Reality has a surprising amount of detail (there was a post about this explaining it at the example of contructing a simple wooden ladder which I can’t find, but I bet there are a lot comparable descriptions out there). Or take a candle. I guess you have used one recently. Looks pretty simple, right? Just use some wax and a wick. Turns out that people have used candles since ages. They were frequently used in rome for example. But the easy to use candles of our time are pretty recent. Recent as in last century. Before that
they didn’t have wicks that burned themselves away and you had to cut them all the time
there was no good wax. Most candles were made of fat with lots of residue that stank and smoked. Bees wax was much better but harder to get
To fix these things you need much better raw materials and production processes...
And you can look at any kind of thing we take for granted and it is basically not posible to grasp all of it. The classical example is I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read Most things depend on the presence of a whole environment—and take part in bringing it about. You could see it as a co-evolution of lots of inventions. Something just hinted at in the comment about roads needed for wheels (and actually you benefit from having wheels when building roads...).
I think this is one of the main overlooked points when talking about the possibility of space travel, esp. interstellar one. Even if you assume AIs. But let’s not. As mentioned in another comment we not really know what kind of coordination problems it comes with. Scaling isn’t automatic. Just look at Moore’s law. Sure we continue to scale, but we pile technology on technology on technology to do so, And we can’t just invent the last one. And neither can a future AI. You need the whole stack (OK granted, you might be able to simplify, but still). And it will keep growing and might become inherently unmanageable. Remember: The price of a chip factories also continues to grow and that might be the limiting factor. See e.g. McKinsey on Semiconductors 2013.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (there was a post about this explaining it at the example of contructing a simple wooden ladder which I can’t find, but I bet there are a lot comparable descriptions out there). Or take a candle. I guess you have used one recently. Looks pretty simple, right? Just use some wax and a wick. Turns out that people have used candles since ages. They were frequently used in rome for example. But the easy to use candles of our time are pretty recent. Recent as in last century. Before that
they didn’t have wicks that burned themselves away and you had to cut them all the time
there was no good wax. Most candles were made of fat with lots of residue that stank and smoked. Bees wax was much better but harder to get
To fix these things you need much better raw materials and production processes...
See this article about candle history (German, but I guess Google translate is good enough).
And you can look at any kind of thing we take for granted and it is basically not posible to grasp all of it. The classical example is I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read Most things depend on the presence of a whole environment—and take part in bringing it about. You could see it as a co-evolution of lots of inventions. Something just hinted at in the comment about roads needed for wheels (and actually you benefit from having wheels when building roads...).
I think this is one of the main overlooked points when talking about the possibility of space travel, esp. interstellar one. Even if you assume AIs. But let’s not. As mentioned in another comment we not really know what kind of coordination problems it comes with. Scaling isn’t automatic. Just look at Moore’s law. Sure we continue to scale, but we pile technology on technology on technology to do so, And we can’t just invent the last one. And neither can a future AI. You need the whole stack (OK granted, you might be able to simplify, but still). And it will keep growing and might become inherently unmanageable. Remember: The price of a chip factories also continues to grow and that might be the limiting factor. See e.g. McKinsey on Semiconductors 2013.
You were referring to: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail