The big factors I see are: 'poverty trap', 'crude hacks', and 'full-time craftsman'. These interact. For example, most people need a day job. Even in R&D shops, day jobs are largely concerned with marginal improvements. I spent 12 years working as an R&D physicist, but I had to do my inventions on my own time because they weren't relevant to the incremental improvement products I was paid to develop. It's very hard to spend time working on a home run when your competition is hitting a thousand singles, and that is especially true with regards to possible uses of your time for paying the bills.
The craftsman thing is a big deal. I suck as a craftsman, mainly because I'm usually doing something for the first time. Need to weld it? Guess I'm learning how to weld. Need to polish it? Time to learn again. MATLAB is too slow? Hello C++. Oh, hey, now electronics are surface mount? Time to learn how to solder all over again. So, unless you are inventing something in a field you have specialized in as a craftsperson, everything you build kinda sucks. Then you have to figure out - is the problem with the idea or the implementation? Is there a different implementation which would be easier to build? What techniques do I have to learn to do that?
The workaround for this is to work with specialized craftspeople. Unfortunately, this adds different challenges. Now you have to pay them ('poverty trap') or convince them it's worthwhile (I didn't see 'social proof' on the list, but lets put it under value). Now you have to manage a project, which is a different skill set than inventing something in the first place. Sometimes, it's better going back to being your own craftsman.
In modern times, then you get to go to commercialization, which is the barrier which kills most inventions because the inventor rarely has the skills to do this right, and the people with the skills aren't usually incentivized properly to do it for them.
So, in short, I see the biggest problems for inventors not in the mental realm, but in the social. Inventors generally need help, and it is not until after the invention is a success that people see the value.
Silicon Valley undervalues the aimless tinkerers and overvalues the incremental bootcamp coders.
I think one of the things that career inventors need to overcome is selling themselves. Often the fun part is in the work of inventing, but conveying the value of the process is just as important and less straightforward.
What actually happened is that communication density exploded upward (pony express, telegraph, radios, phones, industrial printing, computers, etc.) at the same time that communication cost plummeted (aka I'm paying a flat rate for internet access and video chatting with people all over the globe).
And I think this is still the case, that we generally still look down on communications as a kind of lesser technology compared to power gizmos. When if anything it should be the opposite, that the ability to communicate so much more effectively across all of humanity has smeared the ideas and inventions around much faster and more thoroughly than anyone really considers.
Why did things take so long? Because everything had to be individually re-invented, we had no shoulders of giants.
After two world wars, people assumed the future would be wars of tremendous destruction.
When aviation was growing fast, people assumed the future would be flying everything.
During the space race, people assumed the future would be space everything.
During the growth of nuclear power, people assumed the future would be atomic powered everything.
This fails to match reality, because the future doesn't arrive as if we are barreling down a highway at an ever increasing speed. Advances tend to be a left turn down a road you couldn't reach before. Rather than building ever faster jets, we went to space. Rather than going further into space, we built communication satellites etc...
Our current 'Internet' age will be no different. The 'next big thing' will not be Internet v2, but it will be something that could only exist with the internet as a prerequisite.
Thanks for your thought. It reminded me a little bit about an interview with peter thiel where he responded to a question about the future. I guess popular culture in tech moves past ideas rather quickly and generally seems to jump from trend to trend until realizing the value of a trend.
> Having external thinking tools is a big deal. Modern
> ‘human intelligence’ relies a lot on things like writing
> and collected data, that aren’t in anyone’s brain.
But before language, writing, drawing, etc. every time the wave passed from one human to the next, some of the amplitude was lost. In other words, the wave was damped. It doesn't take much damping for the wave to never grow beyond a certain amplitude.
Each new communication technology increases the efficiency that we can pass knowledge from one person to the next and reduces that damping friction. Even a tiny improvement here compounds exponentially as the wave resonates through time.
Now, with the Internet, we've made it incredibly easy to preserve and share information. I think the next advance for us is going to be dealing with the fact that we've made it equally easy to share things that aren't true or helpful. Worse, many of those unfacts prey on our cognitive biases and are more appealing and frequently shared.
There are many ways this can unfold. For example, groups of people with similar values, mindsets, or skills can much more easily manifest significant constructive interference.
