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 agree. The belief that Jobs / Apple defined the modern era of computing is a great myth. What is especially curious about this narrative is how anyone paying attention in the 1980s saw that Apple was a niche player in an industry dominated by the IBM / Microsoft PC.
Jobs and Gates were both copycats. Why Jobs gets praised for being a copycat and Gates criticized is part of the myth. People love stories of heros and villains and the story of personal computing is built on that theme.
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.
Before the iPhone there was the Blackberry and the Microsoft and Sony phones. There was also the Palm Pilot which was very popular just as a handheld device.
I worked on software for the Microsoft Compact PC phone in 2004/2005. These were capable devices but they were a bit heavy with low battery life.
Why was the iPhone so insanely successful? It had design refinements that made it a superior handheld device. It also had buy-in from ATT with a financing plan that made the phone affordable to the masses. Ultimately, it was the right product at the right time. Jobs & Apple did great work designing and selling the product.
Why did Microsoft not succeed in handhelds? I think it is because they had not had much success with handhelds. They had put out good product and the market didn't show much interest - it is critical to remember that Microsoft was used to selling hundreds of millions of its products. A company segment that sold a few million of something was a rain drop, a rounding error. So Microsoft concluded the mass market for handhelds wasn't there.
Apple, on the other hand saw a growth trajectory that worked for them and they invested accordingly.
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.
The biggest breakthrough for music was the invention of the mp3 format, in the early 90s. Combined with the popularization of the Internet, this created the digital music ecosystem. I reckon by the late '90s every organization with access to computer servers had a file share setup with an archive of tens of thousands of digitized songs.
Perhaps what technology did realize was a means for having publishers compensated for the playing of digital music. Prior to iTunes and YouTube, and then Spotify and Pandora, I venture 99.999% of digital music was bootlegged.
Or maybe the work done by EMI (Beatles original record label) in the 1960s to digitise music. EMI invented the first flat disc (analogue) records. EMI’s digital technology was used in the 1970s to digitally record X-ray tomographic imaging to be computer manipulate to give us Computed Tomography or CT-Scanners. EMI Medical was the first to market CT head scanners in the late 1970s.
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.
I remember those days. You called and by the third ring a real live person answered the phone, a person that would take your order. No five minute phone tree.
Perhaps I am just a curmudgeon, but I do not share your optimism on the emotional and psychological front.
A few years ago, I was at a social gathering. I noticed about 5-6 teenagers -- girls and boys about high school age -- sitting around a table together and each one of them was staring at a phone screen. I found the scene jarring.
About a month later, I saw one of the boys who had been at that table and happened to mention that, at his age, mobile phones did not exist. He looked astonished and exclaimed that it must have been horrible. I told him to the contrary: when friends gathered together (which was often), we had nothing but each other to occupy ourselves; we communicated with each other incessantly and developed deep interpersonal relationships over the years. In my view, the social and emotional skills that we developed cannot be replicated -- and are likely degraded -- through the "virtual" social lives that seem so prevalent today.
"As a tribe, we're getting more resilient and more able to deal with that instability as a result. "
This seems falsified by Biden's recent speech demonizing Trump supporters, as well as the calls of the Woke that "speech is violence".
People more often share outrageous behavior of "The Other", those they want to hate. It looks like more instability to me.
Perhaps it's so clearly bad that some change happens, from tech or a movement of people, to again unite people to accept disagreements between people. Or, maybe Putin fears losing and uses a nuke against Ukraine, or somewhere, and more people are shocked into a higher frame of awareness of what violence is.
Now I'm imagining AI controlled drone swarms who do not like disagreeable freedom, not currently inevitable ...
I do hope you're right, and can even imagine it. But:
"There are a ton of people who have been through the wringer."
For the USA, this is almost totally false. They're living lives of the top 20%, 10%, 5% in history, in the world today, but like spoiled kids they throw a tantrum whenever reality is even a tiny amount worse than their high expectations.
Getting fired, losing a spouse or child, getting permanently injured, these are "wringer" events. Failing to get hired at a top company, having a hangnail, getting a car bump or speeding ticket - or having the other party win instead of your party - is not.
But it seems that tiny insecurities are considered so. Did you read the Moonlit Piglet HS teacher Arnold linked?
Insecure teen girls are claiming to be non-binary. This is a rejection of reality ...
If I thought mental illness as a language marker was leading to less mental illness, I'd be more optimistic - but I don't so I'm not. Yet, tech getting better mostly makes me smile. China making nuke power plants, for instance.
Culture and tech are both in feedback loops, more so than politics which is more downstream from culture.
