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From a few oil-soaked German workshops grew a technology that has affected every human being on earth.
Technology has a clear, inevitable trajectory: mass diffusion in great roiling waves. This is true from the earliest flint
people apply these insights to make cheaper food, better goods, and more efficient transport.
what is a wave? Put simply, a wave is a set of technologies coming together around the same time, powered by one or several new general-purpose technologies with profound societal implications.
By “general-purpose technologies,” I mean those that enable seismic advances in what human beings can do.
unfolds in concert with t...
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As the Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich points out, the wheel arrived surprisingly late in human life. But
Waves—pulsating, emergent, successive, compounding, and cross-pollinating—define an era’s horizon of technological possibility.
the futurist Alvin Toffler, the information technology revolution was a “third wave” in human society following the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions.
Lewis Mumford believed the “machine age” was actually more like a thousand-year unfolding of three major successive waves.
Proliferation is catalyzed by two forces: demand and the resulting cost decreases, each of which drives technology to become even better and cheaper.
The long and intricate dialogue of science and technology produces a chain of insights, breakthroughs, and tools that build and reinforce over time, productive recombinations that drive the future. As you get more and cheaper technology,
behind technological breakthroughs are people. They labor at improving technology in workshops, labs, and garages, motivated by money, fame, and often knowledge itself.
Technologists, innovators, and entrepreneurs get better by doing and, crucially, by copying.
copying is a critical driver of diffusion. Mimicry spurs competition, and technologies improve further. Economies o...
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Civilization’s appetite for useful and cheaper technolo...
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Computing transformed society faster than anyone predicted and proliferated faster than any invention in human history.
Robert Noyce invented the integrated circuit at Fairchild Semiconductor in the late 1950s and the 1960s, imprinting
multiple transistors on silicon wafers to produce what came to be called silicon chips. Shortly after, a researcher called Gordon Moore proposed his eponymous “law”: every twenty-four month...
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Since the early 1970s the number of transistors per chip has increased ten-million-fold.
million-fold.
power has increased by ten orders of magnitude—a seventeen-billi...
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in 1983, only 562 computers total were connected to the primordial internet. Now the number of computers, smartphones, and connected devices is estimated at 14 billion.
With this wave came email, social media, online videos—each a fundamentally new experience enabled by the transistor and another general-purpose technology, the internet.
It created a yet more mind-boggling proliferation: data, up twenty times in the decade 2010–2020 alone.
they help us find love and new friends while turbocharging supply chains. They influence who gets elected and how, where our money is invested,
Technology’s unavoidable challenge is that its makers quickly lose control over the path their inventions take once introduced to the world.
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Technology exists in a complex, dynamic system (the real world), where second-, third-, and nth-order
consequences ripple out unpredictably. What on paper looks flawless can behave differently out in the wild, especially when copied and further adapted downstream. What people actually do with your invent...
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Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so people could record their thoughts for posterity and to help the blind. He was horrified when ...
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Understanding technology is, in part, about trying to understand its unintended consequences, to predict not just positive spillovers but “revenge effects.” Quite simply, any technology is capable of going wrong, often in ways that directly
contradict its original purpose.
How do we guarantee that this new wave of technologies does more good than harm?
Containment is the overarching ability to control, limit, and,
if need be, close down technologies at any stage of their development or deployment. It means, in some circumstances, the ability to stop a technology from proliferating in the first place, checking the ripple of unintended consequences (both good and bad).
We might not be able to control the final end points of our work or its long-term effects, but that is no reason to abdicate responsibility. Decisions technologists and societies make at the source can still shape outcomes. Just because consequences are difficult to predict doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
preserving the ability to steer waves to ensure their impact reflects our values, helps us flourish as a species, and does not introduce significant harms that outweigh their benefits.
our species over the next century. Containment encompasses regulation, better technical safety, new governance and ownership models, and new modes
of accountability and transparency, all as necessary (but not sufficient) precursors to safer technology.
In AI, for example, it means air gaps, sandboxes, simulations, off switches, hard built-in safety and security measures—protocols for verifying
the safety or integrity or uncompromised nature of a system and taking it offline if needed.
Then come the values and cultures around creation and dissemination that support boundaries, layers of governance, acceptance of limits, a vigilan...
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there is an almost infinite array of small, local, and often arbitrary factors that affect a technology’s trajectory. Indeed, no one should imagine diffusion is easy. It can be costly, slow, and risky, or require wrenching changes in behavior feasible over only decades or lifetimes. It has to fight existing
interests, established knowledge, and those who jealously hold both. Fear and suspicion of anything new and different are endemic. Everyone from guilds of skilled craftsmen to suspicious monarchs has reason to push back. Luddites, the groups that violently rejected industrial techniques, are not the exception to the arrival of new technologies; they are the norm.
Where there is demand, technology always breaks out, finds traction, builds users.
creates more lethal and destructive weapons as
As long as a technology is useful, desirable, affordable, accessible, and unsurpassed, it survives and spreads and those features compound.
In the space of around a hundred years, successive waves took humanity from an era of candles and horse carts to one of power stations and space stations.
In the coming decades, a new wave of technology will force us to confront the most foundational questions our species has ever faced. Do we want to edit our genomes so that some of us can have children with immunity to certain diseases, or with more intelligence, or with the potential to live longer?
Go’s complexity is staggering. It is exponentially more complex than chess. After just three pairs of moves in chess there are about 121 million possible configurations of the board. But after three moves in Go, there are on the order of 200 quadrillion (2 x 1015) possible configurations. In total, the board
