It might be profitable to take a recent breakthrough and see why it didn’t happen before.
When I did this I found
a) Often an invention requires a lot of prerequisites. Useful wheels seem to require some strong metal as a core component. Also they need open country and smooth hard surfaces to run on. Deep learning required fast computers with a lot of memory.
b) Some actually important inventions are not seen as useful. The Romans had little use for labor saving devices because they had slaves.
c) There are many ways to do something that are obvious, plausible, simple, and wrong. E.g. Edison’s famous comment about the light bulb.
d) Some inventions go against received wisdom. Stretching the definition of invention little, Kepler discovered of the elliptical orbits of the planets and pubished the results, stating that it could not be correct because as we all know the true orbits must be based on circless.
As an exercise, take a current unsolved problem and try to solve it. Consider friendly AI.
What are you up against? <This is a stupid problem and does not require a solution> <We will not understand AI until we understand consciousness> <True intelligence in the human brain comes from quantum magic> <It cannot be solved> <Just turn the thing off if it becomes a problem> Etc.
Or better batteries (100X better batteries would solve so many problems).
Your point c definitely rings true to me. An answer often seems simple in hindsight, but that an answer is simple doesn’t mean it’s simple to find. There are often many simple answers and the vast majority of them useless.
It might be profitable to take a recent breakthrough and see why it didn’t happen before.
When I did this I found
a) Often an invention requires a lot of prerequisites. Useful wheels seem to require some strong metal as a core component. Also they need open country and smooth hard surfaces to run on. Deep learning required fast computers with a lot of memory.
b) Some actually important inventions are not seen as useful. The Romans had little use for labor saving devices because they had slaves.
c) There are many ways to do something that are obvious, plausible, simple, and wrong. E.g. Edison’s famous comment about the light bulb.
d) Some inventions go against received wisdom. Stretching the definition of invention little, Kepler discovered of the elliptical orbits of the planets and pubished the results, stating that it could not be correct because as we all know the true orbits must be based on circless.
As an exercise, take a current unsolved problem and try to solve it. Consider friendly AI.
What are you up against? <This is a stupid problem and does not require a solution> <We will not understand AI until we understand consciousness> <True intelligence in the human brain comes from quantum magic> <It cannot be solved> <Just turn the thing off if it becomes a problem> Etc.
Or better batteries (100X better batteries would solve so many problems).
Your point c definitely rings true to me. An answer often seems simple in hindsight, but that an answer is simple doesn’t mean it’s simple to find. There are often many simple answers and the vast majority of them useless.