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 agree. The belief that Jobs / Apple defined the modern era of computing is a great myth. What is especially curious about this narrative is how anyone paying attention in the 1980s saw that Apple was a niche player in an industry dominated by the IBM / Microsoft PC.
Jobs and Gates were both copycats. Why Jobs gets praised for being a copycat and Gates criticized is part of the myth. People love stories of heros and villains and the story of personal computing is built on that theme.
Yes, in personal computers Apple was just slightly above a niche player. It was the iPhone that made Apple into the powerhouse it is today.
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.
Before the iPhone there was the Blackberry and the Microsoft and Sony phones. There was also the Palm Pilot which was very popular just as a handheld device.
I worked on software for the Microsoft Compact PC phone in 2004/2005. These were capable devices but they were a bit heavy with low battery life.
Why was the iPhone so insanely successful? It had design refinements that made it a superior handheld device. It also had buy-in from ATT with a financing plan that made the phone affordable to the masses. Ultimately, it was the right product at the right time. Jobs & Apple did great work designing and selling the product.
Why did Microsoft not succeed in handhelds? I think it is because they had not had much success with handhelds. They had put out good product and the market didn't show much interest - it is critical to remember that Microsoft was used to selling hundreds of millions of its products. A company segment that sold a few million of something was a rain drop, a rounding error. So Microsoft concluded the mass market for handhelds wasn't there.
Apple, on the other hand saw a growth trajectory that worked for them and they invested accordingly.
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.
The biggest breakthrough for music was the invention of the mp3 format, in the early 90s. Combined with the popularization of the Internet, this created the digital music ecosystem. I reckon by the late '90s every organization with access to computer servers had a file share setup with an archive of tens of thousands of digitized songs.
Perhaps what technology did realize was a means for having publishers compensated for the playing of digital music. Prior to iTunes and YouTube, and then Spotify and Pandora, I venture 99.999% of digital music was bootlegged.
Or maybe the work done by EMI (Beatles original record label) in the 1960s to digitise music. EMI invented the first flat disc (analogue) records. EMI’s digital technology was used in the 1970s to digitally record X-ray tomographic imaging to be computer manipulate to give us Computed Tomography or CT-Scanners. EMI Medical was the first to market CT head scanners in the late 1970s.
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.
I remember those days. You called and by the third ring a real live person answered the phone, a person that would take your order. No five minute phone tree.
Perhaps I am just a curmudgeon, but I do not share your optimism on the emotional and psychological front.
A few years ago, I was at a social gathering. I noticed about 5-6 teenagers -- girls and boys about high school age -- sitting around a table together and each one of them was staring at a phone screen. I found the scene jarring.
About a month later, I saw one of the boys who had been at that table and happened to mention that, at his age, mobile phones did not exist. He looked astonished and exclaimed that it must have been horrible. I told him to the contrary: when friends gathered together (which was often), we had nothing but each other to occupy ourselves; we communicated with each other incessantly and developed deep interpersonal relationships over the years. In my view, the social and emotional skills that we developed cannot be replicated -- and are likely degraded -- through the "virtual" social lives that seem so prevalent today.
"As a tribe, we're getting more resilient and more able to deal with that instability as a result. "
This seems falsified by Biden's recent speech demonizing Trump supporters, as well as the calls of the Woke that "speech is violence".
People more often share outrageous behavior of "The Other", those they want to hate. It looks like more instability to me.
Perhaps it's so clearly bad that some change happens, from tech or a movement of people, to again unite people to accept disagreements between people. Or, maybe Putin fears losing and uses a nuke against Ukraine, or somewhere, and more people are shocked into a higher frame of awareness of what violence is.
Now I'm imagining AI controlled drone swarms who do not like disagreeable freedom, not currently inevitable ...
I do hope you're right, and can even imagine it. But:
"There are a ton of people who have been through the wringer."
For the USA, this is almost totally false. They're living lives of the top 20%, 10%, 5% in history, in the world today, but like spoiled kids they throw a tantrum whenever reality is even a tiny amount worse than their high expectations.
Getting fired, losing a spouse or child, getting permanently injured, these are "wringer" events. Failing to get hired at a top company, having a hangnail, getting a car bump or speeding ticket - or having the other party win instead of your party - is not.
But it seems that tiny insecurities are considered so. Did you read the Moonlit Piglet HS teacher Arnold linked?
https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/gender-theory-in-schools-two-things
Insecure teen girls are claiming to be non-binary. This is a rejection of reality ...
If I thought mental illness as a language marker was leading to less mental illness, I'd be more optimistic - but I don't so I'm not. Yet, tech getting better mostly makes me smile. China making nuke power plants, for instance.
Culture and tech are both in feedback loops, more so than politics which is more downstream from culture.