> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry.
Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the fact that nerds still use that metaphor surprises me)
Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). That asteroid's impact resulted in really unusual circumstances where Earth was barely livable for a long period of time because the sky was globally blackened for years and all large plants died. Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features).
If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down.
This description actually makes me feel like the metaphor is more apt. The dinosaurs went down because they were large, complex lifeforms that required a vibrant, complex ecosystem to support them. Amidst a fundamental shift to that ecosystem, large complex organisms were the first to go down. This is a general pattern - complex systems are always the first to collapse when there's a shift in the ecosystem, because they have more interdependencies. Mammals emerged from the carnage because they were small and nocturnal and could occupy small & simple ecological niches. The original disruptive innovation.
As for what will take them down - all large institutions are failing right now. The public education system. The health care system. The government. The mass media. The immigration system, and general idea of national borders. The zoning / building code / housing system. Childcare. Wouldn't surprise me if we see the financial system, currency, and military go down next. The trigger is part climate change, part demographics, part COVID, and part the loss of trust triggered by the Internet and Big Tech, but all of these are fundamental shifts in the foundations of our society that make our society no longer adapted to the ecological niche it grew up in.
>As for what will take them down - all large institutions are failing right now. The public education system. The health care system. The government. The mass media. The immigration system, and general idea of national borders. The zoning / building code / housing system. Childcare. Wouldn't surprise me if we see the financial system, currency, and military go down next. The trigger is part climate change, part demographics, part COVID, and part the loss of trust triggered by the Internet and Big Tech.
Falling? When was the last time in a developed country when an educational system/heathcare failed as a system? Or the government (other than in Argentina), or Military? As for the concept of borders? No, that is not failing either, it's just people in some countries today became convinced it is not worth to use deadly force to defend borders. See for example Sweden, or France for where this path leads to. It is not a pretty picture, but it is very far from "systems failing". As for reasons, why these systems are under pressure I can definitely agree on demographics, but climate change affecting our education/healthcare systems? No way.
Periods of boom and bust are a feature of our financial system, I'm not seeing anything unusual. Currencies fail too due to mismanagement. But extrapolating this into some sort of overall systemic failure of everything caused by climate change no less is not rational.
On the global scale the biggest challenge in today's world is the growing power of authoritarian nations hell bent on global domination and continued enfeeblement(deindustrialisation, increased corruption, disregard for the rule of law) of the free world. Then demographics, then very far in the distance climate change.
With you on "institutions are not failing as such".
As for biggest challenges: You _massively_ underestimate climate change, and the way it is entangled with everything else. There have always been authoritarian nations. The so called free world does not seem notably more corrupt than it was 50 years ago, it is in many ways freer than it has ever been (see the annoyance and backlash of those that don't think the freedom should extend to such things as chosing your gender), and it's economic power remains unmatched for now.
But: We already live in a changed climate. This means we no longer speculate about the damages climate change will do, we can measure them in macroeconomic data already [1]. This was a huge surprise to ke. I would have expected economic systems to be much more resilient to the warming already seen.
We are facing a situation where the world's poorest are experiencing reduced growth (meaning not fewer corporate profits, but people fleeing hunger and destitution), while we are all dealing with a massively increased number of extreme events (which _will_ stress institutions not adapted to the new normal, possibly to the breaking point), while we also have to transform or economic systems towards carbon neutrality to prevent even more catastrophic impacts.
This is fertile ground for authoritarians, democratic backsliding, loss of liberties and institutional failure.
> Periods of boom and bust are a feature of our financial system, I'm not seeing anything unusual.
We had a decade+ of boom boom boom and the moment the economy dips for a couple years, people start freaking out. Some years, things are more expensive and life is harder. Some years, it's easier. That's life. And that's the economy.
> See for example Sweden, or France for where this path leads to.
