9 ms·

I think the reason is best described by Factorio. Yes, with a lot of spaghetti belts and manual crafting, you can make late-stage products. But to do it well,

I think the reason is best described by Factorio. Yes, with a lot of spaghetti belts and manual crafting, you can make late-stage products. But to do it well, in a way that transcends merely being able to make a handful of items, you need a huge underlying economy. You end up having to re-arrange your whole factory, or you need to clear new land, which means you need to spend some time on diversions like improved military. Translated to the real world, it means you need to rearrange a large amount of the social system (slaves/serfdom) as well as creating markets for a bunch of inputs that build higher and higher in your tech tree. Still a good question though, I don't mean to say things had to happen just as they did.

jiggawatts 4y ago
A nice explanation for the "rate of progress" is the percentage of the population that is not involved in the production of food. Since the dawn of humanity up until "very recently" in the grand scheme of things, something like 95 to 98 percent of the population were directly involved in food production. There were the odd shamans, priests, tribal leaders, or what have you, but everyone else made themselves busy hunting, fishing, or farming. The current ratio in developed countries is something like 1 to 2 percent of the population directly working in farming, and maybe 20 to 30 percent working in "food production". Think workers at the biscuit factory, or chefs in a restaurant. Everyone else is free to do science, engineering, project management, finance, or whatever. The difference between 2% of the population free to work on non-food activities and 70% is massive. This is why so much progress has happened just in the last few centuries.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  That's true, but you need to unlock the tech for you to have enough food to feed everyone comfortably. Until it's comfy you have a fragile economy that occasionally falls into famine, so everyone would have to make plans to accommodate that, ie they can't build the pyramid too high. Your problem also isn't just inventing better methods, you also have to rearrange society to take advantage of this new possibility.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- derekp7 4y ago
  The question I have is how did mega projects in ancient times (such as the Pyramids) get enough people to work on them, and still have enough food to feed them? Or were the people on those projects (and other city-building projects at that time) only less than 5 percent of the total population? Also, is that 95% that are spending the majority of their time on food production? Or is that including people that spend a lot of time on fall harvest and spring planting, but don't do much else during off seasons?
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Pyramids were built during offseasons. But it wouldn't really have been an option to redeploy that unskilled, uneducated labour towards industrial research instead, at least not without a radical change to ancient societies. Not least because kings and religions tended to want non-agricultural engineering resources focused on monuments and defences, not finding more labour/cost-effective ways of increasing output of craft produce or pursuing science for the sake of science
    - isk517 4y ago
      Also wasn't ancient Egypt ridiculously fertile? I imagine being able to consistently produce excess grain means you can divert workers to other projects.
      - lordnacho 4y ago
        Plus don't forget why Egypt was fertile: The farmland got regularly flooded by the river. Can't do much while it's flooded, just go and help out on the pyramid project.
  - feoren 4y ago
