The Timeline of Historic Inventions is a fascinating wikipedia article (and also a fun name for a sci fi short story, I’m constantly on the lookout and finding a good name is very often prior to thinking of the actual story idea). Looking through it the other day really put some things into perspective for me. In case you don’t want to read the whole thing and decide for yourself, here are my highlights and commentary.
The earliest stone tools yet found were invented ~3 million years ago (hereafter: MYA, and KYA = “thousand years ago”). It was so long ago they were actually invented by a prehuman species.
Boats were invented 900 KYA, almost 600k years *before* language.
But the most amazing thing isn’t that boats were so early compared to language—it’s that people (broadly defined) who were smart enough to invent stone tools still took 2 million years to invent boats. That’s ~400x as long as all of recorded human history, to go “what if we got on top of something that floats?”
So 300 KYA we get language and become homo sapiens and migrate out of Africa. This is now 60x recorded human history ago. Almost immediately after that we invent projectile weapons, then glue, then ~200k more years, then we invent beds. As far as I’m concerned, the invention of beds is the official beginning of humankind, from here on out.
So now we’re in the “Upper Paleolithic” era, and we start firing off good stuff: Shoes, 45 KYA, the oldest known example of which are a pair of bark sandals found in a cave in my home state of Oregon. Presumably there are many, many people in Portland still wearing bark sandals, sustainably harvested of course. That is a trend waiting to happen if not.
Then bang: Writing-stuff-down, cave-painting, weaving, The Flute, Star Charts, Rope, and Ceramics in less than 20k years, an explosion of innovation at a pace that literally thousands of previous generations could not imagine.
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Here’s a mind-blower: All the above stuff was invented *before* agriculture.
Some genius was like “what if we wove this tree bark into sandals?” before they were like “what if we put seeds here on purpose and lived near them?”
This is worth pausing our timeline for. In his now-classic book, Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari explains (I am not a scholar and I imagine this idea is disputed as everything is, but this is not a work of history so just go with me and accept) that Agriculture actually decreased the average individual fitness of humankind.
In other words, any given person was better off as a hunter-gatherer. They worked less hours, ate a more varied diet, and lived longer, healthier lives.
The rigorous demands of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle (another phrase that sounds like it could describe a Portland-based trend) meant, however, that a woman would likely have a baby and then nurse almost-continuously for multiple years, suppressing her ovulation and putting space between her pregnancies.
In settled agricultural societies, women could sit inside structures and have a baby a year, splitting the work of raising them while the men worked the fields. That’s 3-4x more baby production (we’re still a long way from the invention of sexual equality) for Ag-based societies.
That means that, over the course of thousands of years, the ag-based societies outbred and outfought the hunter-gatherers, until only pockets remained, mostly in areas unsuitable for farming. That’s what it took to convert us to this new technology. And yet, despite the fact that it literally made the average individual worse off, it still took only ~5-8k years for a complete, worldwide paradigm shift.
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Now we’re into recorded history. The Bronze Age. ~3500 years that brought us ploughing and cities and writing and toilets, reservoirs and receipts and rulers and rhinoplasty (no, seriously, ~5000 years ago), puppetry and pipes and protractors, clocks and chariots, glass, rubber, and concrete.
Then a strange thing happened. A counter-intuitive pair of things, actually. The first was the Late Bronze Age Collapse, ~1200 BC, when most of the most advanced civilizations (centered roughly around the Middle East and North Africa) were simultaneously destroyed. The cause is highly disputed, but the event is not.
The second of the pair of strange events is that, even as civilization collapsed, technology not only continued developing, but continued to increase the pace of its development and deployment. The end of the Bronze Age did not give way to a period of loss and darkness; it gave way to the Iron Age.
Said Iron Age was a period of only (“only”) ~800 years when we first made things like saddles, crossbows, windmills, and coins, and by the end of it we had construction cranes and lighthouses! They were doing Cesarean Sections and giving out deeded loans in Northern India!
Crossing now into Classical Antiquity (~500 BC), and things start to come so fast that I can’t even do lists without making this too long. Cast Iron is invented in China, and in my dreams there is a pan somewhere in a Chinese basement that has been seasoned for 2500 years until it now possesses the ultimate flavor.
Less than 200 years later, machining and materials science has progressed enough to produce The Antikythera Mechanism. That link goes to one of my absolutely favorite super-niche Youtube Series about a guy remaking the mechanism by hand. It is mind-blowing.
200 more years and we’re damming rivers and building arched bridges. 200 more and we’ve got vending machines. It just goes on like this too. There are some weird oversights that seem like they come way too late—No concept of the number zero until 38 BC and no toilet paper until 589 AD?!—but overall, the march of progress is picking up speed.
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Arguably the most important device ever invented by humankind is the printing press. (That word is carefully chosen. “Fire” or “The Wheel” are antecedents and of course more important in a we-wouldn’t-otherwise-be-here sense, but they don’t seem like “devices” in quite the same way.) But then in ~1439 AD—well after the advent of the rocket, the land mine, and the cannon, by the way—Gutenberg invents the printing press and hits the nitro button on the already-accelerating pace not just of innovation but of the *spread* and *permanency* of new knowledge.
