the fibers of this bubble were.
The contours of junk investment are very clear. Uber has lost $36B so far and there's no end in sight. Food delivery companies, ride share scooters, home share - the list goes on and on and on.
And the trend shows no sign of change. For example: what the US needs (and Europe, and the world) are lagging edge semiconductor plants. The CHIPS act is building...leading edge semiconductor plants.
This is just one of innumerable areas where lobbying money and/or corporate influence is taking precedence over any rational or even measured progress-driven investment.
Yes, but... technology, no matter how advanced is a tool in the hands of humans. Human behaviors are governed by social norms and belief systems. While our technologies grew exponentially our social adaptations are still rooted in survival, our morals still lack ethical clarity, and our collective beliefs are so outdated I can't help but think of this situation as "the monkey with a blaster" scenario. Look at our political and economic systems! Who's controlling the tech, its development and application? We already have everything to make life on earth a paradise, but we don't because of the above.
Ooooh this is good pushback and food for thought. The only solution I see to this would be to use technology itself to transcend humanity. What would our morals look like if we were Human-AI hybrids?
We should always ask ourselves: "Who controls the technology"? If you're an "altered" human, who do you pay to get your gadgets serviced? Who has control over upgrades? Not you, obviously. Hence the leverage for the provider of those technologies. The more dependent we are on them the less say we have in everyday choices. Technology is not a solution to our social issues. Moral and ethical issues should be solved by applying ethics in everyday life. Yet our politicians want to remove even the mention of ethics in the government. Our Supreme Judges seem to be exempt from ethical standards. Who cares if you can get the new Apple VR and get lost in the virtual world if the world around us is dying?
You're right. The continual distillation of wealth into a few hands makes this leverage increasingly scary. These are big concepts I rarely think about because every time I do, I never have a solution other than socialism. Maybe I'm just not well-versed enough. What does "applying ethics in everyday life" look like for you? For the greater public? I'm curious.
FINALLY. Someone (and only you could have done this) has beautifully explained (with examples!!!) the type of awe I feel on a daily basis when I go "look at those machines." Yes. Among the doomer ideas that plague modern society, this piece stands out as the antidote. THIS is the techno-optimism I'm subscribed for, and THIS is what I hope you never stop writing about! Keep up the epic work, Packy (and Dan)!
Very happy to hear it hit for you, Dani!
This post makes a powerful and much-needed case for seeing the beauty in modern technological marvels, but I don’t think they are a sufficient replacement for actual physical beauty in the environment that humans experience daily. I think the human built environment has clearly become much uglier over the last century or so. I agree that we haven’t lost the ability to build beautiful things. On the contrary, industrialization makes it much easier to build whatever we choose, and we’ve chosen the new and the alien over the traditional. Our new powers have allowed us to make new mistakes.
There is much evidence that traditional urban design (of individual buildings and their agglomeration into cities) is not merely a temporal aesthetic preference but a reflection of human nature and serves to comfort human beings and to promote social virtue. It is in fact the environment that nurtured human civilization, the starting point for all that you describe. Human economics changes but human nature does not, and therefore a design that reflects human nature is not easily improved upon.
On the timescale of human evolution, what we call traditional design is actually a modern technology that emerged from the same kind of compounding innovation and trial-and-error process that you describe so well. As the Dutch architect Mieke Bosse said, “Tradition is the sum of successful innovations.”
I suspect, though I cannot prove, that the more modern technology evolves and improves human life by dragging it away from its natural conditions, the more humans will feel the need to be surrounded by a physical beauty that appeals to their unchanging nature. I think a lack of such beauty is one of the reasons for the unease and unhappiness we see in the modern world.
Really love how you explained the intricacies of each of these technologies and the people/will power that went into making them - I feel the exact same wonder when I think about both human, technological creations and natural creations too. I will say I'm confused about the link between these and the idea of degrowth though. I think both realities can exist where we can create beautifully complex (and useful!) things, while also being conscious of what's being made and how it's made. My take on degrowth is that we should focus on removing both the many excessive luxuries, and the pointless mass produced 'stuff', and therefore all of the (arguably wasted) people power that goes into making them, allowing us to focus on building the things that matter. All of the technologies you mentioned aren't considered excessive or luxuries (perhaps they were at the time), most people can see the inherent benefit to them. Perhaps degrowth ideals, removing the mass-produced, mass-advertised stuff from the world, would allow us to focus on building more beautiful things.
