1 technology accelerates
Technology compounds — roughly twice as fast ever year.
The process is boring, it compounds in the background until a breakthrough is made in the whole world notices it.
Let’s look at a diagram of gdp growth over the last 200 years. Before 1800s it is essentially a flat line but somewhere where you see it grow exponentially —— what’s the main difference between the last 200 years and previous 200,000 is that technological advancement has taken over labour to became the main driver of economic growth.
2 genetic pool
The reason technology grows exponentially is because this nature works is essentially like bacteria, the more cells you have, the more cells reproduces with each other —— faster growth. One example is the birth of large language model technology crisis back to Alex Nat in 2012, proving neuron network is appeared to traditional algorithms, which the entire thing is feasible because advancement in parallel computing specifically cuda and graphical processing units. In other words, it is a combination of different fields in hardware and software that makes large language model, feasible and intern large language model accelerate development of technology as more people can program more. Creativity can be released faster programming time. Individuals are more efficient this forms a positive reinforcement where a technology will contribute to feasibility of another technology, which will then lead to the next ones faster.
3 Bottleneck
Technological advancement often follows a theme of solving bottlenecks in society. In the 1800s, with the creation of the steam engine, there was an urgent need to transport the might of the industrial revolution around the world as fast and steadily as possible, sparking the birth of railway systems across European and American countries. With the maturity of railways, we could build and transport more. The bottleneck became steel, leading to a boom in the steel industry. After steel and railways, came oil.
The first bottleneck after finding oil is its refinement. After that, the bottleneck becomes utilizing the liquid form of oil for better transportation. Standard Oil Company addressed these last two bottlenecks, establishing a monopoly like never before. Once the oil industry was settled, a long tail effect was formed by the organizational capability of mankind. We have lots of oil, lots of steel production, and thus a foundation for many innovations to build upon like personal vechiles.
The birth of the internet follows the same path. First, we have the internet, which is amazing, but it doesn't scale until the bottleneck of standardization is solved. Then the bottleneck becomes infrastructure, like building railways for the industrial revolution. With the AI revolution, we can see the same trend — LLM sparked the need for AI, and the bottleneck became energy and computation power. After they are solved, we see a bottleneck in the amount of data supplied.
4 Toy until establishment of atomic unit
Almost every mainstream thing started as an edge in humanity. The internet was seen as a toy; Instagram started as a literal toy, Amazon started out as a better bookshop, Twitter/slack started out as an internal tool for a company, so does AWS , which now brings in about 70% of Amazon's revenue nowadays.
Every technology follows a modular approach. The internet served as a random medium for people and hackers to express themselves until the birth of DNS, which standardized website domains. The birth of social media was also a toy and a mess. With MySpace, everyone could host their own pages, but it soon developed into chaos; until Facebook brought standardization to social media pages that social media could actually scale. The invention of the tokenization system and the attention mechanism standardizes processing, making it more scalable by creating standard modular parts that are repeatable.