Fine But Why

Fine. But why

Fine. But why. Philosophy, technology, accelerationism, agents, and AI.
Technology since 1850. 1851. Great Exhibition. The Crystal Palace in London. Steam, iron, and glass under one roof, for anyone with a ticket. 1866. Transatlantic cable. Ireland to Newfoundland. A message in minutes. 1876. Telephone. Bell's instrument. You hear a voice on a wire. 1879. Electric light. Edison's filament. The room stays lit. 1886. Automobile. Benz's Patent-Motorwagen. Three wheels and an engine. 1903. Powered flight. The Wright Flyer leaves the sand at Kitty Hawk for twelve seconds. 1913. Moving assembly line. At Highland Park the chassis rolled past a standing worker. 1945. Electronic computer. ENIAC at Penn. A room of racks doing arithmetic. 1947. Transistor. Bell Labs, December. A solid switch. 1957. Sputnik. A metal sphere in orbit, beeping. 1969. ARPANET. UCLA sent a message to the Stanford Research Institute. 1971. Microprocessor. Intel 4004. A processor on one chip. 1991. World Wide Web. CERN puts the web in public. 2007. iPhone. A computer in your pocket. 2012. AlexNet. A convnet wins ImageNet by a wide margin. 2017. Transformers. Attention Is All You Need. 2022. ChatGPT. A chat box that writes back. 2025. Agents. Software that keeps a job going after you close the tab.
2024 and 2026.

Fine But Why ยท Yair Knijn Essays FSD tracker About RSS