7 ms·

This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office w

This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing. There are plenty of inventions yet to make, from complex AI enabled devices down to the simple mundane items that make daily life slightly easier. I founded a company based on the latter that is ticking over nicely. By saying that it is harder to invent things now shows you have fallen into one of the traps that the author highlights: > If you have never seen rope, it actually doesn’t occur to you that rope would come in handy, or to ask yourself how to make some. You have never seen the thing you need to invent so it takes either a leap of inspiration or a concerted effort to sit down and think of something new to solve a problem you have, chances are you will get their iteratively over a long time and not really see what you have made as "an invention". Ideation isn't some spark that hits you, ideas need to be thought about and created with effort.

coldtea 9y ago
>This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing. Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's also wrong now. And there is such a thing as "low hanging fruit". We have absolutely no contract with the universe or nature that guarantees us that there's "always more to invent", even less so that "the possibilities keep increasing".
- Swizec 9y ago
  > We have absolutely no contract with the universe or nature that guarantees us that there's "always more to invent", even less so that "the possibilities keep increasing". Think of human knowledge as a circle. The edge of that circle is the edge of human knowledge. Inventing a thing makes a little bump in the circle that pushes the edge outwards. The bigger the circle, the bigger the circumference, the more possibilities to invent something. http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
  - Joe-Z 9y ago
    That's just a metaphor, and exactly of the type which GP argued against. To illustrate GP's point metaphorically: Think of human knowledge as discovered areas on a map. The dark areas are what is still unknown to us. Inventing a thing makes a little spot on the map visible. The more you have discovered, the less you still have to discover. (And to extend it a bit: Of course you can make the already discovered areas more detailed, even to levels unthought of when initially discovered. But as discoveries pile up, there probably won't be many 'woah, there's a whole continent here!' moments anymore.) I don't have a strong opinion in this debate. I just wanted to provide a counter-point to your metaphor.
    - radioactivist 9y ago
      As an isolated example of this kind of thing, consider the shape of the Earth as discussed in Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" [http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm]
    - dwaltrip 9y ago
      If the illuminated areas are a very small portion of the entire map, then the circle metaphor actually may be more appropriate. But I see your point. Hmm... Perhaps better still would be an immense valley of very uneven steepness and roughness, that we are climbing out of.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      Ok, now postulate that we can only invent things on the border of that map (because of technological limitations). Then you'll get a very complex dynamics, of the invention possibilities increasing and decreasing, some times fast, and changing almost unpredictably.
    - anonytrary 9y ago
      Does the set of everything exist? Why or why not?
    - munificent 9y ago
- mcherm 9y ago
  > Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's also wrong now. That is absolutely true. HOWEVER, if one notices that those in the past have made the same observation as oneself but were wrong every time, one would be wise to VERY carefully reexamine one's own position. This is good, solid evidence that one might be mistaken
- autokad 9y ago
  are you calling inventing flight low hanging fruit? I'd bet even after given the answer and reading up on wikipedia, you would struggle building a plain from scratch. its not harder to invent things, you just dont know how to do it. its not a problem on you, I couldnt invent anything myself. if anything, we are in a golden age, much like people ~1900 were when it comes to invention. the scripting languages, algorithms, computing power at my finger tips gives me incredible power. sadly, I didnt think of making a crypto currency ~2009. I didnt think of creating a ride sharing service, selfie drones, or fidget spinners. well actually I did create a fidget spinner with my roller blade bearings back in the early 2ks, but I didnt think anything of it. point is, we take for granted all the stuff that is available to us now, and there are plenty of stuff (even low hanging fruit) to invent, its just very hard.
  - Too 9y ago
