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Comment by quadrangle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing.

There are plenty of inventions yet to make, from complex AI enabled devices down to the simple mundane items that make daily life slightly easier. I founded a company based on the latter that is ticking over nicely.

By saying that it is harder to invent things now shows you have fallen into one of the traps that the author highlights:

> If you have never seen rope, it actually doesn’t occur to you that rope would come in handy, or to ask yourself how to make some.

You have never seen the thing you need to invent so it takes either a leap of inspiration or a concerted effort to sit down and think of something new to solve a problem you have, chances are you will get their iteratively over a long time and not really see what you have made as "an invention".

Ideation isn't some spark that hits you, ideas need to be thought about and created with effort.

>This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing.

Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's also wrong now.

And there is such a thing as "low hanging fruit".

We have absolutely no contract with the universe or nature that guarantees us that there's "always more to invent", even less so that "the possibilities keep increasing".

> 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.

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

That's just a metaphor, and exactly of the type which GP argued against.

To illustrate GP's point metaphorically: Think of human knowledge as discovered areas on a map. The dark areas are what is still unknown to us. Inventing a thing makes a little spot on the map visible. The more you have discovered, the less you still have to discover.

(And to extend it a bit: Of course you can make the already discovered areas more detailed, even to levels unthought of when initially discovered. But as discoveries pile up, there probably won't be many 'woah, there's a whole continent here!' moments anymore.)

I don't have a strong opinion in this debate. I just wanted to provide a counter-point to your metaphor.

As an isolated example of this kind of thing, consider the shape of the Earth as discussed in Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" [http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm]

If the illuminated areas are a very small portion of the entire map, then the circle metaphor actually may be more appropriate. But I see your point.

Hmm... Perhaps better still would be an immense valley of very uneven steepness and roughness, that we are climbing out of.

Ok, now postulate that we can only invent things on the border of that map (because of technological limitations). Then you'll get a very complex dynamics, of the invention possibilities increasing and decreasing, some times fast, and changing almost unpredictably.

Does the set of everything exist? Why or why not?

You are both right. Animal reproduction is exponential as long as resources are freely available -- the more animals you have, the more they can mate. Like the parent post, the greater the perimeter of your knowledge, the greater the boundary you can now explore from.

Once animals hit the resource limit of the environment, the exponential curve flattens out. Like you note, the more of the map you cover, the less there is left to explore.

The interesting question is how big is the map and how close are we to reaching it's boundaries?

Personally, I think it is effectively infinitely large. If you consider "discovery" to include new combinations of existing things, then you're talking about permutations. If our universe consisted only of 52 playing cards, there would still be 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different ways for us to discover that they can be shuffled together.

> Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's also wrong now.

That is absolutely true. HOWEVER, if one notices that those in the past have made the same observation as oneself but were wrong every time, one would be wise to VERY carefully reexamine one's own position. This is good, solid evidence that one might be mistaken

are you calling inventing flight low hanging fruit? I'd bet even after given the answer and reading up on wikipedia, you would struggle building a plain from scratch.

its not harder to invent things, you just dont know how to do it. its not a problem on you, I couldnt invent anything myself. if anything, we are in a golden age, much like people ~1900 were when it comes to invention. the scripting languages, algorithms, computing power at my finger tips gives me incredible power.

sadly, I didnt think of making a crypto currency ~2009. I didnt think of creating a ride sharing service, selfie drones, or fidget spinners. well actually I did create a fidget spinner with my roller blade bearings back in the early 2ks, but I didnt think anything of it.

point is, we take for granted all the stuff that is available to us now, and there are plenty of stuff (even low hanging fruit) to invent, its just very hard.

I think a lot of people think of inventions but don't have the motivation or resources to execute - and someone else creates the thing, possibly with roots deep in the past. I remember reading a magazine article (maybe in Popular Science) about the Peltier effect when I was in high school and thinking it could/should be used for cooling CPUs. In practically no time, the Power Macintosh 8100/110 came out, using such a cooler. It may not have been the first, but it was the first I was aware of, and it made me irrationally feel like someone stole my idea. A year or two later, my boss at my first job asked me to create, essentially, eBay. I read some academic articles on computerized auctions and gave it up as too complicated.