As you note, the speed/frequency of the wave seems much faster now with our new communication technologies. These changes, along with the increased scale of human population, introduce new patterns for both constructive and destructive interference that we need to understand and handle.
Of course, if we try to solidify the metaphor further... this wave is likely to have enormous dimensionality and be composed of components that would absurdly difficult to even begin measuring. But it's a great metaphor and certainly got me thinking.
"Reality has a surprising amount of detail": http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
After I read this last year it changed the way I interacted and observed things around me for a while. Poking/prodding more, and asking more "what/how" questions.
When viewed this way as a complex system, it become more easy to understand their behavior as emergent properties of the system. Systems can come to equilibrium, then won't move anymore. They can also take some time to reach equilibrium, traversing full of saddle-points landscapes. Systems that have reached equilibrium are not interesting anymore as they are not thriving, in the concept ecosystem this is the equivalent of being dead. As long as there are alive, these systems are subjected to Darwinian evolutions, which would explain the tendency for systems which take a long time to converge.
But interesting systems (turing complete) can also exhibit chaotic behavior, and knowing when they will crash can't be predicted (halting problem). Any biologist know that ecosystems are fragile and can be pushed either side of the frontier of chaos.
I also like to think of inventions/concept as numbers, which can be factored, multiplied and added. Sometimes you get a new prime number (or was it there all along :) ).
Now build one that will work reliably when the miner dropped it, cleaned and refiled with water from murky puddle, in the dark 500 feet below ground.
Centuries ago, it was easier to think of things to invent (we should be able to fly, to stay under water longer, to copy books faster, to notate music… ). It still took a lot of work to actually realize the invention (which only could be done by people wealthy enough to dedicate the time or get patronage from a wealthy source).
Today, we've run low on the scope of reasonably easy to invent things that are actually valuable. All the obvious "wish we could X" things have been done or are nigh impossible for any one person or small team to figure out (or flat out impossible). Innovation in areas like AI or medicine or battery tech — that stuff is all being actively worked on and requires massive funding of teams of advanced specialists. We're not going to see some person just invent something around these things the way multiple people independently invented forms of rope in prehistory.
There are plenty of inventions yet to make, from complex AI enabled devices down to the simple mundane items that make daily life slightly easier. I founded a company based on the latter that is ticking over nicely.
By saying that it is harder to invent things now shows you have fallen into one of the traps that the author highlights:
> If you have never seen rope, it actually doesn’t occur to you that rope would come in handy, or to ask yourself how to make some.
You have never seen the thing you need to invent so it takes either a leap of inspiration or a concerted effort to sit down and think of something new to solve a problem you have, chances are you will get their iteratively over a long time and not really see what you have made as "an invention".
Ideation isn't some spark that hits you, ideas need to be thought about and created with effort.
Just because somebody said something that was wrong 100 years ago, doesn't mean it's also wrong now.
And there is such a thing as "low hanging fruit".
We have absolutely no contract with the universe or nature that guarantees us that there's "always more to invent", even less so that "the possibilities keep increasing".
La Bruyère in 1690 wrote a very famous phrase "Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes et qui pensent." (Everything has been said, and we're too late after 7000 years of human existence and thought.)
I can't find the quote right now but Aristotle complained once that the level of comfort attained in his era and city was so high nobody would ever conceivably want more.
It's fairly obvious that the breadth of human ingenuity is infinite and that there are orders of magnitude more inventions to make than have been made.
Not all inventions are useful; one could argue humanity would be much better without television, Facebook or nuclear bombs for example. But one just needs to look around to see how our world is inadequate and broken.
Take transportation: today we use huge metal cages (cars) or metal tubes (planes) to move a bunch of ape-like creatures from one place to another, at great expense and risk. Why can't we fly? We say we fly when we're in a plane, but we don't; we are flown. I want wings (or something) that let me take off and land using my body's energy, just like a bird.
I don't know if individual flying can be achieved using genetic engineering or by building a contraption that one can operate with his arms or legs, etc., but I do know that cars / planes / boats / etc. are a ridiculous and laughably overkill solution to the problem of personal transportation.
I'm curious: How much does your company's product rely on materials that either didn't exist 20 years ago or were significantly more expensive to procure in small quantities 20 years ago?
I ask because I have a hypothesis that a lot of things that seem like low-hanging-fruit that should have been invented earlier actually depend on the abundance of materials and manufacturing processes that only became common 20ish years before the invention.
