[Animats]

Technology is inevitable if a lot of people can independently do it without huge resources, and the result is useful.

- Personal computing - inevitable. Once ICs became cheap, it started happening, with no one effort dominating.

- Moon landing - not inevitable. Huge resource commitment required, and not repeated since.

- Internal combustion engine - inevitable. Once fuels and steel were available, it was possible to contain the explosion of an IC engine, and many people started making them.

- Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work.

- Radio - inevitable. Once something with gain and something that rectifies were invented, radio was something many people could work upon.

- Steel - interesting case. Steel is thousands of years old, but mass production of steel only dates to 1880. It took considerable metallurgical research to get it right, with about 10,000 tries before the Bessemer converter worked reliably. No one had done that before, and one person did it.

- "AI", via the machine learning route - inevitable. The concepts date from the 1960s, but it took half a century of IC development to make them feasible.

Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality.

Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat".

[top256]

Thank you for the comment and engaging with my thinking.

You're using hindsight to define inevitability, which is exactly the circular reasoning my essay critiques. "It happened widely, therefore it was inevitable" isn't a useful framework, it's survivorship bias.

Using your IC example: they became cheap because of massive government investment in the space program and military procurement, not natural law. The Apollo Guidance Computer alone drove early IC demand. Different policy choices = different outcome.

Personal computing almost died multiple times. Xerox PARC had it all in 1973 but management killed it. IBM thought the market was ~5 computers total. The Homebrew Computer Club was nearly shut down for copyright infringement. Any of these inflection points going differently changes history.

Your "no moat" observation is telling - you're really describing business strategy (technologies that spread can't be monopolized) not philosophical inevitability. But even that's questionable: TCP/IP could have lost to OSI, the Web to Gopher or AOL's walled garden.

The counterfactual test: if these were truly inevitable, we'd see simultaneous independent invention everywhere. Instead we see: singular inventors, path dependence, and technologies that almost weren't (or actually weren't: where's our supersonic passenger travel?).

Calling only successes "inevitable" while ignoring what didn't happen or was actively prevented (nuclear proliferation, human cloning, various chemicals/drugs) demonstrates the selection bias in this thinking.

[jasode]

>Using your IC example: they became cheap because of massive government investment in the space program and military procurement, not natural law.

There is an underlying natural law to IC's being cheap without any government involvement because printing out circuits with chemicals and light like a photocopier is inherently cheaper than the alternatives of vacuum tubes or discrete components mounted on a board. (For non-trivial circuits where the count/complexity of components exceed the capital cost of lithography etc equipment.)

The privately funded researchers of Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor already knew integrated circuits would be more cost-effective before the inventions were finally solved. Eliminating the rising labor costs of wiring up old-style discrete components was the motivation to invent integrated circuits.

Therefore, it's not realistic to ponder an alternate history where a government bureaucrat in charge of military spending would have ignored the intrinsic physical properties of ICs and kept choosing vacuum tubes for 1970s F-15 and F-16 fighter jets because he believed "ICs are not inevitable because I have agency to make them not inevitable". Every other rational military on the globe would have chosen ICs which would make American equipment uncompetitive.

What government military contracts did was take intrinsically cheaper technology and fund more iterations to help make it even cheaper.

[top256]

I agree that physical and economic constraints matter, but the point I’m making is that cost curves themselves are contingent on human choices. ICs didn’t suddenly become cheap on their own; they became cheap because governments and corporations poured billions into scaling them. That’s not denying the underlying advantage, but showing how rhetoric of inevitability erases the political and economic decisions that actually drive those curves.

[Nevermark]

> ICs didn’t suddenly become cheap on their own; they became cheap because governments and corporations poured billions into scaling them.

That isn't insightful at all.

High returns on high scales of investment are MORE attractive. More "inevitable", even for mundane technologies.

The unbound economics of returns on intelligence without human limitations, and the downsides of being left behind (everything from lost employment to existential military threats), are the most convincing argument for technological investment ever.

The only thing not "inevitable" is how the returns will be distributed. With no end to the competition needed to stay relevant.

"Intelligence" is quite literally "THE" technology of technologies.

This is the most massive step in the form and capabilities of life on Earth, happening in real time, not a marginal improvement in user interfaces. Nothing living will be able to sit this out.

[naasking]

> Personal computing almost died multiple times. Xerox PARC had it all in 1973 but management killed it. IBM thought the market was ~5 computers total. The Homebrew Computer Club was nearly shut down for copyright infringement. Any of these inflection points going differently changes history.

Yes, history would be different, but that doesn't mean ICs and PCs weren't inevitable. As technology improves the capital required to innovate drops. At some point hobbyists can start making ICs at home. I think something like this happened with 3D printing.

> The counterfactual test: if these were truly inevitable, we'd see simultaneous independent invention everywhere. Instead we see: singular inventors, path dependence, and technologies that almost weren't (or actually weren't: where's our supersonic passenger travel?).

I disagree. Inevitability means that something will manifest at some point on a long enough timeline, not that it will necessarily manifest nearly concurrently on that timeline. Concurrent invention happens a lot and is a strong argument for inevitability, but isn't strictly necessary for inevitability.

For example, death is inevitable, even if we solve aging; we know you won't involuntarily die of old age in such a world, but you will die of something else, even if it's the heat death of the universe.

[MengerSponge]

An interesting counterpoint to the inevitability of ICs: Consider East Germany's semiconductor industry. They had state backing and proof of viability but they still couldn't generate a competitive product.

Making things is _hard_, and embodied expertise is critical.

[top256]

Great example. Thanks a lot! Can I add it my essay?

