I suppose penicillin might be a good addition to the list of powerful compounds discovered by happenstance?
Does this mean that innovation is basically a brute force calculation? Humans simply trying permutations until something hits?
But we also keep pushing back earliest dates for precursors to civilization, I start to wonder if maybe there aren't graveyards of people who couldn't distinguish thymol from ethanol and selected themselves out of human history via acute liver failure.
Psychedelic mushrooms make sense. You see it, you eat it. Willow bark tea is a whole process.
Hey, all the bugs that are eating that plant are dying. Let's see what happens if we smoke it.
For mushrooms it was probably desperation, but my head cannon for mushrooms is Trial by Mushroom: You can be expelled from our community for stealing, or you can eat this mushroom and if you survive, you get to stay.
There are a couple varieties of tea that are actually fermented, but for most teas it's a misnomer. You aren't causing fermentation, just autolysis (latin: self digestion), which is more akin to the malting phase of beer production. Black tea is left to process longer, while green tea is interrupted sooner. The switch is turned on by bruising the leaves, and off by desiccating them.
From a caterpillar's perspective, a tea leaf is booby trapped. Waiting for mandibles to mix the ingredients and create the insecticide.
Also, if you're in constant pain you'll try all kinds of random stuff to make the pain go away. If necessity is the mother of invention then desperation is its father.
History of the World in Six Glasses claims that tea and coffee more or less caused the enlightenment. One, it stopped day drinking by the intellectual class. And two, they were foil for socialization.
AI has been an idea for decades. It wasn’t until transformers in the last few years we had big gains.
Google and giant institutions focus on fiat revenue stability over the long term, in line with political ideology. Few big ideas come out of that. I think what Adam Smith is said to have written applies; division of labor taken to the extreme will result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.
We iterated on our current political system over the Boomers lives. Next generations are tired of the threat of brute force from the elders who the kids now see as in no position to back up those threats given their age. They’re abandoning norms of the last 30-40 years, which IMO, is enabled by abandonment of thousands of years of obligation to preserve religion.
There are shorter iterative periods too; 15 years ago comic movies went crazy with Iron Man, iPhone blew up; now we’re iterating on AI generated content and spatial headsets. 15 years prior (with some wiggle room for margin of error) “information super highway” was coming.
On the shorter scales there seems to a pattern of 3-5 year warmup and 7-10 year plateau, with a cooldown of 2-3 years as the masses lose interest. This aligns with neuroscience experiments that show our brains devalue old patterns after roughly 15 years.
Generational churn and lack of generalized sense of obligation to the past (via abandonment of religious buy in by westerners) could free the future to live in cycles that align with scientific measurement versus obligation to be parrots that recite past memes.