1. I realize the need for something and envision a novel invention 2. I discover upon research that it has already been invented
So, I did have the thought about the "thing I've never seen" and could pursue inventing it. But it's a big world and far easier than ever before to learn from others.
I have known people who went all the way, finished inventing something and got it patented, and then I (as a patent critic) have doubts that it's truly novel and then discover, to the surprise of my inventor friend, that it actually was invented before but was obscure and they hadn't heard about it.
There's tons of room for invention still, but it's comparably much reduced from the past for all the basic stuff and far easier to discover existing inventions. It's just NOT anything like it used to be.
And then... https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/06/a-thinner-fla...
It's a very long way from putting a 1500mm lens in a pocket camera, but it looks promising. Of course, it could end up being the fusion reactor of optics: always a half decade out.
We have only allowed a very narrow band of 'solutions' to be explored: those that involve 'doing-making-selling-competing. We have had very minor controls on this process, and even the little we have on that side is constantly besieged or selectively weaponized as there is no barrier between 'the game' and 'the meta-game'. For example, any solution to a problem that involves abstinence, for instance for very real problems such as climate change or the obesity crisis, is impossible due to the way we have structured 'reward'.
And I don't know about battery tech or medicine, but most certainly in AI breakthroughs are very much the work of individuals and do not need massive teams or funding. It is again our 'market-economy', with inane 'IP wars' that seem to stifle these works from being brought to fruition
There is a famous french comedian who said "when you think about it, the only thing needed for this not to be sold... is that nobody buys it".
That pretty much sums up the solution to most problems of the human race. You know that killing thing ? What if we stopped doing it ? You know that unhealthy habit ? That immoral product ? Etc.
Disciplining yourself to not eat too much chocolate is hard enough. So collectively asking all humans to agree on one particular point of discipline....
And neither cars nor steamboats have been invented by single individual. The "reasonably easy to invent things that are actually valuable" mostly have a very complicated history of trials and errors, tinkering and thinking and imagination from many groups and individuals.
Try to create your own lightbuld or try to isolate a mile long cable for the underground transport of electricity. Try to sell any of these to someone who has never heart of them and lacks the infrastracture for using them. In the hindsight these may seem "reasonable easy to invent things that are actually valuable". But seriously, nothing really new has ever been easy.
That's not necessarily the case. Some things can be legitimately, laws of physics-style, impossible.
It requires much more resources to invent a revolutionary battery
"Posing the question is a large part of the work. If you have never seen rope, it actually doesn’t occur to you that rope would come in handy, or to ask yourself how to make some."
Sorry @quadrangle, I would go towards an opposite opinion than yours :) I have never in my life been in such a time when inventing would be as easy as now: It's so easy to communicate through internet to find people and skills to fill the ones I'm missing. From crazy idea to proof of concept is pretty straight forward.
For example if you have invented something including electronics:
You have no knowledge of it? PCB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board) knowledge -> buy some from freelance.net. Basic component drawing with pen and paper is OK to ask a quota for. And when you want to build the PCBs -> alibaba.
And proof of concepts can be built even with more simple parts, such as Arduino, piece of metal can, etc.
(Edited some typos and bad English.)
I agree that there's tons of room and lots of things that enable such novel inventions today in certain spaces.
I was focusing on the bad hindsight that tries to assert that because we see inventions as obvious in hindsight, we should realize how non-obvious they were originally, in the same way that new inventions today are non-obvious.
I think tons of inventions are obvious, both then and now. The hard work to make a good rendition, spread the knowledge to others etc. is just different now than before. People have reinvented most inventions multiple times because the inventions are obvious enough. And still today, there's tons of obvious enough inventions — people imagine Apps that do things no app yet does. Bringing the invention to fruition and to market is harder.
But in the past, it was hard to learn that someone else had also invented the thing you're inventing. That's easier now, and easy enough to stop you from reinventing it in the first place (unless you're one of those self-centered startup people who delusionally believes that whatever your idea is must be novel and just skips doing the research to see what exists already).
Many ideas that seem easy to invent only seem so in retrospect. The article repeatedly points out that inventing rope isn't obvious.
Many of the health issues would be corrected if our environment required people to exercise to get around.
People are just really lazy.
I disagree. There are a lot of small inventions that are happening every day. I've had independently ideas that are now massive sites or products.
