Perspective chauvinism

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The fallacy of judging obsolete tricks, technologies or ideologies by the standards of the prevailing orthodoxy — evaluation criteria that, Q.E.D., weren’t relevant when the old technologies were in fashion.

Judged by such an arbitrary standard, outmoded technologies will, the older they get, necessarily seem more and more primitive and useless: the history of design will seem to lead inexorably to right here, right now. This in turn will create the impression, not easily dispelled, that human progress has been slow, steady, relentless march towards a perfect Platonic ideal, and any imperfection in our current locale is simply a reflection that, however far we have come, we are not there yet. We are but hobbits, on the way to Mt. Doom.

This does prompt questions, though. And doesn’t it seem a bit goal oriented? What are we going to to when we get there?

But this is not the lesson of evolution. The environment changes dynamically and capriciously, and by survival of the fittest, the prevailing community adapts to it. We are part of the environment, and as we change, so does the environment, and fitness criteria shift. But not in any particular direction. Evolution develops away from an unfit present state, not towards an ideal future one.

So it isn’t that we are progressing ever more quickly onward, but the place whence we have come falls exponentially further away as our technology meanders, like a perpetually deflating balloon, through design space. Our rate of progress doesn’t change; our discarded technologies simply seem more and more irrelevant through time.

See also

• Ray Kurzweil
• The Singularity is Near