 People have tried to convince me that it would be smart to get my body cryonically preserved after I die, just in case some future society figures out a cure for death. Personally, I think they just get carried away because it sounds cool. I'm a design engineer, which means that I have a certain way of looking at the world. I have a third favorite plastic snap design. I do CAD on the weekends for fun. I have a personal vendetta against split lock washers. Let's say that I have a preoccupation with the artificial. A heightened awareness of and enthusiasm for technology and the details of its implementation. Many folks share both my proficiency and affinity for tech, including my starry eyed daydreams about the cool stuff that we might be able to build one day. Massive starships voyaging to distant galaxies, glittering cities on terraformed planets, automation that frees all humans everywhere from hunger and work, simulated realities of infinite depth and richness. One of my nerdy enthusiasm for these ideas comes from a tantalizing just out of reach feeling, like these things are right around the corner. After all, as many futurists like Ray Kurzweil have noted, it seems as though the pace of technological innovation keeps accelerating, and we routinely underestimate how close we are to achieving previously inconceivable marvels. There's a bountiful collection of quotes from people who wildly undersold the potential of computers, cell phones, nuclear power, all sorts of stuff. And if futuristic dreams seem impossibly far off, that might just be our well-established myopia for the speed of accelerating technological change. Of course, there are also wild overestimations of what sorts of things tech might make possible in the future. And yes, I have a fair number of them on record here. Jetpacks, flying cars, cheap cloned organs, nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners, moon colonies, fusion power, plain English computer interfaces, there's all sorts of cool stuff that people reckoned would be ubiquitous by the turn of the century. It's not just the far-future stuff that overshoots the mark, either. People are frequently embarrassed by their optimism for what tech will achieve in the next five to ten years. Tesla claimed in 2016 that their cars would be fully self-driving by 2018, and every year since then. One neuroscience researcher actually cited Kurzweil when he predicted that we'd be able to accurately simulate a nematose nervous system in just three years, that there was no way that it would take more than ten. That was eleven years ago. But surely history vindicates this idea that technology has this character of accelerating dynamism, right? We're all familiar with the impact of stuff like the printing press, computers, and steam power. Don't these examples prove that innovation really does have this oversize impact on the rate at which stuff happens, including further innovation? Well, you can certainly tell a compelling story that frames technology as the prime mover of history. But as any historian can tell you, isolating one thread from the tapestry and drawing a straight line from cause to effect like that is a dicey proposition. The precision gearing found in the Antikythera mechanism didn't explode into clockwork automatons and precision measurement devices the first time around. When the social, economic, and political conditions were appropriate almost a thousand years later, precision gearing was involved in how those events unfolded. Someone with a tech brain like mine could easily look at the second instance and mistakenly think, oh, I see. Precision gearing was invented, causing this period of historical upheaval. But amazingly, we happen to have a control group, and we can definitively say that years do not intrinsically lead to revolution, I mean, besides the spinning. The ways we learn about history inadvertently reinforce this sort of interpretation, regardless of how accurate it is. Devices are fairly easy to dig out of the ground, identify and put a date on, which makes them convenient archaeological scapegoats when we're trying to explain some historical upheaval. But other catalysts that are more or less constant in their importance for humanity, like access to water, or gradual and hard to pin down, like cultural and behavioral shifts, are less likely to be blamed for what comes after, even if they play a much larger role. AT&T's 1961 video about the Office of the Future totally nailed online clothes shopping and fax machines, but not women employed alongside men, a cultural shift that has had a much greater effect on history. All this is to say, despite the protestations of Kurzweil and like-minded futurists, there are many good reasons to be suspicious of the accelerating change thesis of technological development and the casual audacity of his predictions. On its own, it's just an interesting bit of trivia to ponder, but there's also a mythology that's been built around this idea, that the future is coming faster and faster, that technological innovation will continue accelerating beyond anyone's wildest expectations, and will inevitably reach escape velocity from all our mundane problems. That's something else. For example, let's take a look at climate change. Not only are we dragging our feet implementing the most trivial measures that, if we did that now, might save us from a large number of heat waves, floods, droughts, and hurricanes, the oil companies that have known about this problem since the 80s are ramping up production to meet growing demand. We see the wall, and not only are we refusing to slow down or alter course, we're speeding up. The majority of people in the US think that more should be done about climate change. Unfortunately, that political will isn't just opposed by greedy cynics and people who've been strategically misled by those cynics. News agencies are all too eager to highlight the exciting cutting edge of anti-global warming tech, subtly implying that no matter how deep of a hole we dig for ourselves, the remarkable power of innovation will swoop in at the last minute and save us. Surely, if we face an unprecedented cataclysm, unprecedented technology will inevitably rise to oppose it, and ultimately triumph over it. Fusion power, drone-based reforestation, moving heavy industry to orbit. There's no shortage of speculation about the revolutionary inventions that are right on the cusp of being the silver bullet we need them to be. Of course, that speculation isn't in the news and public discourse for no good reason. It's sexy. It's futuristic. It makes for a good story. All sorts of sci-fi revolves around humanity recognizing an existential threat and throwing everything we've got at it. Surely, no matter how dire things get here in the second act, it'll just make the payoff in Act 3 that much more satisfying. But there's obviously another possibility. Maybe we continue to wait around for an entrepreneurial savior to show up, repeatedly deferring even the most trivial, straightforward measures to limit the damage, while we dream of the glorious tech that will save humankind until we're staring at our flooded homes and desperately hoping our families are unharmed, wondering why that tech didn't arrive in time to save us. Now, don't get me wrong. I still believe technology will play a significant role in what's coming. I do think that we need to be innovating and developing new ways to combat climate change, including moonshot projects that only have a slim chance of working. I agree with Kurzweil adjacent Futurists that innovation often races ahead in ways that are surprising. But as a dude who spends a lot of his time thinking about engineering and design problems, I'm all too familiar with the various ways those problems can also be surprising, how even the most brilliant and well-funded ideas can be derailed by the most inane details, no matter how badly we want them to work. In that light, I think that some of the stories about a coming technological singularity, or a future of massive engineering mega-projects, might be subtly working against our best interests. Not only are those predictions hampered by our inability to imagine the social or cultural changes that will inevitably drive tech in unpredictable directions, for nerds like me, they can also feed a sort of complacency with the world and its problems, and a rational reassurance that the hockey stick graph of innovation will always win out in the end against its skeptics, that once the right invention gets here, everything will change, and problems like global warming won't even be a blip in our rearview mirror. Tech is great, but if we let our dreams of a shiny Jetsons future erode our will to solve problems using the tools that are immediately available to us, well, there are other futures we're likely to find ourselves inhabiting. How about you? Do you buy the theory of accelerating technological change, or do you think that it might be suspect as an account of our history? Do you think that media tends to downplay the importance of already existing solutions in favor of futureist fetishism? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. First, I don't really plug other channels, but Gemsbock has been with Thunk from the beginning, and he's still here, God bless him. He recently uploaded a fantastic video about existentialism, so be sure to check that out. Also, if you're as worried about climate change as I am, I strongly urge you to join an organization that does real political work, like canvassing or phone banks. Donating is great if that's all you can do, but volunteering can have a much greater impact. I've got a few links in the description. Don't forget to blow up a subscribe law share! And don't stop thunking.