I think mixing France and Sweden on this point makes no sense. France made a deliberate attempt to attract as many refugees (and, at the same time, non-refugee immigrants) as possible in a very short period of time; they understood where it leads to and backpedaled on too open policies but things want a bit too far and they need to deal with the consequences, mainly criminal gang bombings.
As for France, the situation is dramatically different. You have several generations of immigrants already, some feeling more French than the French if I may use this expression. This population is very heterogeneous but suffice it to say than when ISIS planned Bataclan attacks, they had to recruit people in Belgium. Also, the countries of origins for immigrants in both cases are very different and in the case of France related to the history of the country, the Algerian War etc.
So, if you wanted to lump the two together, it would be proper to say "Sweden and Merkel's Germany" (because today's Germany is quite different, too).
Is there a typo in your first para? You seem to want to compare France and Sweden, but both paras refer to France; I'm guessing you meant Sweden in the first.
Large institutions have been "failing" for over a century, in most countries, similar to things in orbit being always "falling". Just go find old newspapers and you'll see similar wording. The constant criticism and renewal of our institutions is part of the system.
That's true but also very germane to the conversation here. Sure, life will go on. It's not guaranteed that life with Google will go on, or that FANG will be an acronym of interest anymore than the "Nifty Fifty" are today.
Well a century is hardly a long time unless someone think that 1987 was deadline or some such. And even during failing only few bemoan, large number of people adjust to new/worse reality.
You aren’t wrong, but we used to teach Latin in schools. Things aren’t getting better in a lot of these arenas, they are being chipped away… and the center cannot hold forever.
What does teaching Latin in schools have to do with schools, ostensibly, failing?
Are you saying that Latin is something that is useful to everyday life and because we don't teach it to our children we're depriving them of this wonderous tool?
I personally do not know Latin, but I have never run into a situation where I needed to know it.
And to analyze the idea that, "Well, it's not Latin in specific, but that we are not teaching our children to think for themselves", this too has been bayed about for the last forever, Plato complained that "children today are not learning the things that they should"
I don't know which pedagogy is the "correct" one, stuff children with, seemingly, random knowledge and watch them "blossom" or to stuff them with narrowly focused learning so that they will flourish at whatever work they are funneled into.
But I do know that teaching a dead language isn't the bellwether you think it is, unless you're trying to start a jobs program for all those unemployeed Latin tutors.
Well, you would be surprised how much historical writing you are locked out of by not being able to read Latin. Not from antiquity, but from the fall of rome up until the turn of the previous century, Latin was the language. A tiny fraction of what's been written in Latin is available in any vernacular. By not reading Latin, you're locked out almost all western pre-modern writing.
> Plato complained that "children today are not learning the things that they should"
Where does he say this? This seems an incredibly uncharacteristic sentiment coming from Plato. If nothing else because his mentor Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth, and almost all extant writing from Plato deals with Socrates' legacy. When Socratres isn't harassing rulers and generals, he's typically portrayed hanging out with the youth in Plato's writing.
Closest thing I'm aware is a section of The Republic. The section, a hypothetical aside really, deals with the horrors of Athenian democracy (the same that killed Socrates), where fathers fear their sons and children are said to think themselves equals to their parents.
I assure you that I am not surprised with how much historical writing I am locked out of by not being able to read Latin. Honestly I would be willing to bet that it as much as I am locked out of from not being able to read Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Japanese, Arabic, etc.
You can't think that's a serious argument for teaching Latin in primary or secondary school? If I were a western historian, sure, you should probably learn Latin, probably some flavor of ancient Greek as well.
I am referencing a Guardian article that I read nearly a decade ago[0] but he wasn't the only one to have bemoaned the "youth".
With Socrates, him being sentenced to death while for "corrupting the youth" that's a pretty naive, and incomplete, explanation, if you were to dig a little deeper you'll find that the, probably, true reasons for Socrates' trial was political[1]. You forget that the "corruption of the youth" was bound with the accusation that Socrates was denying the gods and introducing new gods[2], not, as you imply, that he was a champion of the youths themselves.
