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I think the author is showing a bias common in technology circles: assuming that the limiting factor is technological knowledge. But history is full of example

by ef4 14y ago

I think the author is showing a bias common in technology circles: assuming that the limiting factor is technological knowledge. But history is full of examples of people who had all the necessary knowledge and yet didn't execute. The ancient Greeks actually built toy steam engines. So why didn't they launch an industrial revolution? The limiting factors have much more to do with availability of capital than raw scientific and engineering knowledge. You need the vast web of people with specialized knowledge and tools that keep any technology running. Technology as simple as a pencil has a mind-boggling array of underlying capital requirements (see Leonard Read's classic essay "I, Pencil": http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html) Remember that even a skill like "reading & writing" made you an unusually valuable specialist in a pre-Gutenberg world. The true capital costs of a Roman semaphore internet are almost impossible to guess. Given the myriad other demands on their capital, it's not at all surprising they didn't try it.

throwaway1979 14y ago
"But history is full of examples of people who had all the necessary knowledge and yet didn't execute." Great point. Future observers might ask why our society doesn't exclusively use self-driving cars, renewable energy, all-electric vehicles, etc.
- sopooneo 14y ago
  I take your point, but all three of your examples currently have severe physical limitations. It is not just a matter of execution. Untested, inadequate, and low range.
jivatmanx 14y ago
Fun fact: The Chinese invented a movable type printing press almost 500 years before Gutenberg, but it wasn't practical due to the enormous number of characters in Chinese.
- antman 14y ago
  Movable type has a worse story. Although not usually mentioned it existen in the late minoan age. Delayed for only about 3500 thousand years... [1] [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc
bradbeattie 14y ago
William Gibson refers to this cognitive leap with existing technologies as Steam Engine Time: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive.asp http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive...
cma 14y ago
That's not why the Greeks didn't create an industrial revolution... "The uselessness of the aeolipile is an excellent example of the vastly under-appreciated role of materials in technological development." The British had centralized government planning of materials science research for use in cannons and other armaments. That paved the way too, not just a pure invisible hand of the market.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jivatmanx 14y ago
  A lot of time passed between between the Greeks and British. Near the end of the Roman Empire, the Romans faced a labor shortage and an important economic system was implemented by Constantine, which would later be copied by everyone else and dominate Western Europe until the Renaissance (It began to decline after the Bubonic plague improved the labor bargaining power of the less well off) . The system was called later called Feudalism, and abolished private ownership of land. I'd add another point, the Romans are a better comparison to the Greeks, as they were closer in time. the Romans were far more centralized than the Greeks - The Athenians were directly democratic - That it was hard to scale so the Romans had an extensive system of laws. In terms of overall scientific output there is no comparison, the Greeks were greater by a massive margin.
nkoren 14y ago
I agree that there are non-technological factors for why they didn't invent semaphore, but I seriously doubt that a lack of capital had anything to do with it. Have you seen the sort of things the Romans _did_ try? Stupendously grandiose and expensive things. Rome was awash in capital. A half-decent semaphore network would've been a rounding error in their budget.
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  Rome was awash in capital, but it was missing other economic structures that help support innovation, such as the corporation. Even at the height of the Roman Empire, or later Italian Renaissance, the accumulations of capital that existed were somewhat hamstrung by the fact that they were concentrated in the hands of individuals and families. So personal aggrandizement was a huge motivating factor in deciding how the money would get spent, hence the large mount of art and monumental construction projects we see at those times. I'd suggest that corporations are much better for producing technological innovation. As compared to what things were like in Rome, their key characteristic was that decisions about how money would get spent are generally made by groups of people who don't actually own the money themselves. That cuts way back on the motivation to just blow it all on yet another temple in one's own name.
  - nkoren 14y ago
    This is a really excellent point, and I think cuts much closer to the truth than a simple lack of technology or capital. If you think about the great infrastructure accomplishments of Rome: roads, aqueducts and sewer systems, rapid large-scale concrete construction, hypocausts, etc., then it seems to me that almost all of them were essentially scaled-up versions of domicile-level or urban-level technologies. These technologies could be piloted at a small scale and then scaled up if they proved to be worthwhile. The institutional mindset was almost totally civic rather than imperial. The military was something of an exception to this, and of course individual merchants and merchant companies would have been very much focused on keeping the gears of the empire turning. The roads and the granary systems were scaled-up urban technologies that helped the empire to function, but I'm not aware of any innovations at the empire level which didn't have some kind of urban precedent. Presumably there were no political or commercial institutions which were structured to support that kind of investment -- or even to ask those kind of questions. The British thinking around empires was fundamentally very different. They genuinely thought AS an empire -- a highly distributed network rather than an overgrown city-state. This gave them the insight to support the creation of the semaphore system. Perhaps a more interesting question, in my opinion, is why didn't the Chinese didn't invent the Internet? I'm not as knowledgeable about Chinese history, but my impression is that they were vastly better at thinking and acting like an empire -- not in the expansionist sense, but in the administrative sense. Presumably they would have had the kind of institutional basis to develop a network of semaphore towers. So what was the obstacle for them?
tokipin 14y ago
yea i think the mindframe is a much huger factor than people realize. people underestimate just how different the world looks to people in different places/times/cultures sidenote: pg wrote an essay (i forget which one) where he points out that blogs could have been around years earlier than they were. anyone remember which essay it was?

