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".
That is absolutely true. HOWEVER, if one notices that those in the past have made the same observation as oneself but were wrong every time, one would be wise to VERY carefully reexamine one's own position. This is good, solid evidence that one might be mistaken
its not harder to invent things, you just dont know how to do it. its not a problem on you, I couldnt invent anything myself. if anything, we are in a golden age, much like people ~1900 were when it comes to invention. the scripting languages, algorithms, computing power at my finger tips gives me incredible power.
sadly, I didnt think of making a crypto currency ~2009. I didnt think of creating a ride sharing service, selfie drones, or fidget spinners. well actually I did create a fidget spinner with my roller blade bearings back in the early 2ks, but I didnt think anything of it.
point is, we take for granted all the stuff that is available to us now, and there are plenty of stuff (even low hanging fruit) to invent, its just very hard.
One thing that made a great impression on me was reading an old Dr. Dobbs journal (I think from the 70s) in which someone was angrily responding to Bill Gates. Gates had said that hobbyists generally steal their software, and of course that pissed people off. The letter writer said if you want to be paid for your software you should bundle it with hardware. So with hindsight, Gates became a billionaire not because he had a unique idea, but because he recognized the value of something lots of people knew and executed it.
Thinking of things is infinitely easier than sifting through all the noise and then committing 100% to making something specific a reality.
I think the final chapter, Orders of Inovation, in the original post is on the right track. Today there are less of the first order inventions but there will be more and more of the third order inventions that build upon existing inventions.
If this is the case, why have we seen an explosion in inventions? Is there some critical turning point? When is the critical point? It's a lot of speculation.
As depressed and lonely as I am, I live because I believe the future is worth living for, mainly because there's stuff left to do. If there's nothing left to do, we may as well all die today.
I'm saying that the previous assertion is more religious speaking than valid reasoning.
We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it.
Some fundamental types of new knowledge do increase the space of inventions (e.g. the discovery of fire, or the discovery of electricity, or the discovery of dna, etc), but not all.
>The space of inventions increases exponentially with every new piece of knowledge, insight, or tool we produce. Are you asserting that this space becomes so sparse that we will no longer have any useful inventions?
If we are just living because there's stuff to invent, we might as well, as this means inventions are inherently useless (else what we have already invented would be enough to make life worth). Life should be celebrated (or not) for itself, not because we can create new gizmos and find new natural laws.
That's my toy-definition of an invention. Not very good, but it's a start. Let's take it further and say that each item in the list of knowledge is actually a basis vector, and that an invention is simply a vector in the space spanned by the basis set.
> We can find new knowledge, insight, and/or tool without increasing the "space of inventions", much less exponentially increasing it.
In my model, I will prove this is impossible. The dimension before finding the new vector is N. Suppose we find a new knowledge vector k'. If it is truly new, then it will be orthogonal to the other knowledge vectors, and the new basis will span N+1 dimensions, meaning the "space of inventions" increased. The only way for the dimension to remain the same is if k' could be written as a linear combination of k_i, which would imply that our assumption that k' is new was false.
ENOUGH METAPHYSICS!
Think of human knowledge as a circle. The edge of that circle is the edge of human knowledge. Inventing a thing makes a little bump in the circle that pushes the edge outwards. The bigger the circle, the bigger the circumference, the more possibilities to invent something.
To illustrate GP's point metaphorically: Think of human knowledge as discovered areas on a map. The dark areas are what is still unknown to us. Inventing a thing makes a little spot on the map visible. The more you have discovered, the less you still have to discover.
(And to extend it a bit: Of course you can make the already discovered areas more detailed, even to levels unthought of when initially discovered. But as discoveries pile up, there probably won't be many 'woah, there's a whole continent here!' moments anymore.)
I don't have a strong opinion in this debate. I just wanted to provide a counter-point to your metaphor.
Once animals hit the resource limit of the environment, the exponential curve flattens out. Like you note, the more of the map you cover, the less there is left to explore.
The interesting question is how big is the map and how close are we to reaching it's boundaries?
Personally, I think it is effectively infinitely large. If you consider "discovery" to include new combinations of existing things, then you're talking about permutations. If our universe consisted only of 52 playing cards, there would still be 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different ways for us to discover that they can be shuffled together.
Hmm... Perhaps better still would be an immense valley of very uneven steepness and roughness, that we are climbing out of.
