In the Carpathian Mountains around 6,000 years ago, copper miners faced a major problem: ore was heavy and dragging it out was proving a pain. Their solution was to create a cart mounted on circular wooden discs, with each pair joined by an axle. Copper miners in the place that we now call Ukraine had invented the wheel – and with it comes a lesson about humanity’s new frontier of innovation, AI.
Solid wooden wheels were heavy and hard to steer. Even so, in the right places, wheels changed daily life. They let nomads carry harvests, household possessions and tired kids, as well as trade goods. Wheels allowed people to remain mobile while owning more than they could shoulder. Later, spoked wheels made chariots lighter and faster, turning a device for hauling into one associated with ceremony, racing, hunting and war.
The wheel is the sort of discovery that seems inevitable once you’ve seen it. Simple, round, portable and useful. And yet wheels only prospered in the ecosystems that suited them. In many societies the technology didn’t roll out until thousands of years later. Far from a failure of imagination, the delay was the natural environment talking. In the sandy deserts of Egypt, the stones that built the pyramids were moved by river barges, then dragged into place on sleds. In sub-Saharan Africa, dense forest, river routes, human porters and the scarcity of large draught animals made wheeled transport less practical. In the mountains and jungles of Papua New Guinea, wheeled carts offered little advantage compared with human porters. An invaluable invention on hard-packed plains can be useless on sand or steep hills.
But wheels also needed help where they were adopted. They became more useful in societies that built roads, such as ancient Rome. When Roman roads decayed, wheeled transport became less attractive. As late as the 1700s in London and Washington, streets were essentially dirt tracks, meaning that carriages frequently sank into deep mud and they could be easily outpaced by horses. The lesson is simple: wheels need good roads. To judge their historical usefulness by today’s standards is to put the cart before the horse, since the roads that surround us were built to make the most of the wheel.
Great inventions rarely arrive fully formed. They often wait for complementary technologies, systems or cultural shifts to unlock their full potential. Writing, for example, began as a method of accounting before it became the foundation for literature, law and bureaucracy. Printing started with religious texts and calendars before it helped to spread scientific ideas and political messages. The early internet was populated by digital brochures; the social and commercial uses came later. General-purpose technologies often improve slowly, spread across sectors and then inspire further inventions.
This is one way to think about artificial intelligence. Like sailing ships, railways and electricity, AI won’t transform everything overnight. The technology is built on prior roads: faster chips developed for gaming, large stores of labelled data, open research communities and decades of trial and error. Its future will depend on its own roads too: reliable energy, trusted institutions, skilled workers and rules that encourage use while curbing harm.
Innovation lengthens lives and lifts living standards but it also produces failures and dangers. The right response is to help ensure that good ideas can flourish and bad ones can be checked. That means encouraging innovative tinkering, facilitating diverse teams and promoting freer trade in ideas across the world. It also means letting cosmopolitan cities, universities, labs and firms combine what they know.
The wheel is a beautiful invention because it is uncomplicated. But its history is a warning against a simplistic view of innovation. The device is rarely the whole story. Progress comes when the road is ready.
Andrew Leigh is an author and member of the Australian Parliament. His new book, ‘The Shortest History of Innovation’, is published in the UK on 25 August.
