2020 was an unusual year by any standard. But it was the year when many principles examined here, and in the ATOM publication, came to fruition. $8 Trillion of new monetary creation has not only not caused inflation, but the migration into disruptive technology companies. This is a tremendous confirmation of ATOM principles. More and more people are migrating towards recognition of these realities, but I remain the first, given the publication date of the ATOM in early 2016.
Blogs are a dying medium, at least to the extent that almost no blogs that were around when The Futurist first started (in early 2006) are still around now, unless it has become the author's full-time job, or it is a website with ten or more authors. To give you an idea, the narrow text column of this blog is a relic of how 4:3, rather than 16:9, was still the predominant aspect ratio in 2006. Widening the format retroactively messes up all the old articles, so I have not done it, leaving half of a 16:9 screen unused. The ATOM publication, given its later date, is a wider format for this reason.
Video seems to be a better medium, and I have to think about migrating over to there at some point. But that day is not today. Don't worry, I won't go away, even if the medium migrates.
The nature of this subject matter means that there are relatively few commenters (even if there are still several hundred visits per day, and over 50,000 per article). No other futurism blog, that deals with actual predictions rather than news, does much better either. One could lament that the importance of subjects we discuss here, and the extent to which they improve the human condition, deserve broader readership. That said, comments here maintain quality, rather than quantity.
Commenter Geoman has been a stalwart here for over a decade, and a comment he wrote very late in the year is actually the best comment of the year. He has discussed this idea many times, but here is a comment that encapsulates it, and thus much of what we discuss here, completely :
Hey Jenny,
Every problem can be reduced to energy, time, atoms, and information. And you can trade them off in various ways. Much of our engineering is just figuring out the best trade offs between the four components. And our access to information is increasing exponentially. And that means the inputs of time, atoms, and energy can be reduced - information takes their place. And information is getting cheaper.
That is the source of all technological deflation. Time passes at the same pace. Atoms - the number of atoms on Earth is not subject to change. I'm not sure energy costs have decreased. Nope, only information is increasing.
With fracking, we simply added a lot more information to the system. That reduced the time, energy, and atoms necessary to create the same output. I tell people all the time - fracking is OLD technology. We've been doing it for decades. Maybe a century. Horizontal drilling started in the 1980s. What changed was computers and sensors were able to guide the drill bits more precisely, with less people, AND we were able to more accurately model the impacts of fracking. We could see and understand what was happening in the subsurface. That meant the input of time, energy, and atoms could be vastly reduced. To a point where fracking became cheap and productive.
Look at oil - it is just time, information, energy and atoms. Oil in the ground is created using all of these things, but with very low information input, low energy, but LOTS of time. Millions of years. I could do the same thing with a nuclear reactor, sucking in air and water and creating synthetic oil, replacing the time with energy and information.
Look at SpaceX - tail landing rockets. That was proposed in the 1950s, but never done. Why? Because we didn't have the sensors or computers to precisely control the rocket. We didn't until 2010 or so. It was always possible, but time, atoms and energy could not compensate for the lack of information. In fact the time input (millisecond precision) was fixed, and atoms and energy alone could not compensate. A higher information input was necessary.
Tall building can sway in the wind. To control sway, we built them bigger - using more atoms. But there are two other ways to reduce sway, better design (more information on how wind and tall structures interact) or active dampening systems (use information and energy to compensate). Both reduce the number of atoms necessary to control the problem.
There are hundreds of similar examples, once you start to think about them.
Each advance in human history was about changing the inputs. When humans discovered fire (input energy from wood), or when they finished the periodic table (input new atoms), or when they discovered how to use fossil fuels (input new energy), or society advanced rapidly. They could increase the input of energy and atoms. That reduced the necessary input of time. But now we have a fourth ingredient, information, replacing energy and matter. That fourth ingredient always existed, we were just largely unaware of it (how to make a fire, where to find the atoms, how to extract and refine oil). And for a huge section of human history, it didn't increase very much.
Now it is, and everything is being recalculated. Information gives us more atoms (say, finding new mineral deposits) and energy (say, better solar panels), and at the same time requires we need less of both. Information even compresses time - think of medicine, where, prior to very recently, new drugs were developed by trial and error. That required a huge input of time. With designer drugs (made possible with information), that time input can be reduced substantially.
That is something every adult should internalize, as a broader understanding of everything can flow from these 'first principles'. All sorts of ignorant misconceptions and bad predictions ('peak oil', 'QE causes inflation', 'banning this technology will save X industry', etc.) can be dismissed just based on these principles alone.
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