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[werty892]

Laziness is the mother of invention, and dwarves are the laziest things around. So it makes sense that they invent SOMETHING.

[Di]

Au contraire mon frère, the Romans invented many things to make their lives easier. They had indoor plumbing and heating, concrete, public bathrooms with running water, fast food restaurants, apartment buildings, three story mall-like shopping centers, and highway-like bridges. Also, in Nero’s Domus Aurea there was a water-powered, rotating dining room. Keep in mind that, when Rome was founded, the people lived in mud huts by the river Tiber, by the time the first century A.D. came around, they lived in a city of marble.

Well, I don't say they didn't have the development stage, of course it must have been. But it ended eventually and then most events in their history belonged to a political sphere rather then scientific. They had saunas back in the times of republic and still there were like thousand years of empire after that.

Also, the ancient times of Egypt, Greece and Rome are not called the Dark Ages

By 'those times' I meant to mean 1400's not the ancient world. Though it still may refer to a time I bit earlier than fourteenth century. But the point stands: there were times in history when all that humans were doing was killing each other rather than learning the laws of nature and inventing things.

[Scoops Novel]

The idea is that your fort will come up with unique tech. An alchemist may be throwing things into the pot, but no fort is going to have the same things or the same alchemist. It would depend on a grab bag of personality traits, location, culture, wants, needs, and available resources. Players can influence this, but a lot of it will come down to the particular individual in question.

As for whether it would realistically happen, Dwarf Fortress is built around giving you challenges you didn't expect and showing you bits you didn't know you had, in every sense of the word. This is exactly how Dwarves like it, methinks. There would be periods where progress slows as motivation or culture diminishes it, but there will also be highs. Not all of it would happen in your fort, in fact, as word spreads and reverse-engineering takes place. You have a point about technology being lost, however. To which i say, reclaim it! And even if you don't, every fort will have it's own toys to play with, though given the kind of people who make it, you may not be exactly aware or approving.

[NW_Kohaku]

I would expect immortal races to be pretty useless for innovation, but culturally inclined to megaprojects and the skills commonly employed in megaconstructions.  Immortal races don't live under the constant threat of impending doom.  They lack that essential impetus to find ways to do things better and faster, and have more to lose from taking reckless risks trying to find a better way.  On the other hand, they're likely to still be around to appreciate and reap the benefits of an undertaking that requires decades or centuries to complete.  They're also probably more likely to do things by tradition, the way they've always been done, because they have the memories, not just vague stories distorted by multiple generations of retelling.

People who know they're dead in 40 years no matter how safe they play it, and have only the faintest idea of how things were even 200 years ago, are the ones more likely to be trying new methods and finding new solutions.

I don't think that's the real problem.

Elves won't advance technologically because they don't want to.  They are happy living in peace with nature, sitting under trees that drop orchard fruit on the ground that they can just pick up and eat and talking to animals and smoking every random plant that can give a high rather than having to actually do hard work for a living.   

Why give that up for the life of a dwarf, which tends to involve living in a cave filled with pus and blood, eating mushrooms, and working at a choking furnace only to be killed when the little psychopath next to you finally snaps and beats you to death with his own leg?

Goblins have more reason to innovate, since they are in perpetual competition, but also more reason never to share their innovations, and since the leaders are the strong, they'd have reason to destroy any innovation that might give anyone else a better chance at equalizing power.  They are inherently hoarders, not innovators.


This brings me to the real, overarching problem about the way that people think about technology.

To start with, destroy this notion that we all have because of our modern world that everyone agrees technological progress is just a given or that it's always good.

Technology isn't a timeline of constant gradual progress.  Humanity stayed in Medieval Stasis for so long because it wanted to.  Technological advances were mostly thrown away by the peoples who invented them because they hated the implications of social change they would bring about, and preferred a stable status quo to unpredictable social upheaval.

It's only Europe, with its constant infighting, that ever developed labor-saving techniques (because labor was in short supply after the plague) that would disrupt the social status quo specifically because they were afraid the other European powers would do it first.

Compare this to Japan, which were the premier firearms manufacturers of the world in the middle of their Civil War, which then outlawed all use of, possession of, making of, and teaching of the techniques of manufacturing firearms except under explicit imperial permission (which was never given) until they forgot how to make guns.  The functional ruling class of Japan were the Samurai, and the gun was DEEPLY offensive to their whole worldview, which saw martial discipline as the greatest of goods, and the notion of a weapon that any random peasant could use to kill even the mightiest of warriors shook them to the core, and as such, they tried to eliminate it entirely from their culture. 

