What’s with the massive boom of technology and invention over the last century and a half compared to the slow advancement of the many centuries before?
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Increase in communication causes exponential progress. We’re a species whose defining characteristic is out ability to communicate very abstract ideas effectively.
In the old days, almost everything would have to be reinvented because different communities couldn’t share ideas. One tribe figures out metal tools, but they can’t tell the rest of humanity. That means only people from the same tribe can improve on that. You have to hope you get lucky and have someone else who’s good with that kind of stuff in your tribe, so progress is really slow. Maybe over generations knowledge is lost.
Over time communication improves, but is still slow and not easily accessed by anyone. Education is also limited. This leads to a situation like Newton and Liebnitz both inventing calculus at once. They both happen to be part of the upper class, able to get education and be part of the ‘circle’ of mathematicians so are kinda up to date with what’s going on in the field. But communication is still too slow such that they both spend years doing the same thing, wasting effort. Knowledge isn’t really lost anymore because there’s enough people around the world who can keep and share it.
Skip to now. We can almost instantaneously transmit messages to anyone/everyone across the whole globe, and education is much more accessible (in some places at least), so the pool of people working together on a single problem, and their level of collective skill and coordination is so much higher.
With that context, it’s easier to understand why progress used to be so much slower.
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