    Flying is low hanging fruit, i can explain the core concepts of how it works to a 8-year old child with a paper airplane in 10 minutes. Execution is still tricky but you know that it can eventually be done with enough effort, material and machinery. AI or crypto-currencies though, is har to explain even on a high level to my computer science educated friends. I think the final chapter, Orders of Inovation, in the original post is on the right track. Today there are less of the first order inventions but there will be more and more of the third order inventions that build upon existing inventions.
  - perl4ever 9y ago
    I think a lot of people think of inventions but don't have the motivation or resources to execute - and someone else creates the thing, possibly with roots deep in the past. I remember reading a magazine article (maybe in Popular Science) about the Peltier effect when I was in high school and thinking it could/should be used for cooling CPUs. In practically no time, the Power Macintosh 8100/110 came out, using such a cooler. It may not have been the first, but it was the first I was aware of, and it made me irrationally feel like someone stole my idea. A year or two later, my boss at my first job asked me to create, essentially, eBay. I read some academic articles on computerized auctions and gave it up as too complicated. One thing that made a great impression on me was reading an old Dr. Dobbs journal (I think from the 70s) in which someone was angrily responding to Bill Gates. Gates had said that hobbyists generally steal their software, and of course that pissed people off. The letter writer said if you want to be paid for your software you should bundle it with hardware. So with hindsight, Gates became a billionaire not because he had a unique idea, but because he recognized the value of something lots of people knew and executed it. Thinking of things is infinitely easier than sifting through all the noise and then committing 100% to making something specific a reality.
- anonytrary 9y ago
  The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions? If this is the case, why have we seen an explosion in inventions? Is there some critical turning point? When is the critical point? It's a lot of speculation. As depressed and lonely as I am, I live because I believe the future is worth living for, mainly because there's stuff left to do. If there's nothing left to do, we may as well all die today.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions? I'm saying that the previous assertion is more religious speaking than valid reasoning. We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it. Some fundamental types of new knowledge do increase the space of inventions (e.g. the discovery of fire, or the discovery of electricity, or the discovery of dna, etc), but not all. >The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions? If we are just living because there's stuff to invent, we might as well, as this means inventions are inherently useless (else what we have already invented would be enough to make life worth). Life should be celebrated (or not) for itself, not because we can create new gizmos and find new natural laws.
    - anonytrary 9y ago
      Suppose you have a list of N things you know, and we define an invention as being any subset of those things. There would be 2^N possible combinations, or the size of the set of all subsets, or the size of the set of all inventions. That's my toy-definition of an invention. Not very good, but it's a start. Let's take it further and say that each item in the list of knowledge is actually a basis vector, and that an invention is simply a vector in the space spanned by the basis set. > We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it. In my model, I will prove this is impossible. The dimension before finding the new vector is N. Suppose we find a new knowledge vector k'. If it is truly new, then it will be orthogonal to the other knowledge vectors, and the new basis will span N+1 dimensions, meaning the "space of inventions" increased. The only way for the dimension to remain the same is if k' could be written as a linear combination of k_i, which would imply that our assumption that k' is new was false. ENOUGH METAPHYSICS!
afarrell 9y ago
> I founded a company based on the latter that is ticking over nicely. I'm curious: How much does your company's product rely on materials that either didn't exist 20 years ago or were significantly more expensive to procure in small quantities 20 years ago? I ask because I have a hypothesis that a lot of things that seem like low-hanging-fruit that should have been invented earlier actually depend on the abundance of materials and manufacturing processes that only became common 20ish years before the invention.
- simonbarker87 9y ago
  The product would not have been possible 20 years ago as the fans would have konked out due to the heat, and the plastic would have yellowed and gone brittle also due to the heat. So we needed materials science improvements to make the product viable. I don't think I was advocating for low hanging fruit but instead progress in various fields allow other things to be invented, some of them I guess become low hanging fruit.
