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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Now I'm wondering if the sum total of all inventions prior to 1800 is more or less than the total since 2000, to pick a random year with no particular reason for the choice.

And how would you weight the importance of the inventions?

I think ice is nice — but autoclaves, antibiotics, and anaesthesia during surgery are much more important.

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They had antibiotics. Democedes used apples fermented in hay to produce something which contained penicillin when he performed the first known masectomy of Darius' wife Atossa

I can't find the source right now but it's similar to Peruvian Tocosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocosh

These kinds of comparisons are category errors: you don't get to autoclaves and antibiotics without the civilization-level changes that get you irrigation and ice in summer.

I don't deny that, my claim is more of "what counts as 'primitive conditions'?"

"Ice is nice" is severely understating the importance of refrigeration. The ability to preserve fresh foods is easily up there with penicilin.

There are a lot of ways to preserve food without refrigeration.

There are a lot of ways to stay healthy without penicillin.

Doesn't mean penicillin isn't super-helpful. Doesn't mean refrigeration isn't super-helpful.

Your question is essentially unknowable, as the definition of invention is unclear, and we have no hope of estimating quantity with anything like the precision we have with modern recordkeeping (we can't estimate how many patents would have been produced in the 10th century had the modern patent system existed back then). Recall that there's a lot of innovation in the "little things"; note that a parallel post is talking about different shapes of spearheads, and each of those variations would definitely correspond to a new patent in the modern patent system. At the same time, most written sources throughout history are from elites, who give very little thought to what the working classes are doing, and thus tend to ignore innovation that does exist.

My gut instinct is that innovation rate throughout history is largely constant on a per-capita basis, although I would admit that probably some industries are more or less innovative at various stages or in history. Through that lens, the fact that you're looking at >10× total person-years pre-1800 compared to post-2000 means that I'd feel rather comfortable opining that there were more total innovations before 1800 than after 2000.

> Now I'm wondering if the sum total of all inventions prior to 1800 is more or less than the total since 2000

Not sure why you have the gap between 1800 and 2000. But the number of things 'invented' before 1800 is massive in terms of the broad categories of things we consider essential to life e.g. (in no particular order) fire, transport, cooking, metal working, agriculture, animal husbandry, buildings, weapons, health care, books, paintings, music, optics, etc. There are very few things after 2000 of such importance.

I suspect that if you had a single cut-off at 1800, 'before' might still win, if we stick to these high-level categories, rather than, say, patent applications.

“autoclaves, antibiotics, and anesthesia during surgery are nice but the super intelligent AI that found the cure for all illnesses and the ability to go back in time and etc. are more important.”

Someone in x thousand years from now.

Or even a hundred. The "singularity" analogy isn't one I favour[0] but the radical changes the idea represents would make today seem like a primitive ancient world to those that come after it.

[0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/not-a-singu...

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