I'd like to add my perspective as a struggling inventor. I can't speak to conditions 50k years ago, but a number of the challenges listed are still pretty relevant, and I've had to justify "why are things taking so long" to my friends and family enough times to pay close attention to this.
The big factors I see are: 'poverty trap', 'crude hacks', and 'full-time craftsman'. These interact. For example, most people need a day job. Even in R&D shops, day jobs are largely concerned with marginal improvements. I spent 12 years working as an R&D physicist, but I had to do my inventions on my own time because they weren't relevant to the incremental improvement products I was paid to develop. It's very hard to spend time working on a home run when your competition is hitting a thousand singles, and that is especially true with regards to possible uses of your time for paying the bills.
The craftsman thing is a big deal. I suck as a craftsman, mainly because I'm usually doing something for the first time. Need to weld it? Guess I'm learning how to weld. Need to polish it? Time to learn again. MATLAB is too slow? Hello C++. Oh, hey, now electronics are surface mount? Time to learn how to solder all over again. So, unless you are inventing something in a field you have specialized in as a craftsperson, everything you build kinda sucks. Then you have to figure out - is the problem with the idea or the implementation? Is there a different implementation which would be easier to build? What techniques do I have to learn to do that?
The workaround for this is to work with specialized craftspeople. Unfortunately, this adds different challenges. Now you have to pay them ('poverty trap') or convince them it's worthwhile (I didn't see 'social proof' on the list, but lets put it under value). Now you have to manage a project, which is a different skill set than inventing something in the first place. Sometimes, it's better going back to being your own craftsman.
In modern times, then you get to go to commercialization, which is the barrier which kills most inventions because the inventor rarely has the skills to do this right, and the people with the skills aren't usually incentivized properly to do it for them.
So, in short, I see the biggest problems for inventors not in the mental realm, but in the social. Inventors generally need help, and it is not until after the invention is a success that people see the value.
The keywords there are “aimless” and “incremental”. I think those properties are correctly valued in any fast-paced workplace.
I think one of the things that career inventors need to overcome is selling themselves. Often the fun part is in the work of inventing, but conveying the value of the process is just as important and less straightforward.
Did you even read his post? He explicitly stated that the multi-role problem is what is killing most inventions. If everyone would have to be his own salesman- there wouldnt be any inventors at all- just people trying to sell each other rocks for berries.
What is needed is a inventor currency- that allows for a exchange of services and favours, without it being abused as a source of cheap labour.
We see this happen in ICO-land especially. A lot of ideas are being marketed with absolutely zero substance or scientific innovation behind them.
Innovators like Berners-lee, Shawn Fanning, Satoshi Nakamoto, etc. plant seeds which grow into trees. Businessmen, lawmen, and psychology-manipulators fight over who gets to pick the fruit, sometimes they destroy the tree in the process. Sometimes, they even say that the fruit is not allowed to exist.
This is a massive inequity in power, and it's going to change soon. "Management" is the enemy of innovation. I've stopped looking at what old, rich, white and asian men are doing, and started looking more at what youth are doing.
Great example. If they hadn’t had a cycle shop that generated enough income to develop a plane, while simultaneously not requiring too much of their time, they wouldn’t have been able to do it.
Someone smarter than me noted that most science fiction has badly missed the mark of what the present and near future will look like b/c the assumption was that power sources would trend towards zero cost ("too cheap to meter") and that this would enable all sorts of interesting world altering gizmos's like jetpacks, flying cars, physics defying spacecraft etc.
What actually happened is that communication density exploded upward (pony express, telegraph, radios, phones, industrial printing, computers, etc.) at the same time that communication cost plummeted (aka I'm paying a flat rate for internet access and video chatting with people all over the globe).
And I think this is still the case, that we generally still look down on communications as a kind of lesser technology compared to power gizmos. When if anything it should be the opposite, that the ability to communicate so much more effectively across all of humanity has smeared the ideas and inventions around much faster and more thoroughly than anyone really considers.
Why did things take so long? Because everything had to be individually re-invented, we had no shoulders of giants.
It's not just power sources vs communications. People always assume that the future will simply be like present only more so.
After two world wars, people assumed the future would be wars of tremendous destruction.
When aviation was growing fast, people assumed the future would be flying everything.
During the space race, people assumed the future would be space everything.
During the growth of nuclear power, people assumed the future would be atomic powered everything.
This fails to match reality, because the future doesn't arrive as if we are barreling down a highway at an ever increasing speed. Advances tend to be a left turn down a road you couldn't reach before. Rather than building ever faster jets, we went to space. Rather than going further into space, we built communication satellites etc...
Our current 'Internet' age will be no different. The 'next big thing' will not be Internet v2, but it will be something that could only exist with the internet as a prerequisite.
> People always assume that the future will simply be like present only more so.
Thanks for your thought. It reminded me a little bit about an interview with peter thiel where he responded to a question about the future. I guess popular culture in tech moves past ideas rather quickly and generally seems to jump from trend to trend until realizing the value of a trend.
> Having external thinking tools is a big deal. Modern
> ‘human intelligence’ relies a lot on things like writing
> and collected data, that aren’t in anyone’s brain.
Here's a way to think about it. Imagine human progress as the amplitude of a wave. That wave oscillates forward through time by being passed on from one person to the next. Each person can add their tiny nudge to the wave when it reaches them, increasing its amplitude a little. Over time, that resonance means the wave grows and grows.
But before language, writing, drawing, etc. every time the wave passed from one human to the next, some of the amplitude was lost. In other words, the wave was damped. It doesn't take much damping for the wave to never grow beyond a certain amplitude.
Each new communication technology increases the efficiency that we can pass knowledge from one person to the next and reduces that damping friction. Even a tiny improvement here compounds exponentially as the wave resonates through time.
Now, with the Internet, we've made it incredibly easy to preserve and share information. I think the next advance for us is going to be dealing with the fact that we've made it equally easy to share things that aren't true or helpful. Worse, many of those unfacts prey on our cognitive biases and are more appealing and frequently shared.
It seems that the nudge from each individual can either contribute to the resonance or detract (constructive vs destructive interference).
There are many ways this can unfold. For example, groups of people with similar values, mindsets, or skills can much more easily manifest significant constructive interference.
As you note, the speed/frequency of the wave seems much faster now with our new communication technologies. These changes, along with the increased scale of human population, introduce new patterns for both constructive and destructive interference that we need to understand and handle.
Of course, if we try to solidify the metaphor further... this wave is likely to have enormous dimensionality and be composed of components that would absurdly difficult to even begin measuring. But it's a great metaphor and certainly got me thinking.
Also recommend this as a follow-on. I think it's an important point, and also well presented. The anecdotes make it memorable but it's concise where it matters.
After I read this last year it changed the way I interacted and observed things around me for a while. Poking/prodding more, and asking more "what/how" questions.
