
Taleb: The future will not be cool - mck-
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/nassim_nicholas_taleb_the_future_will_not_be_cool/
======
astine
I was going to say something to the effect of "Who is this guy and why do we
care what he thinks? He seems like an idiot." But it turns out that he's
actually a respected thinker and has published some respected books so maybe
I'm not allowed to say that.

However, I still think this particular essay is insulting drivel. Taleb uses a
lot of 10 dollar words to mast his 10 cent thoughts. He wears his vocabulary
and enculturation on his sleeve like a badge so that he can pour scorn on
_neophiles_ and other people he doesn't like. Now, this may merely be the
predjudice of an "autistic" technophile, but I prefer reasoned arguments to
intellectual muscle flexing.

He makes a few good points. As the old saying goes: "The more things change
the more they stay the same." Some things about society will possibly never
change. But his actual argument is so vapid: We still use glasses to hold
liquids that we intend to drink? Just like the Mesopotamians? No kidding. But
chances are that glass he was drinking out of was manufactured in China
hundreds of miles away with techniques wholly unavailable to Mesopotamia and
shipped across a distance, inconcievable to a Mesopotamian, and at a price,
proportionally less that the price of the rudimentary earthenware mug that a
Mesopotamian would use.

Taleb accuses technophiles of not studying history, but I _have_ studied
history, and the world _has_ changed, quite a bit.

~~~
notJim
You spend a lot of time insulting Taleb, and relatively little time actually
addressing the problems with his arguments.

~~~
akaru
It's a 50/50 split. In an article, 5/95 would suffice? Must a retort require
so much more?

------
ChuckMcM
I always find these sorts of essays curious, here is a guy who is eating lamb
and noting that the fork is an old invention. Except that the lamb he is
eating is probably from New Zealand, a country that is mesopotamian ancestors
couldn't even imagine existed, much less imagine trading with. He might as
well remark that his sperm is using the same sort of gamete structure that was
fashionable in the neolithic period. _That isn't the point._

The future is going to be new, and different, and it is hard to predict. Your
phone (for some definition of phone) can give you answer to nearly any fact
based question you can imagine. Right now, in under 500 mSec. The future
doesn't look different when its entered into gradually, it looks hugely
different when it is punctuated.

So if Taleb really wanted to 'check' on his futurist mantra, he should pick a
number, 10 years, 25 years, 50 years. And then 'spend a day' in that time by
removing everything in his possessions, environment, and activities that were
not created or possible at that previous time.

I would predict that its a matter of opinion as to whether the future is or is
not 'cool', most people would agree that the past _sucks_. :-)

~~~
notJim
I think you're missing the point, but also I admit I'm not entirely sure what
you're trying to say. So please forgive me if I get it wrong.

The point is not that the future will be like the past, or that things which
exist now simply should not. It's that in Taleb's future, technologists will
have recognized that technology should eliminate bullshit (think about the
toilet and sewers, some of the best technology that could ever exist!) and
make it easier to live a life full of the basic good parts of being human:
companionship/sex, food, discovery and knowledge. So the smartphone is not
incongruous with his vision of the future at all. It enables you to seek all
of those things, and adds relatively little in terms of shitty things (I mean,
you have to pay for it and keep it charged, but beyond that it doesn't add a
lot hardship.)

When he talks about the lack of literacy in technology circles, I believe he's
thinking of literature as a tool for looking at human motivations. So, his
theory is that if technologists were to read literature (or were of a mindset
to be already interested in literature), they would recognize these
motivations, and it would provide a path for changing their focus from stupid
social widgets to something that will actually create the future.

~~~
bloaf
But his claim, as stated by his title, was that the "The future will not be
cool." If the author is allowed to reach this conclusion by saying "all
present and future gadgets are just boring solutions to ancient problems" then
his claim is true but basically tautological.

------
russell
Taleb of Black Swans fame says that predictions of future technology dont pan
out, flying cars for example. He says that the predictable new technology is a
replacement of older less capable or less adapted technology. I suppose your
could have predicted cell phones, having see analog wireless phones.

What he doesnt say in this book excerpt is that truly disruptive technology is
usually around in the labs or experimental form 15 or so years before its
disruptive phase. Could you have predicted today's internet from the early
ARPANET? I was there and I didnt. Or the iPad from the integrated circuit?
Good grief, Ted Nelson demoed Xanadu of a group of us in the 1980's and I
didnt see the social implications of the Web.

~~~
don_draper
Has technology really made your life significantly better?

How many of us still get in cars and commute to work, sit in an office, as we
are monitored by our boss, drive home through some awful commute. Then eat
some processed food because we didn't have time to go to the grocery store and
get some fresh food. I'm sure there are plenty on this site who telecommute
and bike, but that's not the norm.

A lot of what is If talked about on this site is really not a big deal: some
new library to make some flashy display; or some new iphone/app thingy; or
some new way to get eyeballs to look at a web page.

~~~
dmpk2k
I'd say vaccines and antibiotics have made my life vastly better.

Let's compare: WW2 was the worst war we've ever had; it killed about 60
million people, or about 2% of the world population.

The Spanish Flu in 1918 killed 3%. Smallpox killed 3-500 million people in the
20th century, or about 5-8x as many as WW2.

Or how about the Black Death a few centuries before? _Half_ the European
population gone. It wiped out entire Asian cities too.

Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would
think us mad.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors
> would think us mad.

And we _damn need to_ speed up the development, as antibiotics are starting to
fail due to their overuse. We take the life without major pandemics for
granted, but we will get a cold wake-up soon if we don't fight to maintain
this.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Wait; have you been reading the news? Several epidemics have swept the globe
in recent years already. Did somebody wake up, and I missed it?

~~~
TeMPOraL
I meant serious pandemics like the ones dmpk2k mentioned. Most of the first
worlders didn't fear any serious contagion for decades.

------
lolcraft
This is, surprisingly, a warning for entrepreneurs worldwide. You should read
it.

"After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences
attended by he new class of technology intellectuals. I was initially
exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as I used to live among tie-wearing
abhorred bankers."

"But these conferences felt depressing. It took a while for me to realize the
reason: a profound lack of elegance."

Take its message as a humbling lesson: "Technology is at its best when it is
invisible."

