this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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I mean, we do have a cannons and guns age.
I agree that it’s been iteration, but the pace of iterations seems to be slowing down. Since the Internet was invented there hasn’t been a game-changing technology created.
Lots of things that claim to be it - Bitcoin, metaverse, now AI - but nothing like what we saw in the 19th and 20th centuries.
And I think that’s because huge population growth and a relatively unknown world led to huge advances very quickly. Now to make similar advances you can’t be a polymath like Newton or Tesla. You need huge investments.
Case in point: Physics. A lot of the fundamental physics from the 19th and 20th centuries can be re-created with simple materials and a little expertise. People can replicate the double slit experiment with a $2 laser pointer and a piece of foil.
But to make new advances in physics you need particle accelerators and supercomputers, and many highly educated people working together.
I’m not sure if we are talking past each other this point or what, but take the Internet since you mentioned it;
Let’s compare to transistors for instance. You could have (and did have) the internet without transistors and you could have transistors without the internet. Nobody would argue that either are not massively impactful inventions but neither would exist without electricity. Electricity is the paradigm shifting breakthrough. In the same way neither cannons nor guns were the breakthrough themselves.
I thought that was the whole conversation we were having. My main point was not only that innovation is slowing down but that we should expect it to slow based on the trajectory of previous paradigm shifting breakthroughs.
I think we are, but by your logic the real breakthrough was fire, because without that we wouldn’t have electricity.
I wouldn’t go quite that far but yeah, in my view there have only been a handful of main paradigm shifting changes; Language, fire, tools, husbandry, agriculture, metallurgy, electricity.
The primary separation between humans and pretty much everything else on earth is the passing of knowledge from generation to generation so if I had to pick the innovation I would probably pick language.