I like to think that inventions/concepts/idea have a life of their own. They interact, reproduce, mutate. They grow around themselves bubbles of compatible ideas. Sometimes they compete to kill other ideas.
When viewed this way as a complex system, it become more easy to understand their behavior as emergent properties of the system. Systems can come to equilibrium, then won't move anymore. They can also take some time to reach equilibrium, traversing full of saddle-points landscapes. Systems that have reached equilibrium are not interesting anymore as they are not thriving, in the concept ecosystem this is the equivalent of being dead. As long as there are alive, these systems are subjected to Darwinian evolutions, which would explain the tendency for systems which take a long time to converge.
But interesting systems (turing complete) can also exhibit chaotic behavior, and knowing when they will crash can't be predicted (halting problem). Any biologist know that ecosystems are fragile and can be pushed either side of the frontier of chaos.
I also like to think of inventions/concept as numbers, which can be factored, multiplied and added. Sometimes you get a new prime number (or was it there all along :) ).
There is a chapter on acetylene lamps I read. There was maybe 50-75 years of development by different companies and inventors trying to solve a bunch of issues with a frankly simple device. Easy enough to build a lamp the slowly drips water on to calcium carbide and burns the acetylene, that works on the bench.
Now build one that will work reliably when the miner dropped it, cleaned and refiled with water from murky puddle, in the dark 500 feet below ground.
About not having invented anything: it's harder to invent something novel today simply because so much has already been invented and knowledge of it is available.
Centuries ago, it was easier to think of things to invent (we should be able to fly, to stay under water longer, to copy books faster, to notate music… ). It still took a lot of work to actually realize the invention (which only could be done by people wealthy enough to dedicate the time or get patronage from a wealthy source).
Today, we've run low on the scope of reasonably easy to invent things that are actually valuable. All the obvious "wish we could X" things have been done or are nigh impossible for any one person or small team to figure out (or flat out impossible). Innovation in areas like AI or medicine or battery tech — that stuff is all being actively worked on and requires massive funding of teams of advanced specialists. We're not going to see some person just invent something around these things the way multiple people independently invented forms of rope in prehistory.
This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing.
There are plenty of inventions yet to make, from complex AI enabled devices down to the simple mundane items that make daily life slightly easier. I founded a company based on the latter that is ticking over nicely.
By saying that it is harder to invent things now shows you have fallen into one of the traps that the author highlights:
> If you have never seen rope, it actually doesn’t occur to you that rope would come in handy, or to ask yourself how to make some.
You have never seen the thing you need to invent so it takes either a leap of inspiration or a concerted effort to sit down and think of something new to solve a problem you have, chances are you will get their iteratively over a long time and not really see what you have made as "an invention".
Ideation isn't some spark that hits you, ideas need to be thought about and created with effort.
>This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing.
Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's also wrong now.
And there is such a thing as "low hanging fruit".
We have absolutely no contract with the universe or nature that guarantees us that there's "always more to invent", even less so that "the possibilities keep increasing".
> Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's also wrong now.
That is absolutely true. HOWEVER, if one notices that those in the past have made the same observation as oneself but were wrong every time, one would be wise to VERY carefully reexamine one's own position. This is good, solid evidence that one might be mistaken
are you calling inventing flight low hanging fruit? I'd bet even after given the answer and reading up on wikipedia, you would struggle building a plain from scratch.
its not harder to invent things, you just dont know how to do it. its not a problem on you, I couldnt invent anything myself. if anything, we are in a golden age, much like people ~1900 were when it comes to invention. the scripting languages, algorithms, computing power at my finger tips gives me incredible power.
sadly, I didnt think of making a crypto currency ~2009. I didnt think of creating a ride sharing service, selfie drones, or fidget spinners. well actually I did create a fidget spinner with my roller blade bearings back in the early 2ks, but I didnt think anything of it.
point is, we take for granted all the stuff that is available to us now, and there are plenty of stuff (even low hanging fruit) to invent, its just very hard.
I think a lot of people think of inventions but don't have the motivation or resources to execute - and someone else creates the thing, possibly with roots deep in the past. I remember reading a magazine article (maybe in Popular Science) about the Peltier effect when I was in high school and thinking it could/should be used for cooling CPUs. In practically no time, the Power Macintosh 8100/110 came out, using such a cooler. It may not have been the first, but it was the first I was aware of, and it made me irrationally feel like someone stole my idea. A year or two later, my boss at my first job asked me to create, essentially, eBay. I read some academic articles on computerized auctions and gave it up as too complicated.
One thing that made a great impression on me was reading an old Dr. Dobbs journal (I think from the 70s) in which someone was angrily responding to Bill Gates. Gates had said that hobbyists generally steal their software, and of course that pissed people off. The letter writer said if you want to be paid for your software you should bundle it with hardware. So with hindsight, Gates became a billionaire not because he had a unique idea, but because he recognized the value of something lots of people knew and executed it.
Thinking of things is infinitely easier than sifting through all the noise and then committing 100% to making something specific a reality.
Flying is low hanging fruit, i can explain the core concepts of how it works to a 8-year old child with a paper airplane in 10 minutes. Execution is still tricky but you know that it can eventually be done with enough effort, material and machinery. AI or crypto-currencies though, is har to explain even on a high level to my computer science educated friends.
I think the final chapter, Orders of Inovation, in the original post is on the right track. Today there are less of the first order inventions but there will be more and more of the third order inventions that build upon existing inventions.
The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions?
If this is the case, why have we seen an explosion in inventions? Is there some critical turning point? When is the critical point? It's a lot of speculation.
As depressed and lonely as I am, I live because I believe the future is worth living for, mainly because there's stuff left to do. If there's nothing left to do, we may as well all die today.
>The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions?
I'm saying that the previous assertion is more religious speaking than valid reasoning.
We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it.
Some fundamental types of new knowledge do increase the space of inventions (e.g. the discovery of fire, or the discovery of electricity, or the discovery of dna, etc), but not all.
>The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions?
If we are just living because there's stuff to invent, we might as well, as this means inventions are inherently useless (else what we have already invented would be enough to make life worth). Life should be celebrated (or not) for itself, not because we can create new gizmos and find new natural laws.
Suppose you have a list of N things you know, and we define an invention as being any subset of those things. There would be 2^N possible combinations, or the size of the set of all subsets, or the size of the set of all inventions.
That's my toy-definition of an invention. Not very good, but it's a start. Let's take it further and say that each item in the list of knowledge is actually a basis vector, and that an invention is simply a vector in the space spanned by the basis set.
> We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it.
