Shmulik wonders: How is it that humanity has existed for tens of thousands of years, but all science, medicine, and technology have only developed in the last two hundred years? Were people more stupid before?
Not that Molik, they weren't more stupid. It's a little hard to believe that the generation that gives such high ratings to a masked singer is smarter than its predecessors. Still, the idea that technology advances today is faster than ever before is almost an axiom. The US Patent Office approves nearly 400,000 patents a year as inventions worthy of protection. This is a huge number that dwarfs the number of patents approved during the peak years of Thomas Edison's inventions.
Moore's Law, which predicts a doubling of the density of transistors on computer chips every two years, continues to be accurate (although it seems to be approaching the end of its journey) and gadget-rich cellular devices are sold to us even before we understood what to do with the multitude of options on the previous phone. And yet there are those who challenge the axiom that attributes greater ingenuity to us than our ancestors.
The number of inventions is a dubious measure
The number of patents is a dubious measure of innovation and creativity. The patent is a legal document and patent inflation has a lot to do with corporate business policies and copyright laws that have become inventor-friendly and allow patents to be registered on DNA sequences, animal and plant varieties, and even business tactics. The fact that more people are making a living from registering patents and copyrights is not evidence that humanity is inventing or creating more. For comparison: Thomas Edison's famous laboratory (Menlo Park Research Laboratory) registered about 400 patents compared to Facebook's 1,317 patents and Google's approximately 2,400.
Human memory is short, inventions of previous generations seem to us to be almost a part of nature and therefore the humanity of a hundred or 200 years ago seems to us to be technologically frozen. A review of the history of inventions and innovations undermines this image. Prehistory seems like a very slow period in inventions and thousands of years pass before archaeologists identify improvements in stone tools, but if we remember that the human population from which the ancient inventors grew was very small, then the pace of inventions seems much less slow.
The population of the world about 10,000 years ago is estimated at about 5 million souls: less than a thousandth of the world's population today. If a person's chance of becoming a talented inventor remained constant, then one could expect a rate of inventions a thousand times lower than today. From such a point of comparison, the "textile revolution" that clothed our ancestors about 20,000 years ago, the domestication of the dog about 15 years ago, and the cave paintings that were about 12,000 years old represent rapid technological development.
About 8000 years ago, agriculture was developed in our fertile crescent and finally food surpluses were created that allowed them to stop wandering and for some of the population to evacuate from the race for the next lunch and invent. The ratio of inventions to the population in Mesopotamia of the fourth and third millennium BC puts Silicon Valley in the shade. The admiration for the open construction of the building and the accompanying engineering innovations such as columns and arches is already recorded in the story of the Tower of Babel "And a man said to his neighbor, Let it be baked for bricks, and be burned, to burn; And the brick was for them, for stone, and the clay, they had for clay. And they said, "Let us build a city, and a tower with its head in the sky." In addition, cargo diversion technologies (and trade with them) were developed. Iron copper and ceramics replaced stone and silver replaced barter. These inventions, first of all, of course, the script, make the Iraqis' ancestors the most significant group of inventors in human history. And yet, even if we were eliminated from the top of the table, how do we stand compared to past generations in terms of the number of inventions we pass on to future generations? Will the history books of the future remind us of a group of prolific inventors?
Are we in a sunset period?
According to Jonathan Huebner, there is a greater chance that our days will be considered a sunset period. Huebner made statistical calculations on 8583 important scientific and technological innovations since the end of the Middle Ages, that is, since Gutenberg printed the Bible in 1454. For each decade since that invention, the number of inventions and innovations was calculated in relation to the population, meaning how many significant innovations produced a billion people during a decade.
For the purposes of the analysis, Huebner does not distinguish between inventions, discoveries, mathematical developments and other innovations: the integral calculus, Newton's laws and the laws of thermodynamics, the daily newspaper, the telescope, water disinfection, photography, the Internet, the metric system, and the bicycle are all "significant innovations" that are counted in relation to the population at the time of invention . The result is a kind of "bell curve" that climbs from the Renaissance to the second half of the 19th century. There, during the heyday of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and their friends, human ingenuity reaches its peak. At the end of that half century that gave us, among other things, the internal combustion engine, the telegraph, the camera, the radio, the periodic table, oil refining, steel and reinforced concrete, the telephone and X-rays, the decline in the number of inventions produced by each of us begins.
Since the world's population grew greatly in the twentieth century (not least thanks to the technology and knowledge bequeathed to it in the 19th century), the total number of inventions continued to rise and reached its peak in the sixties: a decade that credited the invention of the laser, the cracking of the genetic code, and the Internet (the network connected 1969 university computers at the end of 4) . If we believe the graph drawn by Hovner, then in about twenty years the number of inventions per billion people will be similar to the one from which we started the journey at the end of the Middle Ages: about 2 innovations per billion people per year.
