
Why things might have taken so long - blonky
https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/16417/
======
FiatLuxDave
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.

~~~
anonytrary
You touch on a very real social dystopia. What's worse is that it's happening
quietly, under the scenes.

Silicon Valley undervalues the aimless tinkerers and overvalues the
incremental bootcamp coders.

~~~
mzzter
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.

~~~
Pica_soO
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.

~~~
anonytrary
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.

------
michaelbuckbee
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.

~~~
johngalt
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.

~~~
Roybot
> 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.

[https://youtu.be/ryFB6mvy4uE?t=26m38s](https://youtu.be/ryFB6mvy4uE?t=26m38s)

------
munificent

        > 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.

~~~
dwaltrip
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.

------
dwaltrip
One of the links in the post was also a really great read, for those who
skipped it.

"Reality has a surprising amount of detail":
[http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-
surprising-...](http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-
amount-of-detail)

~~~
aray
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.

------
GistNoesis
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 :) ).

~~~
mojoe
I believe this concept was where the term "meme" came from (coined by Richard
Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene"
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene))

------
quadrangle
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.

~~~
simonbarker87
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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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".

~~~
autokad
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.

~~~
perl4ever
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.

------
danieltillett
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.

0\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Alms](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Alms)

~~~
peterburkimsher
What have the Romans ever done for us?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-fRo5-p9hE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-fRo5-p9hE)

[http://peterburk.github.io/pliny/ChaptersHtml/0/1.%20PlinyPe...](http://peterburk.github.io/pliny/ChaptersHtml/0/1.%20PlinyPedia.html)

~~~
adrianN
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

[https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/could-rome-have-had-an-
indust...](https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/could-rome-have-had-an-industrial-
revolution-4126717370a2)

------
adventured
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.

~~~
mncharity
> difficult [...] competitors

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.

------
rebuilder
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.

~~~
panic
Doing any sort of work is a constant process of invention, as you solve all
the little problems involved. This other post linked from the article is a
good read: [http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-
surprising-...](http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-
amount-of-detail)

------
drchiu
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.

~~~
melling
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.

~~~
humanrebar
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.

~~~
melling
Sure, 1000 people working on a difficult problem, and only one person solves
it. Good analogy.

What problem are we trying to solve? Curing cancer? AI? Compiler research?

Most humans are not working on the important stuff. If we could increase that
by even a few percentage points, humanity would benefit.

~~~
humanrebar
> What problem are we trying to solve?

Cheaper clean energy. Cures for diseases. Social stability.

In some cases, we aren't talking about 1000 people. It could be 1000 cities or
1000 countries or 1000 bills of rights.

~~~
melling
I’m personally not working on any of those problems.

I think you’re completely missing my point. 7 billion people on the planet.
Most of are not working on research, ..., the important stuff.

------
jccooper
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.

[http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/197303/why.they.lost.th...](http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/197303/why.they.lost.the.wheel.htm)

------
nicolashahn
If nothing else, this article's example of inventing rope caused me to seek to
learn how to make it, which I now know how to do.

~~~
folli
"Learning how to make rope" != "Watching a 10 min YouTube video"

~~~
nicolashahn
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.

------
nitwit005
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.

------
felipeerias
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.

~~~
racer-v
_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.

~~~
Gibbon1
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.

------
newsbinator
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...

~~~
parrellel
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.

~~~
jtolmar
> 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.)

~~~
TuringTest
> 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.

------
oldandtired
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.

------
brownbat
You can combine many of these...

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.

------
cellis
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.

~~~
fivedogit
> 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.

~~~
racer-v
_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".

~~~
dkural
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.

~~~
racer-v
"That man that hath a tongue, I say is no man,

If with his tongue he cannot win a woman."

------
meri_dian
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.

------
sixtypoundhound
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.

------
ThomPete
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.

[https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664](https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664)

Having said that there is of course a big difference between inventing
something fundamentally new (a rope) and improving it (nylon rope).

But more and more I get the feeling that humans aren't really going to invent
most of the solutions we can dream up.

------
dkural
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.

~~~
racer-v
_People’s brains were actually biologically less functional fifty thousand
years ago._

This is correct; there's been a huge amount of brain evolution in the past 50K
years. See for example "The 10,000 Year Explosion" (Cochran).

~~~
dkural
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.

~~~
racer-v
Could you provide a reference as to how "human genomics can easily refute the
idea of brain functional changes in the last 10K years"?

 _Furthermore, this is why Cochran is considered a racist; correctly so._

I'd caution that this isn't actually an argument, but merely invective:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)

------
fallingfrog
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.

------
2T1Qka0rEiPr
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!

------
paulus_magnus2
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.

~~~
panic
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.

------
racer-v
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.

------
baud147258
> 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.

~~~
wickawic
It was a contrived example but charitably there are lots of inventions that
are only useful in light of other inventions.

~~~
baud147258
Yes, I was just criticizing the example chosen, not the explanation itself
(and judging from the votes, I was unclear).

------
pkalinowski
Ten years of blockchain technology and the only popular use case is
cryptocurrency.

It would seem that current times bring innovation in ridiculous pace, but the
fact is - it's still awfuly slow.

------
amriksohata
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

------
TheOtherHobbes
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.

------
agumonkey
Hindsight gave us so much metaknowledge. It's true that if i never saw a rope
i might lose faith quickly if trying to craft the idea from scratch.

------
dqpb
I think this post is missing a big one: entropy

~~~
Scea91
Elaborate?

------
crispytx
The invention that took a long time to come up with was agriculture. That was
the killer invention.

------
reificator
> _‘Crude hacks’ get you most of the way there, reducing the value of great
> inventions._

------
zebraflask
This whole thread is hilarious. Well done.

~~~
verylittlemeat
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.

------
codeulike
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond has a lot to say on this topic.

------
amelius
No word on patents as a technology driver?

~~~
oldandtired
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.

------
gpvos
It's basically an exponential curve.

------
ngcc_hk
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.

