Root Canals and Bill Gates

In Finding Nemo, there was a scene about a root canal surgery that absolutely terrified me:

This could just be me, but I spent a remarkable amount of my childhood worrying about root canals. Horror stories like these created a universal phobia that dentists suck and that’s why you should take care of your teeth.

Yet recently, I was thinking… when was the last time I thought about root canal surgery? It’s been years. I decided to do some digging. It turns out root canal surgery has kinda become a lovely experience! Sedatives and anesthetics are now given as pills instead of with facial masks. Procedures that used to take hours with multiple visits now take 30-60 minutes. This is thanks to recent advancements: rotary nickel-titanium files make cleaning and shaping easier. Adaptive apex locators measures root canal length that is more accurate and less invasive than radiology. Other innovations in digital imaging, endodontics, laser technology, and software have also scaled across dentistries globally.

To be honest, I don’t find anything in that last paragraph interesting… and that’s what makes it so interesting. A technological root canal boom has happened underneath my feet, and I had no idea! This is the essence of human progress: the largest improvements to life are typically slow, boring, and completely unseen.

In Bill Gates’ 1995 book, The Road Ahead, he wrote:

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” - Bill Gates

This quote always rocks the tech industry when a major event happens, and the AI boom is no exception. Even Apple executives are begrudgingly citing this, so there’s got to be something to it!

Gates wrote this during the dot-com boom of the mid-90s. Tech startups and mainstream news hyped the Internet as a life-changing overnight experience. Webvan promised online grocery delivery. Excite aimed to organize all the Internet’s content. General Magic built a handheld device that combined computing, communications, and organization.¹ Of course, we know of none of these companies today.² Although companies fail for many reasons, the core issue was a lack of infrastructure to support these services.

But through this failure, the infrastructure slowly, deliberately improved:

  • Early 90s: Conversations about “The Internet Highway” begin.
  • Mid 90s: The “highways” literally started by governments and companies with the installation of cable lines.
  • Late 90s: Internet accessibility leads to network effects between online creators and users.
  • Early 2000s: Network effects spurred economic incentive to improve broadband and cellular network speeds.
  • Mid 2000s: Faster networks introduced new use cases, like YouTube (streaming), social media (AJAX), and AWS (cloud).
  • Late 2000s: Streaming, AJAX, and cloud allowed for the scale of Webvan 2.0 (Instacart), Excite 2.0 (Google), and General Magic 2.0 (iPhone).

Key Takeaways

Don’t Panic: Beyond war and meteorites, very little can change our lives overnight. Such change requires investment, skilled labor, and repeated failure. Take solace in knowing you have no idea what this process will make the world look like in ten years.

Learn What’s Boring: Slow, boring, incremental progress is found in research papers and Discord channels. Get off the eye-grabbing, mainstream newsfeeds and into niche blogs and communities that are immersed in the boring. Personally, I enjoy Jack Clark’s Import AI as a source for the latest AI news.

Products are temporary, Platforms are forever: Nobody cares about the debut of a new platform. Rightfully so- a platform must prove itself as viable to the developers and users on top of it. Platforms take years, if not decades, to become successful. But, once that success is reached, you’ve changed the world. Countless AI startups will be created. Some will succeed, others won’t. Regardless, they will all be dumping money into Azure and AWS.

“When everyone is looking for gold, it’s a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.” - Mark Twain.

Footnotes

¹ There’s a brilliant documentary about General Magic. It’s free on YouTube!

² Don’t worry, basically all the employees joined future companies and got super rich.