"the great stagnation" is the discovery of new "disruptive" technologies that would transform the possibilities of economic production in the way the fossil-fuel-powered engine did
People largely think of computers as "invented", but that's horseshit. We've seen maybe 1% of the disruption that computers are going to cause.
Bitcoin was one of those "holy shit" moments for me, when I realized that we've only begun to see how computing is going to radically transform the shape of money.
Huge aspects of our lives remain largely unaffected by the invention of the computer, because actually applying the computer to our problems takes decades. It is a slow process of hacking out brittle solutions to niche problems, and then waiting as those solutions are slowly absorbed and molded to our culture, and then used widely enough that someone else can take the next tiny step.
Think about this: Medicine turns out to be a low hanging fruit as far as A.I. concerned, in that relatively simple statistical models can be valuable diagnostic tools. Doctors still operate the way they did 100 years ago... reading lots of books in medical school, and then looking in those books as they do their job. Only now, in PubMed and the like, they've got a much bigger book and they can flip through it faster. AI hasn't even really poked over their horizon.
And that's an easy problem. The hard problems that computing will obliterate are a hundred years off.
We have yet to experience a single generation where every child had access to programming tools from birth.
We have no idea what is coming. But I am certain we will be seeing decade after decade of relentless innovation as this plays out.
People largely think of computers as "invented", but that's horseshit. We've seen maybe 1% of the disruption that computers are going to cause.
Bitcoin was one of those "holy shit" moments for me, when I realized that we've only begun to see how computing is going to radically transform the shape of money.
Huge aspects of our lives remain largely unaffected by the invention of the computer, because actually applying the computer to our problems takes decades. It is a slow process of hacking out brittle solutions to niche problems, and then waiting as those solutions are slowly absorbed and molded to our culture, and then used widely enough that someone else can take the next tiny step.
Think about this: Medicine turns out to be a low hanging fruit as far as A.I. concerned, in that relatively simple statistical models can be valuable diagnostic tools. Doctors still operate the way they did 100 years ago... reading lots of books in medical school, and then looking in those books as they do their job. Only now, in PubMed and the like, they've got a much bigger book and they can flip through it faster. AI hasn't even really poked over their horizon.
And that's an easy problem. The hard problems that computing will obliterate are a hundred years off.
We have yet to experience a single generation where every child had access to programming tools from birth.
We have no idea what is coming. But I am certain we will be seeing decade after decade of relentless innovation as this plays out.