I have nothing against tea and cinnamon, but, in my opinion, they are still not worth building an empire and drenching half the planet with blood. Of course, the British, Dutch, French, Belgians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Germans did not fight for tea alone: the colonies also had silver, and gold, and rare species of wood, pepper, silk and coffee. And yet this is strange: there was a 400-year period of conquest in history, a period of unprecedented technological progress and social change - and all this in order to sell luxury goods to aristocrats.
What's even stranger is that it was a pretty lousy period. The Middle Ages can hardly be called heaven, but the life of a medieval peasant was not hell either. The average life expectancy (for those who did not die in infancy) is more than 60 years old, relatively rare and not particularly massive wars, healthy compared to the modern diet. Plague and syphilis did not appear in Europe until almost the end of the Middle Ages, puritanical sexual taboos also emerged only in modern times, and besides, the peasant always had a community to rely on.
It's not too bad even compared to our days, but let's take a look at the first and second industrial revolutions. Half of Europe is covered in smog, 10-year-olds plow in factories for 14 hours, villages are overcrowded. In cities, there is a permanent pandemic, and before medicine capable of fighting it is still a couple of centuries. Clean drinking water costs decent money, and workers' food is so disgusting that the average person in the twenty-first century would rather starve to death. And this is the population of the conquerors . Those who were exterminated and enslaved by our guns and microbes had an even less pleasant fate.
- , , . — , , . — , . - , , .
I
, - . , . .
, , . - , , . , , XX .
, , .
. — “ ”, “- ”.
. , , . ( ) , , , .
, . , , . .
, . . , . , ( - - ) .
II
, . , , , . , ( “ ”, “ ”) .
-. , SpaceX. Strip, JUUL, Palantir, Airbnb, Epic Games, Instacart, Wish, UiPath, Robinhood, Coinbase, DoorDash, WeWork . , , , , , . : Google, Apple, Facebook Twitter. , .
. Google Google- Deep Mind, Facebook PyTorch. , Apple , - clang llvm. — , . , . , , .
computer science. ! , GPU. , , . , fps - World of Warcraft, — , .
, , . — . : , .
III
, . , . , , . , ; .
, . .
, , -, , , , , -. , SpaceX Deep Mind “” AirBnB.
, , XVI . , , . linux, llvm, rustc, “”, autograd, coq, , .
, . , — . - , .