Keep in mind, Star Wars was originally based on the old Japanese Civil War, Sengoku Jidai, which is why the Jedi (note the name similarity) Obi-Wan introduces lightsabers (katanas) by saying something that makes no sense in Star Wars, but perfect sense in Sengoku Jidai - "An elegant weapon for a more civilized age."  That is, a time before guns interrupted the status quo of samurai (jedi) being the undisputed rulers of the battlefield. Notably, blasters always existed in Star Wars, no matter how far back in the timeline you go, (lightsabers are actually something that may have been invented AFTER blasters) so it's not like everyone had lightsabers back in the day.  The entire fact that jedi can deflect blasters comes from the myth that samurai could deflect bullets with their sword - something samurai claimed in an attempt to try to reclaim some of their lost mystique after guns were outlawed, to try to help justify their status.

The same goes for MANY instances of Chinese history.  Because China had no rivals as an empire, they could backslide technologically as much as they wanted, and often did so for trivial reasons.  The first (maybe) Chinese emperor famously started his reign by declaring that all history before him was crap, and ordering all texts from before his reign burned. Every successive dynasty would try to delete from history the great works and inventions of the dynasty before them to make themselves look better.

The story of Zheng He is one of the most illustrative - China created a massive super-fleet in the 15th century, led by an enslaved Arab eunuch and close personal friend of the emperor.  This fleet would have absolutely curb-stomped the Europeans that would later come and force China into humiliating subservience to England and crippling opium addictions foisted on them by the English who wanted a nice, docile colony.  This super-fleet was capable of traveling as far as the Cape of Good Hope and possibly California, and created in the Chinese Imperial Court a sort of early Asian U.N.  All the other nations of the Eastern World came to pay tribute to the Emperor of China.

Then, when the emperor died, the next emperor was a nativist who hated all the foreigners walking around, so he banished them all, ordered the whole navy destroyed, ordered all the shipwrights murdered, and all the literature on how to build the boats burned so that China wouldn't deal with foreigners anymore. 

Even in European history, many great labor-saving devices were constantly thrown out specifically because "but if we save on labor, what will we do with the slaves?"  (Which is why slavery is such a horrific retardant upon scientific progress.) 

Stories like Dr. Faustus and even later Dr. Frankenstein (in their original versions) were about how education and science itself was inherently evil.  Faustus was a doctor, and learning about medicine and how to cure diseases, itself, was a Deal With The Devil.  Faustus in many versions even explicitly used his knowledge only for good, and was still considered evil simply for knowing science.  That's the point of the message - not even if you use science to help people will science ever be good.

When the plague swept through Europe, it didn't take them long at all to create a printing press.  Just a couple decades.  They could have made it at any time they wanted, but then, they had plenty of scribes, so why bother?  It was only when they ran out of scribes that they created the printing press.  They merely never wanted scientific progress before that time.


Even in the modern era, we don't advance technology when we don't really want to, when we're comfortable with the old technology.

Thomas Edison was creating electric cars back during the early 20th century.  Sure, they were clunky and unreliable, and needed constant charging, but they were under serious development and people were using production models of them. But then gasoline prices dropped because huge reserves of oil were found under Texas.  Why bother with electric cars, when they're more expensive?

We could have been 100 years more advanced with electric cars by now if only there hadn't been oil under Texas, or we had been less willing to just rest upon the technology we had instead of having a desire to innovate.


Now, let's go back to Japan for a second.  During their Edo period after the great civil war (Sengoku Jidai), they stayed in (completely purposeful) medieval stasis for centuries.  They almost completely isolated themselves off from the world, and quashed any technological development for the explicit purpose of preventing anything that might disturb the social status quo.  (The eventual winner of the civil war was a peasant who eventually came up to being Shogun through sheer talent and ruthlessness... and lived in constant fear of social mobility that would cause someone else to be able to do the same.  So he created an incredibly strict caste system and basically outlawed any contact with the outside world or new ideas that might disrupt his perfectly stable garden.)

