A corollary is that once someone announces a new type of invention or product, a competitor can usually work out how to build the same invention in short order, without espionage.
All that is needed is the information that it can be done.
As a working researcher in science, much innovation and discovery is driven by the **assumption** that something outlandish is possible, well before it is reasonable to think it so. And ofc that pans out badly a lot of the time!
The other corollary is one that Derek wrote about is the Atlantic: It it not always the inventors who matter most, but the implementers. "Inventions do matter greatly to progress, of course," the article says. "But too often, when we isolate these famous eureka moments, we leave out the most important chapters of the story—the ones that follow the initial lightning bolt of discovery....[P]rogress is as much about implementation as it is about invention. The way individuals and institutions take an idea from one to 1 billion is the story of how the world really changes." My example is radio. The technology of using wireless as a music box was around for at least a decade before Westinghouse Electric poured in the capital and expertise to make a commercial service of it in 1920.
The thing about Malthus is that he was right about almost all of human history up to the moment in which he was living, as Brad DeLong has eloquently described. Then suddenly, productivity accelerated in a totally unprecedented way, such that we could actually produce enough to start lifting an ever-greater share of humanity out of bare-subsistence poverty.
Kevin Kelly offers a slightly different explanation for this in "What Technology Wants". My memory of it is that once the prerequisite knowledge is in place, people are (for example) constantly inventing the light bulb, but its only once the social need is there and the capital requirements are filled that anyone takes any notice. The technium wants what it wants, and people just provide it once the technium is ready.
But there are things where an innovation really seems to have been unique and enabled enormous changes. People were trying to invent usable chatbots for the last couple of decades, but it was only the invention the transformer that made this actually possible. I wouldn't be surprised if anyone else came up with the idea before Google published it, but I don't know of any evidence that they did.
It's interesting to think about this idea in the context of AI (yes, I know, but bear with me). As AI has gotten better at more things, a common brake-pumping refrain has been that AI is still not capable of the conceptual leaps that characterize genius: AI may improve some process by 50%, but it won't discover relativity.
If we instead believe that a lot of what we've considered genius is closer to combining newish ideas than cutting Gordian knots, we might be a lot closer to Amodei's outlandish "country of geniuses" idea than we thought.
I love this idea, framing, and how on a broader sense it can be seen as a call to be mindful of the questions we're asking of society. The better we define "with sufficient clarity and precision" the real issues we're facing the better the answers invariably will be.
This puts so much into perspective for me. I can personally relate to it as well. As a student of Buckminster Fuller in the 70s and 80s, I was shocked one day to learn that the famous geodesic dome that Bucky had invented, patented, and popularized had been invented some 20-30 years prior by a German engineer named Walther Bauersfeld. I could never figure that out and thought that it was one of the great coincidences of history. But it still didn't make much sense. Over time, I would hear of simultaneous discoveries in the arts or sciences. But there was never a coherent narrative or thread to tie it all together. Your post just provided that. Thanks..!!
A corollary is that once someone announces a new type of invention or product, a competitor can usually work out how to build the same invention in short order, without espionage.
All that is needed is the information that it can be done.
As a working researcher in science, much innovation and discovery is driven by the **assumption** that something outlandish is possible, well before it is reasonable to think it so. And ofc that pans out badly a lot of the time!
The other corollary is one that Derek wrote about is the Atlantic: It it not always the inventors who matter most, but the implementers. "Inventions do matter greatly to progress, of course," the article says. "But too often, when we isolate these famous eureka moments, we leave out the most important chapters of the story—the ones that follow the initial lightning bolt of discovery....[P]rogress is as much about implementation as it is about invention. The way individuals and institutions take an idea from one to 1 billion is the story of how the world really changes." My example is radio. The technology of using wireless as a music box was around for at least a decade before Westinghouse Electric poured in the capital and expertise to make a commercial service of it in 1920.
The thing about Malthus is that he was right about almost all of human history up to the moment in which he was living, as Brad DeLong has eloquently described. Then suddenly, productivity accelerated in a totally unprecedented way, such that we could actually produce enough to start lifting an ever-greater share of humanity out of bare-subsistence poverty.
https://braddelong.substack.com/p/ensorcelled-by-e-devil-of-malthus
Made me think of the Founders as well where the question/frame was how to create a Republic that would endure.
Kevin Kelly offers a slightly different explanation for this in "What Technology Wants". My memory of it is that once the prerequisite knowledge is in place, people are (for example) constantly inventing the light bulb, but its only once the social need is there and the capital requirements are filled that anyone takes any notice. The technium wants what it wants, and people just provide it once the technium is ready.
But there are things where an innovation really seems to have been unique and enabled enormous changes. People were trying to invent usable chatbots for the last couple of decades, but it was only the invention the transformer that made this actually possible. I wouldn't be surprised if anyone else came up with the idea before Google published it, but I don't know of any evidence that they did.
It's interesting to think about this idea in the context of AI (yes, I know, but bear with me). As AI has gotten better at more things, a common brake-pumping refrain has been that AI is still not capable of the conceptual leaps that characterize genius: AI may improve some process by 50%, but it won't discover relativity.
If we instead believe that a lot of what we've considered genius is closer to combining newish ideas than cutting Gordian knots, we might be a lot closer to Amodei's outlandish "country of geniuses" idea than we thought.
The idea of better frame also reminds me of the Warren Berger book "A More Beautiful Question".
I love this idea, framing, and how on a broader sense it can be seen as a call to be mindful of the questions we're asking of society. The better we define "with sufficient clarity and precision" the real issues we're facing the better the answers invariably will be.
This puts so much into perspective for me. I can personally relate to it as well. As a student of Buckminster Fuller in the 70s and 80s, I was shocked one day to learn that the famous geodesic dome that Bucky had invented, patented, and popularized had been invented some 20-30 years prior by a German engineer named Walther Bauersfeld. I could never figure that out and thought that it was one of the great coincidences of history. But it still didn't make much sense. Over time, I would hear of simultaneous discoveries in the arts or sciences. But there was never a coherent narrative or thread to tie it all together. Your post just provided that. Thanks..!!
Thank you!
Will delete now