I like the "invention wavefront" analogy, but I unfortunately can't remember where I learnt it.
Imagine the high-dimensional space of all possible things that can be invented. In the "centre" of the space is a hypersphere containing everything that has been invented to date. Every new invention is invented by "poking outwards" in one small place on the boundary of this hypersphere (hyperglobule) so that the hyperglobule now contains something that it didn't contain before. All inventions that could possibly be invented right now exist on the surface of the hyperglobule. Think of this as the "invention wavefront". Notice that as the globule expands, the wavefront becomes larger, not smaller. What this means is that as more things get invented, more new inventions become possible (intuitively: you can't invent better brakes for a car until you've invented a car, and so on).
"We might have invented everything" would imply that the space of all possible inventions is bounded, and we're running up against the edges of the box. But I don't see any reason it should be bounded.
No, they really haven't. In fact for a good chunk of centuries (from 16th century onwards), the optimism for the eventual future developments was endless. At some point there was a few scholars saying that during the end of 19th century, but still not some widespread belief.
That said, discovery probably also follows an 80/20 rule, and we're somewhat at the tail end now. We haven't had any major new discoveries, of the kind that we had regularly until the 60s-70s, for decades now.
Progressive refinement (like going from the workstation to mobile phones and watches) yes. But nothing like the advent of the computer, the internet, and so on.
And even less earth-shattering stuff than the time before that (which got us from the steam engine and electricity, to nuclear energy, radio and tv, flight, space exploration, the digital computer, QM and relativity, the DNA, and so on). Stuff like that was coming decade after decade up until the 60s-70s. After that, not so much.
>"We might have invented everything" would imply that the space of all possible inventions is bounded, and we're running up against the edges of the box. But I don't see any reason it should be bounded.
While there's some quasi-religious optimism (like the universe owe us endless discoveries forever), there are real limits, and notions like "low hanging fruit" and "marginal returns" do come into play.
Really?
I've read some pretty authoritative writings about how humanity always thinks The End is Near, that we live in an era of decay after a lost Golden Age, that today's youth is a uniquely corrupted lost generation and so on.
Blockchains are one that I would present. I'm sure experts in other fields would have examples from their worlds as well. We just haven't had time yet to appreciate how dramatic some of the discoveries are going to be.
In that regard, the number of inventions (as subset of all sets of configured matter)- is similarly bound. We might argue that such a bounding is infinitely expanding along with the universe, as space is a important variable in the equation. Even so, my assumption is that space becomes irrelevant after a certain point of expansions. (If I have 2 atoms in a field of a billion of square miles, the number of configurations is only trivially changed by adding a few more square miles.
Once more, even if an infinitely expanding universe equates to an infinitely expanding art of inventions (configurations) - the fact remains that the set is fixed for any given time point.
In our cultural spectrum, we constrict our inventions to optimize for "use", but perhaps "use" is too narrow.
If you look at cultural events like Burning Man, you see all sorts of completely useless inventions. Fascinatingly useless inventions.
I actually hope that one day when we do enter post-scarcity that we can stop obsessing so much on whether or not something has the subjective quality of "use", and allow the boundaries of our hyperdimentional invention-space to grow exponentially.
I think "toy-space", or "art-space" if you will, is a logical expansion of "invention-space".
A delightful example of an invention outside of our current culturally accepted bounds of invention-space: https://youtu.be/apVR5Htz0K4
A good parallel can be draw to evolution in painting. Up until the invention of photography, painting evolved to be photo-realistic. It made amazing strides, with breathtaking results. Once photography made that evolution path obsolete, painting struggled to find a new utility function. Out of that struggle, we got amazing outcomes in conveying feelings, a new utility function. Work in the first half of the XX century, from the likes of Munch, Dali, Picasso, optimized this function up to its limits. From then on? Painting is somewhat lost in the solution space without an utility function.
Take a chess game as an example. No one would say there weren't creative inventions regarding tactics and strategies to win, but the bottom line is that the number of possible chess games, no matter how staggeringly huge, is still finite. In the end, no matter how intelligent the players, there will be a point were nothing will be left to be invented, so perhaps life is also a solved game in that respect.
In that case the issue is that some parts of the universe are out of reach from other parts, because of the light-speed limit.
For most areas of innovation, we don't seem to be near the limits. Certainly it is a sphere where today we are seeing more opportunities than completed explorations, but that may cease to be true in 50 or 150 or 1500 years.
... if it wasn't for
- potential ecosystem collapses due to disappearing bee (pollination), insect (food) and coral populations
- rising global instability due to climate refugees
- the upcoming end of the antibiotics era
- ...
