The Frontier of Novelty Decreases
As you get older, the frontier closes in the sense that much more effort is needed for a small gain in novelty or knowledge. Whereas youth brought the novelty of going to another country for the first time, your mid-twenties can simulate reality from a photograph. Stuff there is not newer, nor better, nor do you feel as inclined to explore. I may see a picture of Hong Kong today and think: wow, crowded and humid, and should I go there one day I doubt the feelings and sentiments will differ much from what was initially thought.
I felt the frontier of youth close in my own life. I’ve been many places, understood different types of places and peoples. These were missions at the time which I have now completed. In closing one frontier in my life, I am closer to entering the actual frontier of this society.
Anything worthwhile I do now will have be the result of incremental work over a long period of time. I’d love to architect and design a house, build a city, or lead a nation (re-read that and was being overly optimistic/cocky, governance is hard). Yet I still am on the level of trading my time for money and salary, having yet to create a machine that can feed me so I can go on to do greater things.
Frontiers in history
Frontiers in historical development bring about great opportunity for people to make something of themselves. I can think of the internet age, China’s modernization, the European transition from landowners to traders, the discovery of the sparsely populated Americas, or from nomadic life to agricultural life. As frontiers close, we should expect decreases in meritocracy. Wealth becomes hereditary instead. Land is just transferred from generation to generation unless political power tries to break it with taxes, as is capital today. The fires that burn across forests: that too is a good analogy for reset and new growth that comes after war.
Labor and expertise/talent become worth less depending upon the environment. The environment changes quickly.
In our modern age: capital, network access and distribution, and homes in major cities are passed down.
The reason for this is that people are sort of stuck in place and societal position: if you are part of an agricultural society and world, leaving to join nomadic tribes doesn’t make sense. If you are a serf and the landlords have an agreement to limit mobility, there is nothing that can be done unless some frontier (the New World) opens up. If you live connected to the modern infrastructure of supermarkets and electricity and running water, it’s not so easy to jump back into an agricultural society much less a nomadic or hunter-gatherer society which barely exists anymore. Some people in this day and age do try to jump countries: but without bringing something of value plus the difficulty of language and network connections, they find they are stuck on the bottom again.
The core constraint is that a frontier brings about a disproportionately high reward for labor only if someone is early (willing to take on higher risk) compared to continuing to work the bottom of an existing world. Generally speaking, there are not new frontiers in the world, so the reward for labor in a non-frontier environment is often below that of the ability of one to sustain themselves. Go out into the wilderness and try to farm: you will starve to death compared to doing Uber and Doordash. Try to replace Google. Won’t you run out of money first? This keeps people stuck in their current society.
Investment in young people is like telling them: here is an opportunity to audition yourself for a chance at the higher levels and give you enough capital to overcome that initial activation energy.
Sometimes, it comes with a price. People who inherit their forefathers’ worlds often become haughty: they see the accumulations of their ancestors and like to believe it is their own. It is this sort of machine that keeps building and creating wealth. They see people coming to work for them and think highly of their own club for drawing masses from all over. This arrogance drives away the truly talented and not subservient: they exist on the fringes to create their own organizations or ally with other barbarians. It is a difficult life and many do not really succeed, but some do. Rome, in the meantime, stands sitting and awaiting a worthy challenger.
Are there new frontiers?
We are coming upon the closure of some major frontiers: globalization and the internet. The AI frontier is ongoing but will peak soon as well, but the creation of products from it should last a while.
My questions at the moment are: will we see any new frontiers in our upcoming decade?
The problem is that these things often build up in secret for years. I first knew of AI in 2021 and it seemed like a nonsensical chatbot, but the Transformers paper was significant in 2017 and decades of research were made even before that.
A frontier is not exactly spending a disproportionate amount of time to eek out a slightly above average result. This suggests the frontier is already starting to close. Frontiers are often man against nature or man against weaker groups. It is the accumulated human constructions and social norms that cause frontiers to close. That being said, what is a frontier for one person based on their skills may be a wall for another.