If you want to know why things have taken so long, have a look to usual flamewars here. There are many in which half of usually smart people can't simply understand what's the others' position about.
The pattern is that one side considers current practice tedious, steep learning curve for professionals only, while the other side finds it "good enough". If it's good enough for you, you'll never invent something easier and faster to understand.
> The pattern is that one side considers current practice tedious, steep learning curve for professionals only, while the other side finds it "good enough". If it's good enough for you, you'll never invent something easier and faster to understand.
This is a bit baffling to me -- the phenomena to which you refer. And it seems to be more general than the pattern you outline.
It appears to have something to do with both pre-suppositions and different orderings of personal values [0]. But I'm not sure.
Do you think it is possible to generalize the structure of the process via which reasonably educated and smart people can be presented with the same facts and come to different conclusions -- that they will defend against each other in pretty feisty debates?
[0] By this I mean, for example, that some people might put individual freedom higher than equality across large populations and vice-versa.
I generally find it hard to pin down to what degree culture motivates people to action and think that explanations should be preferred, that show how single individuals or groups might directly profit from certain actions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-fRo5-p9hE
http://peterburk.github.io/pliny/ChaptersHtml/0/1.%20PlinyPe...
https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/could-rome-have-had-an-indust...
I have the feeling we underestimate how much stuff has been invented and forgotten.
For example, if you consider architecture the romans used half a dozen kind of opus to build walls, different varieties of arches, cement mixtures, hollow bricks and sunken panels to allow for lighter domes, both rib and barrel vaults, and likely a bunch of other things I never heard about.
A lot of that stuff has been superseded, so we don't really care a about a dozen old cement mixtures, or pure wood techniques, but it doesn't mean they were not invented.
I would have put it on the plague, the protestant revolution, the magna carta and the printing press. All pre-dated the industrial revolution - but that itself had to be enabled by something (otherwise - the Romans would have done it, right?)
I would really encourage you to read the book, not so much for the hypothesis Clark proposes, but for all the amazing background and data on this topic he provides in a way that is accessible to the layman.
Prior to 1790, Clark asserts that man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations.
In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy. In that way, according to Clark, less violent, more literate and more hard-working behaviour - middle-class values - were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population. This process of "downward social mobility" eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap.
I am on the fence if "the rich outbred the rest" is valid, but I do know from the genetics side that an enormous amount of selection has taken place in the human population over the last few thousand years. We really are very different to the people living 5000 years ago.
I once saw a video interview with leadership from Hoover, the vacuum bag company. They lamented not accepting a long-ago acquisition offer from Dyson... so they could use his patents to shut down the whole bagless vacuum idea.
In a subsistence farming environment it seems true that people did not have much time or resources to devote to making inventions. However, from what I've read of hunter-gatherer tribes still around today, the people living in them actually seem to have quite a bit of free time, yet obviously technological innovation has been quite rare.
So is it the case that innovation happens in a fairly specific set of circumstances, where resources and time are scarce enough to make innovation necessary, but still plentiful enough to allow for innovation?
Or maybe its just that the type of civilization agriculture creates leads to sufficient population densities for knowledge to start accumulating.
I have to wonder if it is the people that have quite a bit of free time there, or men only.
I can see men having not much to do once they hunted and brought their prey. But if women are left with the task of preparing food from such completely raw ingredients, and also have to do childcare, possibly some gathering in addition, they don't have much time in the day left.
Most of us aren’t contributing to the advancement of knowledge, for example. If we could up our utilization with more people doing R&D, for instance, we’d accumulate knowledge much faster.
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/flowers/ is related - if you have a percentage of your population working on making the rest of the population more efficient, this only makes sense above a certain leverage level.
And we are. What do you think the end result of China, India, etc., lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty will be? In 30 years' time we will have probably doubled the number of researchers out there, if not more.
http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/197303/why.they.lost.th...
Imagine you're in a jungle with your tribe. You basically have plants, animals and rocks with which to make stuff. You live marginally, and people sometimes die from starvation. Your tribe migrates, meaning you have to carry everything you need with you.
If you happened to figure out some metal working, it's probably not worth doing. Your tribe can't set up a mine, and gathering fuel is a huge effort.
Realistically, that sort of thing probably needs an agricultural society that can afford to feed people who aren't farmers.
