Why things might have taken so long • Hacker News Board

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#131

Post by dwaltrip » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

rainbowmverse wrote: post #103

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…

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.

I've recently gotten into amateur astronomy. The modern high-end telescope eyepieces, usually low-power with a really wide FOV, often now have 7 or more lenses and can weigh 2 pounds.

This research looks amazing. It could change the game once again, enabling even higher quality and wider FOVs in a broad range of focal lengths (from what I've read, there has been a lot of improvement in the past few decades already). Probably won't be cheap though.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#132

Post by cf » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

MrFantastic wrote: post #114

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…

Bicycles are 97% efficient. Society could be organized around the bicycle. Many of the health issues would be corrected if our environment required people to exercise to get around. People are just really lazy.

As someone who commutes to work on a bike, you definitely have a sympathetic ear with me.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#133

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #111

PeterStuer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that individual rational optimization can and does lead to collective deterioration. In the abstract: If a given adoption has an individual utility of +1, and a collective detriment of -0.01, then for each rational individual actor in non small populations the decision to adopt is a net improvement even though the resulting utility for all is far below 0. This is why the old excuse of 'vote with your w…

> If a given adoption has an individual utility of +1, and a collective detriment of -0.01, OK but imagine if everyone in the world did the "bad thing". The world would gain 8 billion utility and lose 800 million, so it's still winning. I think you mean something like an individual utility of +1 and a collective detriment of -1.01?

[deleted]

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#134

Post by dkural » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

racer-v wrote: post #10

fivedogit wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our big brains didn't pay off for millenia, until they did, and in a big way. That's not how evolution works. Each step along the way must produce a net benefit or it gets discarded. Just as insect wings served as propulsion for water skimming before actual flight, big brains paid off, then got bigger and paid off some more, etc. The only hiccup is the benefit has to outweigh the cost (eg big brains need more calor…

Each step along the way must produce a net benefit or it gets discarded. Maybe so, but the benefit could have just been individual fitness signalling (like a peacock's tail) without providing any advantage to the species as a whole until the big "payday".

A peacock's tail can be seen; how do you propose the other sex fell in love with the brainier homo sapiens? It's a lot more likely that intelligence provided a net benefit.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#135

Post by dkural » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 5:33 PM UTC

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

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.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#136

Post by munificent » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 5:34 PM UTC

    > 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.

Here'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.

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.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#137

Post by dwaltrip » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

MrFantastic wrote: post #114

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…

Bicycles are 97% efficient. Society could be organized around the bicycle. Many of the health issues would be corrected if our environment required people to exercise to get around. People are just really lazy.

This seems a bit myopic. The Earth receives less than one hundred billionth of the energy being dumped into space by the sun. Of the incredibly small portion the Earth does receive, we barely use any of it. There is plenty of energy available. We just have to harness it.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#138

Post by munificent » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

Joe-Z wrote: post #54

Swizec wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have absolutely no contract with the universe or nature that guarantees us that there's "always more to invent", even less so that "the possibilities keep increasing". Think of human knowledge as a circle. The edge of that circle is the edge of human knowledge. Inventing a thing makes a little bump in the circle that pushes the edge outwards. The bigger the circle, the bigger the circumference, the more possibil…

That's just a metaphor, and exactly of the type which GP argued against. 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 m…

You are both right. Animal reproduction is exponential as long as resources are freely available -- the more animals you have, the more they can mate. Like the parent post, the greater the perimeter of your knowledge, the greater the boundary you can now explore from.

Once animals hit the resource limit of the environment, the exponential curve flattens out. Like you note, the more of the map you cover, the less there is left to explore.

The interesting question is how big is the map and how close are we to reaching it's boundaries?

Personally, I think it is effectively infinitely large. If you consider "discovery" to include new combinations of existing things, then you're talking about permutations. If our universe consisted only of 52 playing cards, there would still be 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different ways for us to discover that they can be shuffled together.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#139

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #92

bambax wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of the existence of bicycles. They are not as useful -- or fun -- as the ability to fly would be. I don't understand your point at all. When something sounds far-fetched / difficult / expensive it means it's actually more interesting rather than less.

My point is that this thread started with the assertion that all easy inventions are already gone and it takes a lot of effort to invent something novel. You countered with flying via genetic engineering, which to me doesn't sound like something reasonably simple that hasn't been invented yet.

But the thread's based on an invalid assumption. I posit that inventions were never "easy." They just seem that way in retrospect, from the outside.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#140

Post by mzzter » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

anonytrary wrote: post #124

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #113

I'd like to add my perspective as a struggling inventor. I can't speak to conditions 50k years ago, but a number of the challenges listed are still pretty relevant, and I've had to justify "why are things taking so long" to my friends and family enough times to pay close attention to this. The big factors I see are: 'poverty trap', 'crude hacks', and 'full-time craftsman'. These interact. For example, most people nee…

You touch on a very real social dystopia. What's worse is that it's happening quietly, under the scenes. Silicon Valley undervalues the aimless tinkerers and overvalues the incremental bootcamp coders.

The keywords there are “aimless” and “incremental”. I think those properties are correctly valued in any fast-paced workplace.

I think one of the things that career inventors need to overcome is selling themselves. Often the fun part is in the work of inventing, but conveying the value of the process is just as important and less straightforward.