I wonder sometimes if there's an earlier level of technology that society could basically "checkpoint" at and freeze, and then build off of. Capitalism today feels like it's hit the Red Queen Paradox - it goes around and around to keep the money flowing, but with very little actual progress. Indeed, most people seem to feel like the world is getting worse for all that work, and that many of the innovations of the last ~10-15 years are "fixing" things that weren't problems to begin with while creating new problems. And yet because all the substrate is shifting around, even if you don't break something someone else will. Could we go back to a world of redundant interchangeable parts where if somebody breaks something, you just cut them off and use a substitute that works just as well?
Or maybe that's well and truly gone and we're just fated to another dark age. I'm reminded of the Smarter Scrubber documentary that found that basically the whole supply chain was gone and it was impossible to make something useful in America.
Thanks for the mention. The philosophy behind Dusk is also eerily relevant to Chuck's problem at the moment. To quote my own manifest[1]:
When you operate a system, there is no problem that can arise that will make you powerless. Sure, you can have a hardware failure that hopelessly breaks your system, but at least you'll be able to identify that failure and know for sure that there is no software solution or workaround. That's control.
In this situation, of course Windows is to blame. But it could also happen with Linux, even if it's to a much much lesser degree.
If an update breaks your software in a way that is obscure enough to break only your software, then nobody else will fix your problem, and the system as a whole is too complex for you to dive in, making you powerless.
Using your scale? ↑7 or ↑8. That seemed to be the sweet spot in capabilities to me, without getting to the point where engagement eats everything else including productivity and future maintenance.
Using semiconductor process nodes? 45-65nm. That was around the point that Moore's Law broke down. At that point, you could do most of the functionality that we depend upon computers for (eg. GUIs, 3D rendering, networking, basic machine-learning, some speech recognition and text synthesis). It also roughly corresponds to ↑7 or ↑8 on your scale, so it's self-consistent.
Conceptually? I'd like to have multiple checkpoints, so that if the ecosystem gets borked you can roll back further.
I agree. Enough to run Quake over LAN, not quite enough to run WoW. A lot of complexity in computing is only necessary for dealing with the internet at scale.
Technology is cultural. People invent what they invent according of the culture that they live in and that orients their needs. Lot of cultures are not producing technology and those culture are not less advanced, just different. There is no going back, because there is no back or ahead. Change the culture, change the kind of technology people will create.
Why is your premise that this state of society is intrinsically caused by technological progress? The issues you describe seem to me a product of general economic trends.
Or maybe that's well and truly gone and we're just fated to another dark age. I'm reminded of the Smarter Scrubber documentary that found that basically the whole supply chain was gone and it was impossible to make something useful in America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY