One of my favorite anecdotes related to the sometimes rocky transition of expanding our mental models to fit new technology: the story of when the first "film", L’Arrivée d’un Train, was screen in Paris:
(highlights taken from Joi Ito's book Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future)
"On December 28, 1895, a crowd milled outside the Grand Café in Paris for a mysterious exhibition. For one franc, promoters promised, the audience would witness the first “living photographs” in the history of mankind. If that sounds a lot like a carnival sideshow to the modern ear, it wouldn’t have deterred a Parisian of the late nineteenth century. It was an age of sensation—of séances, snake charmers, bear wrestlers, aboriginal warriors, magicians, cycloramas, and psychics. Such wonders shared headlines with the many legitimate scientific discoveries and engineering advances of the 1890s.
In just the previous few years, Gustave Eiffel had erected the tallest man-made structure in the world, electricity had turned Paris into the City of Light, and automobiles had begun racing past carriages on the capital’s broad boulevards. The Industrial Revolution had transformed daily life, filling it with novelty and rapid change, and a Parisian could be forgiven for thinking that anything might happen on any given night, because anything often did.
What was it like to be among the first people to see light transformed into a moving image, the first to look at a taut screen and see instead a skirt rustling in the breeze? “You had to have attended these thrilling screenings in order to understand just how far the excitement of the crowd could go,” one of the first projectionists later recalled. “Each scene passes, accompanied by tempestuous applause; after the sixth scene, I return the hall to light. The audience is shaking. Cries ring out.”
And yet the Lumières are remembered less as the inventors of the motion picture—others, including Thomas Edison, were right on their heels—than for a single film, L’Arrivée d’un Train. Or, to be more accurate, they are remembered for the riot the film incited when it was first screened. You don’t need to be fluent in French to guess that L’Arrivée d’un Train features a train in the act of arriving. No one warned the first audience, though. Convinced, supposedly, that the train was about to trundle off the screen and turn them into ripped sacks of lacerated flesh, the tightly packed audience stumbled over one another in a frantic dash for the exits.
> The Lump of Labor Fallacy implies that the amount of work to be done in society is fixed. But it isn’t. Human needs are infinite.
A major critique against "infinite desires, therefore no scarcity of work": As technology develops, the bar of entry for many types of work becomes higher, thus excluding people with lower aptitudes. Not that human desire is bottomless, but that the ability to match this "bottomless pit" is dependent on limitations in human productivity. https://archive.ph/8THZIhttps://archive.fo/l3kNl
When even cliché art can be done by AIs, the "human" factor in rustic creativity is essential for the future. A major way on pushing this direction is through "Etsy-ification" of craft goods to give the common man a sense of being, whilst maintaining industrial effectiveness. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/5-the-land-its-people-and-their-dogs
Maybe we shouldn't close the books on harnessing nuclear energy as a result of that isolated, unrepeated mishap, but it doesn't help to blithely say that there was basically no loss of life that time.
Great post!
One of my favorite anecdotes related to the sometimes rocky transition of expanding our mental models to fit new technology: the story of when the first "film", L’Arrivée d’un Train, was screen in Paris:
(highlights taken from Joi Ito's book Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future)
"On December 28, 1895, a crowd milled outside the Grand Café in Paris for a mysterious exhibition. For one franc, promoters promised, the audience would witness the first “living photographs” in the history of mankind. If that sounds a lot like a carnival sideshow to the modern ear, it wouldn’t have deterred a Parisian of the late nineteenth century. It was an age of sensation—of séances, snake charmers, bear wrestlers, aboriginal warriors, magicians, cycloramas, and psychics. Such wonders shared headlines with the many legitimate scientific discoveries and engineering advances of the 1890s.
In just the previous few years, Gustave Eiffel had erected the tallest man-made structure in the world, electricity had turned Paris into the City of Light, and automobiles had begun racing past carriages on the capital’s broad boulevards. The Industrial Revolution had transformed daily life, filling it with novelty and rapid change, and a Parisian could be forgiven for thinking that anything might happen on any given night, because anything often did.
What was it like to be among the first people to see light transformed into a moving image, the first to look at a taut screen and see instead a skirt rustling in the breeze? “You had to have attended these thrilling screenings in order to understand just how far the excitement of the crowd could go,” one of the first projectionists later recalled. “Each scene passes, accompanied by tempestuous applause; after the sixth scene, I return the hall to light. The audience is shaking. Cries ring out.”
And yet the Lumières are remembered less as the inventors of the motion picture—others, including Thomas Edison, were right on their heels—than for a single film, L’Arrivée d’un Train. Or, to be more accurate, they are remembered for the riot the film incited when it was first screened. You don’t need to be fluent in French to guess that L’Arrivée d’un Train features a train in the act of arriving. No one warned the first audience, though. Convinced, supposedly, that the train was about to trundle off the screen and turn them into ripped sacks of lacerated flesh, the tightly packed audience stumbled over one another in a frantic dash for the exits.
Came across this today and seems relevant so will add: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-did-it-take-so-long
> The Lump of Labor Fallacy implies that the amount of work to be done in society is fixed. But it isn’t. Human needs are infinite.
A major critique against "infinite desires, therefore no scarcity of work": As technology develops, the bar of entry for many types of work becomes higher, thus excluding people with lower aptitudes. Not that human desire is bottomless, but that the ability to match this "bottomless pit" is dependent on limitations in human productivity. https://archive.ph/8THZI https://archive.fo/l3kNl
When even cliché art can be done by AIs, the "human" factor in rustic creativity is essential for the future. A major way on pushing this direction is through "Etsy-ification" of craft goods to give the common man a sense of being, whilst maintaining industrial effectiveness. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/5-the-land-its-people-and-their-dogs
Hey Erik, lovely piece. I think the only thing my mind keeps flagging is this line in the paragraph on people's aversion to nuclear energy: "But these are anomalies that resulted in basically no loss of life." I think that statement is problematic, at best, and doesn't necessarily help the point raised as expressed. This is because the Chernobyl disaster did result in loss of life - the UN estimates 50 people died that day as a result, and reports indicate that thousands more would eventually die from complications from radiation exposure from that incident. (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20official%2C%20internationally,result%20of%20the%20radiation%20exposure)
Maybe we shouldn't close the books on harnessing nuclear energy as a result of that isolated, unrepeated mishap, but it doesn't help to blithely say that there was basically no loss of life that time.