You remember Jobs/Wozniak and Licklider and not the dozens/hundreds of other people world wide who were working on the same ideas at the same time. I do believe the world would look fundamentally the same today even if those three men had died in their cribs.
I think of the Kevin Kelly view as tactically correct but strategically wrong.
It's tactically true that circa 2007 Steve Jobs brought the smart phone as we know it into being, and also that a rectangular touchscreen phone would've been invented anyway perhaps 5 years later. So tactically inevitable to be invented at that point.
But what's contingent is how technology and forked paths build and build and build contingently one atop another, interacting with governance and society. The market duopoly of Android versus iOS was NOT inevitable. But from that has grown much of our digital governance and laws. What happens if Chinese manufacturer had succeeded in it's own open source phone OS? So now we have Apple in the West and China ecosystem elsewhere.
Anyway, that's how I reconcile the two views. Moore's Law itself was a highly contingent path, dependent on social agreement between many companies and the government to invest and bring forth a digital future.
Here is the difference between the old ways and the new ways. Today, I can hear any song I want, on demand, by going to YouTube or Spotify. Using Pandora, I can hear a mix of songs of a certain genre. Doesn't take any effort, and consequently the experience of hearing the song is just the music.
When I hear Toto or The Who I also hear good music. But I also remember that I rode my bike on a damp night over to KMart to buy the cassette tapes of the Toto IV and Who's Next albums. With other albums I can remember talking to the manager of the record store about the band in question. Or I remember I bootlegged the record from a friend.
There was also the anticipation of a new album being played on the radio. FM rock stations were a big deal. They were also a shared experience. You could talk to friends at school about a new album that was played on the radio the night before. You would make a recording of the radio broadcast. This took effort and was sometimes frustrating. But the reward was you had a copy that you had crafted together.
The old way made it harder to access music but the effort was part of what made the music meaningful.
Focusing on the question of the inevitability of a particular technological development, is an inordinately narrow focus for the subject. To have a coherent position , on this question, you must also consider whether the technological development that did materialize, could have developed sooner and better. If you believe that the technology could not possibly have been developed sooner, you will hem yourself in a bit on the question of inevitability. If you acknowledge that it was possible for the technology to develop sooner, this position must then comport with your view of inevitability.
Does hindsight bias affect the prior analysis of successful business leaders like Bezos? Or is the Wyatt Earp affect swamped by the mechanism identified - cumulative impact of better decision making?
Yet the ‘transition’ from fossil fuels to so-called sustainable, renewable energy (spurious nonsense) is predicated on the inevitability that this new wonder technology can be produced to order. Politicians are wedded to the belief that if only we throw enough money at ‘science’, great wonders in technology will automatically appear. These Omniscient, Prescient Ones can know what tech we need - lots of ‘Green tech’ at the moment, so tossing taxpayers’ cash at that is just the ticket and will save the planet.
I got records from a record club too! Like "Weird Scenes Inside The Goldmine", right after Jim Morrison died.
"I think we could have gone many decades without discovering/inventing computer-based communication."
I'm sure this is wrong - tho the DARPA funded internet might well have been delayed and far less successful, perhaps more local token ring networks and less efficient wide area networks.
Connecting computers to each other to transfer data, networking computers, has been a staple of tech since before the BUNCH was being dominated by the IBM 360 in mainframes in the 60s.
Cell phones - 1947 idea, 70s tested in Chicago (one of my genius friends worked with Bell Labs on cell phone optimization algorithms & testing).
"people were not imagining a world where computers were communication tools"
Dick Tracy comics from the 50s, or earlier, had him talking to his wristwatch "phone".
Kubrick's 2001, in 1968, included a "zoom" video call from the orbiting space station.
It also had a talking and listening HAL 9000 computer, a still-not achieved level of AI English interaction. Lots of visionaries with lots of visions, but often constrained by current technology and business / competitive effects.
Recounting the magnitude of change doesn't tell you a whole lot about how inevitable it was. Nor does noting that there were some (many!) "otherwise perceptive" people who didn't catch the vision that others did. Once again, focusing on the particulars of the winning path only tells you what was necessary for *that particular path* to X, NOT that it was the only possible path to X. Perhaps there are several decades of give or take in when digital communication arrived -- but that's a drop in the bucket of human history.
Even as late as 1997 to 1999 ordering items for home delivery hadn't shifted that much. I used to order basketball shoes from a catalog by calling them up and ordering over the home phone.
You remember Jobs/Wozniak and Licklider and not the dozens/hundreds of other people world wide who were working on the same ideas at the same time. I do believe the world would look fundamentally the same today even if those three men had died in their cribs.
