Maybe there’s a pattern here?
1.
It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.
Richard Gatling (1861)
2.
In 1923, Hermann Oberth published The Rocket to Planetary Spaces, later expanded as Ways to Space Travel. This showed that it was possible to build machines that could leave Earth’s atmosphere and reach orbit. He described the general principles of multiple-stage liquid-fueled rockets, solar sails, and even ion drives. He proposed sending humans into space, building space stations and satellites, and travelling to other planets.
The idea of space travel became popular in Germany. Swept up by these ideas, in 1927, Johannes Winkler, Max Valier, and Willy Ley formed the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR) (Society for Space Travel) in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). This group rapidly grew to several hundred members. Several participated as advisors of Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Moon, and the VfR even began publishing their own journal.
In 1930, the VfR was granted permission to use an abandoned ammunition dump outside Berlin as a test site and began experimenting with real rockets. Over the next few years, they developed a series of increasingly powerful rockets, first the Mirak line (which flew to a height of 18.3 m), then the Repulsor (>1 km). These people dreamed of space travel, and were building rockets themselves, funded by membership dues and a few donations. You can just do things.
However, with the great depression and loss of public interest in rocketry, the VfR faced declining membership and financial problems. In 1932, they approached the army and arranged a demonstration launch. Though it failed, the army nevertheless offered a contract. After a tumultuous internal debate, the VfR rejected the contract. Nevertheless, the army hired away several of the most talented members, starting with a 19-year-old named Wernher von Braun.
Following Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933, the army made an offer to absorb the entire VfR operation. They would work at modern facilities with ample funding, but under full military control, with all work classified and an explicit focus on weapons rather than space travel. The VfR’s leader, Rudolf Nebel, refused the offer, and the VfR continued to decline. Launches ceased. In 1934, the Gestapo finally shut the VfR down, and civilian research on rockets was restricted. Many VfR members followed von Braun to work for the military.
Of the founding members, Max Valier was killed in an accident in May 1930. Johannes Winkler joined the SS and spent the war working on liquid-fuel engines for military aircraft. Willy Ley was horrified by the Nazi regime and in 1935 forged some documents and fled to the United States, where he was a popular science author, seemingly the only surviving thread of the spirit of Oberth’s 1923 book. By 1944, V-2 rockets were falling on London and Antwerp.
3.
North Americans think the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. Much of the world believes that credit belongs to Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian inventor working in Paris.
Though Santos-Dumont is often presented as an idealistic pacifist, this is hagiography. In his 1904 book on airships, he suggests warfare as the primary practical use, discussing applications in reconnaissance, destroying submarines, attacking ships, troop supply, and siege operations. As World War I began, he enlisted in the French army (as a chauffeur), but seeing planes used for increasing violence disturbed him. His health declined and he returned to Brazil.
His views on military uses of planes seemed to shift. Though planes contributed to the carnage in WWI, he hoped that they might advance peace by keeping European violence from reaching the American continents. Speaking at a conference in the US in late 1915 or early 1916, he suggested:
Here in the new world we should all be friends. We should be able, in case of trouble, to intimidate any European power contemplating war against any one of us, not by guns, of which we have so few, but by the strength of our union. […] Only a fleet of great aeroplanes, flying 200 kilometers an hour, could patrol these long coasts.
Following the war, he appealed to the League of Nations to ban the use of planes as weapons and even offered a prize of 10,000 francs for whoever wrote the best argument to that effect. When the Brazilian revolution broke out in 1932, he was horrified to see planes used in fighting near his home. He asked a friend:
Why did I make this invention which, instead of contributing to the love between men, turns into a cursed weapon of war?
He died shortly thereafter, perhaps by suicide. A hundred years later, banning the use of planes in war is inconceivable.
4.
Humanity had few explosives other than gunpowder until 1847 when Ascanio Sobrero created nitroglycerin by combining nitric and sulfuric acid with a fat extract called glycerin. Sobrero found it too volatile for use as an explosive and turned to medical uses. After a self-experiment, he reported that ingesting nitroglycerin led to “a most violent, pulsating headache accompanied by great weakness of the limbs”. (He also killed his dog.) Eventually this led to the use of nitroglycerin for heart disease.
Many tried and failed to reliably ignite nitroglycerin. In 1863, Alfred Nobel finally succeeded by placing a tube of gunpowder with a traditional fuse inside the nitroglycerin. He put on a series of demonstrations blowing up enormous rocks. Certain that these explosives would transform mining and tunneling, he took out patents and started filling orders.
The substance remained lethally volatile. There were numerous fatal accidents around the world. In 1867, Nobel discovered that combining nitroglycerin with diatomaceous earth produced a product that was slightly less powerful but vastly safer. His factories of “dynamite” (no relation) were soon producing thousands of tons a year. Nobel sent chemists to California where they started manufacturing dynamite in a plant in what is today Golden Gate Park. By 1874, he had founded dynamite companies in more than ten countries and he was enormously rich.
