30 Year Technology Adoption Cycles

The Model T was in production for over 19 years.

Sales of color TV sets took 15 to 20 years to surpass sales of black and white TV sets, which took 10 to 15 years to move from being a luxury product to being a home staple.

Outdoor sanitation (that’s toilets, kids) was still a thing in many rural areas into the 1980s. In the United States.

Full-scale Internet adoption has taken 15 to 20 years and still isn’t complete in many places.

LLM adoption and the adoption of the outputs from LLMs (even the ones that we goggle at right now) will take 15 to 30 years to accomplish full cultural adoption.

Both the AI-Doomer and the AI Accelerationist alike need to slow their roll, hold their horses, and wait for the bubble generated by OpenAI being massively overleveraged to burst and for all of the current frothing at the mouth to come back to earth.

Cringe

The era we live in requires us to separate sincerity from what is commonly referred to as “cringe.”

“Cringe” is the emotional reaction of people whose temperament is oriented toward epistemic cynicism, nihilism, and the despair of the typically, perpetually Very Online doomer.

Sincerity is hard to find when the words people write, the videos they consume, and the images and memes they create become substitutes for emotional engagement with other real people.

Olestra, GLP-1's, Nietzsche, and the Continued Search for a Chemical Solution to Human Nature

Two things occur to me:

1). People in online popular culture no longer talk about “body positivity” now that GLP-1 drugs are readily available and have proven to be somewhat effective. However, I remember the coming and going of Olestra, so I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

2). There is never going to be a chemical solution to the pile of psychological, emotional, and spiritual factors that cause the differing disorders, pathologies, habits, tendencies, and tics that humans experience as a result of living in a fallen world.

Of course, I am trade-off positive rather than solution positive, because the abyss of human nature is as deep and dark as the abyss Nietzsche rhapsodized about in his various mad warnings.

Wandering Toward Old Age

“Not all who wander are lost” is one of those classic quotes from a movie you may have failed to watch. It applies in multiple contexts, including the context of aging. Wandering toward old age is the ultimate sign, not only of not being lost, but also a sign of getting ready for what happens next.

Category Errors and Their Discontents

If we are going to rebuild the American project, we all need to do some hard work on thinking about how we think. We’ve got the other categories of thinking pretty well covered (the 4Ws). But how we think always slips past us as humans, revealing our biases, our emotions, and even our deep (or shallow) understanding of human nature. Any social or cultural rebuilding project must start with reconstructing how we think.