A lesson from the Antikythera Mechanism

You may have seen the Photos and read headlines as “It’s like finding a pocket calculator in King Tuts grave” But that distracts from some serious lessons that are still valid today.

What is amazing about it and what is not?

We knew that Greeks were capable of creating intricate jewelery from gold and build complicated gadgets. The astronomical knowledge within the mechanism was state of the art of that time.The Greeks were capable of calculating the position of stars and dates for possible eclipses. They did not invent geometry, but put it on the map.

Surprising is that somebody

• brought the knowledge and the mechanical prowess together
• had the wealth to invest the time and material for creating several iterations to the refined specimen that we found.
• escaped notoriety in the process. Though most of greek literature has been lost, one would have expected that the mechanism would have gone “viral” for the time so that we had at least a letter mentioning it.

But that’s not the lesson

Every steampunk enthusiast would immediately ask the question: Why did the Greeks not start an industrial revolution? And the depressing answer is — slaves. Our beloved Greeks were a slaveholder society. And mechanisms could not compete with the efficiency, flexibility and cost of a slave.

Despite being an enormous achievement the mechanism was never meant to be a tool, but a toy. An exclusive gift from one ultrarich merchant/official/king to another with the novelty of not being a slave.

It took a millenium, the population decline due to the black death, the resulting decline of serfdom and a couple of drowning mines in Cornwall to create an environment where mechanisation could thrive and become competitive.

What can we learn

Innovation cycles are as old as mankind. An old concept replacing a new one does not necessarily mean the the newer is better, but could also mean that the older got unsustainable. The iron age did not start because iron was better, but because the disruption of trade lines made the production of bronze impossible. So one had to resolve to iron.

Take e.g. selfdriving cars. For a couple of years they have been announced as imminent. But that does not seem to happen. The truth is that current versions are simply not robust enough for handling complex situations and that the investments show diminuishing returns. This does not mean that selfdriving cars are in the far future: While there is no shortage of private drivers, professionals are a dying breed. Highways are simple enough for an AI to handle. So the first uses might be selfdriving trucks between cities while human drivers take over within.

And this will be a common pattern for future decades. A rise of automation not due to the dramatic improvement of automata but the shrinkage of workforce.

When looking for disruption, do not just look at the newest technology, but also the weakening of current ones. It might be the breakthrough of old concepts.