[MengerSponge]

Sure! I'd recommend you use a more reliable reference than some dude online vaguely recalling a something he read four+ years ago :)

[efsavage]

I think the concepts are inevitable, not so much the specific implementations. PCs were an inevitable stop on the fairly standard adoption path from many workers to one machine (Mainframes), 1:1 (PCs), many machines to one worker (I have at least 10 computers within arms reach right now). IBM/Windows/Apple weren't inevitable, they were just manifestations of that. ICs weren't inevitable, but commoditized computer parts were. TCP wasn't inevitable, but a lingua franca for networks was. LLMs weren't inevitable, but AI is.

To your overall point though, and to the contrary of the type of thinking you're critiquing, the timing of these things is not inevitable. Computers didn't have to happen in the 50s, they could easily have waited 50 or 100 years if we didn't have things like wars or other technological breakthroughs that enabled them. For AI we might be stuck on incremental improvements on LLMs for a generation, or they might be obsolete in 5 years. They will be replaced by something better at some point, but confusing (intentionally or not) inevitable with soon is where the hype proves itself hollow.

[Animats]

> Computers didn't have to happen in the 50s, they could easily have waited 50 or 100 years if we didn't have things like wars or other technological breakthroughs that enabled them.

Not really. While all the Government-funded stuff was going on, International Business Machines was slowly advancing their business machines. There was a long path from the IBM 601 (1931, mechanical multiplication, plugboard programmed), the IBM 602 (1946, mechanical division), the IBM 602A ("a 602 that worked"), the IBM 603 (1946, multiplication and division with vacuum tubes, but still plugboard programmed), the IBM 604 (1948, with 1,250 tubes), and finally the IBM 650 (1954, true stored program, tube logic, drum main memory, Knuth's first computer.) The government-funded machines were more advanced but very low volume. All of the 600 series machines were mass-produced and had long operating careers making businesses go.

Transistors had to progress more before IBM business computers became transistorized. The IBM 1401. (1959, all transistor, 12,000 built) launched business computing in a big way. From then on, the business side, rather than the government side, drove the technology. All that would have happened without WWII. WWII held up the IBM 603 electronic multiplier by several years; IBM was trying out electronic arithmetic in the late 1930s.

[top256]

That distinction is really useful. My critique is aimed at how often “inevitability talk” blurs those two levels together. It’s one thing to say “networks need a lingua franca,” it’s another to say “TCP/IP was inevitable.” When people collapse the concept into the specific implementation, that’s when the rhetoric becomes persuasive but misleading.

[BinaryIgor]

You examples with human cloning and some chemicals/drugs plus potentially nuclear energy being first favored then disfavored (now seems to be getting back to favors) are telling; it shows that outside the pure properties of technology itself, a lot depends on a given society/civilization value systems and who gets to decide what's important and allowed and what's not

[bluefirebrand]

> The counterfactual test: if these were truly inevitable, we'd see simultaneous independent invention everywhere

I don't think there is any reason to think that " a technology was inevitable" implies that the technology would be invented simultaneously in multiple places

[ttoinou]

  - Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work.

The mainstream explanation is that the threat that someone else could be researching and investing is enough of push to try yourself

  Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality.

I would say moving from rhetoric to a simple 3 parameters model ("how many people can research this, how much resources it takes, how useful the promised result it")

[worldsayshi]

> Internal combustion engine - inevitable

This fails to account for competing technologies. If batteries were good enough at the time when we sought to build cars we might've skipped ICE entirely and gone all in on electric cars.

At any point in time there are multiple possible outcomes. The one that ends up being dominant seems so in retrospect because it has been refined and we can follow all the events leading up to it. But we don't see all the paths that failed selection because they weren't competitive enough at that point in time compared to the alternative.

[WorkerBee28474]

You seem to link cars and ICEs, while ICEs predated cars by a century.

[worldsayshi]

Ok sure but electric cars predated ice cars. That's what I was thinking of. We could've skipped ice cars entirely if other enabler technologies were mature enough at the time.

So the ice car wasn't inevitable. It was the car that we could build at that time given the technology we had. So it was only inevitable given the context. Change the context, change the outcome.

[conception]

I would only note that having fuel available was not inevitable and we just happen to be lucky that we have lots of plant matter that got changed into easily accessible oil. This is one of the reasons why humanity is kind of cooked if there is a major war or collapse of civilization. That easy energy is gone

[myfavoritetings]

After reading “The Making Of The Atomic Bomb” I came away with the impression that development of nuclear bombs was 100% inevitable after 1938 when the German scientists proved splitting uranium isotope could sustain a chain reaction. All of the top physicists in the world instantly knew this could be used to create a super weapon. Every power in WWII had a nuclear program but only 1 had the resources to execute on it. Being the only country with a nuke is basically a checkmate on the world order and game theory demands it be created once it was known it was possible

[lesuorac]

What's your definition of a moat?

There's a reason Norway makes a lot of money from oil while Greenland doesn't. I'm not sure why the word moat doesn't apply here?

Sure, with enough money you can overcome any moat but to me that's the whole argument behind a moat. We have something right now that a competitor would need to spend a lot to reach and during that time we can just get ahead of them.

If you have an existing iron mine and coal, to me you have a moat over generic competitor in creating steel because you already have suppliers for your steel mill lined up. Although some may argue that those are actually anchors and that you could import both of them for cheaper and then supply your mill that way.

[CGMthrowaway]

>Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat".

Ironically, despite not having a moat, the inevitable technologies have been however far more lucrative.

With a few more examples I can make the point stronger.

Inevitable: printing press, vaccines, refrigeration, social media Not inevitable: reusable rockets, CRISPR, GPS, high speed rail