Then the Americans, fearing how much power Britain had because of making China their bitch, decided they needed an Asian trading partner, too, so they sent Commodore Perry to kick in the front gates and demand they modernize and start trading with America at gunpoint.  Because Perry apparently "forgot to bring" the opium, Japan actually managed to explode in technological prowess in a few short decades, making a leap in 50 years that took 1,000 years for Europe to make.  (Thanks in no small part to how stable their society was and how centralized their government was, the strong government, when it actually wanted to enforce social change, was capable of doing so fairly rapidly.) 

Sure, they had help, they had someone to copy... but so does the whole rest of the Third World.  It took them just decades to do something that many other nations invaded by Europeans haven't been able to do ever.  That's mostly thanks to the fact that Europeans purposefully destroyed the nations they conquered (while Perry forgot the opium) in order to make sure they were captive markets that would be easily monopolized by the already-established mercantile powerhouses of the home countries of the Empire. 

Really, the whole reason America broke off from England wasn't because of something silly like "taxes", but because of what those taxes were meant to do - cripple American industry, and force America to be a captive market for English goods.  They treated the American colonies the same way they treated the other colonies in the empire, and the Americans found it so offensive that they wouldn't be treated as British, but as those other, lesser, colonies, formed of other, lesser races, that they revolted. 


So no, don't go assuming technological progress is assured. Don't assume that, if you created a parallel world where some aspects of the planet were different, and you watched human history unfold, you'd get the same technological progress at the same rates.

In fact, one of the more sure factors of technological progress is population density. 

Islanders almost always backslide technologically so long as they have populations of less than 500 people.  It's simply impossible to maintain technology and ideas, even basic ones like boat-building that they'd need just to get to the island they're on, with less than a certain amount of population.

Meanwhile, technological progress and the rise of cities almost always go hand-in-hand.

There's a reason Sid Meier's Civilization bases all technological progress off of cities, with the surrounding land merely existing for cities to extract more resources.  Sid Meier is an ardent believer in this view of history.  And notably, with the right situation, you can hit the Space Age by the year 100 AD or so.

The reason why so many inventions were abandoned throughout history?  That it would have left the slaves without jobs, or that it would have left workers without jobs, etc.  They're still reasons we don't use inventions today - every time a new labor-saving invention comes out, there's outcry over all the jobs it will kill.  And technology DOES kill jobs...  it's just that in a city that can infinitely consume and infinitely produce, there will always be more jobs to be created, and the capital that can be raised through the labor-saving devices are worth it.

(And remember, the super-high-tech iPhone?  Assembled by hand by Chinese near-slave labor... because it's cheaper than building a robot that can assemble an iPhone.)

Necessity is the mother of invention, and without the need, technology is thrown away as some evil job-killing disruptor of good social order.


If we're going to build a world with dynamic technology levels, we need to actually model the reasons why technology is adopted, and more importantly, why it's rejected so often.  Technology backslides as often as it advances, and it's only a very recent and very strange anomoly of a time we are living in where technology actually does advance and people actually think of it as a good thing.

[NW_Kohaku]

*sigh*

One of the things forgotten in my previous rant is something else I have to go over every time another one of these technology threads pops up...

Metallurgy techniques, minecarts, and some of the ways mechanisms are used (like drawbridges) are basically the only technology in the game that haven't existed since basically the dawn of civilization.  Even pump stacks were invented by ancient (1000 BC or earlier) Chinese for irrigation, and so were water-wheel based forges.

Glassblowing, ceramics, carpentry, farming, jeweling, mining, brewing, all the rest existed around 5000 years ago. 

Aside from knowing how to make steel, if you're going to add technological advancement, you're going to have to add technologies to advance to, because you can't really take the old ones away.

In the same vein as my last post - Throughout all of human history, up until around the 1700s, and industrialization, the life of the farmer (or peasant more generally) was pretty much identical to that of a farmer from the dawn of civilization.

Egypt, Roman, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, didn't matter.  Their life was almost exactly the same.

Doesn't matter how the kings and emperors lived - the farmers didn't live on the collected wealth of the whole nation, they lived on what they could produce on their farms. 

At the dawn of civilization, farmers used wooden tools because they couldn't make expensive steel tools, and weren't rich enough to trade for them.  Same up to the 1600s.  Only industrialization changed that. 

With those wooden tools, a farmer could work about 3 acres of land.  Didn't matter if it was Egypt or Renaissance Europe.

Didn't matter what the empire had for toilets or sewers, the farmers didn't have them.

Didn't matter what technological advancements went on in cities, the farmers couldn't buy them.

Nearly everything they had was something that could be manufactured by themselves by hand without significant specialization, because they couldn't afford anything else.


Then, when industrialization finally did come in, it was a horrific force of pure evil, destroying their ancient, traditional lifestyle. 

This is where Ring of Nibelung comes in, painting good as love and Nature (chaos), and evil as represented by a dwarf who forswore love for technology and power and Law. 

This is the inspiration for Lord of the Rings, where the heroes live in the rural shire, and the villains manufacture uruk-hai in sulfur-choked assembly lines.

Remember the Luddites.

History remembers them as unthinking opponents of technological progress, but they had legitimate grievances with looms - mechanical looms destroyed the lives of traditional celebrated skilled workers in the place of poorly paid, barely-fed unskilled workers, including those children who could be sent into the loom to repair it and replaced easily if they were crippled by the machines.


So... technology.

If we're going to have technology advancing, this is one of those things where the cultural zeitgeist makes a huge difference.  (The more excess food they have, and more urbanized they are, the more likely it is to happen.)  Where drops in population or population shortages are more likely to make it happen. (Where there isn't a concern that it would kill jobs.)

More importantly, it can backslide easily, especially if an empire doesn't feel threatened by outside forces that would cause it to desire to advance, or if it becomes more rural in general as a society.  (Cities are full of the necessity for invention.  Rural life doesn't need ingenuity to solve its problems, cities need transportation, public sanitation, apartments, etc.)

Make technology something of an equillibrium - if it ever loses one of the things that would push it towards greater technology, it slides back and loses some technology.

If a trade route to another society is +5 to technology, and that gives them some advantage to weaving or something, then if that trade route shuts down, they lose some of their technology improvements.

Europeans were constantly trying to trade with China because the Chinese had porcelain, and the Europeans couldn't figure out how to copy it.  (And they certainly tried.) China would often backslide technologically, losing the capacity to make porcelain in quite the quality they could in previous eras (which is why Chinese say they can tell the greatness of the empire of that era by the porcelain they made) but because the Europeans were willing to pay nearly anything to have Fine China, they kept rebuilding the technology. 


This also brings us to another problem with technological advancement that always serves as a stumbling block for these threads: there's no real capacity for incremental improvement of techniques. 

Many of the technological advances of history largely just let people make the same things, but in greater quantities with less labor.

Right now, a legendary artisan can't work any faster than they already do (they produce a product in one turn), and can't make anything of any quality greater than they do.

Unless we're going to run minecarts through a workshop, uploading and offloading raw materials and finished products to make an actual dwarven assembly line, there's not really much room for improvement (unless you just create whole new products). 

There's likewise no real reason for many new products - porcelain shouldn't be nearly so easy to make (magma kilns aren't nearly hot enough for the fires it takes to cook fine porcelain), but it's kind of a non-issue in the game, because who wants porcelain, anyway? It's easier to make something that works just as well as porcelain out of a simple rock that can be carved more easily than wood, and no, I don't see what's completely absurd about that.

On a fundamental level, if you want to create a lot of the impetus to have technological progress, even from a gameplay mechanical standpoint, you have to change a large number of basic ways the game plays out just to even make something you will notice.  Who cares if porcelain gets locked out because of insufficient tech when carving stone mugs is much easier?  You aren't losing any game feature.  Why bother progressing technologically?

Just plain inventing a reason to even want many higher-end goods like porcelain and trade goods is part of the whole reason I even started writing out the whole Class Warfare thread, which involves having to redefine the basic social structure of dwarven society just so that people will want trade goods in a rational way.

[Di]

Whoa...
Is there an army of near-slave Chinese writers in your house to write those monologues for you or did you build a robot?
Also

Technology backslides as often as it advances, and it's only a very recent and very strange anomoly of a time we are living in where technology actually does advance and people actually think of it as a good thing.

does everyone remember that the Space Race has ended before anyone won?

[Neonivek]

Not to mention Kohaku that history is ripe with great inventors who created things that, were the adopted, would have revolutionised an area of living.

Yet simply never caught on.

China AND Japan actually had invented open body surgery quite a few times before and yet the social stigma tended to cause those to fall into obscurity once more... and these weren't always something some unknown person had written on a peice of paper.

---

Anyhow to go into the mythological side of things I will state that some basic inventions can be given by the gods.

In Greek mythology things like Lyres, Lutes, and Flutes were often dirrect gifts from the gods themselves.