In my model, I will prove this is impossible. The dimension before finding the new vector is N. Suppose we find a new knowledge vector k'. If it is truly new, then it will be orthogonal to the other knowledge vectors, and the new basis will span N+1 dimensions, meaning the "space of inventions" increased. The only way for the dimension to remain the same is if k' could be written as a linear combination of k_i, which would imply that our assumption that k' is new was false.
> We have absolutely no contract with the universe or nature that guarantees us that there's "always more to invent", even less so that "the possibilities keep increasing".
Think of human knowledge as a circle. The edge of that circle is the edge of human knowledge. Inventing a thing makes a little bump in the circle that pushes the edge outwards. The bigger the circle, the bigger the circumference, the more possibilities to invent something.
That's just a metaphor, and exactly of the type which GP argued against.
To illustrate GP's point metaphorically: Think of human knowledge as discovered areas on a map. The dark areas are what is still unknown to us. Inventing a thing makes a little spot on the map visible. The more you have discovered, the less you still have to discover.
(And to extend it a bit: Of course you can make the already discovered areas more detailed, even to levels unthought of when initially discovered. But as discoveries pile up, there probably won't be many 'woah, there's a whole continent here!' moments anymore.)
I don't have a strong opinion in this debate. I just wanted to provide a counter-point to your metaphor.
You are both right. Animal reproduction is exponential as long as resources are freely available -- the more animals you have, the more they can mate. Like the parent post, the greater the perimeter of your knowledge, the greater the boundary you can now explore from.
Once animals hit the resource limit of the environment, the exponential curve flattens out. Like you note, the more of the map you cover, the less there is left to explore.
The interesting question is how big is the map and how close are we to reaching it's boundaries?
Personally, I think it is effectively infinitely large. If you consider "discovery" to include new combinations of existing things, then you're talking about permutations. If our universe consisted only of 52 playing cards, there would still be 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different ways for us to discover that they can be shuffled together.
Ok, now postulate that we can only invent things on the border of that map (because of technological limitations). Then you'll get a very complex dynamics, of the invention possibilities increasing and decreasing, some times fast, and changing almost unpredictably.
La Bruyère in 1690 wrote a very famous phrase "Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes et qui pensent." (Everything has been said, and we're too late after 7000 years of human existence and thought.)
I can't find the quote right now but Aristotle complained once that the level of comfort attained in his era and city was so high nobody would ever conceivably want more.
It's fairly obvious that the breadth of human ingenuity is infinite and that there are orders of magnitude more inventions to make than have been made.
Not all inventions are useful; one could argue humanity would be much better without television, Facebook or nuclear bombs for example. But one just needs to look around to see how our world is inadequate and broken.
Take transportation: today we use huge metal cages (cars) or metal tubes (planes) to move a bunch of ape-like creatures from one place to another, at great expense and risk. Why can't we fly? We say we fly when we're in a plane, but we don't; we are flown. I want wings (or something) that let me take off and land using my body's energy, just like a bird.
I don't know if individual flying can be achieved using genetic engineering or by building a contraption that one can operate with his arms or legs, etc., but I do know that cars / planes / boats / etc. are a ridiculous and laughably overkill solution to the problem of personal transportation.
Well, leaving aside the problem of taking off (which today is improving thanks to electric motors), I guess one could say that gliders[1] are the closest we can have to human-powered flight and it's highly efficient in terms of energy consumption
> It's "not very good" not because people are this or that...
Denying reality is for daydreaming; it will not get anything invented. Sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, but it isn't actually magic.
If you want actual wings, that's just one of those problems that need absurd amounts of money and brains to figure out. Genetic engineering is certainly a lot more difficult than inventing Nitrocellulose.
I'm aware of the existence of bicycles. They are not as useful -- or fun -- as the ability to fly would be.
I don't understand your point at all. When something sounds far-fetched / difficult / expensive it means it's actually more interesting rather than less.
My point is that this thread started with the assertion that all easy inventions are already gone and it takes a lot of effort to invent something novel. You countered with flying via genetic engineering, which to me doesn't sound like something reasonably simple that hasn't been invented yet.
Oh, ok. I was concurring with the comment that said "There are plenty of inventions yet to make" and not really voicing an opinion about their difficulty.
However, after rereading it, I disagree with the top comment that said that "Centuries ago, it was easier to think of things to invent".
It's never easy to think of something to invent. Finding the problem, even just thinking there might be a problem where noone sees any, is a big part of any invention.
Also, in the past, inventions required a much larger leap of thinking than today. When we speak today about growing wings on creatures born without it, we kind of accept the idea, because we know it's already possible to grow eyes on flies' legs for example.
But inventing the steam engine, or disproving "spontaneous generation" and inventing vaccines, sound to me much more impressive because those people went where no one had dared go before them.
Easy is relative. So is "invention". I invent things most days of my life, but they aren't that novel.
People are crazy inventive and always have been. But today, it is far easier than it ever was before to learn about the best inventions others already figured out instead of reinventing the wheel.
New inventions are likely to require more specialized training. The days of a Benjamin Franklin inventing bifocals despite not being primarily an expert in optometry are likely over.
> I founded a company based on the latter that is ticking over nicely.
I'm curious: How much does your company's product rely on materials that either didn't exist 20 years ago or were significantly more expensive to procure in small quantities 20 years ago?
I ask because I have a hypothesis that a lot of things that seem like low-hanging-fruit that should have been invented earlier actually depend on the abundance of materials and manufacturing processes that only became common 20ish years before the invention.
The product would not have been possible 20 years ago as the fans would have konked out due to the heat, and the plastic would have yellowed and gone brittle also due to the heat.
So we needed materials science improvements to make the product viable. I don't think I was advocating for low hanging fruit but instead progress in various fields allow other things to be invented, some of them I guess become low hanging fruit.
Heat resistant suggests a higher melting point, it is not necessarily flame retardant. The yellowed plastics on old consumer electronics aren't specifically heat resistant.
Actually, my personal experience includes a ton of examples of:
1. I realize the need for something and envision a novel invention
2. I discover upon research that it has already been invented
So, I did have the thought about the "thing I've never seen" and could pursue inventing it. But it's a big world and far easier than ever before to learn from others.
I have known people who went all the way, finished inventing something and got it patented, and then I (as a patent critic) have doubts that it's truly novel and then discover, to the surprise of my inventor friend, that it actually was invented before but was obscure and they hadn't heard about it.
There's tons of room for invention still, but it's comparably much reduced from the past for all the basic stuff and far easier to discover existing inventions. It's just NOT anything like it used to be.
It's a very long way from putting a 1500mm lens in a pocket camera, but it looks promising. Of course, it could end up being the fusion reactor of optics: always a half decade out.
I've recently gotten into amateur astronomy. The modern high-end telescope eyepieces, usually low-power with a really wide FOV, often now have 7 or more lenses and can weigh 2 pounds.
