Modern technology - Why did it take so long?

Aren’t all innovations and tools found in any particular time called “modern”?

 

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For most of history, human populations were far too small.

post title: For most of history, human populations were far too small.

Because most people don't invent much at all.

Because technology growth is largely population-driven. So it takes huge human populations to naturally accelerate technology growth. Most people don't invent much, but when somebody does, more population means there are more people around to benefit from whatever, and then one invention feeds into other incremental inventions.

That's one of the many follies of radical "environmentalism," if the size of world population could somehow be more tightly "controlled" or stagnated ("stabilized"), the costs of such oppression would be far huger than imagined, giving up countless inventions, blessed children, friends, advancements in freedom and goodwill towards man, etc.

 

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Or, we end up like Rwanda, overpopulated and at war with each other.
But we know that would never happen if we all converted to your particular brand of fundamentalism, right?

 

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Of course not. Rwanda? Bad religion, poor development, UN meddling.

But look at Japan, or Singapore, or Tiawan? Dense human populations don't necessarily "cause" social problems.

 

I would suggest that the cause of Rwanda was more "colonialism." The Hutus and Tutsis only hate one another because the Tutsi minority was disproportionately placed in power by prior European colonial governments and the Hutus (and the Twa) were discriminated against. In fact, the Hutu and Tutsi weren't even different tribes until the Belgians partitioned the country and separated them.

 

But they can help, as Rwanda suggests. You will recall that Japan and Singapore are both highly authoritarian and regimented societies, seemingly in order to keep everything together.

Would you like to live in societies like them?

 

So IYO, authoritarian and regimented societies are less likely to develop modern technology?

 

Rwanda was not over populated. They killed each other over ethnic tribalism. When Europeans divided up Africa during the colonial days that worked out their own border system that did not take into account the ethnicity of the dominant tribes.

I think if borders had been based along tribal lines the conflicts would be way less.

In Rwanda the Belgium colonials favoured one tribe over another... this lead to increased tribal tensions which was one of the precursors to the genocide.

 

Er, can we stick to modern technology?

 

Is moder technology sticky?

 

Now it is.

 

Oh! I see! You have the powers of a god!
Is this why you made this a sticky? To show us your great power!?

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Myself, I don't see the problem. I spent years carefully studied every mainstream society going back into prehistory, and it seemed to me a natural flow of development that has gradually accelerated. If one realizes the scale of knowlege the Greek-Romans had compared to pre-history, one does not think big jumps in knowledge are unusual. Also, starting about 1500, the Reformation took place and it became possible for new ideas to be developed. Europe then borrowed heavily from what had been learned in Islam and from the Greek-Roman heritage. It all flowered in the centuries afterwards.

But as with all the past societies, it has become over-indulgent, soft, stressed up, and self-satisfied. What I see is that the next great age of science will be the product of a new society. Ours is weakening and returning to the past, to the old religions. This will eventually kill our scientific era and lead us on into a new one.

charles

 

A huge collection of people are not as smart as they think they are. Only a select few out of them are truely ingenuis and innovative. 99% of all inventions today are mere developments of what has previously existed with our ancestors for ages. Medicine, alchohol, politics, astromomy, quantitative analysis, infrastructure, e.t.c. What really happens is that we make improvements over hundreds of years, while the real genuises actually (sometimes) create something totally new.

 

one raven said it himself - the development of modern technology occurred on the basis of an expontential relationship. The technology builds slowly, but after a certain point, the growth skyrockets and keeps getting steeper and steeper (if you're picturing a slope).

 

I honestly believe that it's not a function of how much technology there is (and exponential growth based on that), but on number of technologists or inventors available to develop new technology. That, in turn is a function of the number of people in the society and the ability to educate them in the ways of technology. Roughly speaking, it seems like technology builds on itself in its own growth, but that's because:

• (a) improved technology has led to advancement in education (both technologically as with the printing press) and culturally as education came to be viewed as an important means for the society as a whole and not just the elites; and
  
• (b) as technology has advanced, population has been growing at roughly a similar rate.

The increase in the rate of technological advancement and relationship with the existing stock of technology is, in my opinion, a case where "correlation doesn't imply causation " becomes important. If a world wide plague wiped out 80% of the human race tomorrow, I'd expect to see a crash in the rate of technological development, notwithstanding the fact that the stock of existing technology remained unchanged.

 

It's a mixture of Communication and of course Consensus.

After all in religions heyday, anything that when against a particular set method of understanding was not just ridiculed by the religious but sort out and destroyed. It wasn't until better communication and the changes in the consensus was science allowed to regain ground that had been lost under the fundamentalist regimes.

When printing books other than the Bible occurred, it allowed the transmission of knowledge to begin. More and more people had the opportunity to read about, test and experiment in things that people believed to be the consensus and thus develop further what was understood.

As communication methods grew, so did the speed at which information traveled as well as the depth to the information. No longer was it just hearsay, but multi-volumes of pictures with vasts text allowed people to study things that they wouldn't have been able to do before in their wildest dreams.

Those methods have now evolved from vast encyclopedic libraries to the expanse of information available in various formats across the internet an cleverly depicted as "entertainment" over television and radio into peoples homes.

The more people working on the problem the faster the problem is solved (However it requires organization to stop a "Duplication of effort" where people do the same thing more than once)

I guess an overall example of what has occurred is working out the man hours of labour.

If it takes one man a week to cut a field of corn with a Scythe, how long does it take two men? Four men? Twelve men?

Theres no point having one man cut the corn and 11 men cut the stubs that have already been cut.

 

In most places of very rapid population growth, tech innovation stagnates - Rwanda the current example, a Christian country of family farms that ran out of land for its booming population.

The time of great tech innovation in Europe recently was also a time of recurrent plagues and bad wars - whole areas were abandoned, and grew to weeds, to be taken back as the populations recovered.

The great tech boom in the Americas was built on sparse populations, in a land essentially emptied of people by disease and war, and still not populated at Asian or European densities.

The connection between tech innovation and population is not simple. The large populations of China and India have historically produced proportionately little in the way of large tech leaps for centuries at a time, while the key innovations (and their established employment) seem to have come from marginal - especially trading - peoples, only afterwards migrating into the stable and populous centers.

Few peoples ahve been as sophisticatedly innovative as the aboriginal Inuit and other Arctic dwellers - their sea kayaks and whale hunting gear were the equal in subtlety and complexity and effective performance of any tool or weapon or watercraft in Europe or Asia at the time of their invention, yet their populations were never great or stable or literate.

Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" has maybe the most persuasive take on this matter.

 

You are free to believe what you please, and your thoughts make a lot of sense. I would just like to point out, though, that if technology was graphed, (x being time) and (y being technological advancements), it would very much resemble an exponential function.