Spring 2026 Tech Tree Updates
And an interview with The New Books Network
I was recently interviewed by The New Books Network about the Historical Tech Tree! It was fun answering fairly deep questions about the project and some of my other interests. The original interview was published here; I reproduce my answers below.
This is also a good time for some tech tree news and updates considering that the last time I did this was July 2025):
There is now a zoom functionality! Gone will be the days where people come to me and say, “have you ever thought of adding a zoom?…” Thanks to Codex for succeeding where Claude Code couldn’t. It works pretty well, though not flawlessly on mobile, I think. I’m open to help with the (vibe)coding, if any of you want to submit pull requests to the GitHub.
The tree has now reached 2,270 technologies and more than 3,100 connections! I’m actively working on it at the moment, and still discovering embarrassing gaps (lately: carbon dioxide, ammonia, lots of early chemistry connections, and various printing technologies). Sometimes I tell myself I’ll consider it complete when I’m at 3,000 techs, but that will take a while still.
A blog post by Brian Potter on How long do we wait for new inventions? became pretty viral. I’m working on a replication and/or response of his little study using my tech tree data. Preliminary work in this spreadsheet; blog post forthcoming.
Speaking of using the data, it’s early, but there might be some talks of using the tech tree for real research. Stay tuned!
As always, you can submit suggestions here. I take a look every now and then when I need ideas for things to add. And if you’re on the Discord, I’m sorry to say that I haven’t been able to devote any attention to it and I don’t think that will change. I’m open to ideas for letting a community grow around this project, but it will have to be something that I don’t need to actively manage. If you want my attention it’s better to comment or send me a DM on Substack!
An Interview with The New Books Network
Q: What problem were you trying to solve when you first started building the historical tech tree?
A: This will sound grand, but: I wanted to tackle the problem that history is too big.
The full span of historical events is huge across both time and space. As a result, all historical accounts are extremely compressed. Often this means writing a narrative that focuses on a particular place (“the history of Venice”), period (“the world on the eve of World War II”), or theme (“the history of women’s rights”), or a combination of those. This is fine, but I’ve always been interested in trying to grasp the whole thing at once, because this is how you can see patterns and develop a sense of how everything fits together. That requires a compression of another kind: you eschew detail in favor of some kind of more abstract representation, such as a multidimensional timeline or map.
There have been many attempts at creating such artifacts, such as Emma Willard’s Temple of Time, which tries to summarize all of history in a beautiful building-shaped diagram. For the specific subfield of technological history, however, I found that nobody had created a visualization to my satisfaction. There are basic timelines out there, like Our World In Data’s long-term timeline of technology, but they don’t usually display the one piece of information that is key to understanding the historical processes: the connections between different points on the line. The only kind of visualization that explicitly shows these connections is the tech tree, which is an idea that comes from video games. But most tech trees in existence are just that: game objects, not rigorous and certainly not comprehensive. Sometimes specialized versions of them are drawn as cute figures in books about the history of wireless technology or something. I decided that nothing was preventing me from compiling a list of innovations and connections, and then (using AI coding agents) building an interactive way to display them.
I’m not sure if it has “solved” the problem for others, but it did for me: I now have a much better grasp of the whole thing, so to speak.
Q: If you had to summarize the “core argument” of the tech tree in one sentence, what is it?
A: The apparent complexity of the technology around you is a bit of an illusion; you just don’t know the story well, and an interconnected timeline of inventions and discoveries will help you make sense of it.
Q: Which invention do you think is the most underrated in human history?
A: There are many candidates for this, but I’d have to go with the humble Geissler tube. This was a vial of blown glass, containing a gas at low pressure, that would emit light when an electric current passed through it. It was invented by Heinrich Geißler, a glassblower who specialized in scientific instruments, in Bonn in 1857.
Geissler tubes were originally novelty items, kind of like plasma globe lamps today. They were made in a variety of shapes and colors. But the principle of exciting a gas with an electric current turned out to be key to a huge number of advances in lighting (e.g. fluorescent and neon lights), physics (e.g. the discovery of x-rays), and especially electronics. Indeed, the entire field of electronics descends from it: the electron was discovered in 1897 by using a Crookes tube, which is a variant of the Geissler tube. Devices such as the cathode-ray tube and the thermionic diode (or vacuum tube) descend from this lineage, and these in turn enabled radio, television, and computers, among other key 20th-century technologies.
Of course, since everything is connected, you could equally name predecessors like glass blowing (1st century BC in the Roman Levant) or successors like the vacuum tube itself (1904, London) as the most important nodes, but I like the story of the Geissler tube as a random curiosity that turned out to play a huge, unexpected role.
Q: What’s the biggest misconception people have about how technological progress happens?
A: I think we’re prone to seeing inventions as miraculous, and that’s bad.