One thing that made a great impression on me was reading an old Dr. Dobbs journal (I think from the 70s) in which someone was angrily responding to Bill Gates. Gates had said that hobbyists generally steal their software, and of course that pissed people off. The letter writer said if you want to be paid for your software you should bundle it with hardware. So with hindsight, Gates became a billionaire not because he had a unique idea, but because he recognized the value of something lots of people knew and executed it.

Thinking of things is infinitely easier than sifting through all the noise and then committing 100% to making something specific a reality.

Flying is low hanging fruit, i can explain the core concepts of how it works to a 8-year old child with a paper airplane in 10 minutes. Execution is still tricky but you know that it can eventually be done with enough effort, material and machinery. AI or crypto-currencies though, is har to explain even on a high level to my computer science educated friends.

I think the final chapter, Orders of Inovation, in the original post is on the right track. Today there are less of the first order inventions but there will be more and more of the third order inventions that build upon existing inventions.

The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions?

If this is the case, why have we seen an explosion in inventions? Is there some critical turning point? When is the critical point? It's a lot of speculation.

As depressed and lonely as I am, I live because I believe the future is worth living for, mainly because there's stuff left to do. If there's nothing left to do, we may as well all die today.

>The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions?

I'm saying that the previous assertion is more religious speaking than valid reasoning.

We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it.

Some fundamental types of new knowledge do increase the space of inventions (e.g. the discovery of fire, or the discovery of electricity, or the discovery of dna, etc), but not all.

If we are just living because there's stuff to invent, we might as well, as this means inventions are inherently useless (else what we have already invented would be enough to make life worth). Life should be celebrated (or not) for itself, not because we can create new gizmos and find new natural laws.

Suppose you have a list of N things you know, and we define an invention as being any subset of those things. There would be 2^N possible combinations, or the size of the set of all subsets, or the size of the set of all inventions.

That's my toy-definition of an invention. Not very good, but it's a start. Let's take it further and say that each item in the list of knowledge is actually a basis vector, and that an invention is simply a vector in the space spanned by the basis set.

> We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it.

In my model, I will prove this is impossible. The dimension before finding the new vector is N. Suppose we find a new knowledge vector k'. If it is truly new, then it will be orthogonal to the other knowledge vectors, and the new basis will span N+1 dimensions, meaning the "space of inventions" increased. The only way for the dimension to remain the same is if k' could be written as a linear combination of k_i, which would imply that our assumption that k' is new was false.

ENOUGH METAPHYSICS!

> I founded a company based on the latter that is ticking over nicely.

I'm curious: How much does your company's product rely on materials that either didn't exist 20 years ago or were significantly more expensive to procure in small quantities 20 years ago?

I ask because I have a hypothesis that a lot of things that seem like low-hanging-fruit that should have been invented earlier actually depend on the abundance of materials and manufacturing processes that only became common 20ish years before the invention.

The product would not have been possible 20 years ago as the fans would have konked out due to the heat, and the plastic would have yellowed and gone brittle also due to the heat.

So we needed materials science improvements to make the product viable. I don't think I was advocating for low hanging fruit but instead progress in various fields allow other things to be invented, some of them I guess become low hanging fruit.

Nearly all commercial plastics available now were available back in 1997. Even exotic things like PEEK.

The yellowing is due to flame retardant additive to ABS granules. Modern flame resistant ABS stock is prone to same issues.

We use a heat-resistant ABS, 20 years ago it would have yellowed, now it doesn't.

Heat resistant suggests a higher melting point, it is not necessarily flame retardant. The yellowed plastics on old consumer electronics aren't specifically heat resistant.

Agreed.

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.

Human-powered flight does exist, it's just not very good because people are weak and heavy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft

It's "not very good" not because people are this or that, but because... it isn't very good yet: which means it needs to get better.

That's exactly what inventing is about: making (existing) things better, until they're so much better, they become a different thing altogether.

> It's "not very good" not because people are this or that...

Denying reality is for daydreaming; it will not get anything invented. Sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, but it isn't actually magic.

