We Rarely Lose Technology (2023)

In the modern era, there's a new way of losing technology: A niche product with a shared supply-chain dependency on some components that are used in a high-volume market which disappears in favour of a new technology.

For example, if you make something like a magnetic field sensor, your customers are a handful of university labs, and your supplier of some niche ferromagnetic material stops their production line because they sold primarily to the spinning-rust hard drive industry and that market no longer pays the bills, your product becomes impossible to make. Your use case will never supply the quantities needed to run the crucibles.

For a few decades it's perhaps theoretically possible to reproduce if, somehow the survival of the world depended on it and the old material production line can be restarted, but after that, people with the knowledge have all passed away and any documentation is scattered and incomplete.

I think there's a lot of recency bias here. Over and over again in human history, we've lost technology. We often lose technology. The past 200 years is the exception, not the rule.

I also think that some parts are really weakly-reasoned:

> The Ancient Egyptians cut stone with an impressive level of precision. The Incas in South America did too. So much so that people sometimes claim that the Egyptians and the Incas used some kind of now-lost technology. But they most likely didn’t: they were just really good at cutting stone.

Yeah, but we're not that good at cutting stone anymore. So what gives? The explanation here is very lacking. They either had a technology that let them cut stone so well, or some special know-how (itself a form of technology, in my opinion) that enabled cutting stone so precisely.

Here are two suppressed inventions.

The first was Airadar. (Not "AI", "Air".)[1] I wrote about this on HN in 2016. This was a small phased-array radar for light aircraft, developed in 1973. It was suppressed by a patent secrecy order, because it was better than what the USAF had at the time. The inventor was a really good RF designer. Phased array radars existed back then, but they were huge ground-based installations. Mini phased array radars are available now, but it took decades for them to be available for light aircraft.[2]

The second was the electronic fluorescent lamp ballast. This was a replacement for those bulky magnetic ballasts found inside fluorescent light fixtures. The inventor licensed it to MagneTek, the biggest maker for magnetic ballasts, which didn't make it and didn't pay any royalties. So the inventor went to Townsend, Townsend, and Crew, the IP law firm in Palo Alto, and, after much litigation, came out with a hundred million or so. The law firm put this in their reception room brag book. Today, electronic fluorescent lamp ballasts are a commodity.

The problem with FOGBANK, the aerogel used in fusion weapons, turned out to be that the original process only worked because of some impurity in the raw materials. Attempts to replicate the process used a source for a raw material which was now better purified, and the process failed. It required tens of millions of dollars and a special appropriation to figure out the underlying problem. There was a period of over a decade during which the US could not make new H-bombs.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=NWzlTqj0gQ4C&pg=PA64#v=one...

[2] https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/576890/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11862911

> So: loss of technology is not impossible. But to an innovative and large culture like modern human civilization, it’s not really something that happens. It’s just a fun trope for stories. Let’s hope it remains that way.

I agree with “let’s hope it remains that way.” But you may be underestimating the fragility of modern human civilization and all the systems that are so effective at preserving knowledge. At the scale of history, most of our technology has only existed for the blink of an eye. It would not take much, really, for all this to go away.

Absent the internet, power grid, and other systems of global infrastructure, absent anyone to take care of the libraries (which are falling out of favor), absent an authority to gather together all the experts with their tightly focused specializations, absent the chip fabs and the global supply network, how exactly do you build a computer? Or even something as “simple” as a pencil?

> ... forgotten inventions ... lost technology ... the knowledge of making

I see people in this thread talking past each other and I think the reason why is because the author is conflating 3 very different topics (inventions, technology and knowledge).

E.g. we absolutely have forgotten the knowledge in how Egyptians built the pyramids.

That doesn't mean per se that Egyptians had better/worse technology - but from a knowledge of how they built the pyramids - that absolutely is lost.

Lost technology is an enduring theme because for much of human history it was very easy to "lose". The main narrative of the last 2000 years is one of a fallen great civilization. Only in the past 100 years or so do we have large continuously maintained corpus of knowledge instantly replicated across the entire world, translated to almost every spoken language.

I've heard rumors that the recipe for Cobblestones has been lost. Here in Indiana, they used to be cast at a factory in Attica[2], I have a pile of them from an old walkway we've replaced. The embossed lettering is proof they aren't carved or cut, but rather cast with a debossed negative mold.

I was surprised to learn that most cobblestone was actually quarried rectangular blocks[1], used as ships ballast, discarded after cross-Atlantic voyages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sett_(paving)

[2] https://indianaalbum.pastperfectonline.com/photo/5FA11838-DE...

