🔮 Automating invention; sulphuric acid; tardigrades & mice ++ #389

In the race to secure materials to power the transition to renewables, one chemical gets little attention: sulphuric acid

The near future

📈 Innovation chasm
In a captivating thought experiment swivelling around humanity’s ability to climb up the Kardashev scale, Matt Clancy explores the speed of growth and progress we could achieve were we to automate invention. The focus of unlocking long-term growth, Matt points out, “is not our strengths but our weaknesses”.

Even though the robots can complete their part of the invention process more and more quickly, we can’t advance another 0.1 steps up the Kardashev scale until the human inventors finish the part of the innovation tasks that only they know how to do. [...] Most importantly, growth won’t continuously accelerate into anything crazy so long as less than 100% of the innovation tasks are automated.

One further point Matt makes is about the combinatorics behind invention. He writes: “if innovation is about combining different ideas in novel ways, then the nature of combinatorics means the number of possible ideas grows at a faster than exponential rate.” Th…