~~~
michaelochurch
I moved back into a conservative industry and have started wearing a jacket
and tie. Honestly, I quite like it. It's a couple hundred bucks worth of
clothing to have the image of being "serious" about my job, and to get the
benefit of the doubt in all sorts of social interactions. With the rewards
considered, it's extremely cheap.

I don't know that I'll continue to wear a tie for the rest of my life, and I
certainly won't expect other people to do so when I become a "higher-up", but
I'm not going to dress like a college student for work anymore, no matter what
I do. When you go to work the unfortunate reality is that you need to subtly
tell other people what they think of you, and dressing well is one of the most
time- and energy-efficient ways to do it.

~~~
lolcraft
I guess we, in our youthful arrogance, dismiss our seniors as enterprise
relics of a lost age, without considering what led them to that place before.
Things don't seem to change that much, after all. Sadly. Which is
coincidentally the theme of this article.

~~~
zerostar07
What's sad is the conformist turn this thread has taken. What happened to the
rebelious spirit of the internet generation? People shouldn't make judgments
based on somebody's clothing. We are supposed to be beyond the point where one
needs to be "pleasurable to everyone" in order to be respected. Also, if
anything, shirt-and-tie clothing is quite impractical, how about putting some
brains to work to come up with self-cleaning/self-healing clothes?

Another thing: by creating a strong impression of seriousness, jacket-and-tie
creates a false , narcissistic sense of self-worth that can limit the true
drive to succeed and that's a sad, sad thing when it happens. It's just an
appearance after all.

Taleb may have been referring to certain "conference-whores" [1] who dress up
like geeks to fit into the crowd. Hopefully, in science and technology,
actions matter more than words and dress up, and that's one of the reasons we
like it.

[1][http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/10/13/be-careful-
not...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/10/13/be-careful-not-to-
become-a-conference-ho/)

~~~
michaelochurch
So, I like wearing the suit and tie and you probably think I'm "conformist". I
also tend not to judge people based on how they dress or look. I make active
efforts to be as non-biased by peoples' physical appearances as possible. Yet
I know (from experience) that it's an unreasonable expectation of other people
to hold them to this same status and that, in the real world, appearance
matters.

What I've learned, the hard way, is that you have to spend a considerable
amount of your work time deciding for other people how they perceive you, and
this is a subtle art. If you don't manage your image actively, others will
manage it for you. This is as true, if not moreso, in a startup than in a big
company. At least the social status rules of large companies (as broken and
antiquated as they may be) are _documented_. In a startup, you often have
situations where there are 20 employees who all think they're the alpha dog.

Wearing a suit and tie is a very cheap, efficient way to manage other peoples'
impressions of you. Sure, it's silly, but the reward-to-cost ratio is very
high. It's a lot cheaper and better than, say, sticking around the office till
9:30 when you finished productive work 5 hours ago.

~~~
zerostar07
I didn't make a personal remark, but yes, what you describe perpetuates a
certain conformity.

------
tubelite
Taleb is a Soup Nazi. He (volubly) suffers for his soup. He treats customers
with disdain. And yet people line up for the soup, because it's pretty good,
actually.

I find Taleb's opinionated eccentricity very useful, especially when it
consists of a mixture of ideas, some of which you totally agree with and some
which you totally disagree. Keeps you alert and thinking, instead of blindly
swallowing or blindly rejecting everything depending on religious preferences
(e.g. iOS vs Android)

Antifragility is perhaps the most important perception-refactoring concept
since the selfish gene, and the book deserves to be read purely for that
reason.

The book is pretty laudatory of engineers and the tinkering mentality,
crediting them for most of the inventions of the past age, rather than top-
down science.

Erudition is great. But it is far easier for the engineer to become erudite
than for a liberal arts major to become an engineer.

Where Taleb is wrong is that (good) science fiction is not about predicting
the future. It is really speculative economics fiction - how would a mix of
this kind of intelligent agents and this kind of resource environment work
out? The science, futurism and the aliens are merely literary tools to help
you get out of a human/today-centric point of view. They are thought
experiments which can be sold to the public (at least, the engineering
public).

And God, I hate longhand as the primary mode of input. Connecting the iPad to
ancient tablets is the kind of wankery one gets from the erudite, I guess :)

(I'm picking very small nits here; "Antifragile" is overall very thought
provoking. Highly recommended.)

------
lmg643
I used to be impressed by Taleb (when I was younger and more clueless) but
having read two of his books and many articles I find the negativity tiresome
and petulant, and his finance theories questionable.

Eric Falkenstein:

"Another key to understanding Taleb is that he has a French post-modern
tendency to write to impress rather than explain. He provides hundreds of
loosely related anecdotes, reminding me of the Talmud quote that 'when a
debater’s point is not impressive, he brings forth many arguments.' I actually
agree with a lot of Taleb, such as the intractability of risk because it is
endogenous, and I think he's vaguely libertarian, but he says so many
inconsistent things that doesn't mean much (when he's right it's probably a
good example of the Gettier problem)."

Gettier problem = whether being right by accident still counts as being right.