Huebner, a physicist by training, does not blame the slowdown in the rate of invention on a physical but an economic obstacle: it was the physics of Newton and his successors that made the technological breakthroughs of the 19th century possible, but as technology advances, more human effort in work and capital is required to produce additional solutions. When you calculate the number of inventions not according to the size of the population but according to the financial investment in education and research, the decrease in inventiveness of our generation compared to its predecessors is much more pronounced. Not only was the team led by Thomas Edison in Menlo Park much smaller than the R&D departments of corporations today, but the financial investment for the production of the inventions created there was tiny in today's terms.
And maybe the intelligence is to blame?
There are also those who go further and claim That the Victorians were simply more intelligent than us. The first IQ tests were developed many years after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, but as early as 1889, Francis Goulton (notoriously remembered as the father of eugenics) measured the response time of humans to stimulation. For this simple test "tap a switch as soon as you notice a letter" There is a clear connection to the general component of intelligence: the g factor. When you repeat the Golton tests today, it becomes clear that the reaction time has lengthened and there are those who have calculated from this modern slowness a drop of 13 IQ points since the 90s of the 19th century. This calculation contradicts what is known as the Flynn effect, which indicates an increase in the results of intelligence tests over the years. There are those who try to reconcile the contradiction by saying that the Flynn effect results from the improvement of specific intelligence indicators (eg verbal, spatial, emotional intelligence...) related to the increase in the level of education and the standard of living. This progression masks the decline in his general intelligence component from a significant genetic component. There are also those who dismiss the value of the observation and claim that the difference between our measured reaction time and that of the Golton index is simply due to the difference between the hardware and software used in such tests today compared to the mechanical measuring devices used by the psychologists of the 19th century and that an accurate reproduction of those experiments today yields results similar to those of Golton and his friends.
Fear of a return to the Middle Ages?
In conclusion, Shmulik, you should calm down. The idea that new intermediate days are upon us is not widely accepted: there is no objective or agreed-upon index that would make it possible to name the significant inventions or arrange them in a scale of importance. Measuring inventiveness by dividing the number of innovations in the total population does not take into account the fact that scientific development is mainly shared by the inhabitants of the seventh world, so that the increase in the standard of living and education in third world countries is expected to increase the rate of innovations. Huebner's opponents also point out that new areas of thought such as brain research, nanotechnology and quantum computing are in their infancy and their Thomas Edison and Alan Turing will have enough virgin ground to plow in to postpone the "new Middle Ages" in a few decades.
Did an interesting, intriguing, strange, delusional or funny question occur to you? sent to ysorek@gmail.com
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The huge difference in the amount of inventions that came from the western countries compared to the inventions that came from other countries is due to the level of the food, where the vitamins and minerals that nourish the brain are left in the food, where the patents came from, and countries where it is customary to cook everything for hours on the fire, almost nothing arrived
Like milk powder for a baby that used to be added to boiling water and cooled under the tap, and following such studies, water is boiled and cooled and added to the powder at room temperature
Summary: Sushi, sashimi, carpaccio, pear benedict, steak m, donors to marrow and places whose food is rich in patents and places where it is customary to eat from prom, makluba couscous and other timatums made from inferior meat that requires full of powders and sand in colors such as cumin, turmeric and paprika in oil, and full of pots on the fire All night long, the wonderful mother at home, her inheritance is the contents of the freezer, lives in anxiety all her life from superstitions, obeys every father and the children are mostly in "La Familia"
Of course, "nuclear reactor" (for example) is just the name of a chapter head under which (at least) thousands of patents are registered..
A beautiful article and apart from the fact that Mr. Sorek forgot the wheel, it is almost perfect. It's all true, but today inventions are associated with breakthrough discoveries and personalities. The laser, the atomic bomb, the atomic reactor, the photoelectric cells, the GPS (there must be a few more)... for example - they are all associated with the name of one person: Albert Einstein. If it weren't for him, the curve of inventions would look completely different, like Tesla and Edison, whose inventions allowed others to move forward. If and when a theorist finds a new way (for example) to change space/time - to overcome gravity, etc., there will be a new stream of inventions based on the same principle.
F all a this why is everything why ppl be writing on the past 500 yes you refuse to acknowledge the Atlantic slave trade as a MAJOR cause in the so-called human advancement as if having other humans executing your every basic need has nothing to do with white males having time to invent bs day and night you live in you're own fing world where all these inventions are a product of free will and merit and not, let's say, inhumane slavery and completely dispensable human labor.
The burst of creativity is a result of the freedom and liberty of the modern age. Today, freedom is being taken away from us (and thanks to identity politics), therefore creativity is fading.
The development of our generation can be summed up in two words:
the accumulation of knowledge.
When knowledge accumulates over years and years,
And more and more knowledge is added all the time,
There has come a generation in which the accumulation accumulates a critical mass, where the accumulated knowledge enables relatively simple inventions compared to the ability of the ancients, which change the order of the world.
