The Timeline
In 1903, just as the dog days of summer had kicked off in Dayton, Orville and Wilbur Wright met inside a dirty cramped bar right off Main Street. They were drenched in sweat and muttering to themselves and if you had been a passive onlooker, you might have thought, ‘Gee, what’s wrong with these guys?’
The problem was their airplane project. Though they could build a plane with a powerful engine, they were stuck figuring out how to give any real control to the pilot.
“Maybe if we built a wind tunnel,” Orville said, “we could run better tests.”
“True,” said Wilbur, “maybe. But I think we’re still a long ways off. They’ve always said 1910 was the most optimistic timeline.”
“Right,” Orville sighed. “The timeline.”
And so the Wright brothers never invented the plane, tinkering around dejectedly in their garage and worrying about the timeline while other, more ambitious engineers produced humanity’s first real airplane. Today, nobody even remembers who the Wright brothers were.
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This story sounds unbelievable because it is. It is made up. The true part is that humans love a good timeline. And the only thing we like better than a good timeline is a timeline with a chart that goes up and to the right.
AGI in 5 years. Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) in 10. Large-scale nuclear energy in 20. Fusion power in 50. Google [topic] + [timeline] and you can get all sorts of predictions with pretty charts to accompany them.
Technology people, in particular, love making predictions about if and when technology will “arrive”. As though brilliant new technology is a gift from the aliens and is scheduled to be delivered on a particular date. Sometimes, they’re right. Most of the time, though, the experts disagree with one another, 99 percent of them end up being completely wrong, and nobody really holds them accountable. This might be fine. Non-wizards predicting the future and being wrong is more or less expected behavior, especially when there is little downside to doing so.
But don’t let the timeline influence you. Remember that another human made up the timeline. You can create your own, too. Just sixty-nine days before the Wright brothers’ 1903 flight and two years after our fictional story in the introduction, the New York Times published a piece claiming that it would take 1 to 10 million years in order to produce a flying machine. Can you imagine if the Wright brothers had paid too much attention to the timeline?
Thanks to Linus for a conversation about this idea.
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