Dwarkesh Patel: prediction

Transcript context

…Oh yeah. Think of a leather jacket, but how much more industrial effort went into making leather literally paper-thin like this. Huge amounts of industrial effort go into making the pages of such a book. My favorite example of this kind of distribution and diffusion taking longer than you would think for a very fundamental technology—well, this is now my favorite example, so my second favorite example—is oil. I interviewed Daniel Yergin, who wrote this big book about the history of oil. In the 1860s, Drake strikes oil in Pennsylvania. It’s in the 1910s that the car is invented, the internal combustion engine is put into a thing which you sell millions of copies of. Until then, oil is just used for kerosene, which is just for lighting. The actual gas is just thrown away. In fact, when the light bulb was invented, people were wondering whether Standard Oil was going to go bankrupt because the main use case had gone away. Oh, neat. I always think of Julius Caesar’s description of Britain when the Romans first get there. He says, “The people of Britain are so poor, they can’t afford to burn wood, so they burn rocks.” We know he’s talking about coal.…

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