[http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/taleb-mishandles-
frag...](http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/taleb-mishandles-
fragility.html)

~~~
fusiongyro
I continue to be impressed by Taleb, but I will read the linked blog article.
I don't read him for the financial advice per se so much as for enjoyably-
written reminders to avoid the fundamental attribution error and pay attention
to the expected value as well as the extremes when weighing probabilistic
outcomes. I wouldn't characterize him as negative—he strikes me as about as
positive as you can get with an acute awareness of human ignorance as an
incurable situation that leads to a great deal of needless suffering. A lot of
the anti-Taleb angst seems to derive from him not delivering facts in a
sufficiently rigorous and drab manner, but I don't think there's anything
wrong with entertaining non-fiction.

------
rizzom5000
I enjoyed this excerpt, but I was surprised that he used Orwell as one of his
examples of someone whose imagination failed to predict the future.

As much as Taleb swoons over literary culture in this excerpt, and as much of
cultural force as Orwell was as a writer; I'm surprised that that Taleb
doesn't view Orwell's imagination as a remarkably accurate, in a literary, if
not literal, sense, prognosticator.

After all, Orwell's imagination predicted the surveillance society, death of
individual privacy, the use of propaganda for social engineering among other
things. I may be misinterpreting Taleb's words, "The problem is that almost
everything that was imagined never took place, except for a few over-exploited
anecdotes...", because it strikes me that he would miss the obvious current
reality of Orwell's 'literary predictions' which mostly are very much based on
technological achievements such as ubiquitous networks, cheap cameras, cheap
and ubiquitous data storage, and so on.

------
JVIDEL
I would like to point out that the Space Age futurism the author rants so much
about wasn't made by the, and I quote, "techno-autistic" guys.

Most of the futuristic crap from 50 and 60 years ago was the product of some
uninformed scifi authors who mixed fantasy with technology, marketers creating
products of the future to create more brand-awareness (with the ironic
consequence that some of those companies disappeared decades ago) and many
charlatans who simply had no idea what they were talking about.

For example, food pills wasn't about a rosy cool future, the whole idea
started as a theoretical last-ditch effort to curve a future global famine of
catastrophic proportions caused by the at the time unprecedented increase in
population. Fortunately other "techno-autistics" were able to find a way to
increase crop yields (Green Revolution) which is why we still have real food
instead of something closer to dry dogfood pellets.

------
georgeorwell
I'd like to see a news aggregator where all of the submissions were as well-
written and thoughtful as this one. It doesn't matter whether his perspective
is wrong or right, the fact is that the writing here simply makes reading it a
pleasure. I'd say that 1% or less of articles have this quality.

~~~
rizzom5000
This was actually little more than an advertisement for his book. I agree it
is well written, which is not entirely surprising as the author has been on
the NYT best selling list before. With that being said, the NYT might be the
aggregator you're looking for - that is, if you're looking for high quality
literature.

------
smalter
Venkat Rao at Ribbon Farm has a great post on this topic: "Welcome to the
Future Nauseous" ([http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-
future-n...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-
nauseous/)).

~~~
zem
now that was an excellent article. thanks for the pointer.

------
sabj
A fun article whose real value will likely be missed by many here who will be
rushing, misguided, to defend their ideas of 'technology' or 'progress' from
attack.

The points that Taleb is making here are best discussed, not by considering
technology as artifact alone, but technology for what it really is - a set of
artifacts, systems, processes, and artifices that take place in a social
milieu and as a two-way relationship with society and civilization. To think
otherwise is naive folly, from my perspective. (Please see:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technolo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technology)
for a primer on this, it's fun reading if you're unfamiliar).

Technophiles (myself included!) will often project things out because they
fail to understand that technology does NOT just show up and leave an imprint
on the world, deus ex machina style. Instead the world shapes technology back.
You can see this for any kind of technology, from the bicycle (Bijker's famous
example, shown in the wikipedia article) to the Internet, which has its
present design because of the real fears / threats / motivations that abounded
during its establishment.

It's the (mostly) impossible nature of this dis-entanglement that throws
people off track. In some world of scientist-kings of technocratic technophile
dictatorships, yes, we'd have moon bases by now. But that's not how it works,
and as a result people - messy, annoying humanity - get in the way. For better
or, for often, worse.

The future WILL be cool - I'm still an optimist. But it will be cool in
different ways, and maybe for different reasons, than many here on HN might
imagine.

Since this thread is already a bit long let me instead just close with a great
quote that I reference often. Relevant here.

 _The plain message physical science has for the world at large is this, that
were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to
their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic operating plant, or an
electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment be no appreciate toil
in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the
anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful in its value. There is more than
enough for everyone alive. Science stands, a too competent servant, behind her
wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they
are too stupid to use._ – H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1904)

~~~
TeMPOraL
To quote from the Wikipedia article:

"Advocates of SCOT—that is, social constructivists -- argue that technology
does not determine human action, but that rather, human action shapes
technology."

