This time it’s different

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With every single technological advance, from the invention of writing to the invention of television, those who have failed to appreciate the non-zero-sum nature of technological evolution have prophesied doom and been proven wrong. Every time, they have made some version of the argument: this time it is different, and been proven wrong.

—Venkatesh Rao, Breaking Smart: Season One

Stiffen your sinews if you hear this one.

A laundry list of times everyone agreed it was different, but it wasn’t:

• We have eliminated boom and bust. — © Gordon Brown, April 2000.
• It’s the end of history. We libtards have won. — © Francis Fukuyama, 1992
• How you value businesses without reference to cashflow or profitability. — © every investment banker ever, in the run-up to the dotcom bust in 2000
• We have efficiently allocated risk to those best placed to bear it through credit derivatives. — © every investment banker ever, in the run-up to the global financial crisis, 2004-8
• Mark-to-market accounting of future income streams in a market that doesn’t exist yet is sensible. — © Arthur Andersen Jeff Skilling and the crazy gang at Enron, continually up to October 2001
• The Singularity is definitely going to happen, and the universe will wake up, rewriting the laws of physics as we know them etc. — © Ray Kurzweil, 2005.
• Software is eating the world. — © Marc Andreessen, 2009
• The machines are going to take over, breed us in slimy pods as battery fuel for Skynet which the machines will need because um they just will. Look! Chess-playing supercomputers! — © Daniel Susskind, A World Without Work
• Everyone is going to be nice to each other now Generation Z is in control and we have taken out and shot all the old white men. — © Every millennial, and millennial apologist ever, 2018 -.

See also

• The dog in the night time
• Technological unemployment