|
|
|
|
|
|
by staunch
4255 days ago
|
|
|
If Elon Musk had made $16M, instead of $160M, from PayPal there would be no Tesla or SpaceX. He likely would have spent his time much less productively, and the world would be worse off. And yet, very few people similar to Elon Musk ever find themselves in the position of being rich enough to field an army. In a future where resources aren't so constrained we'll start to see "geniuses" everywhere. |
|
|
I kinda developed this theory playing on a modded minecraft server where we'll hit peak engineering. I'm trying to simulate industrial ascenscion on there right now, moving from nothing to self-sustainability to post-scarcity. And whilst resource aquisition goes up exponentially, the machinery I build becomes more and more complex, and the time I spend engineering things goes up dramatically. I moved from half an hour of thinking on each project to spending an average of a week on most of my current projects. The next one down the line I'm projecting at about a month, gathering data, designing and testing.
Now I understand that directly applying that to a larger system isn't prudent, but I notice distinct similarities in other projects I take on, with the only difference being time scales and project complexity. Which makes sense, since civilisation as a whole, or even a career take a lot longer than the two months I've been playing around with the idea in a simplified system.
So I personally believe that once we hit that point, we'll be at a state of peak engineering, where our progress and the size of the projects we can take on is limited by the amount of brainpower we can spend on them. What I'm saying is that there won't be geniuses everywhere. We'll be more productive as a whole, but there's a ceiling on how much can be done by one person in a given timeframe.