Why are technological advancements more apparent and drastic between 1000 and 2000 AD than 1 and 1000 AD?

by ace8995
restricteddata

Briefly, because over the latter millennium human civilizations dramatically changed their relationship with the means of technological and scientific production. Much of that took place in the last 200 years or so, a period that we mark as the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that, technological developments certainly occurred, but the engines of knowledge production (science, universities, what have you), state/industrial support, and technical innovation were not strongly linked to each other. Technical craft work tended to be done in guilds and other forms of controlled labor, and for most civilizations there were no great interest or belief that this kind of practical work was connected to the abstract thought of natural philosophy.

Once you start going down that path, the advances begin to become self-reinforcing. One technological feat, or interesting scientific insight, leads to another, and another. Hitched to state support or industrial capitalism, the number of people coordinating their work increases. New means of accumulating capital become applied towards these kinds of problems.

The above is a gauzy overview that doesn't really go into any real depth. I am not implying that technology has its own agency or teleology, just that what one sees over the course of the last millennium, but especially the last 200-300 years, is a shift towards a different sort of mode, one that is puts immense resources into the pursuit of technological innovation (for better and worse). We live in that world today, so it seems natural to us that, say, governments will finance technological research for military and commercial interests, that industry and academia would be tightly linked, that companies have their own research and development wings and see technological innovation as tied to their financial viability, etc. But most of these ideas and arrangements are not that old, and would have been alien at most points in human history.

What happened in the last 200-300 years that changed things? A number of things, all at once: the loosening of state strictures and guilds on the economics of technical production; the creation of new means of accumulating capital (e.g. the joint stock company); economic incentives in certain parts of the world (notably Western Europe, esp. England) to move towards the factory model and to invest in labor automation technology; the creation and rise of research universities, in which academia becomes a place of research and not just teaching; an increased professionalism of technical and scientific work; advances in scientific theories and methods (e.g. new forms of quantification of natural phenomena) that actually allow you to make technologies based on them; the birth of state funding for research, esp. for war — just to name a few. Which is to say, what you end up asking if you pursue this question is, "what's up with the Industrial Revolution, anyway?" and there are multitudes upon multitudes of books on that — it's a big topic.