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.
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.