CONCEPT
Macro-Invention and Micro-Invention
Mokyr's distinction between radical discontinuous breakthroughs that open new possibility spaces (macro-inventions) and the incremental improvements that explore them (micro-inventions) across decades or generations.
The macro/micro distinction is Joel Mokyr's analytical framework for understanding how major technological transitions unfold across time. A macro-invention is radical and discontinuous — a device or technique that operates on principles sufficiently different from anything that preceded it that its potential applications cannot be deduced from its initial form. The steam engine was a macro-invention. The printing press, electrification, the transistor — each a discontinuity that opened possibility spaces requiring decades of subsequent exploration. A micro-invention, by contrast, is an incremental improvement that exploits the potential opened by a macro-invention. James Watt's separate condenser was a micro-invention. So were the thousands of subsequent refinements — higher-pressure boilers, better metallurgy, new applications from pumping to locomotion — that transformed Newcomen's crude pump into the engine of the Industrial Revolution.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework has three consistent features across every major technological transition. First, initial applications are conservative — the new capability applied to existing problems in existing domains. Newcomen's engine pumped water out