For me it's difficult to take everything we know about Socrates as true given the posthumous glow up that Plato gives us. This is partly Socrates' own fault for his, as we're told, ideas that writing things down would lead to forgetfulness. Ironic honestly.
I am tempted to discuss further about Socrates' trial, how most thought that he was going to going to get off due to his ability in rhetoric and hi, basically, not defending himself was pretty shocking in and of itself.
All of Plato's extant works are available in English (and it's not a particularly large amount of text), and I assure you this is not something he's ever said. The quote is entirely apocryphal, and there is no evidence of it prior to 1967[1].
I'm omitting the other charge, because I'm focusing on the charge of corrupting the youth, and the fact that he (according to Plato) associated with the youth much more frequently than he did with the adults. The youths of Athens make appearances in almost every platonic dialogue, and they're almost always shown in a neutral to positive light (unlike the leaders, generals, politicians, poets, etc.) He's portrayed as the opposite of a stodgy old man opposed to new ideas; if any thing he's spearheading an ideological assault on the status quo of Athens!
I don't find the lack of Latin in public education to be particularly alarming, and I've found that it's been replaced by subjects a bit more relevant to the modern day (i.e. Comp Sci)
So the right wing isn't trying to gut public education and healthcare? I just hallucinated charter school vouchers and all their attempts to repeal the ACA?
you're saying that dinosaurs were a zero interest rate phenomenon?
ok ok flippant but maybe not entirely flippant... I'm used to conceiving of fitness as in fitness for a niche. But I hadn't grasped the idea of "meta-fitness" being the ability to adapt to a highly dynamic niche. there must be a term in evolutionary theory for this.
Are you saying Big Tech was the primary beneficiary of free money? That doesn't seem as accurate as saying it is/was all ventures that couldn't be funded by revenues and profit, from the largest to smallest players.
"If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds." - C.S. Lewis
Excuse me if the dinosaurs couldn't handle an asteroid they did not adapt, lost the race and went extinct, good day. The birds adapted well and they're still thriving. There are no laws to the race of life. Just survive and reproduce. If you failed to do either you're out.
The metaphor can work to the degree that the dinosaurs succeeded, and the mammals stayed small (occupying a cockroach-like niche) until a large exogenous disruption upended the system.
Of course that isn't what happened to the car companies, or the newspapers, or most once large sectors, and I do actually think that the same gradual, rather than abrupt, decay will happen to these big tech companies. In fact we see it already. I strongly believe there's a Hayflick limit to companies; even GE couldn't fight it indefinitely.
Also I disagree with "Dinosaurs ... occupied every [animal] niche on the planet." Don't forget arthropoda or the variety in the sea. But maybe that's just a quibble.
Right, it can still work, as other commentors also show with their interpretation. However, I'd say that this is only so because we put in the effort to "patch" the metaphor into something the author didn't really say.
Also even then a lot of those comments still miss why I take issue with the "evolutionary dead end" implication, which is that it is presented as evolutionary survivors somehow being inherently better compared to what went extinct. Evolutionary dead ends do exist, but in reality extinction often comes down to (un)lucky circumstances.
> But maybe that's just a quibble.
Heh, maybe, but the quibble is valid. Quibbling over such details is practically how paleonerds show affection, right?
> Also even then a lot of those comments still miss why I take issue with the "evolutionary dead end" implication, which is that it is presented as evolutionary survivors somehow being inherently better compared to what went extinct. Evolutionary dead ends do exist, but in reality extinction often comes down to (un)lucky circumstances.
Yes, it a misunderstanding of evolutio, ascribing some sort of teleology on a inherent process as purposeful as multiplication.
Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out.
As user, I'm pretty ok with Google.
Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day.
Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list.
Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materials more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, very reasonably priced and people love them.
The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc.
Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular.
Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.
Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features.
As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor).
As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet. Meanwhile, vGoogle owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price.
> Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc.