Wow. I think that’s the most interesting and insightful article I’ve read in a long time. Thanks!
Much appreciated, Anton!
Wow. Thank you.
This is a well reasoned and illustrated article with plenty of enthusiasm, so it was a pleasure to read. Keep up the great work!
Funny I just visited La Sagrada Familia a couple of days before... And was beyond amazed to see the architecture we are still capable of building. We don't have many incentives as a society to build beautiful or even crazy things like the ones Gaudí envisioned, but I am glad we still have some incentive to apply technology for art as well!!! I wished the place wasn't so costly to visit, I would love to go there for just reading, just writing, just appreciating it... and thinking "what else can I do to advance humanity?" Even if its just a tiny bit of a contribution, am I in the right track?
Time will tell, I hope. Thanks Patrick for another amazing and definitely not boring overview of how the world around us works.
yes all these things are beautiful bc of the coordination and intellectual power involved (high complex) systems ... however none of these things address man’s spiritual needs, cathedrals were built drawing from a rich cultural reservoir of religious stories, myths, and hymns to fuel an understanding of beauty that simply can’t be “scienced”. the the materialist vs the spiritualist ... so i will say I am begging tech bros to take just one humanities course.
Impressively good!! looking at the intersection of technology and history with a new perspective. Thanks packy for sharing this gem of an article.
Flat out amazing piece of work... Thank you!
This isn't my first exposure to exponentials or the various laws, and I still found it interesting. It's easy to think that these "laws" have happened and so they will continue to do so and therefore we should think about abundance. It's another, which I think was your point: to stand in awe of how a collective of humans have across time and geography without knowing each other made these things happen. Even if we don't agree on what "growth" means or should be (I don't think it should be GDP or even population), these trends are important to retell.
Few additional thoughts:
1) I was not aware of the history of PV going back to the 1800's with selenium, nor the serendipitous error of a cracked silicon rod in a radio prototype that led to even thinking about silicon as a semi-conductor.
It's fascinating, and I think it highlights that if curiosity and luck are so important, we need more experiments, more luck surface area, more sharing of the data. There are probably a hundred other examples like this in various domains.
2) How many other things are like fusion?
Beautiful article! Marvelous! Thank you..
Thanks, Fernando!
I don't have a solution either. I have an idea of what it would take for the world to change: a majority of the population realizing what we're doing and deciding not to do it. But... how to make this happen, I don't know.
As to socialism, that's not a solution. Because it still exists within the framework of exploitative domineering culture/money based economy/limiting and archaic belief systems.
"Applying ethics in everyday life" looks like not consuming more than I need, recycling and upcycling stuff I have, shopping at thrift stores, etc., - doing everything to reduce one's footprint. Since I can't live outside the modern society (lack of wilderness survival skills and constant reduction of wilderness), I have to do what I can to do less damage by reducing my consumption.
This is the worst post I have seen - in a long line of techno utopian ones.
Let's start with Moore's law. People still don't seem to understand that semiconductors deal with information - information is literally zero mass and energy. Furthermore, the reality is that these latest stages of Moore's law are being "met" mostly by handwaving and chart manipulation.
But the key here is that anything else - is not massless and zero energy cost.
The next: solar panels. I am sick and tired of bullshit graphs trying to show solar panels are on the path of Moore's law. They are not.
First of all, Moore's law is a PERFORMANCE metric, not a PRICE metric.
A doubling of performance every generation is NOT the same as a halving of price. What is a "generation" from a solar panel perspective? There are none.
Secondly, a doubling every generation is a geometric curve - not a linear one.
Lastly, the graph is complete bullshit because the start of the curve is completely arbitrarily chosen as are the increments. Note the spike in cost around 2002 - there is no such thing as a plateauing in Moore's law.
All we are seeing here is a marketing at work.
DNA sequencing: the same nonsense at work. As I already noted above: Moore's law is about performance - it is NOT about cost. Again, we see the lack of any form of performance metric in favor of a price one - and even the price one is bullshit.
Did anyone sequence anything at $100M?
I doubt it. The HGP cost $2.7 billion to sequence the first human genome but this was R & D cost, not the actual sequencing cost and it was declared complete in 2003. The actual data starts in 2001 - so before HGP completion and thus the $100M is not applicable. Then there's the machinery. When was the first actual commercial human sequencing machine made? It was certainly not 2004. In fact, the first sequencing machines were created in 1987. And there are a raft of sequencing machines that came out around 2006-2007.