Well, leaving aside the problem of taking off (which today is improving thanks to electric motors), I guess one could say that gliders[1] are the closest we can have to human-powered flight and it's highly efficient in terms of energy consumption

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(sailplane)

You should try a bicycle.

If you want actual wings, that's just one of those problems that need absurd amounts of money and brains to figure out. Genetic engineering is certainly a lot more difficult than inventing Nitrocellulose.

I'm aware of the existence of bicycles. They are not as useful -- or fun -- as the ability to fly would be.

I don't understand your point at all. When something sounds far-fetched / difficult / expensive it means it's actually more interesting rather than less.

My point is that this thread started with the assertion that all easy inventions are already gone and it takes a lot of effort to invent something novel. You countered with flying via genetic engineering, which to me doesn't sound like something reasonably simple that hasn't been invented yet.

Oh, ok. I was concurring with the comment that said "There are plenty of inventions yet to make" and not really voicing an opinion about their difficulty.

However, after rereading it, I disagree with the top comment that said that "Centuries ago, it was easier to think of things to invent".

It's never easy to think of something to invent. Finding the problem, even just thinking there might be a problem where noone sees any, is a big part of any invention.

Also, in the past, inventions required a much larger leap of thinking than today. When we speak today about growing wings on creatures born without it, we kind of accept the idea, because we know it's already possible to grow eyes on flies' legs for example.

But inventing the steam engine, or disproving "spontaneous generation" and inventing vaccines, sound to me much more impressive because those people went where no one had dared go before them.

But the thread's based on an invalid assumption. I posit that inventions were never "easy." They just seem that way in retrospect, from the outside.

Easy is relative. So is "invention". I invent things most days of my life, but they aren't that novel.

People are crazy inventive and always have been. But today, it is far easier than it ever was before to learn about the best inventions others already figured out instead of reinventing the wheel.

Bravo for attitude but we should not forget energy conservation rules.

New inventions are likely to require more specialized training. The days of a Benjamin Franklin inventing bifocals despite not being primarily an expert in optometry are likely over.

It was commonly accepted wisdom that camera lenses could only get so small and light at a certain quality due to the physical limits of glass.

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.

I've recently gotten into amateur astronomy. The modern high-end telescope eyepieces, usually low-power with a really wide FOV, often now have 7 or more lenses and can weigh 2 pounds.

This research looks amazing. It could change the game once again, enabling even higher quality and wider FOVs in a broad range of focal lengths (from what I've read, there has been a lot of improvement in the past few decades already). Probably won't be cheap though.

Actually, my personal experience includes a ton of examples of:

1. I realize the need for something and envision a novel invention 2. I discover upon research that it has already been invented

So, I did have the thought about the "thing I've never seen" and could pursue inventing it. But it's a big world and far easier than ever before to learn from others.

I have known people who went all the way, finished inventing something and got it patented, and then I (as a patent critic) have doubts that it's truly novel and then discover, to the surprise of my inventor friend, that it actually was invented before but was obscure and they hadn't heard about it.

There's tons of room for invention still, but it's comparably much reduced from the past for all the basic stuff and far easier to discover existing inventions. It's just NOT anything like it used to be.

Wish we could be happy, and not destroy the planet and the future crawling over each other in an ever increasing red queen race on the slippery side of a cliff of despair.

We have only allowed a very narrow band of 'solutions' to be explored: those that involve 'doing-making-selling-competing. We have had very minor controls on this process, and even the little we have on that side is constantly besieged or selectively weaponized as there is no barrier between 'the game' and 'the meta-game'. For example, any solution to a problem that involves abstinence, for instance for very real problems such as climate change or the obesity crisis, is impossible due to the way we have structured 'reward'.

And I don't know about battery tech or medicine, but most certainly in AI breakthroughs are very much the work of individuals and do not need massive teams or funding. It is again our 'market-economy', with inane 'IP wars' that seem to stifle these works from being brought to fruition

> For example, any solution to a problem that involves abstinence

There is a famous french comedian who said "when you think about it, the only thing needed for this not to be sold... is that nobody buys it".

That pretty much sums up the solution to most problems of the human race. You know that killing thing ? What if we stopped doing it ? You know that unhealthy habit ? That immoral product ? Etc.