Bringing home some grains of that wild wheat that grows just a tiny bit larger. Befriending a wolf that is a little less distrustful of you. Picking that apple with the slightly smaller seeds. And so on.
Without those, you really are better off remaining a hunter-gatherer. People became significantly shorter when they first adopted a sedentary lifestyle.
Really? The wild plants and animals were already useful. So from day one, the transitional forms to the domestic varieties were useful as well.
Without those, you really are better off remaining a hunter-gatherer.
There's not a sharp division between hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist. Sedentism preceded agriculture. As people accidentally dropped seeds around their dwellings (or discarded them with the trash), they gradually became gardeners and then farmers.
All comments like this assume the AI is absolutely goal oriented toward self-improvement and self-propagation and has no limitations or competition. "No biology or society" - what about the physical hardware and infrastructure needed to maintain it? "Self upkeep" - so its directly connected to an entire automated vertically integrated supply chain and factory complex? "Unlimited ability to record/analyze" - again, where is it getting this infinite storage and processing capacity? "ability to simulate variations of..." - if it's truly intelligent in a way humans would consider intelligent, even massively moreso, why would it spend all its time random walking the solution space of everything?
If we are talking about AI as god, that can work, I suppose, but as someone who really likes transhumanism and the idea of AI in general, this idea of the sloughing away of all limitations and an AI actor totally dedicated with either the infinite and immediate improvement or replacement of itself makes no sense to me.
Am I missing something here, or is there just to much engineer whispering in the corners of my brain.
If I decide that a problem is so hard that the best solution is to invent a superhuman AI to solve it, then this is an approach that human-level intelligence can come up with, so a superhuman intelligence can too.
Self-improvement and self-replacement are probably not an AI's actual goal, they're just things that are useful to most potential goals that an AI can have. (And they're easier for the potential AI because the prerequisite research has already been done at that point.)
(If you knew I was trying to either cure cancer or colonize mars, you could predict that I'll start raising money, even though those goals don't have much in common.)
I agree with most all of your points. On that one, about where its resources are to come from (and thinking just in a fantastical manner on the topic): it's going to trade with humans, who will provide the things it needs to keep growing. For example, give people a 'free' search engine, that they find highly useful, which results in the humans funding the AI through ads/clicks, allowing for massive expansion of the AI infrastructure. You could apply the general concept to most any service an AI could provide. I'll give you this, you give me that, resulting in a dependency, with both sides occasionally trying to seize on an opening to acquire the upperhand in the arrangement.
Simply put, humans will trade with AI eventually. It's inevitable, and it's a critical aspect of how AI will self-expand. To ensure their own survival, they'll want to become so useful to humans that the humans don't kill (or try to kill) the AI, despite occasionally (or frequently) being afraid of its power / potential.
Want to build out the colonies in the US? You're going to trade with the British Empire and France, while trying not to piss off either enough that they destroy you (or try to). You want to be useful to them, enrich them, limit the extent to which you seem to pose a threat. You maintain an even keel until the point where you are no longer subservient. China has been a master at that the last 40 some years, they still behave that way today when it suits their long-term aims (playing down their strength at times, or playing it up at other times). As a concept, I think this represents a power dynamic that is universal between most living (aware, sentient, whatever) things, and the human-AI relationship will also play out that way.
Invention takes place every day in oh so many peoples lives all around the world. However, too many of those same people don't see what they are doing as being inventive. Hence, they quite often do not share their inventions and ideas with others as they don't think that those inventions and ideas are good enough.
If you watch little children, you see invention occurring all the time. It is only when we are adults that we lose the concept that invention is everywhere.
The natural world around us is an incredible source of ideas and usable inventions. As James Tour has put it, we can learn so much advanced technological manufacturing processes from studying the internal workings of biological cells, let alone all the other processes that occur between cells and in the various organs in different species.
The fact of the matter with technological advancement is that we advance despite all of our efforts. In every field in which we humans work, the status quo is the important thing and so we take great efforts to slow change to a crawl for all sorts of reasons. Change occurs and those who have driven the next set of changes then drive the next status quo to stop change.
