(www.experimental-history.com)
You can't see ideas as some isolated objects that can come into existence on their own. The overall ecosystem breeds the ideas. The forces of demand create the supply chain. Human need funds the solutions. Peace times, plenty of food give the time and effort needed for inventions. If Europe has all the science going on in the 17-19th centuries, it is not because only Europe has best minds. Europe has the people with free time, food and riches to afford the science work.
You can't ignore the overall context of the world around you. You can't keep selling infinite ideas. You can't feed infinite amount of sugar to a person. The so-called solutions can turn toxic, dangerous, and unwanted things. Some ideas might be just be a package of problem and solution packed together. When you buy the solution, you receive the problem as well, which didn't exist earlier.
> When you buy the solution, you receive the problem as well, which didn't exist earlier.
Are you proposing stasis? Anti-growth? The problem with that is that growth is life. I don't see any realistic way that slowing growth makes sense. Not when our reality is biology.
It's not obvious why peace would be a necessary ingredient. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary from the last few big wars humans engaged in.
In peace time people invent things for peace and for war, in war time the focus is all on inventing things for war. Screw everything else.
Later on, after the war is over, it may turn out many of the things that were invented for war may also have uses for peace, this however is perhaps not always the case. I don't think the inventions of the first world war that spring first to my mind had a lot of utility beyond war.
The second obvious reason why peace would be a necessary ingredient is the cause of all that inventiveness around creating things for war, it's because in war you are in danger all the time of being killed, which is why when you are not hiding somewhere trying not to be killed you are trying to make things to kill the other guy because if you kill the other guy they can't kill you. If you get killed however, that will be a big dampener on your ingenuity.
Some people might think differently about this state of war, because of historical blindness and the inefficiencies of the English language. If a country is big and powerful enough it can go to war elsewhere, and never have the war touch it.
This is not really war as it has been known in most of the history of humanity, but we call it war. It is really a time of peace in the homeland, and distributed external war.
And in this time of peace in the homeland, people can work peacefully without fear of being killed, and then people who think that this is war say - hey, check it out, peace is not needed for invention and progress at all!
Think about it. Math is a hobby, practically useless. But it benefited humanity with side effects like engineering and computers.
Now to your point. Because math is initially a pretty useless endeavor it can only arise as a leisure hobby. A leisure hobby can only arise in people who have tons of leisure time and have no need to fight for survival. Thats why peace time is important.
It's probably a bit of both, IMO. I don't doubt that pressure and threats to survival can also make people snap out of ruts they have been in, and look for something beyond what they already know. But I still would say you can have inventions without war, but you cannot have them when there is nothing but war. And my argument would be that the extreme of that would be someone who gets screamed at and beaten from the moment they were born, and lives in constant state of war. They will not be able to find the rest and perspective to invent things, they may not even survive.
The only way to make unneeded solutions viable is to make them needed, so there is huge effort and industries in manufacturing need where need previously never existed. That is modern society for you today.
Take a look at advertising for example.
You are talking about a period in history when children were worked to death in mines. When working people in city lived in unimaginably horrible conditions, barely any education, lack of hygiene, 12- to 16-hour work days, flats without windows. A period with horrible wars. A period when Europe build its wealth through the blood and suffering of the global south, by colonization.
It is absolutely crazy that you talk about it as a peaceful time. No, the vast majority had vastly less time than they had in the "dark" medieval times. And it was much, much bloodier.
So what happened? The Industrial Revolution and with it a new economic order: free market capitalism
If you pay people by the hour, you are interested in them working efficiently. You will come up with technical means to increase their productivity.
You can gain a competitive advantage by technological innovation in a free market that has competition.
That is why science exploded. Out for necessity. There was a need. There was a profit to be made.
This is also why progress is now stagnating in the age of big monopoly capitalism. And no, we can't ever go back to free market capitalism. Certain industries simply need a certain scale that makes it not compatible with it. You can't build a startup training the next cutting-edge LLM model.
We will see a lot of progress once we move beyond our current economic system.
What? Progress is now stagnating?
> "You can't build a startup training the next cutting-edge LLM model"
Again, what? That's exactly how ChatGPT and Claude were created. And many other startups with targeted models like ElevenLabs.
> once we move beyond our current economic system
If it's one of the other systems tried before, "progress" will not be on the menu.
> Every discovery opens up additional discoveries to make. Which in turn lead to more discoveries.
A lot of great ideas just need the right prerequisites to become possible.
Makes me wonder if LLMs lowering the bar for implementing new ideas mean that future ideas that depend on said implementations will finally come into their own. Not sure what those would be, but there have to be ideas that depend on prerequisites that didn't occur because there wasn't a technical guy/team interested in implementing those prerequisites.
https://youtu.be/PQYFRuZ5phs?si=wy8-ksarC1pVgQuT&t=5235
I suspect we're always going to be in this state because every breakthrough raises new fundamental questions.
Knowing what is the right problem to solve, what the right idea (of many) to apply to it, and then being able to execute, delivering to the right audience, refining as necessary are the actual things that separate success from failure.
Genuinely good and new ideas do have a lot of value, they are just very hard to capture by its inventor, because others can just take it for free.
If the law protects ideas, practicality aside, ideas will be more valuable; if the law don't protect implementation, as seen in some countries, then good implementation does not naturally create more value than copycats.
To give a more timely example, a software idea was not valuable because others can take it for free, while taking someone's implementation to redistribute is illegal, so implementation was valuable. But with LLM advancement, there is now a legal and increasingly cheap way to copy implementations, which will greatly its value going forward.
Maybe soon the golden rule will change to "ideas and executions are a dime a dozen, <something else that is hard/illegal to steal> is what separates success from failure"
Well... sure, because implementing ideas has always been really hard work. That's not really true any more for software, so I don't think you can blindly assume that ideas will continue to be the easiest part.
Since fall 2023, I’ve used ChatGPT voice while driving (for varied uses), which led me to blog on August 14th about OpenAI's rumored hardware. We dont need another thing to carry but clipping it on our keychains would make the best sense (the idea i proposed).
Then a month later at Meta Connect 2026 I see Zuckerberg announce the Muse Charm keychain. A coincidence.. im thinking. I did later in August apply to Scale AI & submitted my blog post here.
https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...
I don't think the first quote implies the second, as claimed. The first is about scientific discovery and the second is about political and social problems.
Anyway, on AI, lots of people just don't want to do all the QA and interaction to build the software. And those people are willing to pay to not have to.
Design custom hot dogs (software). That's my advice. It's working very well for me. People hire me for my in depth experience in certain fields (logistics, manufacturing, database stuff generally, chemistry). That they can spend time to learn and discuss it with an LLM doesn't change that one bit. I'm earning more than ever.
People use my software because it's a little cheaper or a little better than some other similar software.
There's room for everyone. You don't need to be the only one in your industry.
Expand the breadth of expertise you can offer. Just as has always been the case, people will rather pay you for it than learn it themselves.
I've freelanced before and always ended going back to a "real job" because I either couldn't find clients, or when I did, they didn't know what they wanted and weren't prepared to pay what it would actually cost.
The Idea Guys™ will finally get their day :)
For what it’s worth, I felt my time reading this breezy bite-sized essay was time well-spent. I enjoy Mastroianni’s voice as well as his thinking, and I look forward to his forthcoming book on this subject.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/772441/the-stranges...