Disciplining yourself to not eat too much chocolate is hard enough. So collectively asking all humans to agree on one particular point of discipline....

The problem is that individual rational optimization can and does lead to collective deterioration. In the abstract: If a given adoption has an individual utility of +1, and a collective detriment of -0.01, then for each rational individual actor in non small populations the decision to adopt is a net improvement even though the resulting utility for all is far below 0. This is why the old excuse of 'vote with your wallet' is nonsense.

You indicate rightly that this is a 'hard problem'. Especially because it goes against the new 'geocentrism' of 'market' dogma. But it being 'hard' should not be a ticket to just giving up.

> If a given adoption has an individual utility of +1, and a collective detriment of -0.01,

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?

No, I to think he's saying that -0.01 applies to everyone. Each individual choice is actually causing a loss of 80 million in utility (vs a gain of 1), but that loss is mostly borne by other people, so they are individually better off making that choice.

Got it. -0.01 per person, not -0.01 in total.

I can image a lot of obvious things that still could be invented like beaming, real hoverboards, holodecks and so on. Trying to invent any of this may seem preposterous to us as they are seemingly impossible. But these are only as impossible to us now as driving without horses or sailing the seas without sails have seem impossible three hundred years ago.

And neither cars nor steamboats have been invented by single individual. The "reasonably easy to invent things that are actually valuable" mostly have a very complicated history of trials and errors, tinkering and thinking and imagination from many groups and individuals.

Try to create your own lightbuld or try to isolate a mile long cable for the underground transport of electricity. Try to sell any of these to someone who has never heart of them and lacks the infrastracture for using them. In the hindsight these may seem "reasonable easy to invent things that are actually valuable". But seriously, nothing really new has ever been easy.

>But these are only as impossible to us now as driving without horses or sailing the seas without sails have seem impossible three hundred years ago.

That's not necessarily the case. Some things can be legitimately, laws of physics-style, impossible.

Yes. But as long as we do not actually know the complete laws of physics, we can only make educated guesses about what constitutes 'impossible'.

The point of OP is that as an individual, you can carve a wheel or make a rope alone, with your bare hands.

It requires much more resources to invent a revolutionary battery

Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!

Making your own rope is easy with some trial and error. You just take a bunch of stringy things and twist them together to make a stronger stringy thing.

The twisting bit takes some finesse, and obviously you won't be making nylon rope with your bare hands, but making a grass rope is child's play.

Making a wheel, once you have the concept of a wheel, is pretty damn easy too. If you want a stone wheel, take a large stone and chip away until it resembles a wheel. If you want a wooden wheel, take a large piece of wood and whittle away until you have a wheel.

I think that this sort of perspective is (at best) a-historical. I have absolutely no clue how difficult it would be to actually conceptualize "rope" or "wheel" without any of my modern knowledge.

The saying that 'hindsight is 20/20' would seem to be particularly true at the scale of early human invention and civilization.

Exactly. The invention isn’t the physical object, it’s the idea - the realisation that a certain class of objects/processes can be useful in unexpected and open-ended ways.

Wheels are almost useless in dense forests that have no roads, for obvious reasons. So why would anyone waste a day or two making one?

  Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!

This comment (by my interpretation) implies that the process is difficult. I agree with other comments stating the concept is difficult, but the process for those two inventions is quite manageable - even if you are "alone and naked in the woods".

Wheels are one thing, axles and their bearings and lubrication are another.

> 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.

You don't think this is how they built the original wheels?

I'd prefer to rely on archaeological evidence rather than retroactive first principles; for example http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/archaeology... which shows a panelized wheel. I see SciAm have an article on the difficulties of a useful wheel too: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-it-took-so-lo...

You can't make a useful wheel out of a single large block of wood. It will dry out and crack. Wooden wheels are made of several pieces to minimize this problem.

You are describing a more complex wheel already.

The first used wheel bas probably some vague round stone with a hole it it.

It sucked, but it was better than no wheel.

Creating the concept is hard. But not harder or less hard than inventing the press.

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.

But now there's so much more that you can do alone.

Write an app, and you've made a new tool instantly usable by any person on earth.

Come up with a simple device and 3d print it.

