Time out recently to read accounts of the life's work of George Stephenson and Bill Gates, and how they changed the world by ~ as we stand on the edge of a further bubble which involves it in the form of AI ~ improving lines of communication.
Each step change in evolution ultimately involves connections, whether synaptic or digital, and what these two did was to affect that on a global scale at a distance of a century and a half. It is not generally recognised, but is up there with Gutenberg in terms of the ramifications.
And the similarities are startling. In either event, these characters upon their own admission were not the best of communicators and not least through force of their personality. They each however had a vision they would stop at nothing to pursue, despite a groundswell of scepticism... and both would eventually be astonished at how these dreams would eventually go beyond even their own expectations.
When Stephenson however put steam engines to use not in a stationary form but in locomotive, this created pathways that connected urban centres like Liverpool and Manchester effectively for the first time. In the event, not only did it connect people literally beside freight ~ the forward shipment of American cotton to the textile mills of Manchester ~ but it provided routes which sooner rather than later the telegraph and telephone line would follow.
But you need a nexus to attach lines of communication, and what happened a century and a half later was that Bill Gates would put that upon working surfaces in every country of the world. The extraordinary rate at which these step-changes in communication were taken up was matched in each case; and life has not been and never will be the same since.
If you set aside Gates' education ~ of a sort Stephenson could only have dreamed of ~ nonetheless in each case the technology was a journey of self-discovery: each navigating wholly uncharted territories.
It is why for one thing that some things are worth regardless of the scepticism of self and others and why there will ever be bubbles: whether of the South Seas, tulips, railways, dot-coms or artificial means of intelligence. All offer potential for a much higher rate of return than the banks could ever offer, and all are driven on the one hand by monetary motives ~ like the needs of merchants to expedite goods ~ as well as a genuine effort to improve the lives of people.
Stephenson's first successful railway at Darlington ~ albeit for freight ~ was borne of a Quaker's urge to improve the lot of the poor by reducing the cost of their coal... but also to alleviate the plight of the workhorses that otherwise had to move both it, and them.
