I don’t have the detailed knowledge needed to flesh this out, but it occurred to me that there might be a structure of an argument someone could make that would be shaped something like “we got a lot of meaningful changes in the last 70 years, but they didn’t create as many nonlinear tipping points as in the previous industrial revolutions.”
Fwiw, flying cars probably wouldn’t hit any such tipping point, though self-driving cars probably would.
Widespread nuclear energy might’ve meant little concern about global warming at this point, but solar & wind have been trucking along slowly enough that there’s tons of concern.
I think the internet is doing something important for the possibility of running your own 1-2 person business, which is a meaningful tipping point. There are various other tipping points happening as a result of computers and the internet, which is why I think it stands out as @jasoncrawford’s only named revolutionary technologies.
Anyway, hoping someone can steelman this for me, considering the nonlinear cascades in each era & from each technology, and seeing whether there’s indeed something different about pre-1970 and after. I’m not confident there is, to be clear, but I have some intuition that says this might be part of what people are seeing.
I don’t have the detailed knowledge needed to flesh this out, but it occurred to me that there might be a structure of an argument someone could make that would be shaped something like “we got a lot of meaningful changes in the last 70 years, but they didn’t create as many nonlinear tipping points as in the previous industrial revolutions.”
Fwiw, flying cars probably wouldn’t hit any such tipping point, though self-driving cars probably would.
Widespread nuclear energy might’ve meant little concern about global warming at this point, but solar & wind have been trucking along slowly enough that there’s tons of concern.
I think the internet is doing something important for the possibility of running your own 1-2 person business, which is a meaningful tipping point. There are various other tipping points happening as a result of computers and the internet, which is why I think it stands out as @jasoncrawford’s only named revolutionary technologies.
Anyway, hoping someone can steelman this for me, considering the nonlinear cascades in each era & from each technology, and seeing whether there’s indeed something different about pre-1970 and after. I’m not confident there is, to be clear, but I have some intuition that says this might be part of what people are seeing.