    During the fertile season, right after the floodplains were flooded, you needed an enormous amount of labor to take advantage of the huge area of freshly-fertilized soil. Presumably this area needed to be tended and maintained, and then of course the harvest was another time when you needed enormous amounts of labor. And then you've harvested and the plains are briefly fallow, then they get flooded by the Nile for a few weeks, and there's nothing to do. So you have an enormous amount of labor power with nothing to do for a couple months every year. Why not pay them a little to lug massive stones around to build a monument to your awesomeness? Better than having them idling in the streets!
- flavius29663 4y ago
  and also: today the farming and food making activities are evolving the society beyond the basic need of feeding people. For example the food industry is developing its own materials, processes, refrigeration techniques, delivery industry (doordash, uber eats etc.) are advancing our computer systems
- gopher_space 4y ago
  > something like 95 to 98 percent of the population were directly involved in food production. For some people and areas this just involved wading into a river for a few minutes every other day.
- mjan22640 4y ago
  The percentage of scientists is going to grow exponentially till non-scientist deplete, and might be even better benchmark of progress.
sumtechguy 4y ago
There is that also a matter of economics too. For example take the iPhone. All the bits for an iPhone were in place easily 10 years before that. Yet we did not have it. It took breaking the idea of paying 40 bucks a megabyte, or before that some amount of money per min to talk on land line and over the air. Once those two things were 'gone' we got what we consider a modern cell phone. Sometimes it means taking away things so others can move into their place. In my example the economics of running a phone company had to change before an innovation could happen.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  I think you're underestimating the amount of innovation required to make the original iPhone. The hardware required an extremely thin battery, a super-efficient processor, a high quality display with a built-in capacitative sensing grid, robust(ish) glass, and very small carrier, WiFi, and Bluetooth hardware. The visible software required a good touch OS with a secure file system, while the underlying carrier stack relied on data compression and adaptive line quality innovations, under a complex mix of networking protocols. The productisation required a complex logistics chain that sourced raw materials and converted them into phones at unprecedented scale with extreme precision. Very little of this existed in 1997. ADSL was just starting to be a thing, WiFi was still fairly exotic, and most people were still using dial-up. Windows 95 was everywhere and OS X hadn't been invented yet. Most phones used GPRS. Products like the Nokia Communicators might look somewhat iPhone like, in a bricky way, but they just didn't offer the same intuitive pocket-sized touch screen benefits. Modern phones are very literally the summary of modern materials science, microelectronics, comms and data compression theory, industrial engineering, and some CS, in a package that hides the physics and engineering in an almost effortless way. They seem simple, but they're anything but.
- _trampeltier 4y ago
  I never understood, why there was no Palm with phone in the mid 90s.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    early 2000s well before the Iphone you had PocketPCs with phone and wifi connection and a lot of apps
rocqua 4y ago
Note that the first steam engines in productive use were at coal mines. This is because they were incredibly inefficient, and needed huge amounts of coal. Really the only way to solve the transport problem was to not have to transport the coal at all. As it saw continued value produced, the mechanism was made more efficient, until eventually it was viable to use in certain other places. However, the transport problem still remained. You could replace muscle power with steam power, but if it still took massive amounts of muscle power to get your coal, that wasn't worth much. The breakthrough here came with stream trains. Now you could use coal to transport your coal. And muscle power was possible to be largely eliminated.

