The Innovation Backlog
August 2021
The earliest fossils of modern humans date back to about 200,000 years ago. For most of that time, we used stone tools. Almost all technology was made in the last 10,000 years. That's when our ancestors started settling into stationary farming villages. A historian would say farming caused a technological explosion, but an early farmer wouldn't feel that way. Powerful inventions like wheels, metal tools, and guns were made thousands of years apart. If you were born 5,000 years ago, you would be lucky to see one invention in your lifetime.
If you were one of the lucky few, you might have seen the invention of writing. The earliest writing system, cuneiform, was made about 5,000 years ago. It helped ancient Sumerians organize a large society. Before writing, we remembered everything. Storing and sharing ideas turned out to be extremely powerful.
Today we write novels, poems, math, laws, movie scripts, textbooks, and computer code. It seems obvious that writing can be used in all these different ways, but hindsight makes everything obvious. It took humans a long time to try all those different uses. After writing was invented, it took over a thousand years for anyone to create a system based on an alphabet. Before that, they used a different symbol for each word (which is cumbersome once you have 1000+ symbols). When a powerful invention is created, it's followed by an era of discovery.
Sadly, for most of history these opportunities were rare, because inventions were rare. Ancient societies used the same tools for generations. When China invented ink, they had 300-400 years to master it before they even invented paper.
Imagine how hard it would be to find a new use for ceramics after your ancestors used it for a thousand years. You would have to be more creative than 40 generations who tried before you. It's not impossible, but it's extremely unlikely. Most people would waste their time if they tried.
But over time, technology has been accelerating. A couple reasons why:
Powerful inventions make other ideas possible. Wheels enabled wagons. Steel enables swords. Most inventions are just old inventions combined in a new way. In that sense, inventions are building blocks more inventions. If you have 10 inventions, there are 100 ways to combine two of them. But if you have 1,000 inventions, there's almost 1,000,000 potential combinations. Today, one invention creates countless possibilities.
Another shifting aspect of innovation is the spread of knowledge. Humans aren't a hive mind; we know different things. One person discover calculus while another discovers addition. Only a small fraction of the population knows the most advanced ideas. Writing, Radio, TV, and now the Internet have been solving this problem. It's easier than ever for people to reach the cutting edge of our collective knowledge.
At first technological acceleration wasn't very noticeable. An individual person wouldn't notice a shift from one invention every 2,000 years to one invention every 100 years (even though progress got 20 times faster). The acceleration became a lot more obvious once multiple innovations were being made in one lifetime. The last couple centuries had rapid change. We've turned candles into light bulbs, horses into cars, and newspapers into the internet. It's hard to find one object in a modern home that existed 100 years ago. It's a historical anomaly.
A powerful invention used to be a historic landmark. Today, a powerful invention is made every year. For example, drones.
Today they are mostly used for taking videos and killing people, but imagine the potential. They could replace lightweight package delivery. Drones could make food delivery so easy that storing food in your home becomes obsolete. In theory, we could have construction drones that build a skyscraper. And these are just ideas off the top of my head; The best ways to use drones probably haven't been imagined yet.
And drones are just ONE powerful invention. Every couple years, something similarly powerful is created. In recent decades, we've gotten the internet, online video, cryptocurrency, neural networks, smartphones, social media, ecommerce, nuclear power, self-driving cars, genetic engineering, and robotics. We've only just begun to explore the possibilities.
In the last few decades, we've made powerful inventions faster than we can explore them. Every year an invention is made that could take a century to fully exploit; we don't have 300-400 years between inventions like our ancestors. Our inventions are piling up. There is a massive potential to innovate with tools that already exist. Compared to our ancient ancestors, we are clueless about the tools available to us.
Our era is the best time to be an innovator. You don't have to be smarter than 40 past generations to discover a new use for drones, because drones haven't existed that long. Ancient people had a small number of old toys. It's the opposite today. We have a large number of new toys.
If you started working with cryptocurrency today, you would be in the first generation. The likelihood of discovering innovations is highest when nobody's tried before. That's a big deal. Innovation often results in massive efficiency gains. Henry Ford produced cars almost 10x faster. And in the last 200 years, lighting a room has gotten about 10,000 times cheaper. Technology makes the impossible possible.
If people from 1900 could see our technology today, I suspect it would shift their focus. One modern computer could automate millions of jobs. If they knew that, they would focus harder on making computers. The best economic decision would be to direct all their resources into technology (as long as people could still eat). They could have made a century of progress in half the time. It makes you wonder, if we could see 100 years into the future, what could we invest in that would make us 10x as productive?
The bottleneck has shifted. We used to be limited by technology. Then we started inventing powerful things all the time. Today, the bottleneck to progress is how quickly we can act on technologies that already work on paper. The most successful individuals (and nations) will be the ones that push technology into everyday use. We're already seeing this play out. Startups are disrupting outdated businesses. Digital content creators are replacing traditional media. If one nation spends billions on drones while another nation spends billions on delivery drivers, the one making drones will eventually dominate. Innovation is becoming easier than ever, and the outdated methods can't compete.