I was with you 100% until this. “Innovation” is super easy. It will always be easy to extrapolate new things from existing things. People just over-romanticize “innovation” as some kind of magic.
I think chances are good that human produced newness will be on average more useful, complete and safe.
It will always be easy to extrapolate new things from existing things
I don’t think that’s the case at all. Recombining existing things is interpolation, creating new stuff that is both novel and also interesting or valuable, is a completely different task
All new things are just existing things put together or modified very slightly.
People talk about iphones being this moment of ingenuous creation, but we already had phones, mobile phones, webcams, texting, predictive text, applications, touch screens, mobile web browsers, mobile games, video calling, etc. Even the concept was fairly well-trod in fiction. There was literally new about the first smartphone.
A hafted spear is an incredible innovation, but we already had fully wooden spears, sharp rocks, string and adhesive resins before we put them together. Like a smart phone, that tool opens up new options and lifeways that weren’t viable before, though not a single input is new.
I was with you 100% until this. “Innovation” is super easy. It will always be easy to extrapolate new things from existing things. People just over-romanticize “innovation” as some kind of magic.
I think chances are good that human produced newness will be on average more useful, complete and safe.
I don’t think that’s the case at all. Recombining existing things is interpolation, creating new stuff that is both novel and also interesting or valuable, is a completely different task
All new things are just existing things put together or modified very slightly.
People talk about iphones being this moment of ingenuous creation, but we already had phones, mobile phones, webcams, texting, predictive text, applications, touch screens, mobile web browsers, mobile games, video calling, etc. Even the concept was fairly well-trod in fiction. There was literally new about the first smartphone.
A hafted spear is an incredible innovation, but we already had fully wooden spears, sharp rocks, string and adhesive resins before we put them together. Like a smart phone, that tool opens up new options and lifeways that weren’t viable before, though not a single input is new.