This research looks amazing. It could change the game once again, enabling even higher quality and wider FOVs in a broad range of focal lengths (from what I've read, there has been a lot of improvement in the past few decades already). Probably won't be cheap though.
Wish we could be happy, and not destroy the planet and the future crawling over each other in an ever increasing red queen race on the slippery side of a cliff of despair.
We have only allowed a very narrow band of 'solutions' to be explored: those that involve 'doing-making-selling-competing. We have had very minor controls on this process, and even the little we have on that side is constantly besieged or selectively weaponized as there is no barrier between 'the game' and 'the meta-game'. For example, any solution to a problem that involves abstinence, for instance for very real problems such as climate change or the obesity crisis, is impossible due to the way we have structured 'reward'.
And I don't know about battery tech or medicine, but most certainly in AI breakthroughs are very much the work of individuals and do not need massive teams or funding. It is again our 'market-economy', with inane 'IP wars' that seem to stifle these works from being brought to fruition
> For example, any solution to a problem that involves abstinence
There is a famous french comedian who said "when you think about it, the only thing needed for this not to be sold... is that nobody buys it".
That pretty much sums up the solution to most problems of the human race. You know that killing thing ? What if we stopped doing it ? You know that unhealthy habit ? That immoral product ? Etc.
Disciplining yourself to not eat too much chocolate is hard enough. So collectively asking all humans to agree on one particular point of discipline....
The problem is that individual rational optimization can and does lead to collective deterioration. In the abstract: If a given adoption has an individual utility of +1, and a collective detriment of -0.01, then for each rational individual actor in non small populations the decision to adopt is a net improvement even though the resulting utility for all is far below 0. This is why the old excuse of 'vote with your wallet' is nonsense.
You indicate rightly that this is a 'hard problem'. Especially because it goes against the new 'geocentrism' of 'market' dogma. But it being 'hard' should not be a ticket to just giving up.
No, I to think he's saying that -0.01 applies to everyone. Each individual choice is actually causing a loss of 80 million in utility (vs a gain of 1), but that loss is mostly borne by other people, so they are individually better off making that choice.
I can image a lot of obvious things that still could be invented like beaming, real hoverboards, holodecks and so on. Trying to invent any of this may seem preposterous to us as they are seemingly impossible. But these are only as impossible to us now as driving without horses or sailing the seas without sails have seem impossible three hundred years ago.
And neither cars nor steamboats have been invented by single individual. The "reasonably easy to invent things that are actually valuable" mostly have a very complicated history of trials and errors, tinkering and thinking and imagination from many groups and individuals.
Try to create your own lightbuld or try to isolate a mile long cable for the underground transport of electricity. Try to sell any of these to someone who has never heart of them and lacks the infrastracture for using them. In the hindsight these may seem "reasonable easy to invent things that are actually valuable". But seriously, nothing really new has ever been easy.
But now there's so much more that you can do alone.
Write an app, and you've made a new tool instantly usable by any person on earth.
Come up with a simple device and 3d print it.
Lack skills to do any of that - instantly hire unlimited number of experts. Lack knowledge? Access it instantly.
If we're talking about simple low hanging fruit inventions that can be made by a single person, the search space is much larger than the stuff you can do with your bare hands alone in the forest.
What you describe is the difficulty to be creative. You need to try a lot of things and it takes time.
It's the same now than it was then.
What's changed is that, with the same creative power, as an individual, you could do more then.
You can carve a wheel alone in the wood. It's hard, but as a single individual with only natural resources, you can.
A kid in china, or a grandpa in west africa can do it.
To code a revolutionary AI today, you need a lot of per-requisites: electricity, computer, internet, access to knowledge, education and a looooooot of time to practice.
Even if you are the most creative person in the world, from all centuries included. You can't do it in the wood. You will not see somebody in Mali do it. A kid is unlikely to be able to do it.
Because being capable of creative the concept in your head is not enough. The stuff you could do with what anybody had at hand is gone.
Making your own rope is easy with some trial and error. You just take a bunch of stringy things and twist them together to make a stronger stringy thing.
The twisting bit takes some finesse, and obviously you won't be making nylon rope with your bare hands, but making a grass rope is child's play.
Making a wheel, once you have the concept of a wheel, is pretty damn easy too. If you want a stone wheel, take a large stone and chip away until it resembles a wheel. If you want a wooden wheel, take a large piece of wood and whittle away until you have a wheel.
I think that this sort of perspective is (at best) a-historical. I have absolutely no clue how difficult it would be to actually conceptualize "rope" or "wheel" without any of my modern knowledge.
The saying that 'hindsight is 20/20' would seem to be particularly true at the scale of early human invention and civilization.
Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!
This comment (by my interpretation) implies that the process is difficult. I agree with other comments stating the concept is difficult, but the process for those two inventions is quite manageable - even if you are "alone and naked in the woods".
Exactly. The invention isn’t the physical object, it’s the idea - the realisation that a certain class of objects/processes can be useful in unexpected and open-ended ways.
Wheels are almost useless in dense forests that have no roads, for obvious reasons. So why would anyone waste a day or two making one?
You can't make a useful wheel out of a single large block of wood. It will dry out and crack. Wooden wheels are made of several pieces to minimize this problem.
IMHO this is the point 4. the author is pointing out:
"Posing the question is a large part of the work. If you have never seen rope, it actually doesn’t occur to you that rope would come in handy, or to ask yourself how to make some."
Sorry @quadrangle, I would go towards an opposite opinion than yours :) I have never in my life been in such a time when inventing would be as easy as now: It's so easy to communicate through internet to find people and skills to fill the ones I'm missing. From crazy idea to proof of concept is pretty straight forward.
For example if you have invented something including electronics:
You have no knowledge of it? PCB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board) knowledge -> buy some from freelance.net. Basic component drawing with pen and paper is OK to ask a quota for. And when you want to build the PCBs -> alibaba.
And proof of concepts can be built even with more simple parts, such as Arduino, piece of metal can, etc.
I agree that there's tons of room and lots of things that enable such novel inventions today in certain spaces.
I was focusing on the bad hindsight that tries to assert that because we see inventions as obvious in hindsight, we should realize how non-obvious they were originally, in the same way that new inventions today are non-obvious.
I think tons of inventions are obvious, both then and now. The hard work to make a good rendition, spread the knowledge to others etc. is just different now than before. People have reinvented most inventions multiple times because the inventions are obvious enough. And still today, there's tons of obvious enough inventions — people imagine Apps that do things no app yet does. Bringing the invention to fruition and to market is harder.
But in the past, it was hard to learn that someone else had also invented the thing you're inventing. That's easier now, and easy enough to stop you from reinventing it in the first place (unless you're one of those self-centered startup people who delusionally believes that whatever your idea is must be novel and just skips doing the research to see what exists already).
The invention of "rope" is the invention of a manmade object that can create a strong and flexible connection between two objects.
