It’s fascinating to think about the number of PUs (procedural units) it takes to make a modern tool. Something as simple as a modern hammer must number in the thousands and a mobile phone in the millions or billions.
You might find the essay "I, Pencil" by Leonard Read interesting. It's told from the point of view of a pencil who talks about the complexity of his own creation and all of the components involved in the process
That essay also loosely inspired the opening scene of Lord of War, which showcases the journey of a bullet from an underground mine to an Eastern European factory all the way into the head of an African child soldier.
Loved that scene. Reminds me of all the "autobiography" stories we had to write for various items such as cars, horses, computers and pens, back in school.
There's also Thomas Thwaites' "building a toaster... from scratch" project that goes into the details of how even an extremely simple appliance involves materials and processes that are effectively impossible for a single person to replicate (spoiler: he has to give up and "cheat" on some things).
One part of the drivel - he says don't let the government inhibit the invisible hand of the market that Adam Smith discusses in The Wealth of Nations. But in The Wealth of Nations, the invisible hand is the hand of the government inhibiting free trade between nations.
It gets inhibited by the banking system anyway, you would at least have to adopt the Chicago plan (full reserve banking) to avoid it. As it is now, it's about who gets given the money, rather than anything similar to free market.
That idea is pretty similar to "assembly theory" no? In the sense of how much information or evolution was necessary to generate some artifact, be it a benzene molecule, a stone tool, or an iphone
The same came to my mind. I think there may be some elements of assembly which have to do with biological process that don’t apply to “accumulation of technological knowledge,” but I need to reread it.
Here, we introduce AT, which addresses these challenges by describing how novelty generation and selection can operate in forward-evolving processes. The framework of AT allows us to predict features of new discoveries during selection, and to quantify how much selection was necessary to produce observed objects, without having to prespecify individuals or units of selection.
It took humans 300k years, all of us, our collective output to reach this point. Yet people insist on comparing a human who is part of society with a LLM alone, who doesn't even have search, and very limited contexts, just closed book mode remembering.
There was a great article posted the other day that explained in detail but also followable terms all the processes that go into making a chip. I didn't realise that a single wafer can spend months in the production line.
the genius of photolithography (and its descendents) is that each chip is printed all at once, all the transistors at once over several steps for the several layers. This is what makes chips inexpensive.
The genius of photolithography is many things, I wouldn't say the wafer process is any more special than the statistical models that can predict where a nozzle needs to point to lay substract with more precision than the nozzle itself can provide or a number of other important inventions there.
using the same process that was used to make a single transistor (and package and attach connecting leads to it)...
...to make an entire circuit (and package and attach connecting leads to it)...
is the invention of the integrated circuit
and photolithography made that possible. It subsequently had a large number of important follow on innovations, but which were conceptually proper subsets of it.
had some other process made integrated circuits possible, that other process would have subsequently had many important innovations.
what flowed from photolithographic chip making is still flowing today.
