Why things might have taken so long

I&#x27;d like to add my perspective as a struggling inventor. I can&#x27;t speak to conditions 50k years ago, but a number of the challenges listed are still pretty relevant, and I&#x27;ve had to justify &quot;why are things taking so long&quot; to my friends and family enough times to pay close attention to this.<p>The big factors I see are: &#x27;poverty trap&#x27;, &#x27;crude hacks&#x27;, and &#x27;full-time craftsman&#x27;. These interact. For example, most people need a day job. Even in R&amp;D shops, day jobs are largely concerned with marginal improvements. I spent 12 years working as an R&amp;D physicist, but I had to do my inventions on my own time because they weren&#x27;t relevant to the incremental improvement products I was paid to develop. It&#x27;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.<p>The craftsman thing is a big deal. I suck as a craftsman, mainly because I&#x27;m usually doing something for the first time. Need to weld it? Guess I&#x27;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?<p>The workaround for this is to work with specialized craftspeople. Unfortunately, this adds different challenges. Now you have to pay them (&#x27;poverty trap&#x27;) or convince them it&#x27;s worthwhile (I didn&#x27;t see &#x27;social proof&#x27; 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&#x27;s better going back to being your own craftsman.<p>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&#x27;t usually incentivized properly to do it for them.<p>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.

Someone smarter than me noted that most science fiction has badly missed the mark of what the present and near future will look like b&#x2F;c the assumption was that power sources would trend towards zero cost (&quot;too cheap to meter&quot;) and that this would enable all sorts of interesting world altering gizmos&#x27;s like jetpacks, flying cars, physics defying spacecraft etc.<p>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&#x27;m paying a flat rate for internet access and video chatting with people all over the globe).<p>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.<p>Why did things take so long? Because everything had to be individually re-invented, we had no shoulders of giants.

<p><pre><code> &gt; Having external thinking tools is a big deal. Modern &gt; ‘human intelligence’ relies a lot on things like writing &gt; and collected data, that aren’t in anyone’s brain. </code></pre> Here&#x27;s a way to think about it. Imagine human progress as the amplitude of a wave. That wave oscillates forward through time by being passed on from one person to the next. Each person can add their tiny nudge to the wave when it reaches them, increasing its amplitude a little. Over time, that resonance means the wave grows and grows.<p>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&#x27;t take much damping for the wave to never grow beyond a certain amplitude.<p>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.<p>Now, with the Internet, we&#x27;ve made it <i>incredibly</i> easy to preserve and share information. I think the next advance for us is going to be dealing with the fact that we&#x27;ve made it equally easy to share things that aren&#x27;t true or helpful. Worse, many of those unfacts prey on our cognitive biases and are more appealing and frequently shared.

One of the links in the post was also a really great read, for those who skipped it.<p>&quot;Reality has a surprising amount of detail&quot;: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnsalvatier.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2017&#x2F;reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnsalvatier.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2017&#x2F;reality-has-a-surprising-...</a>

I like to think that inventions&#x2F;concepts&#x2F;idea have a life of their own. They interact, reproduce, mutate. They grow around themselves bubbles of compatible ideas. Sometimes they compete to kill other ideas.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>But interesting systems (turing complete) can also exhibit chaotic behavior, and knowing when they will crash can&#x27;t be predicted (halting problem). Any biologist know that ecosystems are fragile and can be pushed either side of the frontier of chaos.<p>I also like to think of inventions&#x2F;concept as numbers, which can be factored, multiplied and added. Sometimes you get a new prime number (or was it there all along :) ).

About not having invented anything: it&#x27;s harder to invent something novel today simply because so much has already been invented and knowledge of it is available.<p>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).<p>Today, we&#x27;ve run low on the scope of reasonably easy to invent things that are actually valuable. All the obvious &quot;wish we could X&quot; 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&#x27;re not going to see some person just invent something around these things the way multiple people independently invented forms of rope in prehistory.

Nothing much (in percentage terms) got invented until the industrial revolution. The question is why the industrial revolution took so long. If you are interested in this topic I highly recommend <i>A Farewell to Alms</i> [0] - warning controversial hypothesis, but it raises lots of interesting topics to think about.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_Farewell_to_Alms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_Farewell_to_Alms</a>

James Dyson always strikes me as a solid modern representation of just how difficult it is to actually invent (or re-invent) something new, very useful and commercially successful. He went through hundreds of variations and major prototypes on the vacuum cleaner over 5+ years. Even after he got a product he could commercialize, it took another 10-15 years to make it really take off. He spent two decades just to get the business to a point of true sustaining success, while fending off a global swath of well funded competitors at every price tier and quality.

The poverty trap explanation here makes a lot of sense to me, although maybe it needs a bit of expansion.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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?<p>Or maybe its just that the type of civilization agriculture creates leads to sufficient population densities for knowledge to start accumulating.

The post touches on the idea that the number of human beings that exist today far exceeds those in the past. Interesting thought. We are now like a cpu (collectively speaking) with 7 billion cores vs 50,000 years ago would only be about 10-100k in numbers.

Perhaps this is covered by the &quot;crude hacks&quot; category, but I&#x27;m reminded of the story of how the wheel was lost in Arabia. Technology doesn&#x27;t necessarily provide a marginal improvement.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.aramcoworld.com&#x2F;issue&#x2F;197303&#x2F;why.they.lost.the.wheel.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.aramcoworld.com&#x2F;issue&#x2F;197303&#x2F;why.they.lost.th...</a>

If nothing else, this article&#x27;s example of inventing rope caused me to seek to learn how to make it, which I now know how to do.

