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Are there more than 25 General purpose technologies? (x.com)

submitted 1 week ago by Chrononaut@futurology.today to c/futurology@lemmy.ml

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I am reading The New Wave, the last book from Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman. He mentioned that a massive study pegged down the General Purpose Technologies to be only 24 in human history, but I can’t find the study. Does anybody know the study? This is the list btw:

Domestication of plants
Domestication of animals
Smelting of ore
Money
Wheel
Writing
Bronze
Iron
Water wheel
Three-masted sailing ship
Printing
Factory system
Steam Engine
Railways
Steamship
Internal combustion engine
Electricity
Automobile
Airplane
Mass production
Computer
Lean production
Internet
Biotechnology

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[–] VHS@hexbear.net 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I feel like there needs to be some kind of criteria to make a complete list. Why not plastics? Why just the Internet and not telephony… or possibly the most general-purpose technology of the last century, radio transmission? What about timekeeping?

AND we have AI, the ultimate meta-technology… the real question is how many further general-purpose technologies it can unlock in turn.

I'm highly skeptical of claims like this, they seem to be more marketing hype than anything else. How is it "the ultimate"? Is it more important than smelting or electricity? We don't even have artificial intelligence, we have algorithms that take advantage of highly powerful computers to work faster than they did in the past.

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 week ago

Yeah, radio transmission being missing is wild. That's how Mussolini got famous to begin with, he was a radio guy. Let alone all the uses of various modern radio technologies.

[–] 0laura@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago

it is AI, ai just isn't that good. we don't have AGI. they are not the same thing, it's like rectangles and squares.