That distinction is really useful. My critique is aimed at how often “inevitability talk” blurs those two levels together. It’s one thing to say “networks need a lingua franca,” it’s another to say “TCP/IP was inevitable.” When people collapse the concept into the specific implementation, that’s when the rhetoric becomes persuasive but misleading.
I agree that physical and economic constraints matter, but the point I’m making is that cost curves themselves are contingent on human choices. ICs didn’t suddenly become cheap on their own; they became cheap because governments and corporations poured billions into scaling them. That’s not denying the underlying advantage, but showing how rhetoric of inevitability erases the political and economic decisions that actually drive those curves.
"They're describing reality" - No, they're making predictions about the future. If AGI requires 30 years of compute improvements as you say, then it's not reality, it's a forecast contingent on those 30 years of development continuing unimpeded.
As for "oppressive regime", we already do this for nuclear and biotech, and most people find it quite palatable! Nuclear materials are tightly controlled globally. Cloning humans is illegal almost everywhere. We've had the knowledge for both for decades, yet basement nukes and basement human clones aren't happening.
I'm not saying we should make it illegal, I'm just saying there are more gray areas than what's generally accounted for.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I think there's a misunderstanding (maybe my text wasn't clear. If so please point out where so I can fix it).
We actually agree: even if the probability of successful coordination is only 10%, accepting inevitability makes it 0%. That difference matters enormously given the stakes.
My argument isn't "coordination is definitely possible" but rather "believing it's impossible guarantees failure." When tech leaders say "AGI is inevitable," they're not describing reality; they're shaping it by discouraging attempts to coordinate.
Human cloning hasn't happened because we maintain active resistance despite technical feasibility.
You're asking for credible paths with P > 0. I'm saying: knowing P with certainty is impossible, so accepting P = 1 narratives makes alternative paths invisible. The path emerges through trial and error, not before it.
You're absolutely right that predictions exist on a probability spectrum. I focused on the binary for rhetorical clarity, but you're correct that some predictions are more likely than others.
That being said, it doesn't change my point about agency. Your prediction #2 (LLMs impacting the economy) seems "almost inevitable" precisely because thousands of people are actively working to make it true. If everyone stopped tomorrow - if OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc., all pivoted to other projects - would it still be inevitable?
The appearance of inevitability comes from observing massive coordinated human effort toward a goal, then mistaking that effort for natural law. It's like watching a thousand people pushing a boulder uphill and concluding "that boulder inevitably goes up."
Thanks for engaging. I think you meant it's obvious rather than shallow? If so, yes I agree but a lot of my friends disagree so I wrote this as rigorously as possible to explain why this is obvious.
That being said, regarding game theory and coordination: Wars DO end when people change the game's parameters. WWI's Christmas Truce happened despite every incentive against it. Catalonia chose not to pursue independence despite having voted for it. The Montreal Protocol solved ozone depletion despite classic tragedy of the commons dynamics.
My point isn't that coordination is easy - it's that treating it as impossible becomes self-fulfilling. When tech leaders invoke inevitability via game theory, they're choosing to accept those constraints rather than working to change them.
Thank you for the comment and engaging with my thinking.
You're using hindsight to define inevitability, which is exactly the circular reasoning my essay critiques. "It happened widely, therefore it was inevitable" isn't a useful framework, it's survivorship bias.
Using your IC example: they became cheap because of massive government investment in the space program and military procurement, not natural law. The Apollo Guidance Computer alone drove early IC demand. Different policy choices = different outcome.
Personal computing almost died multiple times. Xerox PARC had it all in 1973 but management killed it. IBM thought the market was ~5 computers total. The Homebrew Computer Club was nearly shut down for copyright infringement. Any of these inflection points going differently changes history.
Your "no moat" observation is telling - you're really describing business strategy (technologies that spread can't be monopolized) not philosophical inevitability. But even that's questionable: TCP/IP could have lost to OSI, the Web to Gopher or AOL's walled garden.
The counterfactual test: if these were truly inevitable, we'd see simultaneous independent invention everywhere. Instead we see: singular inventors, path dependence, and technologies that almost weren't (or actually weren't: where's our supersonic passenger travel?).
Calling only successes "inevitable" while ignoring what didn't happen or was actively prevented (nuclear proliferation, human cloning, various chemicals/drugs) demonstrates the selection bias in this thinking.
I wrote an essay critiquing Silicon Valley’s obsession with calling technologies “inevitable.” I argue that inevitability isn’t a fact but a rhetorical move that erases agency and responsibility. What if we treated predictions not as destiny, but as challenges?
Yes exactly and that was the hard part (extract and verify the invariants). Still it's surprising because llm needs to be able to do that for any complex code.
What you wrote is great can I copy/paste it in the blog post? (Referring you of course)