Why things might have taken so long

The poverty trap explanation here makes a lot of sense to me, although maybe it needs a bit of expansion.

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.

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

Wish we could be happy, and not destroy the planet and the future crawling over each other in an ever increasing red queen race on the slippery side of a cliff of despair.

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

I agree on the importance of the industrial revolution. An alternative explanation, that argues more from political institutions, can be found in Acemoglu and Robinsons "Why Nations Fail" [0]. They basically argue that for most of our history, individual innovators. In most countries most of the time, a small minority, which is in power, would either profit from the innovation instead or would actively suppress innovation to protect the status quo. Only when institutions were developed that included a lot of people in the decision making process, would we also develop protections for individual innovators, that would allow them to profit from their work in a meaningful way.

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

No word on patents as a technology driver?