Seeing this list made me think: If these factors contributed to past humans taking so long to invent things, perhaps we could try to influence them in our current era in order to accelerate progress.
Some of them are already changing, for example population growth or the trend in decreasing absolute poverty. However, there seems to be an opportunity to direct more deliberate effort into making headway in the following areas:
Concepts: different human languages are known to have words that are hard to translate into other languages; studies have found that people with different native tongues think differently, etc. So it is possible that we are missing concepts that already exist but haven’t spread universally. Not having these concepts means that we cannot think using them. (The same goes for specialized academic fields.)
External thinking tools: human-computer interfaces and augmented reality can help here.
Records: we seem to be getting better at this, but see also the vulnerability of digital data. In addition to finding new ways of storing data for the long-term, we also need to improve the communication of data across geographic and linguistic regions of the world. For example, a lot of academic articles are never translated into English.
Enhancing human capabilities: genetic engineering, nootropics, cyborgization, etc. can potentially improve our mental hardware (although currently they are ineffective or risky).
Social costs: “nerd culture” seems to be more accepted now, which I guess is encouraging. However, there are still people who oppose technological advances (like GMOs, stem cell research, nuclear energy, etc.) due to ethical concerns or just general skepticism of science.
Value of invention; orders of invention; prerequisites of inventions; etc. : I’m less sure about how we can modify these. Perhaps the more we invent, the more we can invent, implying that invention today should be easier than at any prior point; however, it is also possible that most of the low-hanging fruit have already been harvested. Any thoughts?
I don’t think that nerd culture automatically leads to more openness for innovation. It leads to openness for certain innovations but less openess for innovations made by people who aren’t seen as nerds. This goes especially for innovations that aren’t supported by academic research.
One way to increase the value of many inventions would be Prediction-based Medicine if there would be a market in prediction based medicine it would make many inventions profitable that currently aren’t.
Seeing this list made me think: If these factors contributed to past humans taking so long to invent things, perhaps we could try to influence them in our current era in order to accelerate progress.
Some of them are already changing, for example population growth or the trend in decreasing absolute poverty. However, there seems to be an opportunity to direct more deliberate effort into making headway in the following areas:
Concepts: different human languages are known to have words that are hard to translate into other languages; studies have found that people with different native tongues think differently, etc. So it is possible that we are missing concepts that already exist but haven’t spread universally. Not having these concepts means that we cannot think using them. (The same goes for specialized academic fields.)
External thinking tools: human-computer interfaces and augmented reality can help here.
Records: we seem to be getting better at this, but see also the vulnerability of digital data. In addition to finding new ways of storing data for the long-term, we also need to improve the communication of data across geographic and linguistic regions of the world. For example, a lot of academic articles are never translated into English.
Enhancing human capabilities: genetic engineering, nootropics, cyborgization, etc. can potentially improve our mental hardware (although currently they are ineffective or risky).
Social costs: “nerd culture” seems to be more accepted now, which I guess is encouraging. However, there are still people who oppose technological advances (like GMOs, stem cell research, nuclear energy, etc.) due to ethical concerns or just general skepticism of science.
Value of invention; orders of invention; prerequisites of inventions; etc. : I’m less sure about how we can modify these. Perhaps the more we invent, the more we can invent, implying that invention today should be easier than at any prior point; however, it is also possible that most of the low-hanging fruit have already been harvested. Any thoughts?
I don’t think that nerd culture automatically leads to more openness for innovation. It leads to openness for certain innovations but less openess for innovations made by people who aren’t seen as nerds. This goes especially for innovations that aren’t supported by academic research.
One way to increase the value of many inventions would be Prediction-based Medicine if there would be a market in prediction based medicine it would make many inventions profitable that currently aren’t.