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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1. More people. Between 1700 and now the number of humans has gone from 600 million people to almost 8 billion people. The change in urban population (ie, the people who meet lots of new people) has changed even more drasticly.
2. Those people are also doing more technical jobs. Before the agricultural revolution some 90-95% of society worked in agriculture. Which is tough work and does not leave you with a lot of time to sit and think. About a billion people work in agriculture. Which means that 7 billion people do not work in agriculture, with a disproportional number of those non-agriculture people being in rich countries where people DO have time to sit and think for a significant portion of the day (ie, very few people have 12 hour shifts and no free weekends).
So there is a lot more thinking and networking going on, both from a pure “there are lots of people on earth” and a “Those people have a lot of free time to spend thinking on stuff”.
We also have heated and bright houses (tends to help with thinking) and cheap books (so that you can learn things and make sure that you’re not solving a problem that someone else has already solved) and computers (which can help you with math problems. And for the last 30 years computers also feature the internet. Which is often for porn, but is also a faster way to check if you’re thinking about something that someone else already solved).
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