I think of the Kevin Kelly view as tactically correct but strategically wrong.
It's tactically true that circa 2007 Steve Jobs brought the smart phone as we know it into being, and also that a rectangular touchscreen phone would've been invented anyway perhaps 5 years later. So tactically inevitable to be invented at that point.
But what's contingent is how technology and forked paths build and build and build contingently one atop another, interacting with governance and society. The market duopoly of Android versus iOS was NOT inevitable. But from that has grown much of our digital governance and laws. What happens if Chinese manufacturer had succeeded in it's own open source phone OS? So now we have Apple in the West and China ecosystem elsewhere.
Anyway, that's how I reconcile the two views. Moore's Law itself was a highly contingent path, dependent on social agreement between many companies and the government to invest and bring forth a digital future.
I also joined the Columbia Record Club but in 1981. Got the member form right out of the old style TV Guide.
Here is the difference between the old ways and the new ways. Today, I can hear any song I want, on demand, by going to YouTube or Spotify. Using Pandora, I can hear a mix of songs of a certain genre. Doesn't take any effort, and consequently the experience of hearing the song is just the music.
When I hear Toto or The Who I also hear good music. But I also remember that I rode my bike on a damp night over to KMart to buy the cassette tapes of the Toto IV and Who's Next albums. With other albums I can remember talking to the manager of the record store about the band in question. Or I remember I bootlegged the record from a friend.
There was also the anticipation of a new album being played on the radio. FM rock stations were a big deal. They were also a shared experience. You could talk to friends at school about a new album that was played on the radio the night before. You would make a recording of the radio broadcast. This took effort and was sometimes frustrating. But the reward was you had a copy that you had crafted together.
The old way made it harder to access music but the effort was part of what made the music meaningful.
Focusing on the question of the inevitability of a particular technological development, is an inordinately narrow focus for the subject. To have a coherent position , on this question, you must also consider whether the technological development that did materialize, could have developed sooner and better. If you believe that the technology could not possibly have been developed sooner, you will hem yourself in a bit on the question of inevitability. If you acknowledge that it was possible for the technology to develop sooner, this position must then comport with your view of inevitability.
Does hindsight bias affect the prior analysis of successful business leaders like Bezos? Or is the Wyatt Earp affect swamped by the mechanism identified - cumulative impact of better decision making?
Yet the ‘transition’ from fossil fuels to so-called sustainable, renewable energy (spurious nonsense) is predicated on the inevitability that this new wonder technology can be produced to order. Politicians are wedded to the belief that if only we throw enough money at ‘science’, great wonders in technology will automatically appear. These Omniscient, Prescient Ones can know what tech we need - lots of ‘Green tech’ at the moment, so tossing taxpayers’ cash at that is just the ticket and will save the planet.
I got records from a record club too! Like "Weird Scenes Inside The Goldmine", right after Jim Morrison died.
"I think we could have gone many decades without discovering/inventing computer-based communication."
I'm sure this is wrong - tho the DARPA funded internet might well have been delayed and far less successful, perhaps more local token ring networks and less efficient wide area networks.
Connecting computers to each other to transfer data, networking computers, has been a staple of tech since before the BUNCH was being dominated by the IBM 360 in mainframes in the 60s.
See this cool note about Bell labs
https://blog.tmcnet.com/next-generation-communications/2011/08/the-top-bell-labs-innovations---part-i-the-game-changers.html
Data networking - 1925
Transistor - 1947
Cell phones - 1947 idea, 70s tested in Chicago (one of my genius friends worked with Bell Labs on cell phone optimization algorithms & testing).
"people were not imagining a world where computers were communication tools"
Dick Tracy comics from the 50s, or earlier, had him talking to his wristwatch "phone".
Kubrick's 2001, in 1968, included a "zoom" video call from the orbiting space station.
It also had a talking and listening HAL 9000 computer, a still-not achieved level of AI English interaction. Lots of visionaries with lots of visions, but often constrained by current technology and business / competitive effects.
Recounting the magnitude of change doesn't tell you a whole lot about how inevitable it was. Nor does noting that there were some (many!) "otherwise perceptive" people who didn't catch the vision that others did. Once again, focusing on the particulars of the winning path only tells you what was necessary for *that particular path* to X, NOT that it was the only possible path to X. Perhaps there are several decades of give or take in when digital communication arrived -- but that's a drop in the bucket of human history.
Even as late as 1997 to 1999 ordering items for home delivery hadn't shifted that much. I used to order basketball shoes from a catalog by calling them up and ordering over the home phone.