This is a nice story, but it doesn’t feel realistic to treat the city of the future as such an all-or-nothing affair. Wouldn’t there be many individual components (like the merchant’s initial medical tonic) that could be stand-alone technologies, diffusing throughout the world and smoothly raising standards of living in the usual way? In this sense, even your “optimistic” story seems too pessimistic about the wide-ranging, large-scale impact of the scholar’s advice.
The world of the story would still develop quite differently than in real history, since they’re:
getting technologies much faster than in real history
getting technologies without understanding as much of the theory behind them. (although is this really true? I feel like, if we had access to such a scholar, it might be easiest for the scholar to tell us about fundamental theories of nature, rather than laboriously transcribing the design for each and every inscrutable device. so it’s possible that an oracle would actually differentially advance our theoretical understanding—consider how useful an oracle would be in the field of modern pharma development, where we have many effective drugs whose exact mechanisms of action are still unknown!)
This and other effects (like the obvious power-concentration aspect of whoever controls access to the oracle’s insights) would probably produce a very lopsided-seeming world compared to actual modernity. But I don’t think it would end up looking like either of the two endings to your story.
(Of course, your more poetic endings fit the form of a traditional fable much better. “And then the city kicked off an accelerating techno-industrial singularity” doesn’t really fit the classic repertoire of tragedy, comedy, etc!)
This is a nice story, but it doesn’t feel realistic to treat the city of the future as such an all-or-nothing affair. Wouldn’t there be many individual components (like the merchant’s initial medical tonic) that could be stand-alone technologies, diffusing throughout the world and smoothly raising standards of living in the usual way? In this sense, even your “optimistic” story seems too pessimistic about the wide-ranging, large-scale impact of the scholar’s advice.
The world of the story would still develop quite differently than in real history, since they’re:
getting technologies much faster than in real history
getting technologies without understanding as much of the theory behind them. (although is this really true? I feel like, if we had access to such a scholar, it might be easiest for the scholar to tell us about fundamental theories of nature, rather than laboriously transcribing the design for each and every inscrutable device. so it’s possible that an oracle would actually differentially advance our theoretical understanding—consider how useful an oracle would be in the field of modern pharma development, where we have many effective drugs whose exact mechanisms of action are still unknown!)
This and other effects (like the obvious power-concentration aspect of whoever controls access to the oracle’s insights) would probably produce a very lopsided-seeming world compared to actual modernity. But I don’t think it would end up looking like either of the two endings to your story.
(Of course, your more poetic endings fit the form of a traditional fable much better. “And then the city kicked off an accelerating techno-industrial singularity” doesn’t really fit the classic repertoire of tragedy, comedy, etc!)