Why things might have taken so long • Hacker News Board

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#101

Post by autokad » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 2:31 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #35

simonbarker87 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing. There are plenty of inventions yet to make, from complex AI enabled devices down to the…

> This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing. Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's a…

are you calling inventing flight low hanging fruit? I'd bet even after given the answer and reading up on wikipedia, you would struggle building a plain from scratch.

its not harder to invent things, you just dont know how to do it. its not a problem on you, I couldnt invent anything myself. if anything, we are in a golden age, much like people ~1900 were when it comes to invention. the scripting languages, algorithms, computing power at my finger tips gives me incredible power.

sadly, I didnt think of making a crypto currency ~2009. I didnt think of creating a ride sharing service, selfie drones, or fidget spinners. well actually I did create a fidget spinner with my roller blade bearings back in the early 2ks, but I didnt think anything of it.

point is, we take for granted all the stuff that is available to us now, and there are plenty of stuff (even low hanging fruit) to invent, its just very hard.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#102

Post by brownbat » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

You can combine many of these...

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.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#103

Post by rainbowmverse » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

simonbarker87 wrote: post #31

quadrangle wrote: post #17

About not having invented anything: it's harder to invent something novel today simply because so much has already been invented and knowledge of it is available. 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 weal…

This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing. There are plenty of inventions yet to make, from complex AI enabled devices down to the…

It was commonly accepted wisdom that camera lenses could only get so small and light at a certain quality due to the physical limits of glass.

And then... https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/06/a-thinner-fla...

It's a very long way from putting a 1500mm lens in a pocket camera, but it looks promising. Of course, it could end up being the fusion reactor of optics: always a half decade out.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#104

Post by ataturk » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 2:49 PM UTC

Interesting material. What is harder today for individuals, however, is information overload coupled with so many people. Many times I have had the experience of coming up with a great idea, only to search online and find that others have already turned it into a product or are in the process of already doing so--it's as if nothing you can individually imagine hasn't already been investigated and pushed down on. It's both an amazing time to live and a very depressing time to live. What is my contribution, then, if the hive always beats me to the punch?

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#105

Post by cf » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 2:54 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #77

cf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inventions are motivated by problems, and we still have lots of them. We sorely need cheap sustainable energy, cheap drugs, artificial organs, more efficient transportation, denser batteries, and that's just stuff off the top of my head. Some of that stuff will entail using existing technology, buy much of it will require new inventions. Many ideas that seem easy to invent only seem so in retrospect. The article repe…

Inventing rope isn't obvious, but it's something a single individual can do. You don't need a team of people that each has studied some field for twenty years and a brilliant idea, you just need a brilliant idea. Inventing a device to cheaply store energy at grid scale is not something a single person can do, ever.

Inventing a better battery is something a single person can do in the lab. I worry that you are conflating inventing things and the engineering of scaling them out. Scaling things almost never was doable by one person, but the initial seed was and usually is.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#106

Post by mojoe » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

GistNoesis wrote: post #81

I like to think that inventions/concepts/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. 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 ti…

I believe this concept was where the term "meme" came from (coined by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene)

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#107

Post by adrianN » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 3:10 PM UTC

cf wrote: post #105

adrianN wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inventing rope isn't obvious, but it's something a single individual can do. You don't need a team of people that each has studied some field for twenty years and a brilliant idea, you just need a brilliant idea. Inventing a device to cheaply store energy at grid scale is not something a single person can do, ever.

Inventing a better battery is something a single person can do in the lab. I worry that you are conflating inventing things and the engineering of scaling them out. Scaling things almost never was doable by one person, but the initial seed was and usually is.

A lot of money has been poured into battery technology over the last decade or two. We don't have much to show for it. That makes me believe that inventing a better battery is not as simple as it might seem. Coming up with a terrific chemistry is one thing, finding something that is can be manufactured at a good price is something very different.

You can make your own graphene with some charcoal and sticky tape. Graphene is an amazing material, but making it industrially useful is extremely hard.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#108

Post by simonbarker87 » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

varjag wrote: post #89

simonbarker87 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product would not have been possible 20 years ago as the fans would have konked out due to the heat, and the plastic would have yellowed and gone brittle also due to the heat. So we needed materials science improvements to make the product viable. I don't think I was advocating for low hanging fruit but instead progress in various fields allow other things to be invented, some of them I guess become low hanging f…

Nearly all commercial plastics available now were available back in 1997. Even exotic things like PEEK. The yellowing is due to flame retardant additive to ABS granules. Modern flame resistant ABS stock is prone to same issues.

We use a heat-resistant ABS, 20 years ago it would have yellowed, now it doesn't.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#109

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 3:31 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #99

pjc50 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#110

Post by lurker456 » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #70

riffraff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you quantify the inventions to say "nothing much" was invented? 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 t…

By total inventions since the dawn of time. The vast bulk of innovation (in quantity not necessarily quality) has occurred in the last 200 years.

Taking population into account, that's not that unusual - the vast bulk of people ever alive also fall in the last 200 years.