S‑CURVES a field guide to technology adoption · 1825–2026

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan

In a shocking twist, the prompter works in VC.

dubious numbers and selection/survival bias.

why no tulip S-curve? no crypto "currency" S-curve, just a bunch of hogwash? no AR/VR? no aviation?

citations do not point to specific datasets, just vague places where thousands of datasets can be found.

sadly this is so mangled by the clankers that wrote it, it's not helpful.

Neal Stephenson's Anathem imagines a punishment in his dream monastery as a book you have to memorize with subtly incorrect information -- I'm sure reading clanker-interpreted trend charts with random ordering would qualify in his mind.

Requesting human attention demands demonstrating human effort[1]. Slop at its worst: obscuring actual insight. The main one being that there are no exponential growth curves, no hockey-sticks, they're all logistic s-curves at most. Sure, there is a lot happening right now, but although technologies such as trains reshaped society, society did not come to only consist of railways.

[1] https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/

Seems to be fully AI generated, so most data is likely wrong and hallucinated

It feels like this whole site was manufactured to convince us that generative AI is a rocketship right now? While we might be basing a rocketship right now, to draw that line up at this point is total bullshit. the pc is real. the internet is real. the smartphone is real. its hard for me to even wrap my head around how you compare generative AI to these things. At this point I don't think we are far enough time to allow hindsight to let us see what the "thing" is that we should be tracking. Its not "generative ai"