It’s looking doubtful at this point that there will ever be another true groundbreaking big new invention of the scale of the airplane, submarine, nuclear reactor, printing press, automobile, telephone, engine, radio, computer, antibiotics, anesthesia, robot, etc.
By this point, nearly every property of physics and chemistry is mapped out and understood - at least, as far as usefulness to humans is concerned. There will still be countless innovations and improvements of existing tech. For instance, 2-nanometer standard chips now exist today whereas two decades ago we were at 70nm standard, which was much more primitive. And today’s smartphones do things cell phones in the 1990s could never do. But a chip is still a chip, and a smartphone is still just merely a computer and phone combined in a single device, albeit much more advanced. If we discover a new antibiotics today that kills bacteria in the era of antibiotic resistance, that’s still not really a new invention, just a new discovery within an already well-established existing field. And maybe a few inventions of genuinely new small or rare/obscure things. With science being so mapped out now, there isn’t much if any big unknown room remaining for a big new invention. Even something like quantum computing is still just…computing, an advancement of it, like AI is still just computers and software.
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
-Attributed (probably incorrectly) to Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, in1902
There is an entire field of research which may bring huge, earthshaking inventions: biology and medictne.
In another century or two, genetic engineering might be common.
Regrow damaged organs. Design your baby.
Increase human lifespan to,say, 150 or200 years.
And maybe in 500 years, we might figure out how the brain works. We could invent machines that would revolutionize humanity. Imagine a brain scanning machine that reads peoples’ thoughts, or is a foolproof lie detector.
The entire field of true AI is still an uncharted territory.
However, if and when we develop true AGI with superhuman intelligence, there will be little or no need for humans to invent anything ever again.
As I.J Good said in 1965;
QUOTE
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an OP.
Of course there are inventions undreamed of. We have only begun to scrape the barest surface of the complexity of the universe.
You can take the extreme reductionist POV that every invention is simply an elaboration of the idea of either a “machine”, a “physics process”, or a “form of life”. And once our understanding of Nature becomes subtle enough, those 3 distinctions fall away as simply the same idea expressed at a different scale of size & complexity.
I don’t find that extreme reductionism to be useful for anything. Rather the opposite.
Please accept for the purpose of this thread that working fusion was intended to mean a fusion reactor that sustains and provides far more energy than is used to get it up and running. You know, a power plant like a fission one, but cleaner and better.
Exactly this. It reminds me of the experts in Newtonian physics who declared, just prior to Einstein’s first landmark paper on the photoelectric effect, that there was pretty much nothing left for physics to discover!
That paper launched the theory of relativity which completely transformed the basic foundation of physics. Independently, quantum physics completely transformed our understanding of matter.
And, significantly, relativity and quantum mechanics are in conflict at quantum scales. So there is very much yet to discover, and much of it may be hugely transformational.
Yup, and we’ve been living through that explosion for the past 200,000 years or so. Because a collaboration between multiple humans is far smarter than any individual human, and we’ve been doing that since we invented language.
A previous Patent Office head (Henry Ellsworth) wrote:
“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.” - but that was an irony, because Ellsworth was a big proponent of new technology, and worked to improve the way the Patent Office worked.
Designing whole custom lifeforms from the molecules up could eventually be a thing. Beginning with genetic engineering, but also proceeding to genetic design (not just modifying existing organisms but building from a blank canvas) and possibly transcending it to the design of lifeforms that use other biochemistries and encoding other than DNA.
What if there are infinite parallel dimensions and parallel universes and we learn how to travel to them or share information with them?
Also bioengineering has a long long way to go. Medicine is rudimentary and based on reductionist understandings of biology. We haven’t come close to mastering systems biology or meaningful biological engineering.
Computers that calculate using light waves instead of chips.
I feel like you’re saying we understand enough about physics and chemistry that nothing new can be built. But thats like saying we have 1000 lego blocks and we can’t create anything new. I don’t personally believe that. There is a lot of room for new engineering.