More Technology; More Progress
We didn’t fly for the entire history of humanity, and then suddenly we did. Our only real constraint is physical law. This is why I don’t pay much attention to people claiming something is impossible based solely on past failure. Things change, tech advances, and the mythical Icarus is succeeded by the very real Wrights.
Often, technological breakthroughs are presented in movies as an Icarus-style story, with an old, outdated moral: “Oh, they were so arrogant with their technology. They flew too close to the sun and their wings melted and they fell back to the earth. They should not have been so arrogant as to think they could aim so high.”
That's the implication of Jurassic Park, The Terminator, and Black Mirror. All the bad things that happen are about the hubris of the scientists and blah, blah, blah. The movie Limitless is about a guy who finds a wonderdrug that unlocks the use of our fullest intelligence. There are side effects, but the movie is so refreshing because, at the end, the guy works out the bugs. With his super intelligence, he's able to figure out the better version of the pill. That’s how it works in real life.
We aren't like Icarus. We had some crashes, but we figured out how to have safe, reliable planes stay up in the sky. We engineered the failures away.
We figured out a way around the seemingly un-figure-out-able. Believing the next problem is solvable is a fundamental tenant of the philosophy of technology.
If you haven’t studied something in depth, your mental model of it often implicitly reduces to a few scenes from a Hollywood movie.
Technology is the driving force of history. The entire premise of science fiction is that some new scientific invention has changed the world. We only seem to understand this in the context of a movie (where the changes are often for the worse and happen in fast-forward montages), but not in the context of the world today (where the changes are often for the better and happen one day at a time).
Put another way, science and technology are not the newspaper headlines of each day; politics and crime are—even if the former is where most of our attention should be.
Through history, regimes rise and fall, but technology is (so far!) up and to the right. What distinguishes man from ape is technological progress. The more things that can get done without you thinking about them, the more civilizational progress there has been.
I hit the Enter key to send an email and many, many things happen. I depress the key, the capacitor changes when I hit that key, the wireless keyboard has Bluetooth to send it to the laptop, the laptop captures that event and turns it into packets, and so on. Five hundred things are happening, and you’re not thinking about any of those things. Progress is abstraction.
The issue that stems from abstraction is people get alienated from complexity and start to believe things are easy. That’s just humans being humans. Actually, putting all those things behind an easy interface is ridiculously hard. It’s really, really, really hard to do. It’s really hard to make something easy.
We really should be in the middle of a golden age of productivity. Within living memory, computers did not exist. Photocopiers did not exist. *Backspace* did not exist. You had to write everything by hand. Not long ago, you couldn't search your documents, let alone sort them, back them up, look things up, copy/paste, email, or undo. You had to type everything on a typewriter!
If you're doing information work, relative to your ancestors who worked with papyrus, paper, or typewriters, you are a golden god surfing on a sea of electrons. You can make things happen in seconds that would have taken them weeks, if they could do them at all.
Think about the increase in the number of communications per person. We’ve gone from an occasional letter or phone call to now sending data with every keystroke.
Lots of people mistake the value of new technologies. Things that initially seem frivolous become important down the line. Video games led to 3D graphics, now leading to virtual reality. Social networking led to services like Lyft. Twitter started as breakfast updates, and now it’s used for revolutions and breaking news. Those things are not as trivial as people think.
