Inventions: Useful, Depressing or Dangerous?
your Saturday roundup
Professionally, I focus on creating social benefit startups. In my Saturday morning emails I share what I’m learning and thinking. Topics range from better living and parenting to business and philosophy.
Inventing Sooner. How to Invent Everything is less an instruction manual on creativity and more a history of invention. In the spirit of Connections, it is a fun version of The Knowledge. What if you were stranded by a broken time machine in the past? What knowledge could you bring with you to bring the benefits of technology sooner? Aside from silliness, I’m amazed by the examples of helpful inventions that could have been created centuries sooner. Why weren’t they? Even when there were no technical limitations, something like a plow would wait centuries. Were people missing the free time or missing the belief that life could be improved? Was it respect for Chesterton’s Fence? I find it inspiring to think there are many useful inventions we can create that in retrospect will seem obvious. What are they?
Kids and Phones. If you were to reinvent the smartphone, how would you avoid the downsides? That might be nice in theory but for those of us with kids asking for phones now, we face a choice. Check out the survey data correlating age of first smartphone use with poor mental health. The cause of the issues it not clear. Is it the constant interruption of carrying the smartphone? Therefore a smart watch would cause the same issues. Or is it access to the internet therefore computers or tablets are just as bad? Or is social media the real culprit? Regardless, maybe parents should wait until 8th grade to provide phones to kids.
ET Phone Home. Where are all the extraterrestrials? Please share any good solution’s you know of to the Fermi paradox and Drake equation. I was re-listening to the David Deutsch and Sam Harris conversations and they suggest perhaps the time periods are so long that we haven’t run into each other yet. Or maybe extraterrestrials are they all playing with their smartphones or living in VR powered by a Dyson sphere? Or do you see a doomsday scenario like the Great Filter based on misuse of dangerous technology?
Until next week,
Miles
From reading Haidt, restricting social media for kids seems worth considering. Thanks for the heads up on dark forest - I did not know that term.
Given the ubiquity of smartphones, that chart regarding failure to thrive particularly in our young girls is distressing. I wonder if the middle ground of giving my children smartphones, but putting onerous monitoring and restrictions will be enough to ward off the most damaging effects?
And as for the Fermi paradox, I'm partial to the dark forest.