Sounds like another case of people not understanding feedback loops - that A
can both determine, and be determined by B.

~~~
sabj
Obviously you're going to see a gradient, but I don't think most would contend
human action isn't shaped at all by technologies in ways that are often
unexpected. Plus, you get a sort of chicken-and-egg problem at some levels...

But people very, very commonly fail to see the embedded social factors in
technologies, and are very quick to ascribe autonomy to technology, which is
in my mind fallacious. You see this when the news has stories like,
"Technology just keeps advancing. How will it change our lives next?" instead
of understanding it as part of a relationship between people, their
environment, and their artifacts, technology gets put on some magical self-
propelling trajectory that just isn't true. Yes, Moore's Law is great - but
it's a social/human driver, as is Intel's Tick-Tock, not something innate in
technology!

------
kenjackson
Taleb is wrong. There's a much better analysis on why futurists predict the
future wrong by an author who I forget. This authors central thesis is that
technology moves in spurts along any given dimension. For example building
were getting taller and taller. Every year a new "talltest building" was
built. People began imagining buildings to the moon or at least out of the
atmosphere. This eventually stopped. Similarly, planes got faster and faster.
In the midst of the increase in plane speeds not many would have thought that
we'd have the amount of commercial flights at the current "slow" speeds we
have.

But people tend to miss a lot of other things. Most futurists wouldn't have
predicted that computers 1000x more powerful than ENIAC would fit in our
pocket. I recall one prediction about a computer the size of ENIAC might fit
in a small room. Notice the low resolution displays in most old sci-fi movies.
Or how ubiquitous wireless communication would be. Many sci-fi movies with
tethered phones, or data transfer with USB-key like gadgets.

It's not that things are subtractive (that's just wishful luddite-like
thinking). It's just that things aren't necessarily additive where we think
they may be. It may be that in 50 years the web is a lot like how it is today,
but nutrition technology has drastically changed so that nutrituous food is
tasty and cheap. Or we discover technology to communicate with animals much
more effectively.

Technology keeps moving forward. And I think his comment about literary
culture reveals his bias.

------
breckinloggins
I believe that the future will look more like the past. One thing I'm almost
certain we'll see less and less of is _gadgets_. Smartphones, computers,
things like that will all go inside your head (if you're willing, and most
everyone will be). Soon we will become tired of living in houses with blank
walls upon which are projected whatever we want and, because we can do so,
will revert back to more ancient styles of architecture and furnishings (with
a couple of blank walls or two).

Your stove may look like a wood burning stove, and your fridge may look like a
50's model. Why? Because when almost EVERYTHING is 3D printed to your
specifications, people are free to make things that function in a modern way
but look like what _they_ want them to look, rather than how the
manufacturer's marketing department deems they should look.

I think transport will be dominated by self-driving vehicles, but again: think
of individual styles. I predict quite a few autonomous "horseless coaches"
driving around our cities.

Speaking of cities...

My hope is that high speed network access will be everywhere, and population
densities will equalize as more and more people prefer to live a rural life
even while they do cutting edge professional or academic work. There will
still be slums and there will still be poor people, but I think that the
majority of people who live in cities will do so because they really _want_
to.

Further out, I can see even things like traditional healthcare completely
disappear. Sure, we may always have emergency trauma centers and doctors, but
it's not to hard to fathom a time where a colony of self-replicating bio-
robots and ongoing genetic engineering work 24 hours a day inside your body to
keep it healthy and let you know of any real trouble before it becomes
serious.

This is not to say that all these predictions will come true, only that the
disappearance of electronic gadgets into the mind and into fabrics, paint, and
the air seems inevitable, as does the radical differentiation of physical
_things_ like furniture, houses, and vehicles that will certainly come from
the 3D printing/replication revolution (if that occurs).

------
venus
I want to be contrarian here and say I actually liked this article, whose main
thrust I might summarise thusly:

 _The future will not be as cool as technologists imagine because in the
contest of being what it could be, and being what its current inhabits want it
to be (especially those in power), the latter wins_

It's nothing profound, but it's worth hearing again, and the arguments here
underline that. Technology exists to serve humans, and humans haven't changed
for a very long time, for better or worse. Any prediction that fails to take
this into account will fail. It's an old lesson, but it seems we need to hear
these old lessons again, and again, and again.

------
marquis
"It is remarkable that the tools that seem to currently dominate the world,
such as the Internet, or more mundane matters such as the wheel on the
suitcase of Book IV, were completely missing from these forecasts."

This is completely wrong. I can think of at least 2 victorian examples
imagining the internet: 1, a series of drawings where video telecommunications
is imagined, and the other a story I cannot find, written over 100 years ago I
believe, about a son and mother communicating from their pods where all the
worlds knowledge is accessible, and the son chooses to go "offline".

~~~
gnosis
The story is called _"The Machine Stops"_ by E. M. Forster.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops>

~~~
marquis
Thanks! It's also far out of copyright, here's the story itself.

<http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html>

------
josephlord
He doesn't mention the smartphone, a pocket computer connected to the Internet
that may settle an argument at his dinner without recourse to the library the
next day. It may also enable finding out where the friends who are running
late are and guide him to the address if it isn't familiar.

The smartphone was probably predictable from the early 2000's at the very
least.

Having said that I'm not that I currently see any similar major leaps coming
in the next decade. More accurate and indoor location data could bring useful
(and in some ways almost invisible) functionality to the smartphone.

~~~
dkarl
_The smartphone was probably predictable from the early 2000's at the very
least._

Thinking about smartphone predictability reveals a pattern that might apply to
other technologies: an actual _dip_ in predictability caused by technological
progress. If you leave out the always-internet-connected aspects of the
smartphone, you still have a very small and portable device with books,
amusements, up-to-date reference materials such as maps and encyclopedias,
current periodicals, and real time voice and video communication. If the
Internet did not exist, the iPhone would still have been a breakthrough
product. A web-ignorant but otherwise capable iPhone was theoretically
predictable half a century ago, but the technological reality of the
intervening decades (ugly low-res screens, huge devices with pathetic
capabilities, painfully clumsy input methods) depressed our expectations to
the point that when it finally happened, it was something of a surprise.

AI may be another area where decades of technological disappointment have
narrowed our expectations and reduced our ability to imagine what the future
will bring. Someone transported from the 1960s might be better at predicting
the future of AI than anyone who lived through the intervening decades.

~~~
Someone
_"A web-ignorant but otherwise capable iPhone was theoretically predictable
half a century ago […] when it finally happened, it was something of a
surprise."_

That made me think of Bruce Tognazzini (TOG) in "TOG on Interface"
([http://www.amazon.com/Tog-Interface-Bruce-
Tognazzini/dp/0201...](http://www.amazon.com/Tog-Interface-Bruce-
Tognazzini/dp/0201608421). From 1991, but seems unaware of the existence of
the world-wide web):

 _"I want the United States Library of Congress on my desktop. I want the
collections of every major museum in the world available to project against my
wall. I want every issue of every newspaper published in the English-speaking
world sitting in my laptop.

Is this really too much to ask?"_

I remembered that first paragraph as ending in "in my pocket", but, apart from
minor technical details (for example, wireless communication allows us to
shrink the device even further then laptop size, and he isn't asking for all
of Hollywood or even for all radio recordings ever made) I think that is a
decent prediction of where we are heading.

------
msrpotus
Interesting but very over the top. An iPad might be called a tablet but it's
very different than what Babylonians used (except in shape and sometimes
purpose), contrary to Taleb's assertion.

------
jval
I can agree with a lot of the criticisms in these comments, because the future
will definitely be cool, and Taleb has selectively forgotten about a lot of
the great technological advancements and focussed on things that haven't
advanced.

That said, Taleb makes a good point when he is talking about the tendency for
'futurists' to get it all wrong. He is touching on one of the major problems
of design which is that bad design is always additive, and constantly bolts on
extra useless features in order to strive for something 'newer', whereas good
design demands subtraction.

The iPhone was released in an era where most nerds still got excited about
what Intel was planning to release next year, and yet the most influential
computer of the decade didn't even have an Intel processor. By subtracting
away the unnecessary, Jobs delivered something that was far greater than the
sum of its parts. Most notably, the iOS touch interface was a huge innovation
from a human-computer interaction perspective, yet viewed from another
perspective all it did was bring us back to an interface that had been used
for centuries (I think Taleb can realise the difference between a Phoenician
tablet and an iPad, he is referring to the interface).

I think ultimately Taleb is touching on something that Steve Jobs would often
repeat, which is that the best objects exist at an intersection of the arts
and the sciences. Human nature does not fundamentally change as the years
pass, and this is ultimately the limiting factor on successful technologies,
and the driving force behind the process of disruptive innovation which
continues to favour the less technologically advanced yet more customer-
centric (or human-centric) technologies. This is something that is often
forgotten in the technology world where it took a completely non-technical
liberal arts drop-out in the form of Jobs to help technologists realise that
computers ultimately have to be made for real people.

That said, Taleb is writing outside his domain and therefore this piece could
have been much better written.

------
allenwlee
I'd really like to know if people on HN "share an absence of literary culture"
as Taleb suggests. Can you please respond if you read literature other than
science fiction?