Nylon rope is an innovation that progressed from grass rope. It should not be qualified as an "invention" in and of itself, as it is functionally the same as grass rope, it just does the job of rope better.
I'd go further. Nylon as a material was invented and then the current rope tech was improved by it. Innovation stemmed from the fact that we now have a stronger rope and can use it for stuff that was not possible before.
If I recall correctly, the original impetus for nylon was replacing the natural isoprene rubber in tires, to remove the necessity of rubber plantations as a strategic military asset. This resulted in neoprene. Then DuPont decided to expand the project to explore uses for other novel polymers.
The inventor actually committed suicide, partly because he thought he was a one-hit wonder.
Neoprene was invented in 1930. Nylon 6-6 was invented in 1935. Carothers killed himself in 1937. Nylon was first used in toothbrush bristles in 1938, and rolled out to nylon stockings in 1939. Nylon production was then diverted into war materiel until 1945, which was when people started rioting over shortages of nylon stockings.
Who knows what might have happened to polymers technology if antidepressant medications had been commercially available and known to physicians in the two year window between 1935 and 1937? That seems like an odd dependency, but the inventor of a notable technology failed to invent other notable things because he had severe and suicidal depression. So it isn't just as simple as roads needing chariots and chariots needing roads, like the article mentions. Sometimes the prerequisites are strange and unpredictable--like the inventor had to visit a zoo featuring a particular animal species during their childhood, or they had to drive a car in a climate with cold winters.
The more things we have, and know about, and the more people move around and collaborate, the easier it is to satisfy those prerequisites.
I agree that things that "seem" easy have been invented but I doubt the transistors we put in everything today would have been seen as easy in 1900. I think CRISPR alone has near infinite possibility and that is just one invention. Quantum computers, carbon fiber, battery technology, etc. are all just in their infancy and will spawn whole new industries.
Inventions are motivated by problems, and we still have lots of them. We sorely need cheap sustainable energy, cheap drugs, artificial organs, more efficient transportation, denser batteries, and that's just stuff off the top of my head. Some of that stuff will entail using existing technology, buy much of it will require new inventions.
Many ideas that seem easy to invent only seem so in retrospect. The article repeatedly points out that inventing rope isn't obvious.
Inventing rope isn't obvious, but it's something a single individual can do. You don't need a team of people that each has studied some field for twenty years and a brilliant idea, you just need a brilliant idea. Inventing a device to cheaply store energy at grid scale is not something a single person can do, ever.
Inventing a better battery is something a single person can do in the lab. I worry that you are conflating inventing things and the engineering of scaling them out. Scaling things almost never was doable by one person, but the initial seed was and usually is.
A lot of money has been poured into battery technology over the last decade or two. We don't have much to show for it. That makes me believe that inventing a better battery is not as simple as it might seem. Coming up with a terrific chemistry is one thing, finding something that is can be manufactured at a good price is something very different.
You can make your own graphene with some charcoal and sticky tape. Graphene is an amazing material, but making it industrially useful is extremely hard.
This seems a bit myopic. The Earth receives less than one hundred billionth of the energy being dumped into space by the sun. Of the incredibly small portion the Earth does receive, we barely use any of it. There is plenty of energy available. We just have to harness it.
Don't get into victim-blaming. Where bicycling is prioritized in the development planning (e.g. Netherlands, where it's also quite flat), people bike all the time.
There are powerful entities who throw their weight around in both policy and propaganda to promote the wasteful forms of transportation.
Today, we've run low on the scope of reasonably easy to invent things that are actually valuable. All the obvious "wish we could X" things have been done or are nigh impossible for any one person or small team to figure out
I disagree. There are a lot of small inventions that are happening every day. I've had independently ideas that are now massive sites or products.
If you want to know why things have taken so long, have a look to usual flamewars here. There are many in which half of usually smart people can't simply understand what's the others' position about.
The pattern is that one side considers current practice tedious, steep learning curve for professionals only, while the other side finds it "good enough". If it's good enough for you, you'll never invent something easier and faster to understand.
> There are many in which half of usually smart people can't simply understand what's the others' position about.
> The pattern is that one side considers current practice tedious, steep learning curve for professionals only, while the other side finds it "good enough". If it's good enough for you, you'll never invent something easier and faster to understand.
This is a bit baffling to me -- the phenomena to which you refer. And it seems to be more general than the pattern you outline.
It appears to have something to do with both pre-suppositions and different orderings of personal values [0]. But I'm not sure.
Do you think it is possible to generalize the structure of the process via which reasonably educated and smart people can be presented with the same facts and come to different conclusions -- that they will defend against each other in pretty feisty debates?
[0] By this I mean, for example, that some people might put individual freedom higher than equality across large populations and vice-versa.
I believe it's called projection: you "project" that other persons' minds work the same as yours. If you've tried to solve some computer problem over the phone, you have experienced it. People thinks that you can magically view their screens.
In this case, very smart people is unable to figure out how does an average user thinks.
I do believe that there's something about mindset. Some people lives under the delusion that things work the way they work because that's the way they should work. Actually there are a lot of randomness in the way things work, specially in areas where new territories are being unconvered all the time.
Perception bias: is the tendency not to notice and more quickly forget stimuli that cause emotional discomfort and contradict our prior beliefs.
Confirmation bias: is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.
"It appears to have something to do with both pre-suppositions and different orderings of personal values"
I believe the two cognitive biases above explain this. If negative numbers are "ignore", and positive are "use in conclusion": conclusion = -0.1 * fact1 + 0.9 * fact2 + -0.4 * fact3. Your past experiences determine the weights.
edit: I also think sibling comment by narag plays a part.
A breakthrough in battery tech that results in small but very long lasting batteries will result in the invention of a bunch of obvious things that are currently impossible or impractical given current tech.
I am not sure if those would strictly qualify as inventions or innovations/improvements. We already have a list of designs to build and power once we have significantly better batteries, or significantly better ways of harnessing other energy source (e.g. nanorobots powered by body heat). I do think that those "significantly better" batteries, will need to be completely new ways of thinking about the battery, which would be the disruptive part. But once we have one, the rest is "let's put that to good use, and into every house" kind of thing.
Nothing much (in percentage terms) got invented until the industrial revolution. The question is why the industrial revolution took so long. If you are interested in this topic I highly recommend A Farewell to Alms [0] - warning controversial hypothesis, but it raises lots of interesting topics to think about.
I agree on the importance of the industrial revolution. An alternative explanation, that argues more from political institutions, can be found in Acemoglu and Robinsons "Why Nations Fail" [0]. They basically argue that for most of our history, individual innovators. In most countries most of the time, a small minority, which is in power, would either profit from the innovation instead or would actively suppress innovation to protect the status quo. Only when institutions were developed that included a lot of people in the decision making process, would we also develop protections for individual innovators, that would allow them to profit from their work in a meaningful way.