by ef4 14y ago

throwaway1979 14y ago

"But history is full of examples of people who had all the necessary knowledge and yet didn't execute." Great point. Future observers might ask why our society doesn't exclusively use self-driving cars, renewable energy, all-electric vehicles, etc.

sopooneo 14y ago
I take your point, but all three of your examples currently have severe physical limitations. It is not just a matter of execution. Untested, inadequate, and low range.

jivatmanx 14y ago

Fun fact: The Chinese invented a movable type printing press almost 500 years before Gutenberg, but it wasn't practical due to the enormous number of characters in Chinese.

antman 14y ago
Movable type has a worse story. Although not usually mentioned it existen in the late minoan age. Delayed for only about 3500 thousand years... [1] [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc

bradbeattie 14y ago

William Gibson refers to this cognitive leap with existing technologies as Steam Engine Time: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive.asp http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive...

cma 14y ago

That's not why the Greeks didn't create an industrial revolution... "The uselessness of the aeolipile is an excellent example of the vastly under-appreciated role of materials in technological development." The British had centralized government planning of materials science research for use in cannons and other armaments. That paved the way too, not just a pure invisible hand of the market.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jivatmanx 14y ago
A lot of time passed between between the Greeks and British. Near the end of the Roman Empire, the Romans faced a labor shortage and an important economic system was implemented by Constantine, which would later be copied by everyone else and dominate Western Europe until the Renaissance (It began to decline after the Bubonic plague improved the labor bargaining power of the less well off) . The system was called later called Feudalism, and abolished private ownership of land. I'd add another point, the Romans are a better comparison to the Greeks, as they were closer in time. the Romans were far more centralized than the Greeks - The Athenians were directly democratic - That it was hard to scale so the Romans had an extensive system of laws. In terms of overall scientific output there is no comparison, the Greeks were greater by a massive margin.

nkoren 14y ago

I agree that there are non-technological factors for why they didn't invent semaphore, but I seriously doubt that a lack of capital had anything to do with it. Have you seen the sort of things the Romans _did_ try? Stupendously grandiose and expensive things. Rome was awash in capital. A half-decent semaphore network would've been a rounding error in their budget.

bunderbunder 14y ago
Rome was awash in capital, but it was missing other economic structures that help support innovation, such as the corporation. Even at the height of the Roman Empire, or later Italian Renaissance, the accumulations of capital that existed were somewhat hamstrung by the fact that they were concentrated in the hands of individuals and families. So personal aggrandizement was a huge motivating factor in deciding how the money would get spent, hence the large mount of art and monumental construction projects we see at those times. I'd suggest that corporations are much better for producing technological innovation. As compared to what things were like in Rome, their key characteristic was that decisions about how money would get spent are generally made by groups of people who don't actually own the money themselves. That cuts way back on the motivation to just blow it all on yet another temple in one's own name.
- nkoren 14y ago
  This is a really excellent point, and I think cuts much closer to the truth than a simple lack of technology or capital. If you think about the great infrastructure accomplishments of Rome: roads, aqueducts and sewer systems, rapid large-scale concrete construction, hypocausts, etc., then it seems to me that almost all of them were essentially scaled-up versions of domicile-level or urban-level technologies. These technologies could be piloted at a small scale and then scaled up if they proved to be worthwhile. The institutional mindset was almost totally civic rather than imperial. The military was something of an exception to this, and of course individual merchants and merchant companies would have been very much focused on keeping the gears of the empire turning. The roads and the granary systems were scaled-up urban technologies that helped the empire to function, but I'm not aware of any innovations at the empire level which didn't have some kind of urban precedent. Presumably there were no political or commercial institutions which were structured to support that kind of investment -- or even to ask those kind of questions. The British thinking around empires was fundamentally very different. They genuinely thought AS an empire -- a highly distributed network rather than an overgrown city-state. This gave them the insight to support the creation of the semaphore system. Perhaps a more interesting question, in my opinion, is why didn't the Chinese didn't invent the Internet? I'm not as knowledgeable about Chinese history, but my impression is that they were vastly better at thinking and acting like an empire -- not in the expansionist sense, but in the administrative sense. Presumably they would have had the kind of institutional basis to develop a network of semaphore towers. So what was the obstacle for them?

tokipin 14y ago

yea i think the mindframe is a much huger factor than people realize. people underestimate just how different the world looks to people in different places/times/cultures sidenote: pg wrote an essay (i forget which one) where he points out that blogs could have been around years earlier than they were. anyone remember which essay it was?