Even if I grant all of this, it doesn’t mean that individual reactions don’t matter, it means they all add up in ways that constrain the future along certain axes. Who and where and when can definitely alter the details, which might or might not make a longer-term difference along other axes. Sure it’s historically contingent that the industrial revolution happened in Britain, and the IR didn’t shift the long-term economic growth hyperbola, but that it happened changed human life a lot. If it had happened in China instead then that would have had global downstream effects on language, food, art, culture, religion, and politics, and our lives would be different in ways we find meaningful.
There’s also the deeper question of which straight lines get gods, and for how long. Humans lived at or near the Malthusian population limit for millennia despite rising productivity… until we didn’t, after the IR really got going. And if we limit ourselves just to looking at Moore’s law, we do have to note that the doubling time has increased, it isn’t actually constant over the last 60 years. The line isn’t totally straight. We can look and see when and why it bent, but it did and does bend.
Even if I grant all of this, it doesn’t mean that individual reactions don’t matter, it means they all add up in ways that constrain the future along certain axes. Who and where and when can definitely alter the details, which might or might not make a longer-term difference along other axes. Sure it’s historically contingent that the industrial revolution happened in Britain, and the IR didn’t shift the long-term economic growth hyperbola, but that it happened changed human life a lot. If it had happened in China instead then that would have had global downstream effects on language, food, art, culture, religion, and politics, and our lives would be different in ways we find meaningful.
There’s also the deeper question of which straight lines get gods, and for how long. Humans lived at or near the Malthusian population limit for millennia despite rising productivity… until we didn’t, after the IR really got going. And if we limit ourselves just to looking at Moore’s law, we do have to note that the doubling time has increased, it isn’t actually constant over the last 60 years. The line isn’t totally straight. We can look and see when and why it bent, but it did and does bend.