Overall, this is a good thing - I certainly don't want to go back to superstition, subsistence farming, and dying of infectious diseases at 50.

But it's a good principle to be aware of: economic incentives often make it impossible to intentionally lose a technology once it's developed.

I would love to go back to a time in which I could safely walk my small town's streets without 3-ton steel boxes noisily charging through at speeds far faster than a horse could gallop. But we've developed the technology to build 300 horsepower mobile living rooms that the average person can buy (for a staggering quantity of debt) and we've decided to allow them everywhere. In addition to the greenhouse emissions and costs and noise pollution, they're the leading cause of death for people from ages 5 to 22, and the second most common cause from ages 23 to 67. But the staggering utility means we're not putting those back in Pandora's box.

Air conditioning, likewise, is incredibly comfortable and a massive boon for health and productivity in the hotter regions of the world - not to mention the incredible nutrition benefits of freezing or refrigerating food - but in a vicious cycle, you have to use energy that makes the world hotter to make your tiny part of the world cooler. Personally, I'll go without until June, leave the thermostat high during the summer, and turn it off come September. But a shop can generate traffic and an employer can generate productivity by spending a little more on energy costs. The genie offered us the vapor compression refrigeration cycle, and that will never be put back in the bottle by a selfish society.

I appreciate all the examples and the case the author is making! Don't buy the conclusion, as I think he or she is missing the subtle complexity of technology. If you had to rebuild modern civilization after a calamity, or just a gradual loss, I think it would take a very long time. I think, for example, if China experiences a disaster in the next few decades, our ability to manufacture physical goods at the quality and price they do will be set back decades or longer.

We have already experienced local loss of the details of technology. I think this is what the article is missing. He's looking at big things that are easy to state, while missing the tools-that-build-tools-that-build-tools foundation. I think the also "That's not tech, that's high skill" distinction is a technicality.

It is also viewing history through a filtered lens. A bit like labeling an age as a "stone" or "bronze" age, because that's the durable material that survived. Or anything involving the fossil record.

Apparently we not only lose technology we also lose history. So things that were lost and reinvented usually in a different way: The wheel, Dome building (got reinvented twice 1k years in between), printed letters (3k years), self healing concrete (not sure if has been reinvented since the romans), astronomy calculators (1.5k years? not sure is there was an antikythera mechanism in the rennaisance), steam operated opening doors (2k years, we went directly to electric).

These are of the top of my head mostly covered by HN posts. Especially the antikuthera mechanism the loss was that entire that even the memory of this mechanical calculator or even the existence of other such calculator was lost. Also lost apparently was the process of creating an H bomb that"s for good but probably it has been secretly reinvented by now.

This is a clear case of a discussion appearing as it has a tech content and in fact its historical. Statistically and given tge infinite creativity of people infinite things will have disappeared, through a process of randomness, usefulness and politics a few prevail. The wheel was forgotten because it was useless. It required working economies, trade and usable roads, even dirt roads. As for printing letters if that prevailed when it was invented 2-3k years back we could have reached the stars by now.

In the times its even easier to lose technologies, they are not intuitive anymore, they are stored in miniture formats easily forgotten and stored easily corrupted and fail media, guarded behind laws, encryptions and interests. Medical technology is our lifetime's major culprit.

For about lost technologies, exist very interest niche, remembered to me by mentioning of Roman concrete.

Example, ancient natural asphalt, which literally surfaced at Red sea.

So, probably natural material, not always exactly known how appear, but fortunately existed and used by ancient people.

I only cannot agree that all lost technologies are not that we might truly care about. As example, Roman concrete could be really valuable in modern world, as current concrete just is being destroyed with time, and this is very serious problem, because could be dangerous for constructions like large dams and bridges; also, need some solution for long term burial of radioactive trash.

How to save such info, very interest question and not easy. Possible example could be some sort of long term independent shelter, under Moon surface, where could store digital archives with information.

> It might have been difficult to procure pozzolana ash when the trade routes were less safe in the early Middle Ages, which would make durable concrete rarer.

I think this could be how modern technology will be lost in the future. We have been seeing a reversal of globalization. We have seen countries guard their raw materials more tightly than before. Trade routes could disappear for geopolitical reasons. The United States was happy using Russian RD-180 rocket engines and Russian uranium after the Cold War; and look at how quickly this trade has become undesirable. Now consider materials and technologies lesser known than uranium or rocket engines, or simply less critical to a country's military might. A country might not even know it has a single sourced component until trade has stopped.