~~~
jhales
I'm rather 'well read.' I don't say this boastfully as I feel a lot of it was
a waste of time (although I also found a lot of philosphy/literature etc. very
insightful).

~~~
mindcrime
_I don't say this boastfully as I feel a lot of it was a waste of time_

I try to read a few "classics" now and then, and I definitely read more than
just sci-fi. I like history, philosophy, biographies, etc., as well. But you
touch on something we all have to struggle with: Time. There are only so many
hours in the day to read, and every time I sit down to read, I have to make a
decision on whether or not what I'm thinking about reading is a good use of my
time.

So... I'm going to get a certain amount of raw "escapism", pop-fiction stuff,
that I need just to stay sane. That's a given. Now, how much time do I have
left to read Homer, or obscure French and Russian "literature"? And to what
end? Just to impress hipster douche-bags and self-appointed "intellectuals"?
Or because reading that stuff is actually going to add value to my life? Is
reading _Madame Bovary_ or _Anna Karenina_ going to do more for me than
reading _Teach Yourself Haskell in 21 Days_ or Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy"
books, or whatever?

The last few books I've read (other than technical books) include _Run_ by
Dean Karnazes, _Born to Run_ by McDougal, _The Belgian Hammer_ by Lee, _Eat &
Run_ by Scott Jurek, _Racing Through the Dark_ by David Millar, _Slaying the
Badger_ by Moore, _Running on Empty_ by Marshall Ulrich and _The Secret Race_
by Tyler Hamilton. Would I be better off if I'd spent that time reading
"literature" instead? I don't know, but I'm sceptical.

OTOH, I have a whole pile of stuff lying here by Nietzsche, Kieerkegard, Hume,
Foucalt, etc., that I'm planning to work through. But I'm reading it just
because I find it interesting, not because I see it as having any more
inherent value than "low brow" literature.

~~~
corporalagumbo
Anna Karenina is a really beautiful story. I read it a long time ago and it
is, at the very least, a great achievement, so sweeping, so intricately
detailed, so many rich characters, so much insight into human hopes and
struggles. I don't know much about its context but I imagine if you read up on
Tolstoy's life and Russian social conditions at the time it would make reading
the book enormously stimulating - a panoramic story covering the intersection
of a flowering cosmopolitan aristocratic society and a more ancient world of
feudal landlords, at a turning point in history shortly before that world
vanished forever.

Mostly I would read Tolstoy for the same reason I would read Nietzsche - to
break through our regrettable tendency to take the past and its people for
granted. It's one thing to read about the ideas Nietzsche developed on a
Wikipedia article, it's wholly another to read him in his own words and
suddenly find yourself thrust into contact with a whole mind, a living,
breathing bundle of thoughts and anxieties and dream, a human being palpably
aching to find meaning, caught in the middle of one of the greatest social
upheavals of human history. To get a sense, just for a moment, of the sheer
enormity of the fact that whole generations of people lived and died without
knowing anything of the world we lived in.

19th century literature is special. There is so much heat, passion, confusion,
pain and soul-searching in it - it feels so close, yet so far, from the world
we live in. For me at least it is humbling and amazing that people like
Tolstoy laboured on and left behind such vivid traces of their souls for us to
discover and enrich ourselves with.

Edit: I suppose this is a long-winded way of saying that the value of
literature is that it helps you develop reverence and respect for the enormous
reality and weight of history. Arrogance and shocking stupidity are the
natural consequences of not realising your tiny place in history. The best
literature breeds deep humility.

~~~
mindcrime
Sure, I don't dispute any of that. And, in fact, I mentioned _Anna Karenina_
partly because I bought a copy a few months ago because it _is_ on my list of
books to read. But I do question whether or not it has any _particular_ value
which exceeds any of the innumerable other works I could read with that time
instead.

Of course that might lead you ask "then why are you planning to read it"? To
which I can only say "because it sounds interesting and exactly because I
haven't read much Russian literature and I want to broaden my horizons a bit".
But I'm not reading it because I want to be able to impress some hipster
pseudo-intellectuals, or because it's something you're "supposed" to read. I
just want to see what it's all about. Same with _Crime and Punishment_ , which
I started recently (but got distracted from and set aside temporarily).

 _Mostly I would read Tolstoy for the same reason I would read Nietzsche - to
break through our regrettable tendency to take the past and its people for
granted._

I agree with that, but I find that fiction from (and set in) Victorian era
England has been my primary outlet for thinking about and appreciating the
past in that regard. That's certainly not to discredit the Russian stuff you
speak of, just saying that reading Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or whatever, isn't
the only way to tap into that historical perspective.

 _It's one thing to read about the ideas Nietzsche developed on a Wikipedia
article, it's wholly another to read him in his own words and suddenly find
yourself thrust into contact with a whole mind, a living, breathing bundle of
thoughts and anxieties and dream, a human being palpably aching to find
meaning, caught in the middle of one of the greatest social upheavals of human
history._

Indeed. I greatly enjoyed reading Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ and
have quite a few of his other works on my list.