  - varjag 9y ago
    Nearly all commercial plastics available now were available back in 1997. Even exotic things like PEEK. The yellowing is due to flame retardant additive to ABS granules. Modern flame resistant ABS stock is prone to same issues.
    - simonbarker87 9y ago
      We use a heat-resistant ABS, 20 years ago it would have yellowed, now it doesn't.
      - varjag 9y ago
        Heat resistant suggests a higher melting point, it is not necessarily flame retardant. The yellowed plastics on old consumer electronics aren't specifically heat resistant.
bambax 9y ago
Agreed. La Bruyère in 1690 wrote a very famous phrase "Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes et qui pensent." (Everything has been said, and we're too late after 7000 years of human existence and thought.) I can't find the quote right now but Aristotle complained once that the level of comfort attained in his era and city was so high nobody would ever conceivably want more. It's fairly obvious that the breadth of human ingenuity is infinite and that there are orders of magnitude more inventions to make than have been made. Not all inventions are useful; one could argue humanity would be much better without television, Facebook or nuclear bombs for example. But one just needs to look around to see how our world is inadequate and broken. Take transportation: today we use huge metal cages (cars) or metal tubes (planes) to move a bunch of ape-like creatures from one place to another, at great expense and risk. Why can't we fly? We say we fly when we're in a plane, but we don't; we are flown. I want wings (or something) that let me take off and land using my body's energy, just like a bird. I don't know if individual flying can be achieved using genetic engineering or by building a contraption that one can operate with his arms or legs, etc., but I do know that cars / planes / boats / etc. are a ridiculous and laughably overkill solution to the problem of personal transportation.
- daveFNbuck 9y ago
  Human-powered flight does exist, it's just not very good because people are weak and heavy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft
  - bambax 9y ago
    It's "not very good" not because people are this or that, but because... it isn't very good yet: which means it needs to get better. That's exactly what inventing is about: making (existing) things better, until they're so much better, they become a different thing altogether.
    - mannykannot 9y ago
      > It's "not very good" not because people are this or that... Denying reality is for daydreaming; it will not get anything invented. Sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, but it isn't actually magic.
emodendroket 9y ago
New inventions are likely to require more specialized training. The days of a Benjamin Franklin inventing bifocals despite not being primarily an expert in optometry are likely over.
rainbowmverse 9y ago
It was commonly accepted wisdom that camera lenses could only get so small and light at a certain quality due to the physical limits of glass. And then... https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/06/a-thinner-flatter-lens/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/06/a-thinner-fla... It's a very long way from putting a 1500mm lens in a pocket camera, but it looks promising. Of course, it could end up being the fusion reactor of optics: always a half decade out.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  I've recently gotten into amateur astronomy. The modern high-end telescope eyepieces, usually low-power with a really wide FOV, often now have 7 or more lenses and can weigh 2 pounds. This research looks amazing. It could change the game once again, enabling even higher quality and wider FOVs in a broad range of focal lengths (from what I've read, there has been a lot of improvement in the past few decades already). Probably won't be cheap though.
quadrangle 9y ago
Actually, my personal experience includes a ton of examples of: 1. I realize the need for something and envision a novel invention 2. I discover upon research that it has already been invented So, I did have the thought about the "thing I've never seen" and could pursue inventing it. But it's a big world and far easier than ever before to learn from others. I have known people who went all the way, finished inventing something and got it patented, and then I (as a patent critic) have doubts that it's truly novel and then discover, to the surprise of my inventor friend, that it actually was invented before but was obscure and they hadn't heard about it. There's tons of room for invention still, but it's comparably much reduced from the past for all the basic stuff and far easier to discover existing inventions. It's just NOT anything like it used to be.

