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.
Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's also wrong now.
And there is such a thing as "low hanging fruit".
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".
That is absolutely true. HOWEVER, if one notices that those in the past have made the same observation as oneself but were wrong every time, one would be wise to VERY carefully reexamine one's own position. This is good, solid evidence that one might be mistaken
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.
One thing that made a great impression on me was reading an old Dr. Dobbs journal (I think from the 70s) in which someone was angrily responding to Bill Gates. Gates had said that hobbyists generally steal their software, and of course that pissed people off. The letter writer said if you want to be paid for your software you should bundle it with hardware. So with hindsight, Gates became a billionaire not because he had a unique idea, but because he recognized the value of something lots of people knew and executed it.
Thinking of things is infinitely easier than sifting through all the noise and then committing 100% to making something specific a reality.
I think the final chapter, Orders of Inovation, in the original post is on the right track. Today there are less of the first order inventions but there will be more and more of the third order inventions that build upon existing inventions.
If this is the case, why have we seen an explosion in inventions? Is there some critical turning point? When is the critical point? It's a lot of speculation.
As depressed and lonely as I am, I live because I believe the future is worth living for, mainly because there's stuff left to do. If there's nothing left to do, we may as well all die today.
I'm saying that the previous assertion is more religious speaking than valid reasoning.
We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it.
Some fundamental types of new knowledge do increase the space of inventions (e.g. the discovery of fire, or the discovery of electricity, or the discovery of dna, etc), but not all.
>The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions?
If we are just living because there's stuff to invent, we might as well, as this means inventions are inherently useless (else what we have already invented would be enough to make life worth). Life should be celebrated (or not) for itself, not because we can create new gizmos and find new natural laws.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Hmm... Perhaps better still would be an immense valley of very uneven steepness and roughness, that we are climbing out of.
La Bruyère in 1690 wrote a very famous phrase "Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes et qui pensent." (Everything has been said, and we're too late after 7000 years of human existence and thought.)
I can't find the quote right now but Aristotle complained once that the level of comfort attained in his era and city was so high nobody would ever conceivably want more.
It's fairly obvious that the breadth of human ingenuity is infinite and that there are orders of magnitude more inventions to make than have been made.
Not all inventions are useful; one could argue humanity would be much better without television, Facebook or nuclear bombs for example. But one just needs to look around to see how our world is inadequate and broken.
Take transportation: today we use huge metal cages (cars) or metal tubes (planes) to move a bunch of ape-like creatures from one place to another, at great expense and risk. Why can't we fly? We say we fly when we're in a plane, but we don't; we are flown. I want wings (or something) that let me take off and land using my body's energy, just like a bird.
I don't know if individual flying can be achieved using genetic engineering or by building a contraption that one can operate with his arms or legs, etc., but I do know that cars / planes / boats / etc. are a ridiculous and laughably overkill solution to the problem of personal transportation.
That's exactly what inventing is about: making (existing) things better, until they're so much better, they become a different thing altogether.
Denying reality is for daydreaming; it will not get anything invented. Sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, but it isn't actually magic.
If you want actual wings, that's just one of those problems that need absurd amounts of money and brains to figure out. Genetic engineering is certainly a lot more difficult than inventing Nitrocellulose.
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.
However, after rereading it, I disagree with the top comment that said that "Centuries ago, it was easier to think of things to invent".
It's never easy to think of something to invent. Finding the problem, even just thinking there might be a problem where noone sees any, is a big part of any invention.
Also, in the past, inventions required a much larger leap of thinking than today. When we speak today about growing wings on creatures born without it, we kind of accept the idea, because we know it's already possible to grow eyes on flies' legs for example.
But inventing the steam engine, or disproving "spontaneous generation" and inventing vaccines, sound to me much more impressive because those people went where no one had dared go before them.
People are crazy inventive and always have been. But today, it is far easier than it ever was before to learn about the best inventions others already figured out instead of reinventing the wheel.
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.
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 fruit.
The yellowing is due to flame retardant additive to ABS granules. Modern flame resistant ABS stock is prone to same issues.
1. I realize the need for something and envision a novel invention 2. I discover upon research that it has already been invented
So, I did have the thought about the "thing I've never seen" and could pursue inventing it. But it's a big world and far easier than ever before to learn from others.
I have known people who went all the way, finished inventing something and got it patented, and then I (as a patent critic) have doubts that it's truly novel and then discover, to the surprise of my inventor friend, that it actually was invented before but was obscure and they hadn't heard about it.
There's tons of room for invention still, but it's comparably much reduced from the past for all the basic stuff and far easier to discover existing inventions. It's just NOT anything like it used to be.
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.
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.
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
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 yourself to not eat too much chocolate is hard enough. So collectively asking all humans to agree on one particular point of discipline....
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.
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?
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.
That's not necessarily the case. Some things can be legitimately, laws of physics-style, impossible.
It requires much more resources to invent a revolutionary battery
Write an app, and you've made a new tool instantly usable by any person on earth.
Come up with a simple device and 3d print it.
Lack skills to do any of that - instantly hire unlimited number of experts. Lack knowledge? Access it instantly.
If we're talking about simple low hanging fruit inventions that can be made by a single person, the search space is much larger than the stuff you can do with your bare hands alone in the forest.
You need to know how to make sharp edges. Which rocks are suitable? How to keep them sharp?
You need to cut down a suitable tree.