---

Also interestingly enough after Goblins, Elves, and Dwarves... The only ones left are the Kobolds for technological progress and yeah there is nothing they do that really stands in that way socially except that they arn't really stable and thus don't have the grace period required to develop any.

[NW_Kohaku]

Whoa...
Is there an army of near-slave Chinese writers in your house to write those monologues for you or did you build a robot?

I am not a robot, I am a unicorn.

Sorry, but this is one of those topics that just really frustrate me by how adamantly people hold onto this really false narrative.  I'm basically just rehashing what I wrote in earlier threads on the same topic, so I could probably have just copy-pasted the whole thing.

does everyone remember that the Space Race has ended before anyone won?

I always thought the Space Race was a bullshit moving of the goalposts to whatever it was America could accomplish "first" to make themselves feel better.  ("Russians got into space first? Oh, well the real race was to the Moon.  Space colony too hard?  Well, all that matters is we planted a flag somewhere FIRST.  We totally licked it, the Moon is ours now.")

[Neonivek]

America won the space race because the winner wasn't the first person to reach anything... it was the first person to be able to proclaim unquestioned supperiority over the other.

[Di]

Well, that race did justify a lot of spendings on science and brought a lot of manpower to it. But then Soviets fell apart and now american astronauts fly use relic russian rockets that barely got to a point of not exploding until final destination to get to agglomeration of tin cans located in the cloud of space garbage and being the only humanity's outpost in the space.
So much for a progress.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, that race did justify a lot of spendings on science and brought a lot of manpower to it. But then Soviets fell apart and now american astronauts fly use relic russian rockets that barely got to a point of not exploding until final destination to get to agglomeration of tin cans located in the cloud of space garbage and being the only humanity's outpost in the space.
So much for a progress.

Well, the Chinese want to launch rockets to the moon, maybe we can get a junk-measuring contest going between America and China, just like the good ol' days?  (Mine can extend 3,000,000 miles...)

[10ebbor10]

America won the space race because the winner wasn't the first person to reach anything... it was the first person to be able to proclaim unquestioned supperiority over the other.

Only because the Sovjet Union collapsed due to internal troubles. The Sovjet spaceprogram was actually in a much better shape than the American one (especially in the earlier part of the race, but it wasn't as good as they made it seem. Btw, in a way, it still is.) Sadly, most of the program and it's headscientists was vapourized in the largest non-nuclear explosion known to man.

Well, that race did justify a lot of spendings on science and brought a lot of manpower to it. But then Soviets fell apart and now american astronauts fly use relic russian rockets that barely got to a point of not exploding until final destination to get to agglomeration of tin cans located in the cloud of space garbage and being the only humanity's outpost in the space.
So much for a progress.

Well, the Chinese want to launch rockets to the moon, maybe we can get a junk-measuring contest going between America and China, just like the good ol' days?  (Mine can extend 3,000,000 miles...)

The American spaceprogram is not in a position to compete, nor is the Chinese.

[kerlc]

Well, this topic has blown my mind. I have to say, I've never thought about technological progress in that way before.

[Neonivek]

In the boardgame civilisation someone once asked why when you research a new technology does it take away all your trade (resources) instead of just taking the amount of trade that research was worth.

I said that the best explanation I could think of was that it was the cost of adopting it. The difference between knowing and using.

Well, this topic has blown my mind. I have to say, I've never thought about technological progress in that way before

It is the same issue that most history has. The idea of the grand narrative of all history, as well as several historical myths that are accepted as truth, tends to skew everything.

Or to make it easier to understand. We are taught things as if the modern day was always meant to be and thus everything is taught as if it was a steady progress towards the modern day. Add in the fact that we as a society do not care enough about our history to ensure that it is absent of disproven non-interpretive myths, as well as myths stemming from the common practice of revisionist history, and you have a recipe of why it is so hard to find accurate historical details from the pool of common knowledge.

History tends to be taught and created with the intent of legitimising current ideas.

If Dwarf Fortress ever has history books it should reflect this. With the leanings of the information inside should skew towards it if not outright lie. So heroic villains will become pure heros or pure villains.

[kerlc]

Well, to be quite honest I've never given the entire mechanics of technological progress, beyond that which happened in the last few years, much thought despite my liking of history, and a sizeable storage of knowledge on various quoteonquote advanced civilizations i have and like to keep up to date. You could say I am too interested in the exterior to see what's actually keeping the enormous machine of Human History going.