This is the one thing that makes me want to turn vegetarian.
we waste antibiotics on cattle. regardless those same cattle become reservoirs where new diseases that could kill us are incubated, because they are mammals like is.
It would be very difficult for a plant disease to jump to us.
To be fair, I remember an E Coli outbreak in spinach that laid a lot of people out. (I probably eat as much spinach as I do any meat :| and here I like to say I’m not much of a gambler)
——
Not to take away from your collective points at all. Rehashing the entire situation makes us look like a foolish species to have burned through such an advantageous technology so quickly. One can only hope we might come to yet more elegant solutions.
Of course it’s all part of the same cycle
There are now 80% more people (according to these figures) who now have enough food that they can worry about bees. That's a good thing if you ask me. Now about those bees...
Interesting you should mention monkey brains, because my monkey brain also recoils at this optimism when it understands that most brains are still monkey brains, and I don't trust monkeys that create an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction which can totally wipe out all trace of the things you are rightly passionate about. The evidence is scarce that other than the obvious technological progress there has been any other progress but even that being so, I'm cautiously optimistic that the battle between monkey mind and enlightened mind will eventually be won by the latter rather than monkeys collectively going the way of the dinosaurs.
>I am probably stealing from people cleverer than i whom I cannot remember to reference or am too dumb to reference
Don't remember which book it was, but I remember reading a book where there was a phrase on a page before the first chapter, "All creativity is subconscious plagiarism" :-) Of course this generality can be logically refuted but it's probably something we all do to a degree.
It talks about far future civilizations, hypothesizes they would live in or near the surface of (possibly manufactured) blackholes, and that black holes are actually all over the place.
It also takes the stance that intelligent civilizations (including ours) would be more likely to minitiarize and grow inwards, rather than exploring and spreading throughout the galaxy as per Star Trek.
http://brighterbrains.org/articles/entry/the-transcension-hy...
It seems unlikely that people will be writing code or picking out groceries the same way they do today, for example. Some aspects will be the same. But are you sure we won’t be picking out groceries in VR?
Another thing that helps: technological progress seemed exponential over the last century, but in the long term it’s actually sigmoidal. Progress happens in jumps.
Hasn't people always thought there were living in the pinnacle of technology era? I mean, if you look at texts that are 50 or 100 years old, you can see people chest thumping about how they are in the modern world.
Aren't we doing the same now?
This is because the derivative of e^x is e^x, so when undergoing exponential growth the rate of change tells us nothing about where we are on that curve. And this is also why people (not GP, of course) who talk about the 'knee' in an exponential graph really annoy me...!
Of course, there's no reason to think invention should follow an exponential over the long term...
We do have information for this. We are either towards the end, or the beginning. The rapid advance of the 19th and 20th centuries were only possible due to our discovery of nearly-unlimited amounts of cheap, easily transportable energy, in the form of fossil fuels.
We've also used up our carbon budget for them (And gone over it, in fact.) There are now three likely outcomes:
1. Renewables reach the break-even point where they can affordably provide ~95% of our energy needs.
2. They don't, and we'll cook ourselves to death with our GHG emissions.
3. They don't, and our grandchildren will be shoveling shit as subsistence farmers.
Roughly around the end of the Napoleonic era, call it 1815, 9/10ths of humans lives in what we would call abject poverty. today it is reversed and only 1/10th does. (This is still a travesty, but it is objectively better)
In that period we have seen incredible technological, political and economic improvements. But it's not clear if we will continue to see them "we might have invented everything" is a fairly common refrain (if not on HN!)
So can we say anything about where we are in this period of chnage - near the end? Well with no other information we can only plump for "in the middle". Which roughly speaking means we expect to see change on the scale of 19th and 20th Century well into the 2200s.
And part of my monkey brain just recoils at this ... optimism. My monkey brain does not trust the numbers.
But articles like this help me quieten my monkey. We look up into the night sky with powerful telescopes and find events millennia old, light years away and they confirm how we think galaxies are made. We look into the night sky and find Dark matter that we do not even know what it is made of - and I ask my monkey brain, at some point we did not know what was over the oceans, but we predicted new lands, we did not know what the land was made of and they were made of ores and minerals.
I am by nature a skeptical optimist, but the awesomeness of astronomy, it's generally leading place in science, still impresses me.
It looks like a good two centuries to come.
Just sayin'
Bibliography: I am probably stealing from people cleverer than i whom I cannot remember to reference or am too dumb to reference
Edit: I need to write more clearly. I am not arguing that we have invented everything, just that it can feel "where can the next thing possibly come from?". And Astronomy does things like point out "We can see 13 billion years in every direction, and most of it we don't even know what it is made of. Some of it might be useful :-)"