Pessimists Archive Presents: The Franklin Fallacy, Why We Misjudge New Technologies | Devcon SEA

[Music] hello everyone um okay I'm going to take you back 241 years to 1783 in Paris France and the first untethered manned hot air balloon flight took place um this was was a big deal uh it was the first time man was taking to the sky untethered um most people think of the right Brothers is the first time humans took to the skies but actually it happened over a hundred years earlier um and there were lots of crowd people in the crowd to witness this event and one of those people was Benjamin Franklin um the American polymath uh inventor and Diplomat and there's a famous story um after this event um Franklin was asked a question about this Innovation and that question was what use is it like what's the point um and his response is quite famous and it went something along the lines of what use is a newborn baby right and and this is kind of quite a profound response um in terms of the way we interpret new technologies um and uh the point he was making was that we don't look at a newborn baby and judge it based on the things it can't do right we understand that babies grow and evolve and learn um and so do Technologies and you just wouldn't point at a baby and say it can't walk it can't talk and so it has no hope and you know it's it's a write off right that that that would be IR rational but we do this uh with people do this with new technologies a lot and with hot air balloons they evolved um just like babies grown evolve um and I call this the Franklin fallacy it needs a name and I'm calling it The Franklin fallacy and it's something you notice uh will rear its head whenever a new technology comes along right um and this is a really useful framework um I mean most people at this conference aren't going to be fooling for this fallacy but like it's a good framework to explain to people why they should uh put their doubts to one side and maybe not be so cynical um and I'm going to run you through like the history of this fallacy [Music] um you saw it happen when the airplane emerg bicycles light bulbs um shortly after the W brothers did their first public demonstration um the the Manchester Guardian now just the guardian you'll be familiar um said shortly after we are not belittling the exploit of Mr Wright it is a great Triumph of mechanical Ingenuity a magnificent feat of acrobatics but we cannot understand to what practical use a flying machine that is heavier than air is to be put the English government like the French and the German shows its wisdom in neglecting airplanes and concentrating its attention on the Improvement of the Airship so ironically just as the hot air balloon suffered from the Franklin valac so did man flight and and what people said was well you've just made a worse Airship it can't take off and land vertically it can't carry many people um it has to constantly keep moving in the air um there were lots of reasons why you would think that airships were the future um headlines like this appeared using that same logic airplanes only a fad um and airships were like uh socially accepted um more developed uh it was easy to make a convincing argument uh that airplanes were only a fad because it was hard to kind of predict how it would grow and evolve um you know you couldn't really predict jet engines and stuff like that um the bicycle suffered from a similar thing uh early bicycles were called bone shakers um because they didn't have uh inflatable tires which cushioned act as a suspension um so early bicycles were quite uncomfortable to ride and depending on the surface so again you take an innovation you see its early flaws and you can you can quickly dismiss it um but but it's a mistake because it's hard to predict how things will improve over time um light bulbs they early light bulbs didn't last long they they they were a cool science experiment but they didn't last long enough to be practical or make sense um but Edison looked at that and thought what if there was another way and he and his team tested over a thousand different materials um until they came upon bamboo which he used to create a long-lasting light bulb and suddenly this thing had legs but if Edison had just looked at like the limitations the early limitations it would have been easy to dismiss the light bulbs um and my favorite example is home PCS so uh in the 1970s early 1980s lots of hype around personal computers everyone's going to have one um there was there was a lot of hype and people painting a picture of the future um it's now become true but then it was all speculative um and there were limitations these things were expensive they had you know limited use cases and again the Franklin poliy came along um these quotes are my favorite the home computer may be going the way of video games which were dying fad uh for most personal tasks such as balancing a checkbook Consulting Airline schedules writing a modest number of letters paperworks just as well as a computer and cost less very very amusing in retrospect even more amusing when you realize it was actually Steve wnc who said these quotes um so this was 1985 um the mcos had been released a year earlier it wasn't selling as well as people expected um and was did an interview where he basically said they're just a bit too they're just too expensive and not useful enough in the home um and he basically said that they've been oversold and this isn't really going to pan out and interestingly the same year Steve Jobs basically echoed what Steve wak was saying uh he admitted in an interview with Playboy that H PC was more of a conceptual Market than a real Market but the thing that difference between Steve wnac and Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs wasn't suffering from the Franklin fallacy he he saw a short-term limitations but he was a long-term Optimist and he did this interview with Playboy which is