What you're describing is security, not privacy. Privacy is not determined by how far the data is shared. If Google respected privacy, they would not collect most of the information that they do in the first place.
true, but let's not paint the bike shed here: you can have all the best policies, and hackers and inside threats ruin all of it. If I'm going to trust a cloud provider with (say) multimedia, I trust YouTube and Google Photos a lot more than random small providers, who sound good until the next hack.
With Cloud, as long as you don't mind solving the same problem multiple times every few years when things you depend on go obsolete, indeed it is a nice experience. A lot of people do mind. I won't belabor the point; Steve Yegge said it better[0]. I think some progress has been made on this front, particularly with bigger customers; but even if Google promised decades of backward compatibility tomorrow, Google's reputation would remain its own worst enemy.
Search deterioration has a much longer history than ChatGPT, but nice try. Search is an arms race against a functionally infinite tidal wave of spam, much of which is overwhelming websites beyond Google's control that historically populated Google's top search results. Epistemology is hard, the threshold for financially profitable spam is low, and the cost of sophisticated spam is getting exponentially smaller. And the long-term market solution might be someone like OpenAI thoroughly leap-frogging Google's capabilities. This is a bigger risk than you're making it out to be.
As far as privacy... Google makes an attempt to follow applicable laws, and in many cases succeeds, but it still ends up constantly trolled by regulators for money or clout. Even setting aside fines-as-taxes and legislative opprobrium, I still don't think "our panopticon strips you of way less dignity than our competitor's" is something to brag about. If you believe the nature and incentive structure of the panopticon is diabolical, businesses that function as panopticons are fundamentally untrustworthy. It doesn't stop me from using Google products and services, but in a "least bad" sense - I'm happy to switch search, email, phone OS, whatever, provided someone can make a more compelling product. I think a lot of people feel similarly.
I could argue that Google's open source contributions are largely market suppression tactics to keep the web innovating in a direction that protect's Google's core revenue. This isn't comprehensively a bad thing, as technologies like Chromium and Android are useful. But "our OSS suppresses markets more effectively than our competitors" isn't something to brag about, and combined with those regulatory trolls above, I see this as a big risk factor.
All else aside, Google (and for that matter, most of Big Tech) fundamentally relies on massive volumes of hardware manufactured in Taiwan. This isn't even a black swan, it's a sword of Damocles over the entire industry.
Just because extinction of a species occurs because of a rare Black Swan event doesn't mean that it isn't evolution. (Large) dinosaurs were in fact an evolutionary dead end when it comes to the threat of large asteroids crashing into the planet.
> Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you).
The inability to avert or survive through an extinction level event literally proves that they are an evolutionary dead end. Extinction level events are inevitable. Humanity has the potential to deflect or destroy such asteroids (and other such events), thus we have the potential to not be an evolutionary dead end.
There's very little point in talking about ability to survive "extinction level events" in the abstract—the question is which extinction level events a given species is poised to survive, and was it unlucky enough to encounter one that it wasn't. The dinosaurs as a whole survived hundreds of millions of years, through many extinctions, until they eventually met their match.
Humans can deflect asteroids, so we've (probably) dodged that extinction, but that doesn't mean we're immune to others.
> Humans can deflect asteroids, so we've (probably) dodged that extinction, but that doesn't mean we're immune to others.
At this point, there is no conceivable extinction level event humanity couldn't avoid or avert, in principle, given sufficient time/warning, except the heat death of the universe.
So I disagree that there's no point in talking about survivability in the abstract. You can roughly project the growth of a species' capabilities through time, and the trajectory the dinosaurs were on clearly entails they were heading towards extinction due to an inevitable run in with a supervolcano or an asteroid. Humanity's trajectory is conceivably very different due to science and our ability to construct sophisticated tools.
> The dinosaurs as a whole survived hundreds of millions of years, through many extinctions
I'll also note that this is a slightly unfair comparison because "dinosaurs" is a category consisting of many species, where the comparison here is against the one homo sapiens
species. Many dinosaur species went extinct through those events you mention, some survived.