If we have extensive physical knowledge,
How easy it is to use it to invent machines that facilitate certain operations.
If we are forced to search for knowledge, and certainly if we are laying the first bricks in the tower of knowledge, our development will be much more limited.
Lorem Ipsum: Did the Greeks not develop the steam engine because there were no patents? Why would the lack of patents prevent this invention and not others? Perhaps the steam engine needed coal mines and good enough steel for engine parts that was not available until the 19th century (Bessemer process)? The aviation industry registered an impressive development (the transition from piston planes to jets) in a controlled environment and there was never "suffocating regulation" on the electronics industry. Giant companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon developed without the help of regulation. "Regulation" is not a dirty word: humans are social creatures and need a stable society and institutions that maintain it in order to develop and create. A society without the rule of law, infrastructure, health and education systems (or in one word: bureaucracy) does not provide the basic needs for existence and therefore not for creative progress either. Rather unregulated places are not full of inventions (how many new developments come to us from the unregulated Congo?).
Another element in technological and inventive progress is openness: freedom of expression, economic and business freedom to develop and produce and market and compete in the free market with all other producers and products. Governments have always liked to stifle inventions and grant monopolies to cronies of all kinds. The Greeks knew how to create wonderful clocks, such as the Antikythera mechanism, and utilize the power of steam (to move toys). So why didn't the industrial revolution start 1500 years earlier? I don't know, but it is possible that business freedom and the absence of patents forced the knowledge to be kept a secret.
Today there is another enemy to development in the advanced countries: excess regulation. The really significant developments were in an open-business, low-regulation environment: in the 19th century there was no regulation of steam engines, trains, bridges, and ships, and manufacturers could build whatever system of railroads and trains they wanted and let them compete with alternative means, and crash and kill people in the process. , until practice and regulation caught up.
The revolutions in aviation, electronics, computing and the Internet also benefited from a refreshing lack of regulation at the beginning of their journey. If the record companies, and the TV stations, and countless other industries had realized in real time what the risk was in letting the Internet develop freely, it would probably still be stuck in some committee, which would have produced another fancy version of teletext.
so that's it. Currently there are restrictions on the internet. A huge group like Google, Facebook, Amazon and totalitarian regimes have taken over the freedom of expression, and they are engaged in manipulating it for their business and ideological needs. It is impossible to put a drug on the market without investing at least a billion dollars in research and regulation, the FAA is busy stifling the creativity of Elon Musk and Spike-X, and all of this will surely have a negative impact on the amount of inventions we will see in the near and medium term.
A beautiful and interesting article, in my opinion there are a number of major technological/engineering breakthroughs that, if they happen in the coming decades, have the potential to jump humanity forward in a significant way:
- fusion technology and especially if fusion is detected at room temperature
– Superconductors at room temperature
- The ability to produce space elevators (the ability to produce carbon nanotube cables)
–AI
– Brain-machine interfaces
When there is a basic technological breakthrough, it gives rise to a cascade of related technological developments and inventions, which naturally fades over the years, until the next breakthrough. So how much do we (the non-historians of the Victorian era) know about the inventions that accompanied the invention and improvement of the steam engine, and steelmaking technologies? And about the actual improvement they brought to the lives of the residents at that time? Only on the surface we may think that our progress is more impressive, because we are closer to these inventions and some of us remember what life was like in the era of the duplicating machine in school, which preceded computing, but not the cash register which preceded the printing of newspapers on a large scale using steam engines.
The basic technological developments that drive the current of inventions forward now are the invention of the transistor, the use of plastic, advanced battery technologies, nuclear energy, means of launching into space and cracking the DNA code (did I forget something?). Except for the last one, all the rest are over fifty years old and may already be close to reaching their potential. That is why the decline in the patent curve is perhaps evident, and most of them are in the nature of idle legal documents, which deal with the rounded edges of some button on the cell phone screen.
The question is whether we will become aware of initial technological breakthroughs and thus receive a new wave of improvements and inventions, or will we get stuck at a stage where in each version of the operating system for which device we go from rounded to angular edges and back.
That's why SpaceX's cheap space launch is so important. This may lead to the creation of a new technological economy in space.
That is why the creation of molten salt thorium nuclear reactors (MSR and LFTR) are so important - they will sweep out a lot of polluting and dangerous substitutes and allow the supply of clean energy to regions that are currently backward.
Therefore, the success and advancement of quantum computers is definitely significant in this aspect.
And probably the next technological breakthrough may be something whose importance we do not currently foresee.
Very nice article. You can comment on other small details that can be included in it, but it doesn't matter - the writer looks at things in a beautiful way and also a bit jokingly.
The number of inventions increases not only because of the increase in the size of the population but also because of the leisure time and the economic ability to turn to culture (and also inventions around culture such as in the field of food, music, etc.). It is possible that some of the talented and creative people simply resorted to inventing in areas that are not technological and do not file a patent for them - but we still enjoy their existence very much.