# progress: innovation is inevitable

in @/intmon i ranted about intellectual monopolies. the existence of such things makes me a bit sad so i thought i'll try to collect some thoughts to convince myself that it's a temporary thing and we'll grow out of it. i came across a very comforting thought: "innovation is inevitable". that's good news: perhaps in the end all attempts at stifling progress will eventually fail.

# evolution

life is one of the big mysteries of the world. but we know about the building blocks: genes. these genes copy, transform/mutate, and combine themselves to create new genes.

ideas or memes are the same. whenever you see something, that something's idea is copied into your mind. you can then spread it. often you mutate said idea or meme a little bit (adding a caption) or you combine it with other idea or meme in a novel way, and thus new interesting ideas or memes born. this could be called as "social evolution".

# learning

how does learning actually work? do you read a book and then suddenly understand everything in it? if you are like me, then probably not.

every idea is basically a combination of other ideas or concepts. when you see an idea where the concepts it works on are unfamiliar, learning cannot happen. however if you know all the interacting concepts well, and the combination makes sense, learning seems to be effortless.

think about explaining the intricacies of the c++ programming language to a caveman: impossible. however if you talk with an experienced programmer, they will probably know some of the words and might have some vague idea what you are talking about.

learning happens when we combine and strengthen the concepts we are already familiar with.

# fertility

when weed takes root in a fertile ground, it will spread. in the case of an idea, the fertile ground can be thought as having a large number of people with an understanding of an idea's concepts. when the idea makes sense, it'll spread among the people. if it's simple, you cannot stop an idea from spreading. and so the new idea's concept will expand the list of concepts upon which new ideas can grow on.

but this means that ideas have a "prime time". an idea can be too early and it simply won't make sense. you couldn't build facebook in the medieval times.

but there's a converse observation: when the ground becomes fertile for a specific idea, it's very likely it will appear and spread. if the right fertile ground appears, an innovation happens on multiple fronts. in practice this means that new inventions born independently around the same time. this happens very frequently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries.

so if you invent something, chances are someone invented it at the same time too just because you work on the same fertile ground.

just think about companies facebook or youtube. many people have attempted to create similar technologies before them. but usually they were too early: internet wasn't as commonplace that would have allowed such companies to grow. facebook and youtube came at the right time with the right interface (being free). basically they had dumb luck. had they not come, some other companies would have created very similar software to fill this niche.

this means that if the time is right, innovation will happen one way or another. innovation is inevitable.

edit 2023-12-04: the book "where good ideas come from" from steven johnson calls this "the adjacent possible". it's a nice book, i recommend it.

# regulation

uncontrolled evolution in life leads to jungles: a rich, diverse, self-sustaining, and very resilient ecosystem.

controlled evolution is like agriculture: a monoculture that requires a lot of resources and maintenance. it's not self-sustaining. and it's very vulnerable. think about how much worry banana farmers always have due to the banana plant being very vulnerable to disease.

currently the regulatory world (copyrights and patents) doesn't acknowledge the combining nature of the ideas. it treats them as property, as if they live in isolation of other ideas. however this view is in a strong clash with reality. thanks to the internet, ideas are combined at an even larger rate. similarly to agriculture, this will become more expensive and brittle as people need more and more patents and copyrights to defend their turf. the regulation won't be able to keep up. i'm on the strong opinion that it will simply fail. the regulation can delete videos from youtube or delete code from github, but they cannot delete them from people's machines. all regulation can do is to move things underground.

# tragedy of commons

a common counterpoint against unregulated access to a resource is the tragedy of commons. the resource can be a field to graze cows on or a lake to fish in. it assumes that people will be greedy and will overgraze or overfish the resource to extreme levels at which the resource will not be able to regenerate and thus the resource dies.

however in practice this turns out not to be true. in practice a governing community grows around the resource and people learn to take only their fair share. elinor ostrom got a nobel prize in 2009 for disproving that the tragedy of commons being universally true.

and this is true even in truly underground activities like piracy. just look at the elaborate release rules or the warez scene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene#Release_procedure.

i'm not concerned that lack of regulation in this space will cause trouble. there's no need to regulate a jungle to keep it alive. trying to control it usually leads to death in some way. however the jungles are important piece of life on earth (they provide the breathable air for us). similarly, we need idea jungles because our big problems need lot of creativity to resolve.

# prime time

in general there's a slow trend to work less. there might be a time, when our basic needs will be met well without needing to work for it. when that comes, people will have a lot more free time to pursue their non-profitable activities. scientists will stay in academia where they will work for the fame rather than money. since academia is more about ideas rather than actual products, there wouldn't be much to litigate about. or they will work in government sponsored research where they can work free from the threat of patents (e.g. nasa). artistic people will create their remixes in underground as mainstream's litigative native will be too expensive. underground material will start to overtake the mainstream in demand and the copyrighted mainstream will slowly dwindle away.

if some company wants to litigate others, they might do so for a while but they will soon go broke simply because of the litigation costs. their litigation courts might not even take place because the system will not care about them, waiting times will be simply too long. the time they spend on litigation means they don't evolve which means they will soon become obsolete as novel ideas take over world. it'll be a losing battle.

# future

i'm optimistic that humanity will reach a point when we'll be so rich that hard work won't be needed. work will be done for pleasure.

i think the key turning point will be when the asteroid mining becomes a thing. suddenly we'll get access to an incredible amount of raw resources. at that point we'll build more and more crafting infrastructure in space, outside earth. nobody cares about pollution in space so it's the best place to build stuff there. and humanity will remotely control all this from earth. production on earth will cease as it will be more hassle to deal with all the environmental regulation. we'll import our goods from space.

earth will become a pollution-free living space for humans where we'll live for the art of progressing our ideas and to have fun. the future will be awesome!

one can dream, right?

(my primary inspiration for this post was the "everything is a remix" youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc.)

published on 2021-12-30, last modified on 2023-12-04

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