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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: When should we be surprised that an invention took “so long”?, published by jasoncrawford on November 16, 2022 on LessWrong. My first highly popular essay was “Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?” I’ve asked the same question of the cotton gin and the threshing machine. Others have asked it of the steam engine and the wheel. Recently Brian Potter asked it about wind power and Anton Howes about semaphore signaling systems. See more examples here. When asking these questions, we should think about when the question even needs an answer. That is, “why did it take so long” is only interesting if it took an abnormally long amount of time. Here’s my model for this. First, an invention is not going to happen at all if (1) it’s not technically possible or (2) there’s no market for it. Gate (1), technical possibility, could include, for example: Scientific foundations. No light bulb before electromagnetism, no antibiotics before the germ theory. Components. Airplanes were not possible before the internal combustion engine. Materials. Skyscrapers could only be built once cheap steel girders were available. Manufacturing techniques. Precision machining was necessary to make the gears, sprockets, chains, bearings, and other parts for a wide variety of inventions, probably including the threshing machine and the bicycle. Gate (2), the market, is whether it can be done commercially at a price that anyone will pay. If someone does make an invention there is no market for, it doesn’t go anywhere, and we might not even hear about it, because it is unlikely to make the history books. In any case, it wouldn’t affect the world, because it wouldn’t get distribution, and so it wouldn’t be historically relevant for our purposes. You see examples of this from time to time, such as the Korean movable-type printing press that predated Gutenberg. Note that the bar inventions have to meet is not just a proof of concept: they have to be sufficiently powerful, efficient, and reliable to be of practical use. Early computing machines were too slow; early threshing machines broke down too frequently; early light bulbs burned out too quickly. These are technically interesting prototypes, but not true inventions. An invention does not merely demonstrate a concept, it solves a problem—the whole problem, not just a part of it, even if it is the most visible or obvious part. An invention has to be practical. (See more discussion of this here.) Once something is technically possible and economically viable, then the clock starts ticking on how long we “waited” for it. But invention is a human process, and it’s not instantaneous. There is no perfectly efficient market in which an invention springs to life immediately as soon as it’s viable. It takes time, effort, trial and error. People have to decide to do something—they have to get the idea, and be sufficiently inspired and motivated to devote full-time efforts to something unknown, with an indefinite timeline and uncertain rewards. (Only a minority of people even have the temperament for this; in this sense, I agree with Anton Howes that innovation is not simply “in human nature.”) Then they have to get free to do it: at any given time, most inventors will be busy with projects, and only a subset will be looking for something new to do. They may have to acquire resources or recruit help, which takes time. Once they finally get to work, they have to experiment with approaches, discard failures, get new ideas, iterate. Given the nature of that process, there are several factors that affect the time that elapses before an invention. I have written about many of them before in the context of “flywheels of progress.” Here are some that I would call out specifically regarding the invention process: Total amount of R&D effort in the world, or in a specifi...