Paradigm Shifts
Are new technologies really revolutionary?
I think one of the most interesting things is when a technology is considered revolutionary. Just in my memory over the last 29 years. I remember concepts like the internet, iPhones, Blockchain, and recently AI being revolutionary technology in the general social conversation. But I wonder if revolution is the correct way to view this “progress” in technology and how it affects the human race, and society.
Thomas Kuhn had this idea of a paradigm shift. The idea was that science develops around a set of tools that are set by a given paradigm and at some point there is a new paradigm that is created or discovered that completely changes the fabric of the science being done. For example, physics was centered around Newton and Leibniz invention of calculus, and partly centered around Newton’s theory of gravity. Society continues to develop ideas, mathematics, and theories/laws centered around these concepts. But when Einstein discovered general and special relativity the concept of gravity was completely revolutionized and scientific understanding began to center around that instead. The idea is that slow and steady progress can only get us so far, and that true expansive progress happens suddenly.
Assuming these this correct, are the things that we are seeing these large shifts in paradigm?
Blockchain was said to revolutionize the financial industry. And everyone wanted to jump on the wagon before the landscape was changed forever. Every new project or business started saying they were going to use the blockchain. And old business were scrambling to find out how they were going to use the blockchain. Fast forward 10ish years, and we see the same centralization happening on the blockchain and seemingly the same scams happening in the crypto markets (like the whole FTX and SBF fiasco) that we saw in the traditional financial markets. The widespread adoption of currencies such as Bitcoin has not happened. In a sense, it functionally just become a gold-like creation. A copy of something that already exists.
And even just looking at progress of money, digitalization seemed to be the next incremental change. We went from bartering to precious materials to coins to promissory notes to legal tender and now to digital. We were already almost there before bitcoin. Many mid-class americans were already transitioning to being cashless, and using either a debt card or a credit card. And with Apple, Google, and Samsung Pay that was even being transitioned away from.
Even when looking at something like the computer or the internet. These had large impacts on society, but were they really sudden changes? We see this movement of communication from stone to paper to electrical conduction to telephones to television to computers to the internet to the cell phone to the smart phone and now to AI. But all this development was caused by the discovery of Quantum Mechanics and creation of the transistor in the 1920’s
The idea is that a lot of our recent technological changes have been gradual, and have slowly permeated into society in incremental steps. Computers went from being us military use-case during WWII to universities in the 50’s and 60’s to personal computers and continuing on from there.
When looking at something like AI, is has slowly been introduced to us since beginning of personal computing, as programming and computation became more ready accessible we saw an expansion in machine learning and in automation. And as these process became more complicated and as we learned about the human brain, we started to dive into the AI, which started to slowly get integrated into our digital assistants, how we browse the internet, what ads we see, how we drive our cars, etc.
But all this is still part of the paradigm of Quantum Mechanics and General/Special Relativity. We are still in the midst of seeing how far these two concepts can take us in terms of our science and our society.