You need to know which tree is even suitable.
You have to figure out that either the chunk of wood should rotate, or the sharp edge rotate around it.
You need to know how to make a center pivot, or spindle to turn the wheel. You need to know that you even need this!
After making the wheel, now you need to make axles and some kind of platform to make it useful.
Before doing all this, you first have to realize that you need a wheel!
There is a long list of basic knowledge needed to invent even the simplest things. Every invention builds on previous knowledge.
It's the same now than it was then.
What's changed is that, with the same creative power, as an individual, you could do more then.
You can carve a wheel alone in the wood. It's hard, but as a single individual with only natural resources, you can.
A kid in china, or a grandpa in west africa can do it.
To code a revolutionary AI today, you need a lot of per-requisites: electricity, computer, internet, access to knowledge, education and a looooooot of time to practice.
Even if you are the most creative person in the world, from all centuries included. You can't do it in the wood. You will not see somebody in Mali do it. A kid is unlikely to be able to do it.
Because being capable of creative the concept in your head is not enough. The stuff you could do with what anybody had at hand is gone.
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.
The saying that 'hindsight is 20/20' would seem to be particularly true at the scale of early human invention and civilization.
Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!
Wheels are almost useless in dense forests that have no roads, for obvious reasons. So why would anyone waste a day or two making one?
> 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.
The first used wheel bas probably some vague round stone with a hole it it.
It sucked, but it was better than no wheel.
However, alone, you CAN make rope. It's painful, but you can.
You can't invent the press alone. You need ink, paper, metal, and people being able to put it in shape for you.
Everybody had access to plants to make rope. Not everybody had access to the money, education, market and knowledge necessary to invest the press.
Now today, it's even worst.
"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.)
I agree that there's tons of room and lots of things that enable such novel inventions today in certain spaces.
I was focusing on the bad hindsight that tries to assert that because we see inventions as obvious in hindsight, we should realize how non-obvious they were originally, in the same way that new inventions today are non-obvious.
I think tons of inventions are obvious, both then and now. The hard work to make a good rendition, spread the knowledge to others etc. is just different now than before. People have reinvented most inventions multiple times because the inventions are obvious enough. And still today, there's tons of obvious enough inventions — people imagine Apps that do things no app yet does. Bringing the invention to fruition and to market is harder.
But in the past, it was hard to learn that someone else had also invented the thing you're inventing. That's easier now, and easy enough to stop you from reinventing it in the first place (unless you're one of those self-centered startup people who delusionally believes that whatever your idea is must be novel and just skips doing the research to see what exists already).
It's very, very different.
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.
The crucial step is understanding that you can link objects with a bendable but strong connection.
Then you can start innovating applications, such as multiple people working together to move a single heavy object.
Eventually you end up with previously unimaginable applications like horse bridles and ship rigging.
The point of invention isn’t a new tool, it’s a completely new class of tools with an open-ended set of applications that aren’t immediately obvious.
(largely inspired by: http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding...)
The inventor actually committed suicide, partly because he thought he was a one-hit wonder.
Neoprene was invented in 1930. Nylon 6-6 was invented in 1935. Carothers killed himself in 1937. Nylon was first used in toothbrush bristles in 1938, and rolled out to nylon stockings in 1939. Nylon production was then diverted into war materiel until 1945, which was when people started rioting over shortages of nylon stockings.
Who knows what might have happened to polymers technology if antidepressant medications had been commercially available and known to physicians in the two year window between 1935 and 1937? That seems like an odd dependency, but the inventor of a notable technology failed to invent other notable things because he had severe and suicidal depression. So it isn't just as simple as roads needing chariots and chariots needing roads, like the article mentions. Sometimes the prerequisites are strange and unpredictable--like the inventor had to visit a zoo featuring a particular animal species during their childhood, or they had to drive a car in a climate with cold winters.
The more things we have, and know about, and the more people move around and collaborate, the easier it is to satisfy those prerequisites.
Many ideas that seem easy to invent only seem so in retrospect. The article repeatedly points out that inventing rope isn't obvious.
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.
Many of the health issues would be corrected if our environment required people to exercise to get around.
People are just really lazy.
There are powerful entities who throw their weight around in both policy and propaganda to promote the wasteful forms of transportation.
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.
> 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.
This is a bit baffling to me -- the phenomena to which you refer. And it seems to be more general than the pattern you outline.
It appears to have something to do with both pre-suppositions and different orderings of personal values [0]. But I'm not sure.
Do you think it is possible to generalize the structure of the process via which reasonably educated and smart people can be presented with the same facts and come to different conclusions -- that they will defend against each other in pretty feisty debates?
[0] By this I mean, for example, that some people might put individual freedom higher than equality across large populations and vice-versa.
In this case, very smart people is unable to figure out how does an average user thinks.
I do believe that there's something about mindset. Some people lives under the delusion that things work the way they work because that's the way they should work. Actually there are a lot of randomness in the way things work, specially in areas where new territories are being unconvered all the time.
Confirmation bias: is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.
"It appears to have something to do with both pre-suppositions and different orderings of personal values"
I believe the two cognitive biases above explain this. If negative numbers are "ignore", and positive are "use in conclusion": conclusion = -0.1 * fact1 + 0.9 * fact2 + -0.4 * fact3. Your past experiences determine the weights.
edit: I also think sibling comment by narag plays a part.
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.