super fascinating and it really like summed up the challenge of of countering the Franklin fallacy and he said the hard part we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them um 100 years ago if somebody asked Alexander gr Bell what are you going to be able to do with the telephone he wouldn't have been able to tell them um and the interviewer kind of said well are you just asking people to have blind faith in this vision of the future uh like you just want people to put down like thousands of dollars and just hope everything pans out and and jobs replied with this he said I can only begin to speculate we see that a lot a lot in our industry you don't know exactly what's going to result but you know it's something very big and very good um and this kind of sums up the problem with arguing against the Franklin pacy you can't be that specific like the limitations people are bringing up that's a fact that's reality and then you're asking people to kind of have a faith but history shows that like when there's a lot of smart people working in a new technology you can be damn sure that a lot is going to change a lot is going to improve and you shouldn't judge a new technology based on these early limitations in the same way that you shouldn't judge what a baby is going to become in the future um and this is all very relevant to this conference because we've we've seen this happen with cryptocurrency um Bitcoin energy usage has was a big thing that world economic Forum projected it was going to consume more power than the world does in 2017 um Bitcoin itself has a bunch of limitations um and then stuff like ethereum came along which removed them um and ethereum itself its energy use was really quite High um for a long time uh when nft are collecting blew up there was uh a lot of criticism around the amount of energy and carbon emissions uh a lot of people protesting uh selling art in that way as a result and of course we saw uh we saw the shift to proof of proof of stake um which reduced the energy use by 99% uh and as we saw at the beginning of this conference the opening speeches the improvements of ethereum over the last few years have incredible and to judge ethereum two years ago based on its limitations would have been would have been a big mistake now of course everyone here knows this that's why you're in this space uh if you if you were suffering from this fallacy you would wouldn't be here um but the reason I'm doing this talk is because I think it's a really useful framework uh to explain to people how to think about new technologies and why their reservations and doubts might not be not be so rational and they should think beyond the current reality um yeah I'm a little bit little bit under time here but that that's it um I run a project called pessimist archive we explore the history of technophobia and moral Panic um we have a Twitter account we have a newsletter you can scan the QR code for that now um uh but we catalog a lot of examples of the franklen fallacy and other things um yeah thank you very much thank you very much Louie so I really like the animations that was used in the slides yes beautiful yeah all right so we have two questions here I urge everybody to continuously send your questions over but let's talk about the first one so in your opinion what point is technology ready to be judged without the fear of the tech being too early wait wait wait what's at what point is a technology ready to be judged I mean what is a technology I don't really know in your opinion we could take the second one first maybe we can have some time to think about it well no I think like um you know if a limitation persists for many many years and it's starting to look like that's kind of hard to solve then okay like that's fair enough but in the early early days it's like let's let's just hold out right let's not assume this is going to persist um but obviously there are some things which aren't you can't overcome um but but uh it's it's best not to act in too much haste uh around that so understood okay and the second one would then be what are some of the times where the Franklin poliy turned out to be right counterargument to that uh I mean maybe MAV us yeah I mean what I guess te telegraphy had its limits you know um and then the telephone came along so you know I think it was fair to doubt that like it's it's funny that in the Playboy interview Steve Jobs talks about this he talks about people predicting the telegraph there' be a telegraph every desk but he said that you know learning to learning to use mors code was just not practical for most people and the telephone came along and it made it more accessible to people so like I guess I guess that's one like telegraphy kind of hit a wall there okay um and you know I I guess you could say you know uh ethereum was created because Bitcoin had some hard limit ations yeah um but I guess like the the broader technology is blockchain technology and that's what people were judging based on the limitations of Bitcoin um so yeah there there are hard limits but um but you shouldn't be too hasty in deciding what those hard limits are I think well fantastic Insight from Louie thank you very much for anyone who have oh there's one more question actually that just came in oh has it worked for you to convince people of blockchain potential by explaining the Franklin fallacy uh I mean I I'm not sure but I hope it I hope it does I hope I hope it helps um you know I I kind of concocted this concept about a month ago so I haven't had all that much time to deploy it um but but it's it's really worth using history to point this stuff out and point to headlines about people dismissing the airplane dismissing the light bulbs cuz these are all things we accept toly and we understand their value um so I'm hoping I will be able to use it so could probably be a fun story at Christmas absolutely all right thank you very much uh