coldtea 9y ago

>This is not the case, the famous (if apocryphal) quote of "everything that can be invented has been invented" made in 1900 by the head of the US patent office was clearly wrong and made either in jest or due to an enormous lack of imagination. The point is that there is always more to invent and the possibilities keep increasing. Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's also wrong now. And there is such a thing as "low hanging fruit". We have absolutely no contract with the universe or nature that guarantees us that there's "always more to invent", even less so that "the possibilities keep increasing".

Swizec 9y ago
> We have absolutely no contract with the universe or nature that guarantees us that there's "always more to invent", even less so that "the possibilities keep increasing". Think of human knowledge as a circle. The edge of that circle is the edge of human knowledge. Inventing a thing makes a little bump in the circle that pushes the edge outwards. The bigger the circle, the bigger the circumference, the more possibilities to invent something. http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
- Joe-Z 9y ago
  That's just a metaphor, and exactly of the type which GP argued against. To illustrate GP's point metaphorically: Think of human knowledge as discovered areas on a map. The dark areas are what is still unknown to us. Inventing a thing makes a little spot on the map visible. The more you have discovered, the less you still have to discover. (And to extend it a bit: Of course you can make the already discovered areas more detailed, even to levels unthought of when initially discovered. But as discoveries pile up, there probably won't be many 'woah, there's a whole continent here!' moments anymore.) I don't have a strong opinion in this debate. I just wanted to provide a counter-point to your metaphor.
  - radioactivist 9y ago
    As an isolated example of this kind of thing, consider the shape of the Earth as discussed in Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" [http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm]
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    If the illuminated areas are a very small portion of the entire map, then the circle metaphor actually may be more appropriate. But I see your point. Hmm... Perhaps better still would be an immense valley of very uneven steepness and roughness, that we are climbing out of.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    Ok, now postulate that we can only invent things on the border of that map (because of technological limitations). Then you'll get a very complex dynamics, of the invention possibilities increasing and decreasing, some times fast, and changing almost unpredictably.
  - anonytrary 9y ago
    Does the set of everything exist? Why or why not?
  - munificent 9y ago
mcherm 9y ago
> Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's also wrong now. That is absolutely true. HOWEVER, if one notices that those in the past have made the same observation as oneself but were wrong every time, one would be wise to VERY carefully reexamine one's own position. This is good, solid evidence that one might be mistaken
autokad 9y ago
are you calling inventing flight low hanging fruit? I'd bet even after given the answer and reading up on wikipedia, you would struggle building a plain from scratch. its not harder to invent things, you just dont know how to do it. its not a problem on you, I couldnt invent anything myself. if anything, we are in a golden age, much like people ~1900 were when it comes to invention. the scripting languages, algorithms, computing power at my finger tips gives me incredible power. sadly, I didnt think of making a crypto currency ~2009. I didnt think of creating a ride sharing service, selfie drones, or fidget spinners. well actually I did create a fidget spinner with my roller blade bearings back in the early 2ks, but I didnt think anything of it. point is, we take for granted all the stuff that is available to us now, and there are plenty of stuff (even low hanging fruit) to invent, its just very hard.
- Too 9y ago
  Flying is low hanging fruit, i can explain the core concepts of how it works to a 8-year old child with a paper airplane in 10 minutes. Execution is still tricky but you know that it can eventually be done with enough effort, material and machinery. AI or crypto-currencies though, is har to explain even on a high level to my computer science educated friends. I think the final chapter, Orders of Inovation, in the original post is on the right track. Today there are less of the first order inventions but there will be more and more of the third order inventions that build upon existing inventions.
- perl4ever 9y ago
  I think a lot of people think of inventions but don't have the motivation or resources to execute - and someone else creates the thing, possibly with roots deep in the past. I remember reading a magazine article (maybe in Popular Science) about the Peltier effect when I was in high school and thinking it could/should be used for cooling CPUs. In practically no time, the Power Macintosh 8100/110 came out, using such a cooler. It may not have been the first, but it was the first I was aware of, and it made me irrationally feel like someone stole my idea. A year or two later, my boss at my first job asked me to create, essentially, eBay. I read some academic articles on computerized auctions and gave it up as too complicated. One thing that made a great impression on me was reading an old Dr. Dobbs journal (I think from the 70s) in which someone was angrily responding to Bill Gates. Gates had said that hobbyists generally steal their software, and of course that pissed people off. The letter writer said if you want to be paid for your software you should bundle it with hardware. So with hindsight, Gates became a billionaire not because he had a unique idea, but because he recognized the value of something lots of people knew and executed it. Thinking of things is infinitely easier than sifting through all the noise and then committing 100% to making something specific a reality.
anonytrary 9y ago
The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions? If this is the case, why have we seen an explosion in inventions? Is there some critical turning point? When is the critical point? It's a lot of speculation. As depressed and lonely as I am, I live because I believe the future is worth living for, mainly because there's stuff left to do. If there's nothing left to do, we may as well all die today.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions? I'm saying that the previous assertion is more religious speaking than valid reasoning. We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it. Some fundamental types of new knowledge do increase the space of inventions (e.g. the discovery of fire, or the discovery of electricity, or the discovery of dna, etc), but not all. >The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions? If we are just living because there's stuff to invent, we might as well, as this means inventions are inherently useless (else what we have already invented would be enough to make life worth). Life should be celebrated (or not) for itself, not because we can create new gizmos and find new natural laws.
  - anonytrary 9y ago
    Suppose you have a list of N things you know, and we define an invention as being any subset of those things. There would be 2^N possible combinations, or the size of the set of all subsets, or the size of the set of all inventions. That's my toy-definition of an invention. Not very good, but it's a start. Let's take it further and say that each item in the list of knowledge is actually a basis vector, and that an invention is simply a vector in the space spanned by the basis set. > We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it. In my model, I will prove this is impossible. The dimension before finding the new vector is N. Suppose we find a new knowledge vector k'. If it is truly new, then it will be orthogonal to the other knowledge vectors, and the new basis will span N+1 dimensions, meaning the "space of inventions" increased. The only way for the dimension to remain the same is if k' could be written as a linear combination of k_i, which would imply that our assumption that k' is new was false. ENOUGH METAPHYSICS!