jiggawatts 4y ago

A nice explanation for the "rate of progress" is the percentage of the population that is not involved in the production of food. Since the dawn of humanity up until "very recently" in the grand scheme of things, something like 95 to 98 percent of the population were directly involved in food production. There were the odd shamans, priests, tribal leaders, or what have you, but everyone else made themselves busy hunting, fishing, or farming. The current ratio in developed countries is something like 1 to 2 percent of the population directly working in farming, and maybe 20 to 30 percent working in "food production". Think workers at the biscuit factory, or chefs in a restaurant. Everyone else is free to do science, engineering, project management, finance, or whatever. The difference between 2% of the population free to work on non-food activities and 70% is massive. This is why so much progress has happened just in the last few centuries.

lordnacho 4y ago
That's true, but you need to unlock the tech for you to have enough food to feed everyone comfortably. Until it's comfy you have a fragile economy that occasionally falls into famine, so everyone would have to make plans to accommodate that, ie they can't build the pyramid too high. Your problem also isn't just inventing better methods, you also have to rearrange society to take advantage of this new possibility.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
derekp7 4y ago
The question I have is how did mega projects in ancient times (such as the Pyramids) get enough people to work on them, and still have enough food to feed them? Or were the people on those projects (and other city-building projects at that time) only less than 5 percent of the total population? Also, is that 95% that are spending the majority of their time on food production? Or is that including people that spend a lot of time on fall harvest and spring planting, but don't do much else during off seasons?
- notahacker 4y ago
  Pyramids were built during offseasons. But it wouldn't really have been an option to redeploy that unskilled, uneducated labour towards industrial research instead, at least not without a radical change to ancient societies. Not least because kings and religions tended to want non-agricultural engineering resources focused on monuments and defences, not finding more labour/cost-effective ways of increasing output of craft produce or pursuing science for the sake of science
  - isk517 4y ago
    Also wasn't ancient Egypt ridiculously fertile? I imagine being able to consistently produce excess grain means you can divert workers to other projects.
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      Plus don't forget why Egypt was fertile: The farmland got regularly flooded by the river. Can't do much while it's flooded, just go and help out on the pyramid project.
- feoren 4y ago
  During the fertile season, right after the floodplains were flooded, you needed an enormous amount of labor to take advantage of the huge area of freshly-fertilized soil. Presumably this area needed to be tended and maintained, and then of course the harvest was another time when you needed enormous amounts of labor. And then you've harvested and the plains are briefly fallow, then they get flooded by the Nile for a few weeks, and there's nothing to do. So you have an enormous amount of labor power with nothing to do for a couple months every year. Why not pay them a little to lug massive stones around to build a monument to your awesomeness? Better than having them idling in the streets!
flavius29663 4y ago
and also: today the farming and food making activities are evolving the society beyond the basic need of feeding people. For example the food industry is developing its own materials, processes, refrigeration techniques, delivery industry (doordash, uber eats etc.) are advancing our computer systems
gopher_space 4y ago
> something like 95 to 98 percent of the population were directly involved in food production. For some people and areas this just involved wading into a river for a few minutes every other day.
mjan22640 4y ago
The percentage of scientists is going to grow exponentially till non-scientist deplete, and might be even better benchmark of progress.

sumtechguy 4y ago

There is that also a matter of economics too. For example take the iPhone. All the bits for an iPhone were in place easily 10 years before that. Yet we did not have it. It took breaking the idea of paying 40 bucks a megabyte, or before that some amount of money per min to talk on land line and over the air. Once those two things were 'gone' we got what we consider a modern cell phone. Sometimes it means taking away things so others can move into their place. In my example the economics of running a phone company had to change before an innovation could happen.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
I think you're underestimating the amount of innovation required to make the original iPhone. The hardware required an extremely thin battery, a super-efficient processor, a high quality display with a built-in capacitative sensing grid, robust(ish) glass, and very small carrier, WiFi, and Bluetooth hardware. The visible software required a good touch OS with a secure file system, while the underlying carrier stack relied on data compression and adaptive line quality innovations, under a complex mix of networking protocols. The productisation required a complex logistics chain that sourced raw materials and converted them into phones at unprecedented scale with extreme precision. Very little of this existed in 1997. ADSL was just starting to be a thing, WiFi was still fairly exotic, and most people were still using dial-up. Windows 95 was everywhere and OS X hadn't been invented yet. Most phones used GPRS. Products like the Nokia Communicators might look somewhat iPhone like, in a bricky way, but they just didn't offer the same intuitive pocket-sized touch screen benefits. Modern phones are very literally the summary of modern materials science, microelectronics, comms and data compression theory, industrial engineering, and some CS, in a package that hides the physics and engineering in an almost effortless way. They seem simple, but they're anything but.
_trampeltier 4y ago
I never understood, why there was no Palm with phone in the mid 90s.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  early 2000s well before the Iphone you had PocketPCs with phone and wifi connection and a lot of apps

rocqua 4y ago

Note that the first steam engines in productive use were at coal mines. This is because they were incredibly inefficient, and needed huge amounts of coal. Really the only way to solve the transport problem was to not have to transport the coal at all. As it saw continued value produced, the mechanism was made more efficient, until eventually it was viable to use in certain other places. However, the transport problem still remained. You could replace muscle power with steam power, but if it still took massive amounts of muscle power to get your coal, that wasn't worth much. The breakthrough here came with stream trains. Now you could use coal to transport your coal. And muscle power was possible to be largely eliminated.