~~~
corporalagumbo
I think we're pretty much on the same page here. There is an ocean of great
stuff to explore, and 19th century Russia is just one lovely part of that
ocean. For example I haven't read Dickens or Eliot - I still consider myself
pretty well-read, but there's always more out there. And of course with
foreign-language writers there's always the additional dream of learning the
language and reading in the original. One reason to hope for radically-
extended lifespans eh?

I wasn't trying to claim that Tolstoy et al are better and more important than
anyone else, just trying to counter the suggestion that the only reason to
read them is to try and impress people. Faux-reading to try and cultivate a
sophisticated appearance is, I think we can agree, just stupid.

Personally if I had a choice between Tolstoy and Saramago or Le Guin, I think
I would pick one of the latter. And yes, Nietzsche is the 19th century
bomb.com

NB: I read a lot of non-fiction too. An educated person has to have his or her
fingers in a lot of intellectual pies I think.

~~~
mindcrime
_And of course with foreign-language writers there's always the additional
dream of learning the language and reading in the original. One reason to hope
for radically-extended lifespans eh?_

Indeed. I have this dream of learning Latin and most of the associated Romance
languages one day, but I haven't gotten very far yet. I was making some
headway with Spanish, and then my one Spanish speaking friend kinda
disappeared due to marriage, so I haven't been as motivated without anyone to
practice with.

And my Portugese speaking friend got deported back to Brazil. :-(

Still, one day...

~~~
corporalagumbo
<http://www.language-exchanges.org/>

Might be helpful?

------
egypturnash
I think he's missing an important thing about SF and futurism. The point of
them is not to predict. The point is to say "What if...?" and proceed from
there.

Every now and then someone nails something. And every now and then someone
building a device is inspired by something they read or saw; the form of the
once-ubiquitous flip cellphone came from Star Trek's tricorders.

Taleb's theoretical dinner might be woven through with the Internet: did he
and his friends decide to have this dinner by making appointments on the
phone? Or did they use email? Or Facebook, or even just kinda hooked up via
Twitter when one of them tweeted "hey who wants to go to The Grinning Wok with
me tonight #omnomnomsogood".

And maybe that choice of restaurant came in part from reviews online? The
Internet is no longer cool, this is true. This is because we're used to it.
Hell, the tablet I'm typing this on was cool for like a month after I got it;
now it's normal. Maybe a little annoying because the onscreen keyboard sucks
and the autocorrect is aggressive and occasionally wrong.

The real parts of the future go from "cool" to "normal" very quickly.
Impractical stuff stays "cool" in imagination forever.

------
zerostar07
It's true that our basic needs haven't changed much. We 've become a little
more brainy but our basic needs are served by relatively little technology.
That's because humans haven't evolved visibly since ancient times. Our way of
life will truly change once we start altering ourselves in substantial ways.
The future will be very cool in a world where people can grow wings at will.

~~~
jamesjporter
Unfortunately, this future is still very, very far away. We're not even close
to understanding how a single eukaryotic cell works, much less an entire
organism as complex as a human being or a bird.

~~~
zerostar07
We don't necessarily need to know all the inner workings, just the important
things to do our job. Cavemen didn't know about torques, loads and angular
velocities when they invented the wheel. Thus i am hopeful that i will live to
see the major breakthroughs in genetics and neuroscience.

~~~
jamesjporter
I suppose that's true; its also a good summary of how molecular biology has
been done thus far and we've managed to learn quite a bit. Translating it into
practical applications has been more of a challenge. I'm skeptical that we'll
see any breakthroughs in transhumanism in our lifetime, although naysayers are
always being proven wrong— I sure hope I am as well.

------
zb
I have long thought that the highest purpose of engineering is to reduce
entropy. Although he doesn't express it in those terms, I think Taleb is
advocating something similar here. It's not anti-technology in the way that a
lot of comments here seem to be interpreting it, but it probably is
incompatible with the sort of techno-utopianism that is in vogue at the
moment.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Paradoxically, Engineering practice is almost entirely entropy-positive.
Turning electricity into heat and light (and minute electro-magnetic patterns,
but that's insignificant).

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Everything is entropy-positive. Some things, though, are less entropy-positive
than others.

------
001sky
_Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder [Hardcover] Nassim Nicholas Taleb
(Author)_

\-- You Save: $13.01 (43%)

I thought the Amazon-affiliate link was a bit Ironic.

~~~
notJim
Why is it ironic?

~~~
001sky
_Taleb: The future will not be cool_

\-- but it will be 43% off ! [1]

_________

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Situational_irony>

~~~
notJim
Uh... did you read the article?

~~~
001sky
edit: footnoted for future reference.

~~~
notJim
If I understood it in this circumstance, I wouldn't have asked you to explain
it.

\--

Edit: link added for future reference: <http://xkcd.com/1053/>

~~~
001sky
You seem to be reading condescension into where it is/was non-existent or
trying to throw it around where it is not warranted.

------
JulianMorrison
A simple way to predict the future is to step back into the past. 5 years ago?
Aside from the whole tablet/smartphone revolution, not much. 10 years? Much
faster computers, web 2.0, Facebook, Gmail, the whole social media thing. 20
years? The entirety of the modern web. MMO games. Global warming. Cloning.
Cell phones.

Basically technical progress moves quite fast in the medium term but slower
than you'd expect in the short term, except with surprises. (Nobody saw
tablets coming. A move _away_ from the web, to native apps? In this day and
age?)

------
bozho
Arthur Clarke is one of the futurists that has imagined things right:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxYgdX2PxyQ>

~~~
NoPiece
I think he's also a good example of what Taleb is pointing out - the problems
with taking a snapshot of the present and projecting. 2001 was published in
1968, with a moon landing imminent. Projecting ahead, it seemed reasonable
that by 2001 we would have had moon bases, commercial flights to large space
stations, and ships ready to explore Jupiter and Saturn. I wish he had been
right!

