Why things might have taken so long • Hacker News Board

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#41

Post by sametmax » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:42 AM UTC

kalonis wrote: post #32

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…

I can image a lot of obvious things that still could be invented like beaming, real hoverboards, holodecks and so on. Trying to invent any of this may seem preposterous to us as they are seemingly impossible. But these are only as impossible to us now as driving without horses or sailing the seas without sails have seem impossible three hundred years ago. And neither cars nor steamboats have been invented by single i…

The point of OP is that as an individual, you can carve a wheel or make a rope alone, with your bare hands.

It requires much more resources to invent a revolutionary battery

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#42

Post by interfixus » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #36

kalonis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can image a lot of obvious things that still could be invented like beaming, real hoverboards, holodecks and so on. Trying to invent any of this may seem preposterous to us as they are seemingly impossible. But these are only as impossible to us now as driving without horses or sailing the seas without sails have seem impossible three hundred years ago. And neither cars nor steamboats have been invented by single i…

> But these are only as impossible to us now as driving without horses or sailing the seas without sails have seem impossible three hundred years ago. That's not necessarily the case. Some things can be legitimately, laws of physics-style, impossible.

Yes. But as long as we do not actually know the complete laws of physics, we can only make educated guesses about what constitutes 'impossible'.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#43

Post by PeterStuer » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:52 AM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #38

PeterStuer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 selective…

> For example, any solution to a problem that involves abstinence There is a famous french comedian who said "when you think about it, the only thing needed for this not to be sold... is that nobody buys it". That pretty much sums up the solution to most problems of the human race. You know that killing thing ? What if we stopped doing it ? You know that unhealthy habit ? That immoral product ? Etc. Disciplining your…

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 wallet' is nonsense.

You indicate rightly that this is a 'hard problem'. Especially because it goes against the new 'geocentrism' of 'market' dogma. But it being 'hard' should not be a ticket to just giving up.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#44

Post by kalonis » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:53 AM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #41

kalonis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can image a lot of obvious things that still could be invented like beaming, real hoverboards, holodecks and so on. Trying to invent any of this may seem preposterous to us as they are seemingly impossible. But these are only as impossible to us now as driving without horses or sailing the seas without sails have seem impossible three hundred years ago. And neither cars nor steamboats have been invented by single i…

The point of OP is that as an individual, you can carve a wheel or make a rope alone, with your bare hands. It requires much more resources to invent a revolutionary battery

Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#45

Post by jaggederest » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 10:00 AM UTC

melling wrote: post #27

drchiu wrote: post #19

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.

But only a few million cores are doing worthwhile work. Most of us aren’t contributing to the advancement of knowledge, for example. If we could up our utilization with more people doing R&D, for instance, we’d accumulate knowledge much faster.

I think it's a sheer mass problem. In order to support a few million people full time innovating, you need a tremendous support infrastructure that just wasn't even possible with ~10m people on the planet.

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/flowers/ is related - if you have a percentage of your population working on making the rest of the population more efficient, this only makes sense above a certain leverage level.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#46

Post by afarrell » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 10:02 AM 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…

> I founded a company based on the latter that is ticking over nicely.

I'm curious: How much does your company's product rely on materials that either didn't exist 20 years ago or were significantly more expensive to procure in small quantities 20 years ago?

I ask because I have a hypothesis that a lot of things that seem like low-hanging-fruit that should have been invented earlier actually depend on the abundance of materials and manufacturing processes that only became common 20ish years before the invention.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#47

Post by panic » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 10:04 AM UTC

rebuilder wrote: post #22

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 innova…

Doing any sort of work is a constant process of invention, as you solve all the little problems involved. This other post linked from the article is a good read: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#48

Post by Swizec » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 10:04 AM 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…

> 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 possibilities to invent something.

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#49

Post by fastball » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 10:08 AM UTC

kalonis wrote: post #44

sametmax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of OP is that as an individual, you can carve a wheel or make a rope alone, with your bare hands. It requires much more resources to invent a revolutionary battery

Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!

Making your own rope is easy with some trial and error. You just take a bunch of stringy things and twist them together to make a stronger stringy thing.

The twisting bit takes some finesse, and obviously you won't be making nylon rope with your bare hands, but making a grass rope is child's play.

Making a wheel, once you have the concept of a wheel, is pretty damn easy too. If you want a stone wheel, take a large stone and chip away until it resembles a wheel. If you want a wooden wheel, take a large piece of wood and whittle away until you have a wheel.

Re: Why things might have taken so long

#50

Post by fastball » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 10:14 AM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #40

tkoski-hs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO this is the point 4. the author is pointing out: "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 t…

That's not inventing. That's innovating. It's very, very different.

Exactly. To illustrate your point:

The invention of "rope" is the invention of a manmade object that can create a strong and flexible connection between two objects.

Nylon rope is an innovation that progressed from grass rope. It should not be qualified as an "invention" in and of itself, as it is functionally the same as grass rope, it just does the job of rope better.