Several early inventions were incredibly time consuming to make by hand, and judging from apes, social groups didn't have a concept of specialization, but all sat around making and teaching the same thing at the same time, partially as a form of bonding. So, say, sharpening rocks improved consistent access to food, but lowered free time required to experiment or make other inventions, and doing the latter would exclude you from the social bonding of making the one tool, which risks making you an other the group resents. Lack of storage, even on clothing, meant everything after your first tool was disposable. Keeping things more than a day might have been an unnatural concept too, so already expensive production costs are multiplied by uses.
There was a long term observational study of chimps where a subgroup of them started spontaneously team hunting, chasing prey towards the others, like a set sports play. They did it effectively for a few seasons, then just stopped... Group dynamics changed and some left the tribe, others had mates, priorities just changed. Maybe retaining knowledge is really hard before you're organized around shared knowledge as a principle.
That's not how evolution works. Each step along the way must produce a net benefit or it gets discarded. Just as insect wings served as propulsion for water skimming before actual flight, big brains paid off, then got bigger and paid off some more, etc. The only hiccup is the benefit has to outweigh the cost (eg big brains need more calories).
Side note: I think our wide array of modern mental disorders are costs of our brains' continuing enlargement. I.e. brains are trying to figure out how to get even bigger and more powerful without also having OCD or schizophrenia.
More precisely, each step must not impose a net fitness cost or it gets selected against to a degree positively linked to the degree to which it imposes a net cost. But that's, more importantly, each genetic variation taken in total, not actually each individual phenotypic effect of the genetic variation (e.g., sickle cell trait was preserved not because sickle cell anemia is not a net negative, but because the malaria resistance that comes even when an individual is heterozygous for the trait is a strong benefit that manifests more often than sickle cell disease which occurs when an individual is homozygous for it.)
Maybe so, but the benefit could have just been individual fitness signalling (like a peacock's tail) without providing any advantage to the species as a whole until the big "payday".
It took a long time because we started with nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I like the article but I think it's missing the forest for the trees. The reason why things took so long relative to current rates of progress is just because knowledge compounds upon itself.
Early on in a system defined by compound growth you will have slow growth. Then eventually exponential growth. This is what we've experienced.
My general expectations:
- First six months of full time focus on a work process is basically just learning your way around; goal is to get a real process map (actual activity) and proper data source - By the end of that period, I usually have a hypothesis about the way things ought to be - Months 6 - 18: get knuckleheads to test hypothesis - Years 2 - 3: Use results of tests to identify the metrics we actually should have been tracking and build appropriate data sources. Test new sets of hypothesis which work out brilliantly, usually from stuff we thought didn't matter.
Incidently... this is likely why most MBA strategy firms are full of shit... they usually exit the project within six months, which as you see... isn't anywhere near enough.
With regards to what we consider inventions that move us forward (more advanced or fundamentally more novel solutions) I wonder if the problem isn't just a lack of imagination but imagination and abilities compared to what technology can deliver.
I always think of this as a reminder that perhaps it's possible to imagine things that humans can't imagine.
https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664
Having said that there is of course a big difference between inventing something fundamentally new (a rope) and improving it (nylon rope).
But more and more I get the feeling that humans aren't really going to invent most of the solutions we can dream up.
A major reason is, people are not actually as intelligent or creative as one assumes. We are bad at unsupervised learning. A lot of our learning, when you look more closely, is supervised learning.
This is correct; there's been a huge amount of brain evolution in the past 50K years. See for example "The 10,000 Year Explosion" (Cochran).
Furthermore, this is why Cochran is considered a racist; correctly so.
While today saying "how about it, science?" has become our second nature, it wasn't the obvious way to think about the world 50K years ago.
Even without chariots, road are useful: pack animals and people on foot will move much more easily if there is a solid path that doesn't turn to mud when it's raining, that's clear of obstacles and relatively smooth.
And vice-versa; chariots are, after all, implements of war that fight off-road.
While A requires B and B requires A may exist elsewhere, chariots/roads is a particularly poorly chosen example.
It would seem that current times bring innovation in ridiculous pace, but the fact is - it's still awfuly slow.
Hence we are still in AI-human coevolve stage. When some AI leaks to internet and survive there as Like bots and evolve (not necessarily self aware) it would be a different. When it start to find a way to get enemy and declare independence it would be even more different.
Alphago takes years to do CO-human-game-player-evolution but 3 days for go and a couple of hours for chess. May be it could be shorter than we thought.
The Egyptian Slave will go to the promise land leaving their master behind.