In 1876, Nobel met Bertha Kinsky, who would become Bertha von Suttner, a celebrated peace activist. (And winner of the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize). At their first meeting, she expressed concern about dynamite’s military potential. Nobel shocked her. No, he said, the problem was that dynamite was too weak. Instead, he wished to produce “a substance or invent a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale destruction that wars should thereby become altogether impossible”.
It’s easy to dismiss this as self-serving. But dynamite was used overwhelmingly for construction and mining. Nobel did not grow rich by selling weapons. He was disturbed by dynamite’s use in Chicago’s 1886 Haymarket bombing. After being repeatedly betrayed and swindled, he seemed to regard the world of money with a kind of disgust. At heart, he seemed to be more inventor than businessman.
Still, the common story that Nobel was a closet pacifist is also hagiography. He showed little concern when both sides used dynamite in the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war. In his later years, he worked on developing munitions and co-invented cordite, remarking that they were “rather fiendish” but “so interesting as purely theoretical problems”.
Simultaneously, he grew interested in peace. He repeatedly suggested that Europe try a sort of one-year cooling off period. He even hired a retired Turkish diplomat as a kind of peace advisor. Eventually, he concluded that peace required an international agreement to act against any aggressor.
When Bertha’s 1889 book Lay Down Arms became a rallying cry, Nobel called it a masterpiece. But Nobel was skeptical. He made only small donations to her organization and refused to be listed as a sponsor of a pacifist congress. Instead, he continued to believe that peace would come through technological means, namely more powerful weapons. If explosives failed to achieve this, he told a friend, a solution could be found elsewhere:
A mere increase in the deadliness of armaments would not bring peace. The difficulty is that the action of explosives is too limited; to overcome this deficiency war must be made as deadly for all the civilians back home as for the troops on the front lines. […] War will instantly stop if the weapon is bacteriology.
5.
I’m a soldier who was tested by fate in 1941, in the very first months of that war that was so frightening and fateful for our people. […] On the battlefield, my comrades in arms and I were unable to defend ourselves. There was only one of the legendary Mosin rifles for three soldiers.
[…]
After the war, I worked long and very hard, day and night, labored at the lathe until I created a model with better characteristics. […] But I cannot bear my spiritual agony and the question that repeats itself over and over: If my automatic deprived people of life, am I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, ninety-three years of age, son of a peasant woman, a Christian and of Orthodox faith, guilty of the deaths of people, even if of enemies?
For twenty years already, we have been living in a different country. […] But evil is not subsiding. Good and evil live side by side, they conflict, and, what is most frightening, they make peace with each other in people’s hearts.
Mikhail Kalashnikov (2012)
6.
In 1937 Leo Szilárd fled Nazi Germany, eventually ending up in New York where—with no formal position—he did experiments demonstrating that uranium could likely sustain a chain reaction of neutron emissions. He immediately realized that this meant it might be possible to create nuclear weapons. Horrified by what Hitler might do with such weapons, he enlisted Einstein to write the 1939 Einstein–Szilárd letter, which led to the creation of the Manhattan project. Szilárd himself worked for the project at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago.
On June 11, 1945, as the bomb approached completion, Szilárd co-signed the Franck report:
Nuclear bombs cannot possibly remain a “secret weapon” at the exclusive disposal of this country, for more than a few years. The scientific facts on which their construction is based are well known to scientists of other countries. Unless an effective international control of nuclear explosives is instituted, a race of nuclear armaments is certain to ensue.
[…]
We believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.
On July 16, 1945, the Trinity test achieved the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon. The next day, he circulated the Szilárd petition:
We, the undersigned scientists, have been working in the field of atomic power. Until recently we have had to fear that the United States might be attacked by atomic bombs during this war and that her only defense might lie in a counterattack by the same means. Today, with the defeat of Germany, this danger is averted and we feel impelled to say what follows:
The war has to be brought speedily to a successful conclusion and attacks by atomic bombs may very well be an effective method of warfare. We feel, however, that such attacks on Japan could not be justified, at least not unless the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender.
[…]
The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.
[…]
In view of the foregoing, we, the undersigned, respectfully petition: first, that you exercise your power as Commander-in-Chief, to rule that the United States shall not resort to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender; second, that in such an event the question whether or not to use atomic bombs be decided by you in the light of the consideration presented in this petition as well as all the other moral responsibilities which are involved.
The Truman administration did not adopt this recommendation.
>“a substance or invent a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale destruction that wars should thereby become altogether impossible”.
