{"id":5483,"date":"2024-09-05T00:01:38","date_gmt":"2024-09-05T00:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=5483"},"modified":"2024-09-05T00:02:28","modified_gmt":"2024-09-05T00:02:28","slug":"why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-bicycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2024\/09\/05\/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-bicycle\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.rootsofprogress.org\/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-bicycle\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/early-bicycle-models.png?w=625&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The excellent &#8216;Roots of Progress&#8217; blog investigates a very interesting question.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I&#8217;ve lately been starting to believe that precision manufacturing is much more difficult and finicky than people generally realize. Even if given precise and comprehensive plans for a high-precision product, it&#8217;s very difficult for a new manufacturer to start manufacturing it without hands-on help from someone who&#8217;s actually done it. This reaches its apex in semiconductor chip manufacturing, which is so difficult that basically only one company, TSMC, is able to manufacture the high-end wafers.<\/p>\n<p>(this has been of interest to me because it somewhat decreases the risk of human extinction from AI; killing all humans is a losing move for any AI system not yet capable of this level of very-high-precision manufacture, which may require significantly greater-than-human intelligence to be able to reliably spin up from scratch on any reasonable timeframe)<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Yet it was a simple mechanical invention. It would seem to require no brilliant inventive insight, and certainly no scientific background.<\/p>\n<p>Why, then, wasn\u2019t it invented much earlier?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Source: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.rootsofprogress.org\/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-bicycle\">Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The excellent &#8216;Roots of Progress&#8217; blog investigates a very interesting question. Personally, I&#8217;ve lately been starting to believe that precision manufacturing is much more difficult and finicky than people generally realize. Even if given precise and comprehensive plans for a high-precision product, it&#8217;s very difficult for a new manufacturer to start manufacturing it without hands-on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1qr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5483"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5486,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5483\/revisions\/5486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}