------
Vivtek
Y'know, this is a cute article, but as facilely as he refuses to accept that
the present is not as weird as people thought - I'm wearing a flannel button-
down right now as I type this in 2012 - the fact remains that I had a nice
face-to-face chat with my dad yesterday, even though he's still on the farm in
Indiana and I live in Budapest this year.

------
akaru
'I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a
“killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as
tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns.'

Lost me there. Doesn't even make sense. At a time when people were still
hungrily eating meat fresh from the coals, silverware was the least of their
worries.

------
xiaoma
Sadly, Taleb failed to address the predictions of one of the biggest
"neophiles" of them all-- Kurzweil

[http://www.techi.com/2011/01/ray-kurzweils-tech-
predictions-...](http://www.techi.com/2011/01/ray-kurzweils-tech-predictions-
have-been-eerily-accurate/)

~~~
wladimir
Luckily we have Mr Carrico to address those (warning: he is very rude)
[http://amormundi.blogspot.nl/2009/01/condensed-critique-
of-t...](http://amormundi.blogspot.nl/2009/01/condensed-critique-of-
transhumanism.html) Techno-utopianism and futurism does have quite a few
critics.

Anyway, I've read two of Taleb's books (Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan).
Taleb seems to be filled with nostalgia at times. He dreams of a simple, slow
life. He regards the news and up-to-dateness of modern mediums mostly as
'noise', and even takes a stab at people that read the newspaper in transit
every day.

What is also interesting is that he rails against people that try to predict
the future because of black swans, the unknown unknowns. Still, this is the
second article by him about the future that I read. And it's just as boring as
the last one.

Technophiles have the tendency to exaggerate what change the future will
bring, but conservatives like him fill the predictions with good-old-
timesness. It's wishful thinking just as much.

~~~
xiaoma
Be that as it may, Kurzweil has a decades long history of making predictions,
often considered absolutely nuts by the press and in some very high profile
cases, technology even beat his predictions. I don't think there's anyone else
with as good of a track record when it comes to predicting far off technical
advances.

(e.g. saying in the 80s that a chess AI beating the top ranked human by 1998
or that the human genome would be sequenced by the year 2000).

------
Millennium
The future will be plenty cool. What it won't be is what the cool people (or,
indeed, anyone at all) thinks it will be. It will be, as it has always been,
the cool future that nobody thought of.

------
JDSD
I can't believe I just read that entire thing... I feel as though the
trajectory of technological advancement and "Taleb's" personal vision of the
future are two seperate things and he is unable to acknowledge that fact. He
is let down because reality isn't living up to his idea of what he thinks
reality should be... There are far too many points to refute..

Shoes look no different than they did 3500 years ago because they serve a
purpose.

Once a technology serves a purpose, there is no need to improve that purpose,
unless said technology is to be used in another setting which requires change
or improvement... Hence sandals, flip-flops, sneakers, skateboarding shoes,
high heels, rollerblades, iceskates, snowshoes. I think author touched on
this, kind of... You get my point...

Chairs are the same as they were because panda's aren't sitting in chairs.
People are sitting in chairs, and people haven't physically changed since the
inception of chairs. So a device that humans use for sitting is not likely to
change... But wait, what about lounging chairs, or baby chairs, or high
chairs, or stools? I'm sure if a fish needed a chair, it would look like a
bed...

Technology is the instantiation of idea's into physicality. This is done for
any number of reasons, most of which to solve some type of rudimentary
problem. Some become extrusions of ourselves. Human beings are limited in MANY
ways, but we are able to identify the limitations and problem solve through
technological means.

For example, an iPhone is an extreme technological extrusion, not just a
device. Think about a text message. Bear with me here...

A thought you have makes it's way from being a mere THOUGHT, to then being
processed by LANGUAGE, which is processed to WRITTEN LANGUAGE, which is
expressed through typing on a KEYBOARD, on a TOUCH SCREEN DISPLAY, on a
WIRELESS MOBILE DEVICE, and then SENT THROUGH THE AIR to someone else's
WIRELESS MOBILE DEVICE, to be READ, PROCESSED, and your thought implanted in
that persons mind.

No words were used here. Just transference of thoughts through technological
means.

Look at a car... Metal exoskeleton with wheels that can change it's rate of
speed at will. Another technological extrusion of yourself. Without you
driving, the car doesn't do shit.

Try explaining that to the shoe person 3500 years ago, or your fork friend, or
someone even a mere 150 years ago... "Yeah man, instead of walking in 3500
years you'll get into a 2500lb metal box with rubber wrapped wheels filled
with air that burns a a flammable liquid in another metal box of moving parts
and listens to commands your right foot gives it!"

The internet has allowed people to have access to a network of information no
other period in known history has ever had. The library of Alexandria MAY have
contained similar amounts of knowledge, but it was in a centralized location
that required your physical presence. The internet itself isn't changing the
technological landscape, but the access to information the internet provides
is. The rate at which thoughts/ideas are physically instantiated is increasing
rapidly, as more tools are created by more people having more access to other
tools, etc...

In short, what I gathered from this piece is that people should give up
looking forward, and be happy right where they are, because our prediction
skills suck and change is scary and doesn't always have the best outcome...

I'm sure glad pre-bigbang conditions didn't feel the same way. Or the
primordial soup. Or Einstein. Or Edwin Hubble. Or Carl Sagan. Or Nikola Tesla.
Or anyone who's ever had an idea and executed it for that matter.

===============================

TL;DR Technologies are idea's that solve problems. The future is
unpredictable. Problems of an unpredictable future are also unpredictable.
Hence, why people are shit predictors of the future technological climate.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

------
marze
Reminds me a lot of a 120 year ago prediction that all the good stuff had been
invented/discovered. So wrong...

------
TeMPOraL
Obligatory xkcd: <http://xkcd.com/728/>

------
corporalagumbo
This post is so poorly argued and sloppy it is unbelievable. Intellectual
trash.

------
ddw
He picked the perfect example of his point.