I don’t see Nobel as being entirely wrong here. The proliferation of nuclear weapons did ensure that the Cold War stayed mostly cold, and open conflict between nuclear powers remains rare and limited in scope. Sure, it didn’t end all war, but the world has been remarkably peaceful for a very long time. I can only hope it stays that way.
While we don’t have a counterfactual history for the post-WW2 decades, this interpretation seems at least plausible. At the same time, there were almost-catastrophic events in those decades that suggest that our timeline contains a good amount of luck. (Additionally, I also hope that there will not be a nuclear war in the future, but a situation in which several major powers are armed with nuclear weapons does not seem as stable to me as the Cold War was.)
Is there a pattern here? Do most technologies end up being used for war? Are most technologies which are used for war invented by people who didn’t know this or thought their invention would stop war because it’d make war too horrible?
Maybe! But there are 6 examples here, clearly selected for illustrating the relevant theme, that is good for a jumping off point for a larger & more comprehensive (or less selective) analysis, but an answer to such implicit questions it does not make!
There is a pattern, but it can be interpreted in multiple ways.
A lot of intelligent people are incredibly naive, or underestimate how dirty society is. Well, all people do until their early 20s or so, but intelligent people seem to be able to avoid disillusionment for longer. Also, the main reason people can work hard on anything is because they feel like it will lead to good results, but they vastly overestimate the positives and underestimate the negatives.
The same goes for LLMs and AGIs, and I hope this forum realizes so in time.
Though, I think the cognitive bias exists for a reason. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. Unreasonable man peristantly attempts to change the world. Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable man”. It’s also the case that the average person would rate themself at 7⁄10. Hofstadter’s law seems to apply to most estimations.
Business, and ideologies too seem to *depend* on optimism. The belief in positive change, and the eternal over-promising and under-delivering.
People rightly notice that you can we can make things better, but they rarely grasp that they’re not given the benefits. Those who make technology worth 4000$ are not going to sell it sold at 2000$, making everyone better off. The gap between the value we find in things, and the value we pay for it, will be exploited by companies until it almost disappears. They will sell it at 3950$, or sell it at 3500$ and fill it with advertisements (whatever makes it just barely worth it for the buyer) For as long as it’s a good deal, there’s more value to extract! And once 95% of the value has been extracted, the new technology only benefits everyone 5% of what it could have. (This pattern doesn’t apply when the technology is sufficiently easy to mass-produce, but even then, other zero-sum mechanics will kick in, and other cognitive biases prevent people from thinking about these)
The only reason the technology is “worth” $4000 is because people were willing to pay that in the first place. You as the consumer chose to capture the qualitative value it provides you at that price: if you were not willing to pay, the price would fall until you were (or the technology itself cannot be made more cheaply).
I was with you up until “by companies” (and generally agree with most of your post up until that point, I’m focusing on an area of disagreement). And your 5% estimate for consumer surplus seems far off what I experience. Two caveats which mean I may be misunderstanding:
1. People don’t sell “technology”, typically they sell the product of a technology (a good or service which is enabled to exist or be produced less expensively by some new knowledge or way of making things) and when I’m thinking of consumer surplus (“the value we find in things, and the value we pay for it”), I’m thinking of how much things are worth to me, relative to how much I have to pay for them, not how much the underlying production method is worth to the person who originally invented it or the factory-owner who uses it to set up a system for producing things. There are some edge cases where the value of a new technology can be monetized, like, patents are worth money and so people who invent a new technology can, by legal convention, sell the use of that technology/idea for a limited amount of time. But I think you’re not making the distinction between “technology” and “things typically sold to consumers”. Ideas are non-rivalrous (you knowing about and making use of an idea doesn’t inherently stop me from also knowing about and using that idea) unlike physical goods or personal services.
2. “(This pattern doesn’t apply when the technology is sufficiently easy to mass-produce”… a) as above, a technology is an idea about how to do things, so mass producing it seems like a category error. But if you mean that the idea that companies will extract 95% the value out of the goods and services they produce leaving end-consumers with only 5%… but this pattern doesn’t apply to mass produced goods or services… then I notice that most things are mass-produced, and thus most of my counter-examples to your point are excluded. I feel like I would if you had said “I have a theory about how the economy generally works, but it doesn’t apply to anything produced in the G7 countries, but it does apply to the economy in general”. And “things that aren’t mass produced, but are produced by companies rather than individuals” would be an even smaller section of the economy.