You can see this progression in the actual timeline wiki page, too. It started sectioning itself off in periods of millions of years, then went to thousands of years, then to individual centuries, and right about now it starts listing inventions by decade instead. Some of this is record-keeping and knowing more exactly when things were made, but also there’s just more things that have definitive beginnings and still exist!
Within a couple of centuries, we’re already into the technologies we know and love: Newspapers and microscopes and pressure-cookers in the 17th century, thermometers and stoves (invented by Benjamin Franklin!) and parachutes in the 18th, batteries and morphine and the internal combustion engine in the 19th. Oh wait, excuse me, those last three were *just in the 1810s*.
The list of major inventions just in the 19th and 20th centuries is as long as the list of major inventions from 3 MYA until the start of the 19th century.
In 1799, Claude Chappe had just invented the semaphore telegraph, and the first telegraph network was being constructed throughout France. This consisted of long rows of towers within line-of-sight of each other, at the tops of which men would use fire and wood shapes to spell out physical codes, thus passing a message faster than a horse could run.
In 1999, we were sending emails that bounced off satellites in stable orbits, passing messages that could include text, pictures, or video instantly, anywhere on earth.
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In November 2022, ChatGPT launched. By January 2023, it had a user base of 100 million people. That is the fastest ever consumer product to get to 100 million users, surpassing TikTok, which took nine months to do the same.
These products are not yet on the Invention Timeline Wiki, but it’s fair to say that we’re reaching the point where the article is going to have to stop listing major inventions by decade and start listing them by year.
It is conceivable that at some point, it will have to list them by month. By week? By day? How about by hour? Will the wikipedia article at some point need to be edited by an A.I., since no human will be able to learn about the new inventions fast enough to keep the article up to date, even if that is their full-time job?
A paralyzed man was able to walk again thanks to an implant. Whatever Elon Musk is costing himself with his shitposting on Twitter, Neuralink has won FDA approval to test brain implants on humans. We are deciphering the language of our own brains at this stage, and we’re doing it very quickly in civilizational terms.
There is a version of the future where the job of every human is just to sit at home, trying new things. Watching the shows and playing the games and exploring the new tools and undergoing the new treatments will not only be everyone’s job, it will seem strange to the younger generation (who may largely be born in artificial wombs) that people used to do things as quaint as farm or make excel spreadsheets.
My point here today is to assure you that 1) If this makes you feel anxious, that’s not only okay, it’s the most reasonable response, and 2) You have actual power and agency to slow this down—if not for society then at least for yourself.
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There is one thing the A.I. cannot ever take from you—the experience of being yourself.
It will get better at your job than you, no matter what your job is. It will make better art than a professional artist makes, just through sheer iteration. It will write better than me, and more than that it will write more than me. It will flood the zone with so much content and productivity and *stuff* of every single type that no amount of signal from you can amount to anything within the noise of it. But it cannot literally be you. That is the miracle only you are blessed to perform.
The last couple of years, I’ve been getting really into gardening. I snapped these in my garden at sunset tonight. It’s all happening out there right now and I feel so blessed to have another spring to enjoy. The vegetables don’t make up that much of my family’s diet yet, but going out there and just working, I feel present in my body. Nothing can take from me the experience of putting a seed in the ground, bringing it water regularly, and watching it emerge into something like this.
The experience is, of course, very slow from the perspective of modern life. It is a throwback, a conscious decision to slow. I am learning old wisdoms and they don’t change much from year to year. New technology is not much affecting the home gardener at this point.
(I am at this point aware, of course, of the farcical hypocrisy of sending you this nostalgic and possibly Luddite paean to a pre-technological way of life via email. I plead guilty. Necessitas non habet legem.)
Next week, I’m headed to the Metolius River, God’s chosen country in my view, to camp with some family members and for Jack’s first camping trip ever. The water there is bluer than any river I’ve ever seen.
This water seeps through rock for centuries to come out of this ground, freed of all impurities by the long journey. The water I’ll be dunking in has been trapped underground since before America was founded, and because the Black Butte drainage basin forms a natural standpipe above the headwaters of the Metolius, the flow of water is nearly-constant year round, approximately 50,000 gallons per minute, and almost always the same temperature, a literally breath-taking 48 degrees.
This constancy makes it excellent for both fish and fishermen, but for me it means something more. This is a metronome of the very planet. On a long enough timeline of course it will fade, but not until long after my fate is decided. Whatever the outcome of my life or our society or humanity itself, this will go on. It does not play in the time signature of human civilization, and that is deeply reassuring.
I hope that you will take time this weekend or soon to connect with some of the deeper things in life, things that are not accelerating rapidly. So much of our lives are doing exactly that, that I consider it an outright moral duty to stay in touch with these slower, longer, non-optimized, non-controllable aspects of our experience. The faster things keep happening—and they are going to keep happening faster—the more important this duty will become.
Enjoy your weekend, and thanks as always for reading.
Thanks for this perspective! The pace at which technology is exploding is frightening, particularly when you think about it in comparison to how quickly the human system can adapt to change.
What a fabulous trip through time, and a reminder that we all have the capability to live our lives at whatever pace we choose. I especially liked the comparison (and reason) between childbearing women of the hunter-gatherer age and the agriculture age.