Why things might have taken so long
meteuphoric.wordpress.com
meteuphoric.wordpress.com
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.
Silicon Valley undervalues the aimless tinkerers and overvalues the incremental bootcamp coders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Reality has a surprising amount of detail": http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
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.
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 :) ).
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.
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.
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
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....
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.
OK but imagine if everyone in the world did the "bad thing". The world would gain 8 billion utility and lose 800 million, so it's still winning.
I think you mean something like an individual utility of +1 and a collective detriment of -1.01?
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.
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".
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.
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.
Hmm... Perhaps better still would be an immense valley of very uneven steepness and roughness, that we are climbing out of.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ENOUGH METAPHYSICS!
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.
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.
The yellowing is due to flame retardant additive to ABS granules. Modern flame resistant ABS stock is prone to same issues.
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.
That's exactly what inventing is about: making (existing) things better, until they're so much better, they become a different thing altogether.
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 don't understand your point at all. When something sounds far-fetched / difficult / expensive it means it's actually more interesting rather than less.
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.
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.
And then... https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/06/a-thinner-fla...
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not necessarily the case. Some things can be legitimately, laws of physics-style, impossible.
It requires much more resources to invent a revolutionary battery
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.
The saying that 'hindsight is 20/20' would seem to be particularly true at the scale of early human invention and civilization.
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?
Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!
> take a large piece of wood and whittle away until you have a wheel
This does not resemble the actual construction of any but the smallest wooden wheel for toys.
The first used wheel bas probably some vague round stone with a hole it it.
It sucked, but it was better than no wheel.
However, alone, you CAN make rope. It's painful, but you can.
You can't invent the press alone. You need ink, paper, metal, and people being able to put it in shape for you.
Everybody had access to plants to make rope. Not everybody had access to the money, education, market and knowledge necessary to invest the press.
Now today, it's even worst.
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.
You need to know how to make sharp edges. Which rocks are suitable? How to keep them sharp?
You need to cut down a suitable tree.
You need to know which tree is even suitable.
You have to figure out that either the chunk of wood should rotate, or the sharp edge rotate around it.
You need to know how to make a center pivot, or spindle to turn the wheel. You need to know that you even need this!
After making the wheel, now you need to make axles and some kind of platform to make it useful.
Before doing all this, you first have to realize that you need a wheel!
There is a long list of basic knowledge needed to invent even the simplest things. Every invention builds on previous knowledge.
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.
"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.
(Edited some typos and bad English.)
It's very, very different.
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.
The crucial step is understanding that you can link objects with a bendable but strong connection.
Then you can start innovating applications, such as multiple people working together to move a single heavy object.
Eventually you end up with previously unimaginable applications like horse bridles and ship rigging.
The point of invention isn’t a new tool, it’s a completely new class of tools with an open-ended set of applications that aren’t immediately obvious.
(largely inspired by: http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding...)
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 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Many ideas that seem easy to invent only seem so in retrospect. The article repeatedly points out that inventing rope isn't obvious.
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.
Many of the health issues would be corrected if our environment required people to exercise to get around.
People are just really lazy.
There are powerful entities who throw their weight around in both policy and propaganda to promote the wasteful forms of transportation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-fRo5-p9hE
http://peterburk.github.io/pliny/ChaptersHtml/0/1.%20PlinyPe...
https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/could-rome-have-had-an-indust...
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.
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.
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.
Do you have more details for this? I was under the impression that biologically we aren't that much more different from Homo sapiens 50k years ago.
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.
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.
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 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'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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you’re completely missing my point. 7 billion people on the planet. Most of are not working on research, ..., the important stuff.
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.
http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/197303/why.they.lost.th...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
It can try, but it doesn't mean that it would success at it.
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.
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.
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".
If with his tongue he cannot win a woman."
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
Furthermore, this is why Cochran is considered a racist; correctly so.
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
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.
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.
And vice-versa; chariots are, after all, implements of war that fight off-road.
While A requires B and B requires A may exist elsewhere, chariots/roads is a particularly poorly chosen example.
It would seem that current times bring innovation in ridiculous pace, but the fact is - it's still awfuly slow.
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.