Nobody will come out and say that a particular technology arose due to divine or supernatural intervention. But since most of us haven’t taken the time to understand all the work and iteration that went into inventing anything remotely complex, we end up with a mental model in which new things arise fully formed, springing from the genius of an inventor in seemingly discrete, unpredictable events. We don’t see the unsuccessful prior attempts, the false starts, the gradual addition of small improvements, the unexpected combination of ideas from different people or cultures. What we see is “the printing press,” “the airplane,” “the transistor.” Things that seem to have just “happened.”
This view of progress as supernatural manifests when we discuss current problems. For example, I commonly hear that we shouldn’t expect a technological solution to climate change, because this would be akin to hoping for a miracle. But this is a failure of understanding how invention actually occurs. No invention in the tech tree was a magical event that just “happened”; all were the work of specific people trying to devise solutions to specific problems.
By definition, we can’t predict which solutions we’ll find to currently unsolved problems, and it’s understandable that this uncertainty makes us nervous. But we have a pretty good track record at finding solutions! And more importantly, progress only occurs when we believe in our ability to control it, rather than being at the whim of miraculous events. I hope that the tech tree helps with this — even if, as a constraint of the format, it discretizes inventions more than would be ideal.
Q: Do you have a favorite invention story that most people don’t know?
A: I’m a fan of stories of the “this was invented way earlier than you thought” kind. The tech tree dates the vending machine to AD 60: the inventor Hero of Alexandria wrote of a device that accepted a coin to dispense wine or holy water in a temple. (Hero is also known for creating the aeolipile, the first steam engine, though it was a curiosity and not a practical invention.) In a similar vein, I like to tell people that mechanical clocks may be more ancient than hourglasses — both date to the High Middle Ages, with the first known reference to an hourglass being from 1338.
Q: What do you see as the biggest risk(s) to technological progress in the next decade?
A: Cultural forces, perhaps? Much of the developed world has become increasingly technophobic in the last half century or so, and if this keeps going then progress will slow down, improving our lives far less than it should. Fighting this cultural battle is what the “progress movement” (and especially the Roots of Progress Institute, where I’ve been a fellow) is for, and I wholeheartedly agree.
This effect is furthermore made worse by the interconnectedness of the modern world. We live, increasingly, in a monoculture. It’s rare that scientists or inventors work in an isolated way, separated from the influence of their peers. The reasons for this are obvious — you can quickly learn from the successes and failures of others — but it does mean that if a single bad idea becomes fashionable, or if a good idea becomes unpopular, progress can stall everywhere instead of just in some isolated pocket. Similarly, at the political scale, technophobic ideas can become contagious and spread across industries and countries to put us on the wrong path.
One specific cultural force that I expect to have a big negative impact in the long run (though that’s outside the scope of this question, since this won’t be apparent until a few more decades) is our declining worldwide fertility rate. A smaller population will mean fewer new ideas and less motivation for growth. Hopefully it encourages automation enough that we won’t feel the effects for a long time.
Q: What’s the best book you read last year and why?
A: I really enjoyed Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova. The mechanics of the rise, spread, and mutation of ideas (memes) is obviously something I care about, and her book is a nice and short exploration of an important trend: memes that remain hidden for a while until they become “ripe” and tear through our hyperconnected networks. We can see technology as a subset of this phenomenon. A technological solution to a problem might remain “antimemetic” for years or decades before it suddenly becomes viable and, within a short time, ubiquitous.
Q: How is AI changing how scientists conduct research?
A: I’m not directly clued into formal research environments, so I don’t know exactly. What I do know is that AI research assistants like Elicit, where I work, as well as general-purpose language models, are going to speed up a lot of components of the process of research and invention. It will lower the barrier to entry, and will simultaneously raise the bar for truly novel contributions. My friend Alexander Kustov writes that “AI can already do social science research better than most professors”. One example of a trend is that it is now far easier to do things like custom software and data analysis for research purposes, removing a bottleneck in the exploration of ideas. Other bottlenecks will remain for the foreseeable future, but there will be more opportunity for fast progress as we solve more of them.
Q: What’s next for the tech tree?
A: This is a great question. I released it about a year ago, in May 2025, and since then I’ve been using it as… my main form of productive procrastination. I’ve recently implemented a working zooming mechanism (finally!) and am adding new content every week (recently, color printing, paint, industrial robots, and diapers). At 2,250 technologies and 3,000 connections, the database doesn’t feel complete at all yet, so I’ll probably keep doing this for some time.
Still, I do wonder about ways to take the project to another level. It’s still an amateur software project, maintained and paid for solely by me. Perhaps it would be good to partner with someone to help maintain it, sponsor it, or publicize it more. I’m open to ideas — please reach out if you’d like to help!
Happy one year anniversary of the publication of your tech tree! 🌳 Is the tech tree in the tech tree?!?
Soooo when can you make an app for it?? Just kidding!! It is looking great, Etienne! I can’t wait to look at it on my big screen tomorrow while drinking coffee and procrastinating. A morning well spent!!