Very interesting work indeed. A bunch of different observations:
The invention of the shipping container seems a likely candidate for a discontinuity in shipping speed, shipping costs and global trade. Though economic data on it is patchy, the go-to book on the subject is The Box by Marc Levinson.
Re invention of the telegraph, the book A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark accounts (pp. 305-7) via a series of clever inferences how from Roman times to 1800 the speed of long-distance travel of important information, regardless of method, was constant at 1 mph. This increased slightly in the first half of the 19th century, until the discontinuity from the telegraph. The book has lots of other data on historical innovation that may well be useful to you.
Re product features, and this recent LessWrong article (which no doubt you’ve seen) about the crucial difference between a prototype and a practical invention, I repeat my comment there that a high-quality implementation, e.g. usability & user-friendliness, rather than specific features often seems to be the crucial breakthrough. As shown by Apple: various inventions of theirs—the Apple Mac, iPod, smartphone, iPad—had little innovation as such. Desktop computers, GUIs, mice; digital music players; mobile phones, personal digital assistants; touch screens, tablet computers—these all already existed. But in each case Apple’s breakthrough was to take them from being commercial but mediocre implementations, to very good implementations. And only when that happened did mass adoption occur, which is a crucial step in the impact of the invention.
Finally, I should make the obvious remark that though looking at the history of past inventions is very interesting, applying this to the future, particularly to AI, would be an extrapolation, which may or may not be valid at all, particularly if superhuman AGI is a quite different phenomenon from any previous invention (which it may well be).
Very interesting work indeed. A bunch of different observations:
The invention of the shipping container seems a likely candidate for a discontinuity in shipping speed, shipping costs and global trade. Though economic data on it is patchy, the go-to book on the subject is The Box by Marc Levinson.
Re invention of the telegraph, the book A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark accounts (pp. 305-7) via a series of clever inferences how from Roman times to 1800 the speed of long-distance travel of important information, regardless of method, was constant at 1 mph. This increased slightly in the first half of the 19th century, until the discontinuity from the telegraph. The book has lots of other data on historical innovation that may well be useful to you.
Re product features, and this recent LessWrong article (which no doubt you’ve seen) about the crucial difference between a prototype and a practical invention, I repeat my comment there that a high-quality implementation, e.g. usability & user-friendliness, rather than specific features often seems to be the crucial breakthrough. As shown by Apple: various inventions of theirs—the Apple Mac, iPod, smartphone, iPad—had little innovation as such. Desktop computers, GUIs, mice; digital music players; mobile phones, personal digital assistants; touch screens, tablet computers—these all already existed. But in each case Apple’s breakthrough was to take them from being commercial but mediocre implementations, to very good implementations. And only when that happened did mass adoption occur, which is a crucial step in the impact of the invention.
Finally, I should make the obvious remark that though looking at the history of past inventions is very interesting, applying this to the future, particularly to AI, would be an extrapolation, which may or may not be valid at all, particularly if superhuman AGI is a quite different phenomenon from any previous invention (which it may well be).