why didn’t humanity advance technologically for thousands of years when it comes to things like electricity and other electrical power devices like WIFI, but now humanity is advancing rather rapidly?
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Because humanity hadn’t developed cognitive problem solving methods yet. Imagine medieval blacksmith asking a local learned man how to make better steel and getting a response that he should try to find answers from bible because all truth is in it. The concepts of science and engineering just weren’t there. The tools to build the tools didn’t exist.
It’s about to get a whole lot more interesting
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
Collective knowledge. We started with simple observations (oh look! Every time the sun rises from that rock, it gets cold!) to getting explanations about everything from priests and elders to scientists, philosophers and pure luck. Once collective knowledge in theoretical science is proven and disproven, exponential discoveries and inventions happen.
It’s not that we are smarter today, the past 100-200 years, there’s more information fed to us for collective knowledge to wok on.
The answer is energy, meaning coil and oil.
Since humans are able to extract huge amounts of energy from coil and oil, we started building machines to do what we used to do using human body. And much more efficiently.
Since we have “free” energy, we can become sedentary, we can live in cities, most of us can go to university, etc.
I recommend you reading Jean Marc Jancovici “World without end”. Very interesting book, talking about climate change, energy and society.
EDIT : Added the coil instead of only oil, thanks to Douglas1994 comment.
Because material science wasn’t at that level yet. Obviously certain events had profound effects on our ability to advance technology like the scientific method (1500) but it would still be another 300 years before germ theory (1800) came around, the industrial revolution (1800). This paved the way way for Nicola tesla to invent alternating current generators and modern electrical devices but it’s still before the discovery of the proton(1900). Before then you don’t really have the chemistry or knowledge to make things like modern microchips. It’s not easy to understand or prove something like the structure of the atom because they too small to see, even with a microscope. Modern electronics require chips that have millions if not billions of transistors on a single chip, so there was just no way of making such a thing.
It’s the advancement of information sharing. If you wanted to invent an electric toothbrush 10,000 years ago, first you had to discover electricity, then you had to invent the electric motor, then you had to invent a battery… not to mention the toothbrush. If you wanted to invent something similar today, you could build on what others have done and just taken the next step.
The biggest steps in human history start with the invention of written language. Before that, no human accomplishment could take more than one lifetime, because you couldn’t (accurately) pass down knowledge to the next generation.
The next big step was the invention of the printing press. This allowed written language to be available to the masses, and not just an elite few.
We are currently living in the next big leap in information sharing, and I’m hoping that historians similarly look back at this age as one of equal magnitude to the invention of the printing press and written language.
Exponential growth. Knowledge and technology lets us develop knowledge and technology faster.
It also allowed us to rapidly increase our population size due to improved economics and devote larger percentages of our population to technology.
Education is a huge factor.
For most of human exsitence only a tiny petcentage of people could read. During the last century that number has shot up.
This is a huge question but one answer is that humans are now connected and live longer. Imagine a human born with a genius brain, who lived in the Middle Ages. Chances are they would have died illiterate and in their forties. All their thoughts and insight would have died with them. Now, such people can read, study, and share their brains with the whole world in an instant.
There was a show froma while back called “Connections” and “The Day The Universe Changed” – both hosted by the same guy (something Burke)… He chronicles the history of science and technological advancements – sometimes small and seemingly unimportant discoveries, but when these little advancements come together, everything changes – literally the whole world (err universe) changes.
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