Modern technology - Why did it take so long?

That thousand years of ignorance and squalor, known as the Dark Ages, was the period when Christianity had a stranglehold on Europe. The resumption of progress when this hold was broken is heralded by many names such as the Renaissance (art), the Reformation (philosophy) and the Enlightenment (science). [A vastly oversimplified paradigm of course.]

The Greeks saw no need to invent labor-saving devices because they had unlimited slave labor. The people who gave us the word "democracy" were not very democratic.

A little of both. In the U.S., the northern states began industrializing, which reduced the economic value of slavery and ultimately gave it a negative value. The South was desperate to hang onto its medieval storybook lifestyle of grand balls, ladies in impractical clothing and estates staffed by dozens or hundreds of servants. Slavery was part of the fantasy and industry was not. With only the limited agricultural technology of the time, German immigrants who did not believe in slavery proved that free men could outproduce slave gangs in plantation work. Had Lincoln not gone to war to force the South to do his bidding, an independent Confederacy would have collapsed economically within a generation in the face of competition from the rest of the Western Hemisphere where slavery was abolished peacefully (except Haiti).

It's because you're looking at a compressed version of history. It wasn't until the 20th century that very many people began to notice substantive changes due to technology within a single lifetime. It wasn't until after WWII that children began to realize that the "wisdom of the elders" wasn't very applicable to the world they were growing up into, which was partially responsible for a historically new phenomenon called the "Generation Gap."

Most of time, most of the world was ruled by people whom we would today call despots. They just didn't care about improving the lives of their subjects.

Technology has an accelerating effect on itself. If you think the Industrial Revolution happened with a bam because it only took a few hundred years, wait until you see the blinding speed of the Information Technology Revolution. So much of this new technology is virtual that the world's information infrastructure is maturing, developing and expanding at a pace that industrialization could never have achieved. The West has already reached the point at which parents are largely unable to give useful advice to their children, because the children understand the world of today better than they do.

Yes, and there was always a huge population of conquered people, or just serfs, to schlep it around. The number of serfs working for you was a measure of your status. Who would have wanted to replace serfs with machinery? You can see the same principle at work today. I'm convinced that most Americans have jobs that they could perform at home. But their managers will feel their power and status eroding if they don't have huge office buildings full of people under their direct control. So we continue to "go to work" every day, even though commuting accounts for something like 25-30 percent of our petroleum consumption. Corporate America would rather lead us into a Holy War over the Middle East oilfields than let us work at home, where we all happen to have telephones and computers just like the ones in the office. Does this help you understand the forces that work against technology?

The Romans were not, by any stretch of the imagination, a science-oriented people. They were people-oriented people. They nonetheless are credited with some important achievements, like sewers, aqueducts, and a well-managed civil government that brought about what we still call the Pax Romana over almost a whole continent. They showed us what can be done without whiz-bang technology.

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You guys just don't get it. The Greeks didn't care. They thought that was interesting, but they had no motivation to seek a practical application for it. They couldn't possibly have understood why we think it's so important to move people and goods so much faster than horses travel when draft animals were a technology that worked satisfactorily for the Greek ruling class. You have to remember that the people we refer to as "the Greeks" were the ruling class, at a time when class was taken for granted. You would not have found them to be as noble as we give them credit for. You would probably have found them to be real jerks.

 

The modern positional numbering system with zero was fully developed in India and spread to Arabia by 900CE at the latest, yet it was not used by anyone except mathematicians for hundreds of years. The same thing happened in Europe, it was brought there by Fibonacci in the 13th century but not adopted by the populace until the Enlightenment three centuries later. We're missing some cultural mindset that prevented the citizens from feeling a need to take that step beyond the arduous arithmetic using what we see as intolerably clumsy Greek or even Babylonian numerals. I suspect it's similar to the way we holdouts in the Colonies still feel about the Metric System. Pounds, feet, acres, gallons and Fahrenheit work for us. As we say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The rest of the world thinks we're insane but most of us never even think about it, much less wish there were a better way.

As for the printing press, the Romans were disciplined administrators and clever civil engineers but they did not seem to be very inspired inventors. Again, there may have been some mental inertia that prevented anyone from imagining the utility of mass-produced copies of documents. After all, there were entire monasteries full of monks who would have suddenly lost their jobs as scroll copyists.

The abacus? Perhaps they could have managed that. It might have caused them to think in terms of positional decimals and inspired the invention of the number system. The Romans simply did not seem to be scientists, that's all I can say.

Paper money is rather more easily managed after inventing the printing press. And remember that money is merely the technology for representing surplus wealth. Industrial technology caused a quantum increase in the human race's surplus wealth, as the technology of civilization itself did before that. A relatively small surplus does not require a lot of cash for moving it around. Again, the mindset. Even today a lot of people can't shake the conviction that gold has intrinsic value. It's just a dangfool metal that comes out of the ground and isn't good for much except making rather flimsy trinkets! But when people have a box full of gold they're comforted by the idea that they've really got some wealth. Imagine convincing more primitive people that a drawer full of paper is wealth!

When we realize that "technology" is not just gadgets and machinery, but any concrete or abstract toolset including agriculture, writing, money and the entire organization of city life, the complex interaction between technologies becomes clearer and perhaps it starts to make more sense that they had to be invented in a certain order.

 

Radical new technologies always do that. Look at agriculture. Humans became dependent on grain, which is not the best diet for our modified-ape digestive system. At the end of the Mesolithic Era, the life expectancy of a human who had survived childhood was up in the 40s. At the end of the Neolithic, when agriculture had completely replaced hunting and gathering, it dropped to around 30. By the Roman Era, when most people lived primarily on wheat (or just rice or just corn) and dairy products, it fell to about 20.

The technology of civilization itself was a disaster for public health and the environment. It took the Romans to invent sewers--the single accomplishment which qualifies them as the all-time world champions of civil engineering in my opinion. Municipal street cleaning wasn't practiced until quite recently in "the West," although the Japanese were doing it at least as far back as the 15th century.