I generally find it hard to pin down to what degree culture motivates people to action and think that explanations should be preferred, that show how single individuals or groups might directly profit from certain actions.
There is a lot of discussion online why the Romans didn't have an industrial revolution. One argument I heard was that they relied too much on slave labor and improvements in productivity weren't really sought after. See for example here
how do you quantify the inventions to say "nothing much" was invented?
I have the feeling we underestimate how much stuff has been invented and forgotten.
For example, if you consider architecture the romans used half a dozen kind of opus to build walls, different varieties of arches, cement mixtures, hollow bricks and sunken panels to allow for lighter domes, both rib and barrel vaults, and likely a bunch of other things I never heard about.
A lot of that stuff has been superseded, so we don't really care a about a dozen old cement mixtures, or pure wood techniques, but it doesn't mean they were not invented.
That's certainly depressing. I'm going to have to go w/ McCloskey and push some pencil on some of that.
I would have put it on the plague, the protestant revolution, the magna carta and the printing press. All pre-dated the industrial revolution - but that itself had to be enabled by something (otherwise - the Romans would have done it, right?)
I am not sure why you think it is depressing unless you mean what life was like for the vast majority of people before the industrial revolution.
I would really encourage you to read the book, not so much for the hypothesis Clark proposes, but for all the amazing background and data on this topic he provides in a way that is accessible to the layman.
I tend to agree. I've lived in Indonesia - when the Nike plants paying several cents/day and had hunreds of people line up for those horrible jobs that Americans were boycotting Nike for.
I've seen the jockeying at the line any time one of those factory workers committed suicide.
But does not that make us wonder if we could do better? (I'm not an equality warrier - more of a let's do better down here warrior - and I have to say Nike does pretty good in that regard)
Prior to 1790, Clark asserts that man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations.
In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy. In that way, according to Clark, less violent, more literate and more hard-working behaviour - middle-class values - were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population. This process of "downward social mobility" eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap.
The hypothesis Clark proposes is the least interesting part of his book - it is all the background and data on the industrial revolution that he provides that make it worth reading.
I am on the fence if "the rich outbred the rest" is valid, but I do know from the genetics side that an enormous amount of selection has taken place in the human population over the last few thousand years. We really are very different to the people living 5000 years ago.
Genetically there has been more evolution in the last 10,000 years (most of this in the last 5000 years) than in the preceding 500,000. This is tied to the change in environment (hunter-gather to agriculture) and the expansion in the population size.
An accessible book on this topic is the 10,000 Year Explosion [0]. It is a little dated (it is before all the amazing data that has come from sequencing ancient homo DNA), but what it does have is a very good overview of the topic.
James Dyson always strikes me as a solid modern representation of just how difficult it is to actually invent (or re-invent) something new, very useful and commercially successful. He went through hundreds of variations and major prototypes on the vacuum cleaner over 5+ years. Even after he got a product he could commercialize, it took another 10-15 years to make it really take off. He spent two decades just to get the business to a point of true sustaining success, while fending off a global swath of well funded competitors at every price tier and quality.
I once saw a video interview with leadership from Hoover, the vacuum bag company. They lamented not accepting a long-ago acquisition offer from Dyson... so they could use his patents to shut down the whole bagless vacuum idea.
The poverty trap explanation here makes a lot of sense to me, although maybe it needs a bit of expansion.
In a subsistence farming environment it seems true that people did not have much time or resources to devote to making inventions. However, from what I've read of hunter-gatherer tribes still around today, the people living in them actually seem to have quite a bit of free time, yet obviously technological innovation has been quite rare.
So is it the case that innovation happens in a fairly specific set of circumstances, where resources and time are scarce enough to make innovation necessary, but still plentiful enough to allow for innovation?
Or maybe its just that the type of civilization agriculture creates leads to sufficient population densities for knowledge to start accumulating.
> the people living in them actually seem to have quite a bit of free time, yet obviously technological innovation has been quite rare.
I have to wonder if it is the people that have quite a bit of free time there, or men only.
I can see men having not much to do once they hunted and brought their prey. But if women are left with the task of preparing food from such completely raw ingredients, and also have to do childcare, possibly some gathering in addition, they don't have much time in the day left.
(I'm no farmer but) From what I hear, farming is characterized by periods of very hard work followed by long winters that you spend mending tools and clothes. I think a farmer could have had enough free time to invent, say, a plough.
Perhaps hunter gatherers are generally content with their existence and see no need to invent, whereas farmers and agricultural societies are frequently unsatisfied and unhappy (because they spend more time working and less in recreation) and are therefore more motivated to try to change their circumstances.
Also I would imagine that incremental improvements to tools and methods have the potential to benefit farmers much more than hunter-gatherers. So even given the same amount of free time, farmers have more incentive to tinker.
The post touches on the idea that the number of human beings that exist today far exceeds those in the past. Interesting thought. We are now like a cpu (collectively speaking) with 7 billion cores vs 50,000 years ago would only be about 10-100k in numbers.
But only a few million cores are doing worthwhile work.
Most of us aren’t contributing to the advancement of knowledge, for example. If we could up our utilization with more people doing R&D, for instance, we’d accumulate knowledge much faster.
I think it's a sheer mass problem. In order to support a few million people full time innovating, you need a tremendous support infrastructure that just wasn't even possible with ~10m people on the planet.
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/flowers/ is related - if you have a percentage of your population working on making the rest of the population more efficient, this only makes sense above a certain leverage level.
> If we could up our utilization with more people doing R&D, for instance, we’d accumulate knowledge much faster.
And we are. What do you think the end result of China, India, etc., lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty will be? In 30 years' time we will have probably doubled the number of researchers out there, if not more.
A fast search algorithm is to have 1000 threads check all 1000 array elements at the same time. Possibly only one thread will find the value you're looking for, but it's not like the other 999 threads were wasting their time.
Perhaps this is covered by the "crude hacks" category, but I'm reminded of the story of how the wheel was lost in Arabia. Technology doesn't necessarily provide a marginal improvement.
Sure, but were I to find myself stranded in the wilderness, my odds of successfully creating rope are many times higher than before I spent those few minutes. I think that's pretty amazing, especially from the perspective this article is trying to convey.
The inventions we care about today are only useful to a certain sort of society, and it took a long time for that to emerge.
Imagine you're in a jungle with your tribe. You basically have plants, animals and rocks with which to make stuff. You live marginally, and people sometimes die from starvation. Your tribe migrates, meaning you have to carry everything you need with you.
If you happened to figure out some metal working, it's probably not worth doing. Your tribe can't set up a mine, and gathering fuel is a huge effort.
Realistically, that sort of thing probably needs an agricultural society that can afford to feed people who aren't farmers.