afarrell 9y ago

> I founded a company based on the latter that is ticking over nicely. I'm curious: How much does your company's product rely on materials that either didn't exist 20 years ago or were significantly more expensive to procure in small quantities 20 years ago? I ask because I have a hypothesis that a lot of things that seem like low-hanging-fruit that should have been invented earlier actually depend on the abundance of materials and manufacturing processes that only became common 20ish years before the invention.

simonbarker87 9y ago
The product would not have been possible 20 years ago as the fans would have konked out due to the heat, and the plastic would have yellowed and gone brittle also due to the heat. So we needed materials science improvements to make the product viable. I don't think I was advocating for low hanging fruit but instead progress in various fields allow other things to be invented, some of them I guess become low hanging fruit.
- varjag 9y ago
  Nearly all commercial plastics available now were available back in 1997. Even exotic things like PEEK. The yellowing is due to flame retardant additive to ABS granules. Modern flame resistant ABS stock is prone to same issues.
  - simonbarker87 9y ago
    We use a heat-resistant ABS, 20 years ago it would have yellowed, now it doesn't.
    - varjag 9y ago
      Heat resistant suggests a higher melting point, it is not necessarily flame retardant. The yellowed plastics on old consumer electronics aren't specifically heat resistant.

bambax 9y ago

Agreed. La Bruyère in 1690 wrote a very famous phrase "Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes et qui pensent." (Everything has been said, and we're too late after 7000 years of human existence and thought.) I can't find the quote right now but Aristotle complained once that the level of comfort attained in his era and city was so high nobody would ever conceivably want more. It's fairly obvious that the breadth of human ingenuity is infinite and that there are orders of magnitude more inventions to make than have been made. Not all inventions are useful; one could argue humanity would be much better without television, Facebook or nuclear bombs for example. But one just needs to look around to see how our world is inadequate and broken. Take transportation: today we use huge metal cages (cars) or metal tubes (planes) to move a bunch of ape-like creatures from one place to another, at great expense and risk. Why can't we fly? We say we fly when we're in a plane, but we don't; we are flown. I want wings (or something) that let me take off and land using my body's energy, just like a bird. I don't know if individual flying can be achieved using genetic engineering or by building a contraption that one can operate with his arms or legs, etc., but I do know that cars / planes / boats / etc. are a ridiculous and laughably overkill solution to the problem of personal transportation.

daveFNbuck 9y ago
Human-powered flight does exist, it's just not very good because people are weak and heavy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft
- bambax 9y ago
  It's "not very good" not because people are this or that, but because... it isn't very good yet: which means it needs to get better. That's exactly what inventing is about: making (existing) things better, until they're so much better, they become a different thing altogether.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    > It's "not very good" not because people are this or that... Denying reality is for daydreaming; it will not get anything invented. Sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, but it isn't actually magic.

emodendroket 9y ago

New inventions are likely to require more specialized training. The days of a Benjamin Franklin inventing bifocals despite not being primarily an expert in optometry are likely over.

rainbowmverse 9y ago

It was commonly accepted wisdom that camera lenses could only get so small and light at a certain quality due to the physical limits of glass. And then... https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/06/a-thinner-flatter-lens/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/06/a-thinner-fla... It's a very long way from putting a 1500mm lens in a pocket camera, but it looks promising. Of course, it could end up being the fusion reactor of optics: always a half decade out.

dwaltrip 9y ago
I've recently gotten into amateur astronomy. The modern high-end telescope eyepieces, usually low-power with a really wide FOV, often now have 7 or more lenses and can weigh 2 pounds. This research looks amazing. It could change the game once again, enabling even higher quality and wider FOVs in a broad range of focal lengths (from what I've read, there has been a lot of improvement in the past few decades already). Probably won't be cheap though.

quadrangle 9y ago

Actually, my personal experience includes a ton of examples of: 1. I realize the need for something and envision a novel invention 2. I discover upon research that it has already been invented So, I did have the thought about the "thing I've never seen" and could pursue inventing it. But it's a big world and far easier than ever before to learn from others. I have known people who went all the way, finished inventing something and got it patented, and then I (as a patent critic) have doubts that it's truly novel and then discover, to the surprise of my inventor friend, that it actually was invented before but was obscure and they hadn't heard about it. There's tons of room for invention still, but it's comparably much reduced from the past for all the basic stuff and far easier to discover existing inventions. It's just NOT anything like it used to be.