I have been thinking the last week or so that for all the appearance of our rapidly escalating technology, we really haven’t invented anything since the middle of the last century. I view the last real invention as the Laser (actually LASER), back in the very late 1950’s and prior to that the transistor in ’47. Lots of interesting things happened in the early part of the 1900’s such as the first plane (Wright Brothers) in 1903, penicillin in ’28 and nuclear fission in ’38. While there have been lots of things patented, the real breakthroughs have been few and all in the deep past, at least according to my calculation. The World Wide Web? I don’t view that as much of an invention, it was going to be ‘invented’ very soon by someone, it was the logical extension of what had gone before. Integrated circuits? Obvious once the transistor was invented. Man on the moon? ‘Only’ an engineering problem once the basics of rocketry (not really invented by Goddard, though he is credited with inventing the liquid fueled version that was probably necessary for meaningful advances) had been worked out. Cell phones? Coupled with the invention (discovery) of radio (much of the work was done by Hertz in the 1880’s) and the transistor cell phones are pretty much inevitable. Computers? Babbage invented them back in the 1820’s, though it pretty much had to wait for sophisticated electronics and later the transistor to make much of an impact. What can you think of that isn’t easy to see as inevitable that has been invented or discovered since the 1950’s?
While the pace of invention has slowed to a crawl (or, more honestly, come to a dead stop), the refinement of earlier inventions and the combination of various concepts into interesting agglomerations has been moving at an accelerating rate. Will that, though, be enough to take us to the singularity? Perhaps our technological advances will simply peter out as we fill in all the holes between advancements. I certainly think we can carry our ‘filling in the holes’ for decades yet to come, and given the advances I have read about regarding understanding how the brain works, it is feasible that even absent any significant breakthroughs we might be able to ‘jack’ ourselves into the ‘net and that could be the singularity. The vast majority of my ideas really aren’t much more than extending concepts that are already in the works or combining various concepts in apparently new ways, I can’t think of any idea I have had that can’t easily be imagined by someone else thinking of it (indeed, just this weekend I ‘discovered’ that someone has already commercialized an idea I had for parallel writing of electron beam lithography). While I was getting a D in physical chemistry a couple of decades ago I found myself thinking about a wave theory of matter, only to learn years later that there really wasn’t anything special about that idea.
Surely we haven’t invented everything!
