I keep wrestling with a myth in my own mind and in the minds of others. It is the idea that a great invention or a great idea appears out of thin air, then delivers sudden progress that solves a problem in a flash. Reality is different. The marvelous invention is almost always the result of a long effort, a steady march through a cluster of smaller problems. If you work at a problem long enough, and stack enough incremental improvements, the final result will look like a miracle to anyone who only just noticed the problem.
Large language models and the natural language chat tools we use today, like OpenAI ChatGPT or Anthropic Claude, are good examples. A language model and all the data science that supports training it, building the parameters, and learning how to interact with natural language represent decades of work, not a sudden spark. The same is true of the iPhone. That device emerged from many years of effort by many people. The first release simply arrived at a moment when feasibility, the market, and Internet connectivity finally met at the necessary intersection.
Human made miracles are the culmination of effort by many people over a long period of time; they are not single moments. I once spent time learning how an old water mill worked to grind wheat into a fine flour. The engineer who built it walked me through the many inventions that came together in the design. Each piece was a marvel on its own; the total system produced the ability to create wheat products at scale for its day.
All invention is a culmination and a slow evolution of our species. Our ability to share knowledge through language and other means, passing what we learn to the next generation, explains why we have seen such an industrial, technological, and medical renaissance over the last twenty years. As long as humans remain mostly peaceful, stable in our economic structures, and generally good natured and community centered, we will continue to see exponential improvement across many parts of life for centuries to come.
Now bring this back to the present moment. You are not going to create an innovation in the blink of an eye. It will take considerable effort over an extended period of time, and a consistent focus on one problem domain, to build anything that even approaches amazing, let alone miraculous. You will borrow, use, extend, copy, and mimic. You will stitch together the work of others along the way. Given enough pressure, enough time, and enough effort, the day will come when someone will call your invention miraculous.