Lack skills to do any of that - instantly hire unlimited number of experts. Lack knowledge? Access it instantly.

If we're talking about simple low hanging fruit inventions that can be made by a single person, the search space is much larger than the stuff you can do with your bare hands alone in the forest.

That's not helping for invention, that's just compensating for the hardening of innovation.

Really? Try carving a wheel when all you have is rocks and a bunch of trees and no mathematical knowledge.

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.

What you describe is the difficulty to be creative. You need to try a lot of things and it takes time.

It's the same now than it was then.

What's changed is that, with the same creative power, as an individual, you could do more then.

You can carve a wheel alone in the wood. It's hard, but as a single individual with only natural resources, you can.

A kid in china, or a grandpa in west africa can do it.

To code a revolutionary AI today, you need a lot of per-requisites: electricity, computer, internet, access to knowledge, education and a looooooot of time to practice.

Even if you are the most creative person in the world, from all centuries included. You can't do it in the wood. You will not see somebody in Mali do it. A kid is unlikely to be able to do it.

Because being capable of creative the concept in your head is not enough. The stuff you could do with what anybody had at hand is gone.

IMHO this is the point 4. the author is pointing out:

"Posing the question is a large part of the work. If you have never seen rope, it actually doesn’t occur to you that rope would come in handy, or to ask yourself how to make some."

Sorry @quadrangle, I would go towards an opposite opinion than yours :) I have never in my life been in such a time when inventing would be as easy as now: It's so easy to communicate through internet to find people and skills to fill the ones I'm missing. From crazy idea to proof of concept is pretty straight forward.

For example if you have invented something including electronics:

You have no knowledge of it? PCB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board) knowledge -> buy some from freelance.net. Basic component drawing with pen and paper is OK to ask a quota for. And when you want to build the PCBs -> alibaba.

And proof of concepts can be built even with more simple parts, such as Arduino, piece of metal can, etc.

(Edited some typos and bad English.)

That's not inventing. That's innovating.

It's very, very different.

Exactly. To illustrate your point:

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.

This distinction seems arbitrary. Couldn't I just say that rope itself wasn't an invention but simply a better kind of vine for climbing?

No, because that’s exactly what rope isn’t.

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.

I'd go further. Nylon as a material was invented and then the current rope tech was improved by it. Innovation stemmed from the fact that we now have a stronger rope and can use it for stuff that was not possible before.

(largely inspired by: http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding...)

If I recall correctly, the original impetus for nylon was replacing the natural isoprene rubber in tires, to remove the necessity of rubber plantations as a strategic military asset. This resulted in neoprene. Then DuPont decided to expand the project to explore uses for other novel polymers.

The inventor actually committed suicide, partly because he thought he was a one-hit wonder.

Neoprene was invented in 1930. Nylon 6-6 was invented in 1935. Carothers killed himself in 1937. Nylon was first used in toothbrush bristles in 1938, and rolled out to nylon stockings in 1939. Nylon production was then diverted into war materiel until 1945, which was when people started rioting over shortages of nylon stockings.

Who knows what might have happened to polymers technology if antidepressant medications had been commercially available and known to physicians in the two year window between 1935 and 1937? That seems like an odd dependency, but the inventor of a notable technology failed to invent other notable things because he had severe and suicidal depression. So it isn't just as simple as roads needing chariots and chariots needing roads, like the article mentions. Sometimes the prerequisites are strange and unpredictable--like the inventor had to visit a zoo featuring a particular animal species during their childhood, or they had to drive a car in a climate with cold winters.

The more things we have, and know about, and the more people move around and collaborate, the easier it is to satisfy those prerequisites.

This is among the best replies I got.

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 agree that things that "seem" easy have been invented but I doubt the transistors we put in everything today would have been seen as easy in 1900. I think CRISPR alone has near infinite possibility and that is just one invention. Quantum computers, carbon fiber, battery technology, etc. are all just in their infancy and will spawn whole new industries.

Inventions are motivated by problems, and we still have lots of them. We sorely need cheap sustainable energy, cheap drugs, artificial organs, more efficient transportation, denser batteries, and that's just stuff off the top of my head. Some of that stuff will entail using existing technology, buy much of it will require new inventions.