The list is missing what IMHO is the most important reason: it took a really, really long time to transform wild plants and animals into useful domesticated varieties.
Bringing home some grains of that wild wheat that grows just a tiny bit larger. Befriending a wolf that is a little less distrustful of you. Picking that apple with the slightly smaller seeds. And so on.
Without those, you really are better off remaining a hunter-gatherer. People became significantly shorter when they first adopted a sedentary lifestyle.
it took a really, really long time to transform wild plants and animals into useful domesticated varieties.
Really? The wild plants and animals were already useful. So from day one, the transitional forms to the domestic varieties were useful as well.
Without those, you really are better off remaining a hunter-gatherer.
There's not a sharp division between hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist. Sedentism preceded agriculture. As people accidentally dropped seeds around their dwellings (or discarded them with the trash), they gradually became gardeners and then farmers.
You can consider wheat. Originally the number of seeds produced by a wheat stalk was small. Which meant needing to sow a high proportion of your crop for next year. With domestication the yields slowly increased over several thousand years.
This is also why true AI would advance very rapidly: no biology or society to stand in the way, few constraints re: self-upkeep, unlimited ability to record/analyze, ability to simulate variations of combining A&B, even when A or B seem useless in isolation...
True AI as in a true artificial thinking being? Or true AI as effectively a god?
All comments like this assume the AI is absolutely goal oriented toward self-improvement and self-propagation and has no limitations or competition.
"No biology or society" - what about the physical hardware and infrastructure needed to maintain it?
"Self upkeep" - so its directly connected to an entire automated vertically integrated supply chain and factory complex?
"Unlimited ability to record/analyze" - again, where is it getting this infinite storage and processing capacity?
"ability to simulate variations of..." - if it's truly intelligent in a way humans would consider intelligent, even massively moreso, why would it spend all its time random walking the solution space of everything?
If we are talking about AI as god, that can work, I suppose, but as someone who really likes transhumanism and the idea of AI in general, this idea of the sloughing away of all limitations and an AI actor totally dedicated with either the infinite and immediate improvement or replacement of itself makes no sense to me.
Am I missing something here, or is there just to much engineer whispering in the corners of my brain.
> an AI actor totally dedicated with either the infinite and immediate improvement or replacement of itself makes no sense to me.
If I decide that a problem is so hard that the best solution is to invent a superhuman AI to solve it, then this is an approach that human-level intelligence can come up with, so a superhuman intelligence can too.
Self-improvement and self-replacement are probably not an AI's actual goal, they're just things that are useful to most potential goals that an AI can have. (And they're easier for the potential AI because the prerequisite research has already been done at that point.)
(If you knew I was trying to either cure cancer or colonize mars, you could predict that I'll start raising money, even though those goals don't have much in common.)
> If I decide that a problem is so hard that the best solution is to invent a superhuman AI to solve it, then this is an approach that human-level intelligence can come up with, so a superhuman intelligence can too.
It can try, but it doesn't mean that it would success at it.
> again, where is it getting this infinite storage and processing capacity
I agree with most all of your points. On that one, about where its resources are to come from (and thinking just in a fantastical manner on the topic): it's going to trade with humans, who will provide the things it needs to keep growing. For example, give people a 'free' search engine, that they find highly useful, which results in the humans funding the AI through ads/clicks, allowing for massive expansion of the AI infrastructure. You could apply the general concept to most any service an AI could provide. I'll give you this, you give me that, resulting in a dependency, with both sides occasionally trying to seize on an opening to acquire the upperhand in the arrangement.
Simply put, humans will trade with AI eventually. It's inevitable, and it's a critical aspect of how AI will self-expand. To ensure their own survival, they'll want to become so useful to humans that the humans don't kill (or try to kill) the AI, despite occasionally (or frequently) being afraid of its power / potential.
Want to build out the colonies in the US? You're going to trade with the British Empire and France, while trying not to piss off either enough that they destroy you (or try to). You want to be useful to them, enrich them, limit the extent to which you seem to pose a threat. You maintain an even keel until the point where you are no longer subservient. China has been a master at that the last 40 some years, they still behave that way today when it suits their long-term aims (playing down their strength at times, or playing it up at other times). As a concept, I think this represents a power dynamic that is universal between most living (aware, sentient, whatever) things, and the human-AI relationship will also play out that way.
There is an old adage about necessity being the mother of invention.
Invention takes place every day in oh so many peoples lives all around the world. However, too many of those same people don't see what they are doing as being inventive. Hence, they quite often do not share their inventions and ideas with others as they don't think that those inventions and ideas are good enough.
If you watch little children, you see invention occurring all the time. It is only when we are adults that we lose the concept that invention is everywhere.
The natural world around us is an incredible source of ideas and usable inventions. As James Tour has put it, we can learn so much advanced technological manufacturing processes from studying the internal workings of biological cells, let alone all the other processes that occur between cells and in the various organs in different species.
The fact of the matter with technological advancement is that we advance despite all of our efforts. In every field in which we humans work, the status quo is the important thing and so we take great efforts to slow change to a crawl for all sorts of reasons. Change occurs and those who have driven the next set of changes then drive the next status quo to stop change.
Several early inventions were incredibly time consuming to make by hand, and judging from apes, social groups didn't have a concept of specialization, but all sat around making and teaching the same thing at the same time, partially as a form of bonding. So, say, sharpening rocks improved consistent access to food, but lowered free time required to experiment or make other inventions, and doing the latter would exclude you from the social bonding of making the one tool, which risks making you an other the group resents. Lack of storage, even on clothing, meant everything after your first tool was disposable. Keeping things more than a day might have been an unnatural concept too, so already expensive production costs are multiplied by uses.
There was a long term observational study of chimps where a subgroup of them started spontaneously team hunting, chasing prey towards the others, like a set sports play. They did it effectively for a few seasons, then just stopped... Group dynamics changed and some left the tribe, others had mates, priorities just changed. Maybe retaining knowledge is really hard before you're organized around shared knowledge as a principle.
This is one of the primary takeaways I got from reading Sapiens. Our big brains didn't pay off for millenia, until they did, and in a big way. Most times, innovation isn't enough to beat the competition...you have to survive long enough for it to give you an edge.
> Our big brains didn't pay off for millenia, until they did, and in a big way.
That's not how evolution works. Each step along the way must produce a net benefit or it gets discarded. Just as insect wings served as propulsion for water skimming before actual flight, big brains paid off, then got bigger and paid off some more, etc. The only hiccup is the benefit has to outweigh the cost (eg big brains need more calories).
Side note: I think our wide array of modern mental disorders are costs of our brains' continuing enlargement. I.e. brains are trying to figure out how to get even bigger and more powerful without also having OCD or schizophrenia.
> Each step along the way must produce a net benefit or it gets discarded.