Net net: more marketing nonsense even if this came from NIH.
Next: "That just leaves the question of will and economics. One of the reasons we don’t build churches and stone buildings like we used to is that they just don’t make financial sense. "
No, we don't make churches any more because religion is no longer a dominant social force. Unless you believe the "advanced early civilizations that left zero evidence" crowd - the pyramids were built by tens of thousands of people over decades; medieval churches were built by thousands over hundreds of years. That's real commitment. Sagrada Familia is probably the last gasp of Christianity in terms of religious construction barring an unforeseen massive resurgence.
Robot cost decline: more graph games. The numbers aren't doubling and the focus is again on cost as opposed to performance. And the source is ARK LOL.
Internet speeds: this also looks like nonsense.
Yes, gigabit speed internet does exist. What percent of people outside of a major city in the first world have access to gigabit internet speed? The actual speeds are also nowhere near 1 gigabit even for people who supposedly have it.
Why not measure the # of pixels capability of the most expensive iPhone - it would be the same appearance.
In any case, the next step is obviously not going to happen for a long, long time if ever: home petabit internet access.
I genuinely don’t understand why you waste time reading Not Boring
I read it because you provide a valuable techno-utopian viewpoint and furthermore are a great barometer for the likely areas in which the Uber/Theranos scam marketing model is likely to get deployed next.
The true great innovation of this latest expiring liquidity fueled tech bubble is the deployment of political campaign types into marketing and communications for fundamentally crap business model (or outright scam) startups kicking off with Plouffe's stint at Uber.
From my perspective: when techno-utopians start talking about what matters - then a Western resurgence has a chance to occur.
What matters is not the new - it is the old; the tools to make the tools to make the machines. The chemicals, raw and intermediate processed materials, the skilled labor and industrial focus that go into the machines.
One of the more egregious examples: Several states are mandating EV only sales in under a decade. Yet the US power grid is in a sad state - literally 2 generation old power lines are more the rule than the exception. The US also only produces 1/3 of the grid scale electricity transformers consumed each year (note this is with a massive under maintenance regime on par with overall US infrastructure) and is clearly setting out to get into some type of economic/kinetic conflict with China.
Guess where most of the 2/3rds of imported grid scale transformers come from?
So the possibility of loss of access to well over half of existing grid scale transformer capacity is significant - this in turn is compared with and end-state of 40% to 80% more electricity consumption from 2030 to 2045 in states with EV mandates (I'll guess average age of car on the road goes from 12.5 to AT LEAST 15 by 2045) - not gonna be pretty.
The good news is that there are enough transformer companies and engineers still because of that 1/3 - the bad news is that gigantic grid scale transformers need all manner of materials in the 2 and 3 digit ton range each: steel and various fluids which I'd bet money are also imported.
Thing is - this setup is "better" than most of the other industries of the needed inputs for import substitution. Remember the late COVID/early post COVID shortages? That exposed an enormous range of "made in America" that was actually the US equivalent of India's pharma industry - that is, 80% of inputs come from China.
So thank you for being a representative of the techno-utopians.
Appreciate the response.
I think we're close on this one: "What matters is not the new - it is the old; the tools to make the tools to make the machines. The chemicals, raw and intermediate processed materials, the skilled labor and industrial focus that go into the machines." I think new and old both matter, and the extent to which old matters is underdiscussed (by me certainly).
Agreed - I've never said that all things new are bad.
What I greatly dislike are overhyped garbage.
The sad reality is that there has been an enormous misallocation of capital in the startup space in this bubble - far more so than in past ones. At least we got a bunch of working and dark fiber lines in the Y2K bubble...
That’s where we’ll disagree. Obviously some misallocation, but venture still a relatively small asset class and I think in a decade we’ll see what the fibers of this bubble were.
The contours of junk investment are very clear. Uber has lost $36B so far and there's no end in sight. Food delivery companies, ride share scooters, home share - the list goes on and on and on.
And the trend shows no sign of change. For example: what the US needs (and Europe, and the world) are lagging edge semiconductor plants. The CHIPS act is building...leading edge semiconductor plants.
This is just one of innumerable areas where lobbying money and/or corporate influence is taking precedence over any rational or even measured progress-driven investment.