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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

Facts like this always make me wonder if perhaps we, as a species, haven't undergone some major mutation in the last 100 years or so as a result of .. I dunno, some cosmic event or something .. to accelerate our intelligence and understanding of the universe, and propel us so rapidly into the current state of things. Sometimes, it sure feels like the human species took a major, major leap somewhere .. and I wonder what it is? Sure, it can be explained culturally - the Enlightenment, world wars, medicine, etc. But how come things are being compelled along at an exponential rate so rapidly .. penicillin? Electricity? All of the above? Just: whoa. The next 100 years is probably going to be amazing ..

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The simplest answer is probably that we stopped spending 90% of our effort as a species on feeding ourselves. And sure, a lot of that freed up labor went to people becoming car salesmen or yoga instructors, but a lot of it also went to people becoming scientists and engineers.

A good deal of humanity also started to "believe" in science and technology. Maybe for thousands of years people would live in spirits, gods and nature; but since the 19th century society keeps running after progress and feeds the research structure to do so. Think about it, until the 17th century, you'd risk death to dare question religion.

It's the result of a large culmination of factors. For one, it's largely an incremental process. For example, someone didn't just build the first personal computer out of thin air. There was electricity, then transistors, then microchips, etc. all 'invented' by different people but each previously needed for the latter. Secondly, in order for incremental processes to happen, there needs to be large knowledge-sharing so that people know what's possible and can build on top of previous advancements. The 20th century brought rapid globalization, long-distance communication, and now the internet, which have all rapidly increased the dissemination of information. Lastly, the population has been steadily growing, and if you believe that the more people there are, the more inventions there will be, then it makes sense that they have increased over time.

There was no major leap. Have you ever heard of the Antikythera Mechanism [1]? A small device built two thousand years ago to predict astronomical positions. As a counter argument it shouldn’t have taken us two millennia to reach the first computer. Science should have progressed a lot faster, there was no shortage of intellect. There was a shortage in political support of science though, especially if you put in the mix the strong opposition of religion which used to have a huge influence in how things were run a few centuries ago. Once that influence withered science flourished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

If you really want to blame religion, you're going to have a hard time making the case. The ancient Greeks were quite religious, but were also quite advanced in some fields of philosophy and mathematics. They also (largely) moved war away from their mainland. They actively worked to remove the daily effort of living onto a working class, which consisted largely of non-Greek citizens. This freed up the Greeks (at least a large class of their citizens) to expend energy on what would previously have been considered trivialities or indulgences. See the Roman empire, war on the fringes made the core of the empire safer and advancement of various schools of thought much more feasible. The same story has played out in other locations at other times.

Move war and famine away from your core population. Move the core population closer together (to enable communication, this is a non-issue today with the internet). You'll see a surge in productivity and advancement of knowledge.

Humans weren't a bunch of cavemen 100, 300, or even 500 years ago. We've had things like microscopes and telescopes for 400 years. Things like algebra and geometry are over a thousand years old.

Things have just been snowballing ever since. And things will be even more insane in another 100 years.

Exactly! We've been building huge things out of stone, just because, for at least five thousand years.

Electricity is a VERY big deal. Simply having light at night is huge.

Now: add in washing machines and refrigeration.

There were two history professors recently who attempted to live with their family like it was the late 1800's. The wife broke down because all she ever did was cook and wash. If I remember correctly, the husband didn't do much better as his physical "job" left him completely exhausted every day.

I wish I could find the link, but my Google-fu is failing.

You're describing Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.

If you subscribe to it, you'll note that innovation is exponential, such that we were innovating faster in 1900 than we were in 1800 by a greater factor than 1800 to 1700.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

Also, lets not forget that this all really kicked off once we changed our style of governments feudalistic to capitalistic. It's not the last 100 years but rather the last 200 that made the difference the industrial revolution put into place the foundation for the advances of the 20th century. It's hard to get headwind on advancements when every few years all your stuff is being taken away due to the whims of the king/queen/new invaders etc..

I suspect, and the evidence seems to support, that things have pretty much always seemed like this. Because advancement is accelerating, it seems to an observer at any given point that things have been advancing much more rapidly that they did previously.

In The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch "discusses the rapid progress we've seen since the Enlightenment, and its cause: the rational quest for good explanations. [The book] unifies many themes of reason and unbounded progress." (http://beginningofinfinity.com/interview)

Innovation builds on itself. It's not only a positive feedback loop it's also an exponential. It builds like compound interest. Basic chemistry leads to creating the periodic table which leads to an explosion of understanding which leads to further innovations which then lead to yet more innovations. Exponentials start slow and accelerate rapidly.

Google "Accelerating change", it's basically what you're talking about and there's a lot of information about it.

Apparently the rate of inventions per capita is approximately constant. We just became a lot more.

One way you can think about it is that humanity's finally hit the "elbow" in the exponential curve of technological advancement.

That doesn't work... every point in an exponential curve is the "elbow." That's its defining characteristic, actually.

While technically true, if you stop at any point and zoom out far enough you will get something reminiscent of a hockey stick moment.

And for every way you zoom it, the hockey stick moment will be in a different point. A completely different point if you try completely different views.

Just try it.

I don't disagree :)

So I think the elbow analogy has value when you note that there are two ways of describing in an elbow in the exponential function when considering finite human lifetime.

Given two points in time t,u they have progress exp t and exp u and relative rates of progress exp u / exp t = exp (u-t). So of course the relative rate of progress between 2 points in time is fixed and so we can scale our y-axis to make any 2 points have the characteristic "elbow" of an exponential.

But if we consider absolute difference between 2 points on the scale of a human lifetime over different periods of time we can see that absolute difference doesn't have the same property as relative rate of progress.

exp u - exp (t-u+u) = exp u - exp u (exp(t-u)) = exp u (1- exp (t-u))

Which I guess I'll interpret as saying that the absolute difference of progress between 2 points in time is proportional to an exponential. So for most of history that exponential was very close to zero and humans did not experience must change in a lifetime. Now however we live in a time where the exponential can be said to be nearing an "elbow."

So while over time relative rates of progress between 2 points do not vary, absolute progress between 2 points certainly does vary can be described as an elbow when measured against a human lifetime.

Ok, the lifetime of a person is a preferential zoomlevel for the time axis. But a zoomlevel for the productivity axis is still missing, so that everybody for the last 500 years did experience an elbow just before the time they were living.

And if our growth had been exactly exponential+, everybody for the last 500 years would have experience an elbow with the exact same shape. Just the magnitude would change, and so fast that everybody would dismiss the previous generation claims, just like you are doing now.

+ Now, it hasn't been exactly exponential. The exponent is accelerating since we got precise enough measurements, and funny thing is that this fact just extends that "no sudden change of behavior" further back, while still not creating any privileged zoomlevel for the productivity axis, and not letting any new generation have any claim that their time is different.

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