By when will all the things to be invented be invented

[Jukeball]

a question to think about isnt it
Stephen Hawking says it should be by 2020!!!

Surely he cant be true

[dreamlab]

I agree with Scot Adams (author of “Dilbert”) who believes that the last human invention will be the holo-deck, since all otherwise productive time will be consumed by humans getting a massage by Cindy Crawford and her twin sister.

[pkbites]

If Stephen Hawking says it, it has to be true.:rolleyes:

New things will always be invented. Some inventions are invented just to improve or add on to an old invention.
Plus, times and human needs always change, and necessity is the mother of invention, so, on & on it will go.

I recall hearing a quote about how “all the things that will ever be invented already have been” or something like that. Some idiot said this about 100 years ago! I don’t recall who or exactly what was said,I’m confidant another doper will supply this for me.

[Mooney252]

In recommending closing the U.S. Patent Office:
“Everything that can be invented, has been invented.”
Charles H. Duell, U.S. Patent Attorney General, 1899

So, you see you’re concerned about an issue that’s already passe!

[JimOfAllTrades]

In recommending closing the U.S. Patent Office:
“Everything that can be invented, has been invented.”
Charles H. Duell, U.S. Patent Attorney General, 1899

And I know that was probably a joke, but even though this is one of those “people in charge can be so stupid” stories that you hear pretty frequently, it seems it never happened.

Check out this cite

http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/patent_office_ul.html

on the AFU site, which in turn quotes the Skeptical Inquirer:

Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 13 Spring 1989.

A Patently False Patent Myth by Samuel Sass

“For more than a century there has periodically appeared in print the story about an official of the U.S. Patent Office who resigned his post because he believed that all possible inventions had already been invented. Some years ago, before I retired as librarian of a General Electric Company division, I was asked by a skeptical scientist to find out what there was to this recurring tale. My research proved to be easier than I had expected. I found that this matter had been investigated as a project of the D.C. Historical Records Survey under the Works Projects Administration. The investigator, Dr. Eber Jeffery, published his findings in the July 1940 Journal of the Patent Office Society.
Jeffery found no evidence that any official or employee of the U.S. Patent Office had ever resigned because he thought there was nothing left to invent. However, Jeffery may have found a clue to the origin of the myth. In his 1843 report to Congress, the then commissioner of the Patent Office, Henry L. Ellsworth, included the following comment: “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” As Jeffery shows, it’s evident from the rest of that report that Commissioner Ellsworth was simply using a bit of rhetorical flourish to emphasize that the number of patents was growing at a great rate. Far from considering inventions at an end, he outlined areas in which he expected patent activity to increase, and it is clear that he was making plans for the future.”

Sass mentions another atribution of the quote to Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office Charles H. Duell, who didn’t say it either.

So while the people in charge may indeed be frequently stupid, this particular piece of stupidity probably didn’t happen.

Ugly

[TheNerd]

The last invention will probably be invented shortly before the last novel and song are written.

I’m not too worried about it.

[Alessan]

The last invention?

A molecule-sized machine that can do anything you want - write a sonnet, create life, fabricate a perfect reproduction of a 1956 T-Bird out of thin air, travel through, raise the dead, destroy a galaxy… anything.

I’m guessing 2040, at least.

[kbutcher]

The end of human invention? Proabably when We’re all dead. I mean… you think the president of Intel is going to decide that they’ve got the fastest chip anyone’s ever going to need and stop researching new technologies?

Will McDonalds decide they’ve found all the different ways to sell fat and stop changing the menu?

Will Ford decide this year’s model doesn’t need to be improved upon, and sell it in perpetuity?

In all… Will people in general decide everything is as good as it needs to be and stop thinking of new ideas?

Face it… for every great Idea out there that works, a million other ideas are created. Atari proved that home videogames would work, and 20 years later, videogames make more money than practically any other entertainment medium. Which attracts more people to the market, Who bring more ideas and inventions to capitalize on the technology.

I could go on, but I’ll just restate my origional point. If there were no new ideas, we’d all be dead.

[manhattan]

Yeah, the closest thing to a General Questions answer this thing will get is “just as that big mother of an asteroid starts entering the atmosphere.”

For more philosophical answers, I’m moving this thread to IMHO.

[ITR_champion]

Consider this for a moment. Somebody who saw a personal telephone in the 1800’s might have thought “Now that I can talk with anybody whenever I want, there won’t be any need for more inventions in the field of communications.”

[Jukeball]

Actually ITR someone did say that in the 1800’s was probably a great scientist saying that all the things to be invented would be done in the next 100 years!!!