The big factors I see are: 'poverty trap', 'crude hacks', and 'full-time craftsman'. These interact. For example, most people need a day job. Even in R&D shops, day jobs are largely concerned with marginal improvements. I spent 12 years working as an R&D physicist, but I had to do my inventions on my own time because they weren't relevant to the incremental improvement products I was paid to develop. It'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.

The craftsman thing is a big deal. I suck as a craftsman, mainly because I'm usually doing something for the first time. Need to weld it? Guess I'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?

The workaround for this is to work with specialized craftspeople. Unfortunately, this adds different challenges. Now you have to pay them ('poverty trap') or convince them it's worthwhile (I didn't see 'social proof' 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's better going back to being your own craftsman.

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't usually incentivized properly to do it for them.

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.

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'm paying a flat rate for internet access and video chatting with people all over the globe).

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.

Why did things take so long? Because everything had to be individually re-invented, we had no shoulders of giants.

    > Having external thinking tools is a big deal. Modern
    > ‘human intelligence’ relies a lot on things like writing
    > and collected data, that aren’t in anyone’s brain.

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't take much damping for the wave to never grow beyond a certain amplitude.

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.

Now, with the Internet, we've made it incredibly easy to preserve and share information. I think the next advance for us is going to be dealing with the fact that we've made it equally easy to share things that aren't true or helpful. Worse, many of those unfacts prey on our cognitive biases and are more appealing and frequently shared.

"Reality has a surprising amount of detail": http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

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'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.

But interesting systems (turing complete) can also exhibit chaotic behavior, and knowing when they will crash can't be predicted (halting problem). Any biologist know that ecosystems are fragile and can be pushed either side of the frontier of chaos.

I also like to think of inventions/concept as numbers, which can be factored, multiplied and added. Sometimes you get a new prime number (or was it there all along :) ).

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.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Alms

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'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.

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?

Or maybe its just that the type of civilization agriculture creates leads to sufficient population densities for knowledge to start accumulating.

http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/197303/why.they.lost.th...

Imagine you'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.

If you happened to figure out some metal working, it's probably not worth doing. Your tribe can't set up a mine, and gathering fuel is a huge effort.

Realistically, that sort of thing probably needs an agricultural society that can afford to feed people who aren't farmers.

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.

Without those, you really are better off remaining a hunter-gatherer. People became significantly shorter when they first adopted a sedentary lifestyle.

Invention takes place every day in oh so many peoples lives all around the world. However, too many of those same people don'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't think that those inventions and ideas are good enough.

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.

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.

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.

Several early inventions were incredibly time consuming to make by hand, and judging from apes, social groups didn'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.

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're organized around shared knowledge as a principle.

It took a long time because we started with nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I like the article but I think it'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.

Early on in a system defined by compound growth you will have slow growth. Then eventually exponential growth. This is what we've experienced.

My general expectations:

- 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't matter.

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't anywhere near enough.

With regards to what we consider inventions that move us forward (more advanced or fundamentally more novel solutions) I wonder if the problem isn't just a lack of imagination but imagination and abilities compared to what technology can deliver.

I always think of this as a reminder that perhaps it's possible to imagine things that humans can't imagine.

https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664

Having said that there is of course a big difference between inventing something fundamentally new (a rope) and improving it (nylon rope).

But more and more I get the feeling that humans aren't really going to invent most of the solutions we can dream up.

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.

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.

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

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.

"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.)

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

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.

I generally find it hard to pin down to what degree culture motivates people to action and think that explanations should be preferred, that show how single individuals or groups might directly profit from certain actions.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-fRo5-p9hE

http://peterburk.github.io/pliny/ChaptersHtml/0/1.%20PlinyPe...

I have the feeling we underestimate how much stuff has been invented and forgotten.

For example, if you consider architecture the romans used half a dozen kind of opus to build walls, different varieties of arches, cement mixtures, hollow bricks and sunken panels to allow for lighter domes, both rib and barrel vaults, and likely a bunch of other things I never heard about.

A lot of that stuff has been superseded, so we don't really care a about a dozen old cement mixtures, or pure wood techniques, but it doesn't mean they were not invented.

I would have put it on the plague, the protestant revolution, the magna carta and the printing press. All pre-dated the industrial revolution - but that itself had to be enabled by something (otherwise - the Romans would have done it, right?)

Prior to 1790, Clark asserts that man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations.

In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy. In that way, according to Clark, less violent, more literate and more hard-working behaviour - middle-class values - were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population. This process of "downward social mobility" eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap.

All comments like this assume the AI is absolutely goal oriented toward self-improvement and self-propagation and has no limitations or competition. "No biology or society" - what about the physical hardware and infrastructure needed to maintain it? "Self upkeep" - so its directly connected to an entire automated vertically integrated supply chain and factory complex? "Unlimited ability to record/analyze" - again, where is it getting this infinite storage and processing capacity? "ability to simulate variations of..." - if it's truly intelligent in a way humans would consider intelligent, even massively moreso, why would it spend all its time random walking the solution space of everything?

If we are talking about AI as god, that can work, I suppose, but as someone who really likes transhumanism and the idea of AI in general, this idea of the sloughing away of all limitations and an AI actor totally dedicated with either the infinite and immediate improvement or replacement of itself makes no sense to me.

Am I missing something here, or is there just to much engineer whispering in the corners of my brain.

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!

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.