Many ideas that seem easy to invent only seem so in retrospect. The article repeatedly points out that inventing rope isn't obvious.

Inventing rope isn't obvious, but it's something a single individual can do. You don't need a team of people that each has studied some field for twenty years and a brilliant idea, you just need a brilliant idea. Inventing a device to cheaply store energy at grid scale is not something a single person can do, ever.

Inventing a better battery is something a single person can do in the lab. I worry that you are conflating inventing things and the engineering of scaling them out. Scaling things almost never was doable by one person, but the initial seed was and usually is.

A lot of money has been poured into battery technology over the last decade or two. We don't have much to show for it. That makes me believe that inventing a better battery is not as simple as it might seem. Coming up with a terrific chemistry is one thing, finding something that is can be manufactured at a good price is something very different.

You can make your own graphene with some charcoal and sticky tape. Graphene is an amazing material, but making it industrially useful is extremely hard.

Bicycles are 97% efficient. Society could be organized around the bicycle.

Many of the health issues would be corrected if our environment required people to exercise to get around.

People are just really lazy.

As someone who commutes to work on a bike, you definitely have a sympathetic ear with me.

This seems a bit myopic. The Earth receives less than one hundred billionth of the energy being dumped into space by the sun. Of the incredibly small portion the Earth does receive, we barely use any of it. There is plenty of energy available. We just have to harness it.

Don't get into victim-blaming. Where bicycling is prioritized in the development planning (e.g. Netherlands, where it's also quite flat), people bike all the time.

There are powerful entities who throw their weight around in both policy and propaganda to promote the wasteful forms of transportation.

I disagree. There are a lot of small inventions that are happening every day. I've had independently ideas that are now massive sites or products.

If you want to know why things have taken so long, have a look to usual flamewars here. There are many in which half of usually smart people can't simply understand what's the others' position about.

The pattern is that one side considers current practice tedious, steep learning curve for professionals only, while the other side finds it "good enough". If it's good enough for you, you'll never invent something easier and faster to understand.

> There are many in which half of usually smart people can't simply understand what's the others' position about.

> The pattern is that one side considers current practice tedious, steep learning curve for professionals only, while the other side finds it "good enough". If it's good enough for you, you'll never invent something easier and faster to understand.

This is a bit baffling to me -- the phenomena to which you refer. And it seems to be more general than the pattern you outline.

It appears to have something to do with both pre-suppositions and different orderings of personal values [0]. But I'm not sure.

Do you think it is possible to generalize the structure of the process via which reasonably educated and smart people can be presented with the same facts and come to different conclusions -- that they will defend against each other in pretty feisty debates?

[0] By this I mean, for example, that some people might put individual freedom higher than equality across large populations and vice-versa.

I believe it's called projection: you "project" that other persons' minds work the same as yours. If you've tried to solve some computer problem over the phone, you have experienced it. People thinks that you can magically view their screens.

In this case, very smart people is unable to figure out how does an average user thinks.

I do believe that there's something about mindset. Some people lives under the delusion that things work the way they work because that's the way they should work. Actually there are a lot of randomness in the way things work, specially in areas where new territories are being unconvered all the time.

Perception bias: is the tendency not to notice and more quickly forget stimuli that cause emotional discomfort and contradict our prior beliefs.

Confirmation bias: is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.

"It appears to have something to do with both pre-suppositions and different orderings of personal values"

I believe the two cognitive biases above explain this. If negative numbers are "ignore", and positive are "use in conclusion": conclusion = -0.1 * fact1 + 0.9 * fact2 + -0.4 * fact3. Your past experiences determine the weights.

edit: I also think sibling comment by narag plays a part.

A breakthrough in battery tech that results in small but very long lasting batteries will result in the invention of a bunch of obvious things that are currently impossible or impractical given current tech.

I am not sure if those would strictly qualify as inventions or innovations/improvements. We already have a list of designs to build and power once we have significantly better batteries, or significantly better ways of harnessing other energy source (e.g. nanorobots powered by body heat). I do think that those "significantly better" batteries, will need to be completely new ways of thinking about the battery, which would be the disruptive part. But once we have one, the rest is "let's put that to good use, and into every house" kind of thing.

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