------
michaelochurch
First of all, I disagree. The future _will_ be cool, at least in the long
term. What it won't be is _weird_ , in the sense of people wearing spacesuits
in their living rooms. The bizarre visions people have traditionally had of
the future (and which, demonstrably, haven't come true) seemed to focus
largely on superficial stuff (clothing fashions, which are highly
unpredictable but have a long-term mean-reversion) and to exaggerate. That
doesn't mean that the world hasn't changed, and won't change, in profound
ways.

Yes, the pleasures of life (wine, music, books, sex, spiritual experience)
don't change all that much and therefore we use a lot of old technologies in
daily life, so it can appear like there's nothing new... but there will be
more people able to afford them, and they will be much less impeded by the
stupid shit that clogged up peoples' lives in pre-technological times. Just to
continue Taleb's example: in the 21st century, a lot of people get to drink
wine of (by historical standards) exceedingly high quality. Three millennia
ago, wine existed but the vast majority of people never got to drink any.

 _Many of the modern applications that have managed to survive today came to
disrupt the deleterious effect of the philistinism of modernity, particularly
the 20th century: the large multinational bureaucratic corporation with “empty
suits” at the top; the isolated family (nuclear) in a one-way relationship
with the television set, even more isolated thanks to car-designed suburban
society [...]_

I'm going to stop there with the quote. His point is valid, but I think
there's something missed when people rip on suburbia. Yes, it's outmoded and
wasteful and somewhat ugly, but the Levittowns were a lot better than the
"company towns" of early-industrial hell, and those were a lot better than
being a serf on a medieval enclosure, in a time when it wasn't uncommon for a
peasant to have his head cut off by a knight (knights were more like warlords
than the noble paladins of romance). People tend to compare the experiences of
average people now against those of an elite in the past and conclude that
things were better, but that's not fair. The 1800-era analogue of a bored
suburbanite of 50th-percentile social status (only one car!) was not an
English baron, but someone who started work at seven in the coal mines.

People rip on suburbia now because it's outmoded, but it wasn't always this
way. Urban freeways are called "parkways" because the vision of Robert Moses
(in hindsight we say, "That fucker!", but he was very respected in his time)
was for them to be park-like roads for an automotive elite. In the 1920s,
suburbia was very much _in_. The suburban lifestyle, with lots of driving, was
designed for the rich and handed down, over a couple of decades, to the
working classes in a watered-down form. The result now, almost a century
later, is that "suburbia" is no longer cool because the low-quality suburbs of
the poor have killed the image of the concept.

Oddly enough, has anyone ever noticed how rich people suburbs aren't called
that? The Hamptons isn't "suburbia". The Woodbury towns out there are
"charming little towns" rather than suburbs, because the rich people who live
there have enough time to make zoning rules that keep a quaint little street
or two alive. These people aren't morally superior for having houses in high-
price towns that still have walkable main streets as opposed to "suburbs".
They're just richer.

One thing I find interesting is that Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) wrote an essay
about technology and alienation, while most of his complaints were of the
industrial-era society, not the _technological_ society we evolved into. He
was miserable because, in spite of his extreme intelligence and adept writing,
he had no real influence in a world run by corrupt corporate institutions. So
he went out and killed people in order to effectively force the New York Times
to publish his rant. If he had waited 15 years and not killed people, he would
have had the public access and attention he craved. He might have trolled a
bit, but no one would have died. Technology was just about to solve many of
the problems that had him so upset-- that he blamed on industrial society.

My view of technology and progress is that it's nearly monotonic in
"goodness", but that the old humanity we're now trying to distance ourselves
from is quite tenacious and willing to use technology toward pre-technological
purposes, and so the long-term convergence toward democracy that we'd like to
see doesn't come nearly as fast as we'd like. For example, one might like to
believe that, in an electronic world, old-style industrial pressures like
taking orders from managers, showing up in an uninspiring white-box office
during certain hours, and writing TPS reports would vanish... but human nature
is a certain way and power likes to maintain position, so the transition is
actually taking decades rather than the hours that it "should". The result of
this is that the technological push toward a better world appears to collapse
into an unsatisfying half measure and people end up having to use technology
in uninspiring ways (e.g. getting to write code, but still having to take
orders from non-technical executives or "product managers"). That's not
technology's fault. That's an artifact of humans being slow to improve
themselves.

~~~
petercooper
_Yes, the pleasures of life (wine, music, books, sex, spiritual experience)
don't change all that much_

I'm not so sure. Those pleasures all continue to _exist_ but except for wine,
the way we enjoy or practice most of these would be alien to people of 100
years ago. It's not the concepts that change but their expression.

Throw two 20-somethings from 1912 into a common modern scenario of doing shots
before you go out, hitting a nightclub full of techno music, laser lights and
people 'grinding', then coming home and indulging in some pre-maritial anal
sex (just to be safe) and you might as well have thrown them on a different
planet.

Life in 100 years will seem similarly bizarre and intense to us now. I think
the author of the article has a certain notion of what 'cool' is but I think
radical changes in expression and society are also 'cool' - they're just not
jetpacks or spacesuits.

~~~
notJim
And yet, starting just 8 years later: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapper>

I think it's easy to overestimate the difference between people in the past
and ourselves. The lack of shame with which people pursue their pleasures now
may be different, but it's silly to think people 100 years ago didn't enjoy
getting smashed and having sex.

~~~
Surio
After the double take/uneasy giggle at the choice of word to describe women
(in the 1920s), I looked at the article.

One main difference that stands out for me is that the type of behaviour
patterns described by the OP above (booze, grind, etc.) would be classed as
"typical" from today's point of view, the "flapper" behaviour pattern above
wouldn't have been "typical" in that usual sense of the word in those times
(would it probably be tame from today's stand point?). Anecdotally, it would
have been, at best fringe, and dare I say, restricted to (perhaps) the
wealthy.

Someone also mentioned roman orgies. That would have been restricted to the
wealthy, upper class too and would not have been classed as "typical"?

Therefore, the OP's point, namely, " the way we enjoy or practice most of
these would be alien to people of 100 years ago. It's not the concepts that
change but their expression." is relevant IMO.

And usually that is where clash of the generations originate from?

~~~
corporalagumbo
Roman orgies is a bullshit myth. Christian smear propaganda to discredit Roman
culture.