Maybe the reason I’m going “I don’t agree” is rooted in you thinking of technology differently than I do, but, if we’re talking about the consumer surplus for goods or services, I find that the price I pay for things is typically much, much lower than the value they provide to me (the price I would be willing to pay, if that’s what companies were charging, and still feel like I got some value out of the purchase). I actually think that the causality runs the other way—a lot of useful things don’t get produced because it’s hard for the inventors or producers to capture enough of the value to make it financially worthwhile for them, given competitive pressures. If an entrepreneur wants to produce a new thing that would be valuable to a consumer, they have to think “OK, I have talked to some people who say they would buy this at $1,000, and I can produce it in my garage for $900, but as soon as I produce it for $900, I have to consider that some large corporation is going to set up a factory producing it for $850, and the actual cost of the raw materials is $50, so competitive pressures will drive it down to maybe being sold for $50 plus a small margin over time, and if I can’t get the capital to be the person who produces it at that price, I’m not going to capture much of the value, and I’m taking a lot of risk to set up the production at $900 and quit my job, so probably not worth it.” And then, someone not thinking clearly about the competitive pressures starts a company producing the thing at $900, the new venture isn’t financially viable (the vast majority of new businesses fail within a couple years), and 5 years later consumers can buy a thing they typically value at $1,000 for $60.
A concrete example: When I was a kid, standard jeans cost $50 a pair, which was 3-4 hours work for me at the wage I made at the time. Now, 30 years later, I can get a standard pair of jeans for $15-20, which is 1⁄3 of an hour of work at my current wage, or 1 hour at my 30-years-ago wage. So even if it was the case that I had 0 consumer surplus for jeans 30 years ago and my wage hadn’t gone up, I’d have a 66% consumer surplus now. I know, jeans are mass produced, but, so are most things that aren’t public goods, where it’s even harder for the producers of those goods to capture the value (which is why governments have to pay for them). I tried to think of examples where the consumer surplus is low, and the only ones I could come up with quickly were potentially housing, and potentially art to put on my walls.
In general, there are goods available in the marketplace that cost more than I would value them, but I don’t have to buy them, so I don’t. And this is true of everyone. So generally, it should be the case that consumer surplus is always positive for any voluntary transactions that take place. And for companies selling to a mass market where there is competition (whether or not they’re mass producing) they have to set their prices as low as they can. Given that different people value various things different amounts (rather than everyone valuing everything the same) it’s not possible for companies to decide “this is how much everyone values this good, and so I can set my price at 95% of that and collect most of the value”. Say that price, if we averaged what everyone valued the good or service at, is $100 for a particular good or service. Some people in the market are going to value it at $5, and some are going to value it at $1,000, and so the company, to get as much volume as they can (and drive down unit costs) is going to price it at under $100, and most buyers are going to get a large consumer surplus.
What I have seen in the direction of reducing consumer surplus is moves by online sellers to price-discriminate (guessing that I will pay more for a good and charging me more for it, because I don’t see the same webpage that another person may see, or offering coupons and discounts with some friction, so that people who have more money than time get some of the value extracted, while people who are very price sensitive still get sold goods, but at a lower margin). Also, in an economy that wasn’t based on offering goods at set prices, but there was haggling over everything, sellers would be able to capture more of the value of their goods or services. So in subsections of the economy where buyer and seller negotiate price for each sale, I would expect the consumer surplus to be less. And I note that that applies to housing and (non-mass-produced) art.
I may be mistaken, but I don’t think these claims are supported by historical scholarship. The Byzantines did develop Greek fire but it likely contained petroleum rather than gunpowder.
I’m also not aware of any modern historians suggesting that Arabs or Indians independently invented gunpowder. Earlier European writers sometimes associated gunpowder with the broader “East,” which seems to have led to misunderstandings about its origins. In a similar same vein, medieval Europeans attributed “Arabic Numerals” to the Arab world despite them originating from India.
As for the Western Europeans, historical consensus supports it being a diffused technology from China (perhaps via the Mongols, especially given the timing of when it appears in the west), though I have heard occasional (and fringe) claims of independent development.
Finally, fulminated mercury is another explosive besides gunpowder that predates nitroglycerin.
Thanks for the correction. I think I got that list from this New Yorker profile: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1958/03/15/adventures-of-a-pacifist But it’s from, umm, 1958, and a bit of searching suggests that modern scholarship no longer supports any of that, and honestly I should have known better to use that without checking it. Regarding fulminated mercury, you’re clearly correct. I think I’ll revise to some wishy-washy “few explosives” language. (Though let me know if you think that’s still misleading.)
No problem dynomight. The history of technology as an academic subject has exploded in size and depth since the mid 20th century, I’d say as a rule of thumb, recentness matters more for it than many other fields of history. And yeah I think “few explosives” would be perfectly accurate.
You know, it does seem like maybe he was right here, sorta? Nuclear weapons do seem like the main reason why WW3 hasn’t happened yet.
That said, WW3 isn’t impossible, and if it were to happen nuclear weapons would make it much worse than all previous wars.
When you have more dakka, you use it, because more dakka.