Anyone with even a vague awareness of history is aware of the historical parallels.
Let's hope saner heads will prevail in these times of rapid change.
> Blom begins with Stravinsky, whose famous orchestral work The Rite of Spring was inspired by ancient Russian dance rituals. A melange of old folk music and arresting dissonance, the piece’s first performance in Paris 1913 triggered one of the most infamously violent reactions of any concert-hall audience in history. As Blom puts it bluntly, “all hell broke loose”:
> “During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,' Monteux [a musician] later recalled, “then there were boos and hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand. Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially against the orchestra... Everything to hand was thrown at them, but we continued playing. The chaos was complete when members of the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her detractor's face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to duels were issued.”
There’s something about the image of a concert hall full of rich, fancy people erupting in a melee that is just delightful
Not to harsh your schadenfreude buzz, but this is not the right image. Classical music was mass culture at the time.
Opera, in particular, was popular with all classes. (There's a delightful sequence in, I think?, "The Leopard" of brick-layers coming to blows over the merits of one singer versus another.) Recordings of famous singers were the first "hit" gramaphone records. Enrico Caruso sold out concerts all over the world - and (in legend, at least) sometimes gave impromptu balcony concerts to disappointed punters gathered in the street below.
“The Gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small pieces ! . . . I can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .” ― Plautus
Platus lived 254 – 184 BC. Sundials are from 1500BC. While it's a great quote, it certainly wasn't a new invention when he wrote it.
Already prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, there was a massive network of Phoenician and Greek colonies that would trade with one another constantly, from Cadiz to the Levant. The sea was a highway to them.
Amazon did not exist, but cunning merchants absolutely did, and they knew how to make money by selling attractive goods.
Back when cars were new, there was no infrastructure for petrol either, that was something you got in tiny quantities from a pharmacy. (The diesel engine can run on vegetable oil, but I don't think Mr Rudolf Diesel himself ever did that?)
I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.
"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"
Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
There's several things that it depends on which are TRL 1-3, but are known to be at least theoretically possible. Based on how long it takes to get other things from TRL 1 to working device, I think it's most likely to take longer than my current remaining life expectancy even to be even odds, but not by such a large margin as to be infinitesimal odds.
Not by itself. I basically agree with your broader point, of course, but on this particular detail, if someone's goal is to turn the moon into something like a Culture Orbital with the Earth at the centre*, the overall momentum of the system doesn't need to change.
* Or the old barycentre at the centre. This is also a terrible idea, please don't do this. Apart from anything else, mistakes are inevitable and large chunks of moon/O will rain down on us.
Imagine if we ate and drank out of lead paint containers constantly for decades before discovering their health impacts. That's basically what has happened with plastics.
I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt so "current" in describing events of the day e.g.
- local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news" that arrived immediately
- the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could communicate instantly around the world
- financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph.
- there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days)
I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often just updated versions of old technologies.
(NOTE: the link above takes you to a later edition)
40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.
All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.
My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/
Similarly, CNN essentially became the mainstay with live coverage of the start of Desert Storm in '91.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world.
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham
About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it.
I care about the fact that technology is used to undermine democracy and destroy social cohesion.
Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h). Did cars (and bicicles) go so fast then?
> in 1904 in NYC the limit was set to 12 mph inside of the city and 15 mph outside of it.
With that 12 mph figure being a little under the average running speed of the record holder marathon runner (26.2 miles in 2 hours flat, so 13.1 mph).
Now of course, most people are not record holding athletes, so sustaining these speeds on foot is not really happening for most. But you can definitely at least keep up for the duration of a sprint. So no real need for a horse even, your own legs can make do, despite these speeds being supposedly unnatural.
You can also sustain these speeds with a bicycle today, not sure about the bicycles of then.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Writeresearch/comments/hmy0h4/what_...
The last 150-200 years really is remarkable historically speaking. I don't think we've grasped what to do with it completely.
Today, even the Internet's positive impact is wildly debated, the LLM copyright issues are wildly debated and no data exists for the long term impact of LLM usage on the reasoning faculties (if you tell me that the article was not posted to discredit LLM skeptics, I have a bridge to sell you).
It would seem to me that the public sentiment of stuff is not very trustworthy in general, especially at its typical intensity.
Were they wrong?
So... how would we know?
Spend 3 days in deep nature, or meditate etc, and you can uncover your humanity....
Go look at the clouds, or better the stars, for some time. But don't do it tool long because you might start wondering why the fuck you're wasting so much time and energy fulfilling other people's TODO lists
Previously:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
-- Blaise Pascal (~1650)
David Farber - Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed [Audiobook]
Extrapolating such curves into the future suggests the current AI revolution is simply the last and latest node in a string of revolutions and it's nothing special.
If you think about it, having the world's all information at your fingertips (google), and in your pocket (iphone) might have been equally revolutionary. And before that came TV, radio, car, train, boat, plane, electricity, gas engine, steam engine etc as revolutions.
There's nothing that suggests the economic output per person is accelerating beyond the historical 2%/year. What could be reasons? Perhaps limited electricity, compute, AI model quality, computer speed etc.
So, the more analytical side of me thinks what we're experiencing is nothing extraordinary. It's just another revolution in a string of many :)
Obviously, my other, the more human side gets scared and feels afraid about the meaning of life, and humanity's place in it.
They’re neat tools. They help some people (a much, much smaller group of people than most think) be a bit more productive.
If LLMs are considered revolutionary, we are stagnating.
We already had the genAI goodies for 2 decades. It's not going to be such a shocking change.
If you know Russian, Dusk Of The Empire podcast is pretty cool.
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCL7ox52jCNuMcckQSc0o5HQ#botto...
And now the USA is starting to circle back.
Thinking of it, even current (terrible) war pales in comparison.
Makes a cold sorta sense – why even bother getting too close to them if most won't even survive to become a useful adult. Rough world.
Notably, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, and Tito were all there at the same time.
ChrisMarshallNY•2h ago
JJMcJ•2h ago
They were also the first to understand that steering the airplane was best done by warping the airfoils. Now we do it with rudders and elevators and flaps, then they did the whole surface.
BurningFrog•1h ago
Their accomplishments make more sense to me now!