Philosophical Ideas Behind Their Time

Economist Alex Tabarrok (GMU) recently wrote of “ideas behind their time”. He explains: We are all familiar with ideas said to be ahead of their time, Babbage’s analytical engine and da Vinci’s helicopter are classic examples. We are also familiar with ideas “of their time,” ideas that were “in the air” and thus were often simultaneously discovered such as the telephone, calculus, evolution, and color photography. What is less commented on is the third possibility, ideas that could have been discovered much earlier but which were not, ideas behind their time. Tabarrok’s post is mainly about physical inventions, and someone’s attempt to use AI to come up with a list of such inventions that appeared “behind their time”. The results? Most useful technologies tend to be invented quite quickly once they are possible—this is reassuring. The airplane, for example, could not have been invented before a high power-to-weight engine, which happened circa 1880 making the late 1880s the earliest…