> At this point, there is no conceivable extinction level event humanity couldn't avoid or avert
Um, how would humanity deal with a supernova going off within a few light years? I am still not convinced it will deal with climate change until billions die.
> Um, how would humanity deal with a supernova going off within a few light years?
Enclosed surface habitats, subterranean habitats, generation ships to spread humanity across numerous solar systems, and so on. All of this tech seems achievable within the next 2 generations.
Humanity is currently showing very little potential for averting extinction level events. They might end up surviving and rebounding from the Jackpot, but that's not the way to bet.
I wouldn't go that far. Fossil fuels helped for sure, but we still had wood as a renewable resource that would have served until we discovered nuclear power.
I am pretty sure it would not be possible to launch an industrial revolution with just wood. It isn't dense enough energy wise and there isn't nearly enough of it.
Tangent: I thought you were going to hate the inflection point metaphor (and hence started your post with a pun about it).
The point being inflection points mathematically speaking don't usually imply a peak, rather a change in concavity (which might still be increasing).
It would be better for people to say something like "...it feels like we reached a high water mark..." to stress they worry about a certain maxima being hit.
Well, you can't change to concave down without eventually either hitting a maximum or another inflection point, right? Could be apt, given that most big tech companies are still growing in strength, for now. Just not as rapidly.
building on the dino thing, we've currently hellbent in creating a new dino age it seems. Hot ass planet high in the CO2 required to create thriving lush jungles.
Much of it is coming from the carbon in fossilized remains of a time when there was much more O2 in the atmosphere because there was so much flora and a warmer planet... what am I missing?
And where it goes after a plant captures the carbon.
Now read the original comment again. Did you notice the problem?
That wiki page is surprisingly unhelpful. The O2 on the atmosphere mostly doesn't come or go anywhere, but on geological timescales it is mostly created from water and absorbed by rocks. The phenomenon that entire page is about stopped billions of years ago.
Much oxygen also gets trapped in the oxidization of things. Its pretty prolific, and part of why antioxidants in our food are considered so important. While some species of microorganism exist which might be able to help recover much of this oxygen with the right environment (e.g. the hot CO2 heavy and thus acidic water heavy environment we're creating) it might not be a realistically useful amount over time, or in time.
when we burn long carbon chains, these are broken up and combined with atmospheric oxygen to form CO2, so any CO2 we produce through burning carbon sources we dig up actually reduces O2 availability. However, a CO2 boom might free up oxygen from other molecules in an indirect way. CO2 dissolved in water forms carbonic acid, this increase in acidity is good for species like Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans, which will help recover much of the oxygen trapped in complexes like iron oxide.
Or everything goes to hell in a handbasket and earth looks like mars in a few thousand years. Who knows.
or humanity begins changing with its environments, becoming smaller to cope better with the extreme heat and humidity and in a few millions years sentient lizards complain on a forum over a bucket of RFH (rogars fried humanoid) about the terror of global cooling and how it's coming for them all.
You're right that big dinosaurs only lost because they were big, not because they were an evolutionary dead end of some sort.
From an anthropocentric point of view, though, they seem very dead end. Despite bipedalism and possible warm bloodedness sometimes, they would never use tools. Down so many taxonomic branches, their arms would shrink away and their jaws become enormous. Nothing to motivate any of those lizards to get big brains -- something anthropos value highly :)
trivia: you just made me wonder what's the etymology of dinosaur, https://www.etymonline.com/word/dinosaur#etymonline_v_8600 says it's from "deinos "terrible" (see dire)". seems that from start, people in the field had this view of crippled genus
> Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features).
Conspiracy theory: Birds are not real, they're actually dinosaurs.
Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the fact that nerds still use that metaphor surprises me)
Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). That asteroid's impact resulted in really unusual circumstances where Earth was barely livable for a long period of time because the sky was globally blackened for years and all large plants died. Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features).
If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down.
(this is not a defense of Big Tech, btw)