The inventions we care about today are only useful to a certain sort of society, and it took a long time for that to emerge.<p>Imagine you&#x27;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.<p>If you happened to figure out some metal working, it&#x27;s probably not worth doing. Your tribe can&#x27;t set up a mine, and gathering fuel is a huge effort.<p>Realistically, that sort of thing probably needs an agricultural society that can afford to feed people who aren&#x27;t farmers.

The list is missing what IMHO is the most important reason: it took a really, really long time to transform wild plants and animals into useful domesticated varieties.<p>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.<p>Without those, you really are better off remaining a hunter-gatherer. People became significantly shorter when they first adopted a sedentary lifestyle.

This is also why true AI would advance very rapidly: no biology or society to stand in the way, few constraints re: self-upkeep, unlimited ability to record&#x2F;analyze, ability to simulate variations of combining A&amp;B, even when A or B seem useless in isolation...

There is an old adage about necessity being the mother of invention.<p>Invention takes place every day in oh so many peoples lives all around the world. However, too many of those same people don&#x27;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&#x27;t think that those inventions and ideas are good enough.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

You can combine many of these...<p>Several early inventions were incredibly time consuming to make by hand, and judging from apes, social groups didn&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;re organized around shared knowledge as a principle.

This is one of the primary takeaways I got from reading Sapiens. Our big brains didn&#x27;t pay off for millenia, until they did, and in a big way. Most times, innovation isn&#x27;t enough to beat the competition...you have to survive long enough for it to give you an edge.

Well, at the dawn of human civilization our finest tools were hewn rock. Now we have computers and have stood on the moon.<p>It took a long time because we started with nothing. Absolutely nothing.<p>I like the article but I think it&#x27;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.<p>Early on in a system defined by compound growth you will have slow growth. Then eventually exponential growth. This is what we&#x27;ve experienced.

Having run a few areas &#x2F; programs that delivered a decent amount of innovation in the underlying process, I&#x27;ve been surprised with just how much isn&#x27;t obvious...<p>My general expectations:<p>- 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&#x27;t matter.<p>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&#x27;t anywhere near enough.

Great read, however, I think there is something else in play here.<p>With regards to what we consider inventions that move us forward (more advanced or fundamentally more novel solutions) I wonder if the problem isn&#x27;t just a lack of imagination but imagination and abilities compared to what technology can deliver.<p>I always think of this as a reminder that perhaps it&#x27;s possible to imagine things that humans can&#x27;t imagine.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Hello_World&#x2F;status&#x2F;861735184990961664" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Hello_World&#x2F;status&#x2F;861735184990961664</a><p>Having said that there is of course a big difference between inventing something fundamentally new (a rope) and improving it (nylon rope).<p>But more and more I get the feeling that humans aren&#x27;t really going to invent most of the solutions we can dream up.

The article is factually incorrect: Our brains were as modern 50K years ago as they are now.<p>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.

Hmm, none of these sound right. I think the issue was mostly that as a hunter gatherer, if you make something, you have to carry it. So you couldn&#x27;t accumulate a lot of tools, not to mention stuff like forges and so forth.

I occasionally think about certain foods (e.g. diary things such as meringue - or bread - or alcohol etc.), and think, &quot;how the hell did someone come across this&quot;. I guess the answer is simply: time!

There are tons of new inventions happening every day. People do new things only for themselves. What is impeded is bringing these to mass market due to markets being concentrated in few hands.

A favorite from Jack Handy: &quot;I think somebody should come up with a way to breed a very large shrimp. That way, you could ride him, then after you camped at night, you could eat him. How about it, science?&quot;<p>While today saying &quot;how about it, science?&quot; has become our second nature, it wasn&#x27;t the obvious way to think about the world 50K years ago.

&gt; Often A isn’t useful without B, and B isn’t useful without A. For instance, A is chariots and B is roads.<p>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&#x27;t turn to mud when it&#x27;s raining, that&#x27;s clear of obstacles and relatively smooth.

Ten years of blockchain technology and the only popular use case is cryptocurrency.<p>It would seem that current times bring innovation in ridiculous pace, but the fact is - it&#x27;s still awfuly slow.

Harder to mass market, hire and develop tools without television, internet and also the dependency on other things not yet invented, freeing up of capital and access to credit

There&#x27;s also the minor point that up until around 12,000 years ago a lot of prime land was under ice, and resources were rather less accessible than they are today.

Hindsight gave us so much metaknowledge. It&#x27;s true that if i never saw a rope i might lose faith quickly if trying to craft the idea from scratch.

I think this post is missing a big one: entropy

The invention that took a long time to come up with was agriculture. That was the killer invention.

&gt; <i>‘Crude hacks’ get you most of the way there, reducing the value of great inventions.</i>

This whole thread is hilarious. Well done.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond has a lot to say on this topic.

No word on patents as a technology driver?

It&#x27;s basically an exponential curve.

AI currently evolve under a human environment. Its success to next gen all based on human selection even if it is self breeding ( the guy just lost funding whilst it ...)<p>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.<p>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.<p>The Egyptian Slave will go to the promise land leaving their master behind.