alt Hacker NewsYou can't turn a blind eye to the natural saturation of need vs solutions, and derive unlimited optimism from the fact how the people were wrong when they said "everything is already done".
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.
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There’s also huge demand for creating unneeded solutions and making those solutions viable.
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.
> Peace times, plenty of food give the time and effort needed for inventions.
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.
> 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 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.
Your last paragraph loses me. Agree that "infinite ideas" is as flippant as "everything is already done". Context is vital. But for every thing that turns toxic and unwanted doesn't that create the opportunity space for corrective measures? We're fucking up our climate and I am not uber accelerationist but the problem very much creates opportunity-space to contribute to the solution.
> 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.