Comment by kalonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kalonis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com