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To innovate is human.
(lemmy.ml)
Also it requires cooperation way more than competition.
Me caveman discover fire
Me not sure how to stonetise it?
Fire useless, not giving me more rocks to buy sexy caveladies time.
Laziness is the root of invention. And innovation.
The best programmers are the lazy. However AI probably will kill this statement with vibe coding.
I... wouldn't call AI an innovation... lol.
I'm sure somebody is using it somewhere for something useful, but 95% of it- including vibe coding- is.... laughable. (and honestly more work.)
Right! Best ideas come from. "Christ im bored, lets build something, make clothes, cook and give the food to friends.
naw. hand weaving was labor intensive. ergo the loom. (and increasing amounts of automation ever since.)
Carrying shit? the travois allowed you to carry more with less effort (reducing the number of trips.) The wheel even more so. Then the handcart.
every invention and innovation comes down to people wanting to do less work. And I can't really blame them.
Given that so much of our history (the history of people genetically indistinct from us) was unrecorded and presumed to be some form of hunting and gathering where no innovation took place (that was recorded), I think it goes too far to call innovation a human universal trait. I wish we could know what human cultures were like prior to all recorded history, even thirty thousand years ago. Perhaps we innovated in oral traditions, art, cooking, animal handling, social customs (you can innovate e.g. slang), dance etc. That would convince me of innovation's place as a part of human nature. Short of that, I think of it as more of an occasional capacity or potential, and something we can find rewarding. Dogs can learn a great deal of clever tricks that they enjoy doing, but you wouldn't call it canine nature to play dead when shot with a finger gun. It's a novel behaviour borne of circumstances that can become rewarding with gradual behaviour shaping processes. I think of things like human invention as basically the same process with a more complex brain.
All those things you mentions have been around since prior to the neolithic revolutions.. Plus a whole bunch of tool making.
Pretty sure humans always did innovate as you said yes. And I mean, you can just look at modern humans for that, were not fundamentally biologically different to the humans back then. And we loooove slang, and trying out new things, and being curious, and learning. And we need no external motive to this
But you need to think yourself in their position, they wouldn't have known the limits of technology, they wouldn't have known that anything in our modern world was possible. They had nothing to go off on. All they had were rocks and wood and plants, and maybe fire (that's not hot enough to melt metal)
There is such a long way to get to any technological point resembling anything close to the industrial revolution it's not strange that it took a long time. Or, hell, even agriculture. A big problem with agriculture was that it didn't improve the well-being of the farmers in the short-term (and the long-term is beyond their lifespan), so it wasn't just a purely technological thing. It needed the correct set of external factors for it to be preferable to hunting and gathering.
I'd wager to guess that if you had the humans that were back then, but instead they just knew that our modern world is possible, you'd see a hell of a lot more progress happening a lot quicker. Because then it wouldn't be a question of whether gears, or electricity, or medicine, or a complete understanding of the world was possible, but instead how.
I think innovation is easier when you're not constantly preoccupied with survival, having to spend every waking moment worrying about starvation or predators or disease or freezing to death probably puts quite a bit hamper on what creative new ideas you are able to come up with and try.
Most hunter gatherers had a shitload of free time. Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything includes a bunch of references about this.
I love that book
Sometimes the "profit" is just "this makes my life better"
More often than not, the profit motif makes people more hesitant to try something new if you can't be sure it works. Being free of the profit motif gives you the space to work on your own schedule and create something innovative that might or might not work
Historically the overwhelming majority of important innovations in science and technology were done with public money in academia, military or government-sponsored industry programs. All most corporations usually did with their own money is productionize them and make incremental improvements.
The only reason that's slowly changing now is because such an insane amount of money is leaving universities and being accumulated by a small number of trillion-dollar multinationals, which isn't good either.
How many innovations have been canned and fucked over because the only thing it was going to improve was the shareholders pockets...
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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