Why I Think Global Warming and Sustainability "are mostly bunk"!

In todays WSJ L. Gordon Crovitz writes "Technology Predictions Are Mostly Bunk", his view how technology improvements actually happen and the perception as documented by various quotations from the past. The key paragraphs:


'"Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments," said Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus in 10 A.D. This end-of-progress view has been echoed many times, including by Charles Duell, commissioner for the U.S. Patent Office, who in 1899 said, "Everything that can be invented has already been invented."

It's worth recalling, especially in a gloomy year like the one drawing to an end, that the opposite is true: The more we invent, the more we invent. Knowledge grows on itself. '


You not only can't precict the future, but making decisions on technological predictions - either positive or negative - is a fools errand.

I particularly like this example: "No one will need more than 637kb of memory for a personal computer - 640K ought to be enough for anybody," Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1981.

Read the column, it is quite interesting!

P.S.: I am writing this on a Toshiba portable with 1 gig of RAM and 160 gig of disk drive!