More precisely, each step must not impose a net fitness cost or it gets selected against to a degree positively linked to the degree to which it imposes a net cost. But that's, more importantly, each genetic variation taken in total, not actually each individual phenotypic effect of the genetic variation (e.g., sickle cell trait was preserved not because sickle cell anemia is not a net negative, but because the malaria resistance that comes even when an individual is heterozygous for the trait is a strong benefit that manifests more often than sickle cell disease which occurs when an individual is homozygous for it.)
Each step along the way must produce a net benefit or it gets discarded.
Maybe so, but the benefit could have just been individual fitness signalling (like a peacock's tail) without providing any advantage to the species as a whole until the big "payday".
A peacock's tail can be seen; how do you propose the other sex fell in love with the brainier homo sapiens? It's a lot more likely that intelligence provided a net benefit.
Well, at the dawn of human civilization our finest tools were hewn rock. Now we have computers and have stood on the moon.
It took a long time because we started with nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I like the article but I think it's missing the forest for the trees. The reason why things took so long relative to current rates of progress is just because knowledge compounds upon itself.
Early on in a system defined by compound growth you will have slow growth. Then eventually exponential growth. This is what we've experienced.
Having run a few areas / programs that delivered a decent amount of innovation in the underlying process, I've been surprised with just how much isn't obvious...
My general expectations:
- First six months of full time focus on a work process is basically just learning your way around; goal is to get a real process map (actual activity) and proper data source
- By the end of that period, I usually have a hypothesis about the way things ought to be
- Months 6 - 18: get knuckleheads to test hypothesis
- Years 2 - 3: Use results of tests to identify the metrics we actually should have been tracking and build appropriate data sources. Test new sets of hypothesis which work out brilliantly, usually from stuff we thought didn't matter.
Incidently... this is likely why most MBA strategy firms are full of shit... they usually exit the project within six months, which as you see... isn't anywhere near enough.
Great read, however, I think there is something else in play here.
With regards to what we consider inventions that move us forward (more advanced or fundamentally more novel solutions) I wonder if the problem isn't just a lack of imagination but imagination and abilities compared to what technology can deliver.
I always think of this as a reminder that perhaps it's possible to imagine things that humans can't imagine.
The article is factually incorrect: Our brains were as modern 50K years ago as they are now.
A major reason is, people are not actually as intelligent or creative as one assumes. We are bad at unsupervised learning. A lot of our learning, when you look more closely, is supervised learning.
Cochran's popular science book has no scientific backing or support from working scientists and peer reviewed articles. In particular, human genomics can easily refute the idea of brain functional changes in the last 10K years. Our ancestral populations that colonized EurAsia, Africa, and the Americas diverged before the 10,000 mark, and there are no discernible cognitive differences between any of these groups.
Furthermore, this is why Cochran is considered a racist; correctly so.
Hmm, none of these sound right. I think the issue was mostly that as a hunter gatherer, if you make something, you have to carry it. So you couldn't accumulate a lot of tools, not to mention stuff like forges and so forth.
I occasionally think about certain foods (e.g. diary things such as meringue - or bread - or alcohol etc.), and think, "how the hell did someone come across this". I guess the answer is simply: time!
There are tons of new inventions happening every day. People do new things only for themselves. What is impeded is bringing these to mass market due to markets being concentrated in few hands.
Not to mention the huge amount of work it takes to communicate ideas clearly and get people to pay attention to them. Making money from an idea gets people to pay attention, but that only works for some inventions -- lots of great ideas will never turn an immediate profit.
A favorite from Jack Handy: "I think somebody should come up with a way to breed a very large shrimp. That way, you could ride him, then after you camped at night, you could eat him. How about it, science?"
While today saying "how about it, science?" has become our second nature, it wasn't the obvious way to think about the world 50K years ago.
> Often A isn’t useful without B, and B isn’t useful without A. For instance, A is chariots and B is roads.
Even without chariots, road are useful: pack animals and people on foot will move much more easily if there is a solid path that doesn't turn to mud when it's raining, that's clear of obstacles and relatively smooth.
Harder to mass market, hire and develop tools without television, internet and also the dependency on other things not yet invented, freeing up of capital and access to credit
There's also the minor point that up until around 12,000 years ago a lot of prime land was under ice, and resources were rather less accessible than they are today.
Holy crap I agree. I mean I know it's not polite to point and laugh but this thread is nuts. How do people write and upvote some of the opinions in this thread? It's like they have zero sense of irony or introspection.
If you look at the history of patents, I think you might be surprised at just how little patents drive technology forward. I think you will find many, many examples of technology moving forward after patents expire.
AI currently evolve under a human environment. Its success to next gen all based on human selection even if it is self breeding ( the guy just lost funding whilst it ...)
Hence we are still in AI-human coevolve stage. When some AI leaks to internet and survive there as Like bots and evolve (not necessarily self aware) it would be a different. When it start to find a way to get enemy and declare independence it would be even more different.
Alphago takes years to do CO-human-game-player-evolution but 3 days for go and a couple of hours for chess. May be it could be shorter than we thought.
The Egyptian Slave will go to the promise land leaving their master behind.
The big factors I see are: 'poverty trap', 'crude hacks', and 'full-time craftsman'. These interact. For example, most people need a day job. Even in R&D shops, day jobs are largely concerned with marginal improvements. I spent 12 years working as an R&D physicist, but I had to do my inventions on my own time because they weren't relevant to the incremental improvement products I was paid to develop. It's very hard to spend time working on a home run when your competition is hitting a thousand singles, and that is especially true with regards to possible uses of your time for paying the bills.
The craftsman thing is a big deal. I suck as a craftsman, mainly because I'm usually doing something for the first time. Need to weld it? Guess I'm learning how to weld. Need to polish it? Time to learn again. MATLAB is too slow? Hello C++. Oh, hey, now electronics are surface mount? Time to learn how to solder all over again. So, unless you are inventing something in a field you have specialized in as a craftsperson, everything you build kinda sucks. Then you have to figure out - is the problem with the idea or the implementation? Is there a different implementation which would be easier to build? What techniques do I have to learn to do that?
The workaround for this is to work with specialized craftspeople. Unfortunately, this adds different challenges. Now you have to pay them ('poverty trap') or convince them it's worthwhile (I didn't see 'social proof' on the list, but lets put it under value). Now you have to manage a project, which is a different skill set than inventing something in the first place. Sometimes, it's better going back to being your own craftsman.
In modern times, then you get to go to commercialization, which is the barrier which kills most inventions because the inventor rarely has the skills to do this right, and the people with the skills aren't usually incentivized properly to do it for them.
So, in short, I see the biggest problems for inventors not in the mental realm, but in the social. Inventors generally need help, and it is not until after the invention is a success that people see the value.