Understanding technology

This is a small excerpt from Not Your Usual Clever Ideas, which is about crazy ideas that occasionally pay off. I published it some years ago, and I will upload a revised version in the first week of September.

Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do…The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!

—Alan Kay.

Legend has it that Niels Bohr said “Prediction is difficult—especially about the future”. Bohr himself always claimed that somebody else said it, but whoever said it first, the statement remains true. Logical consequences only look logical when we view them from the other side, when we can see which scraps of context really counted. Even Arthur C. Clarke (who predicted communications satellites in 1945) never saw the full potential when he wrote his first outline of it.

Some many years ago, I proposed the idea of the 50-year effect, when I was writing a history of rockets. While I pursue many temporary obsessions in my writing, I have allowed room for only one permanent obsession, and this is it, because the 50-year effect explains why we can never predict the social effects of any technology when it is invented.

The effect probably has the same duration as a human working life because it takes a while for the old fogeys who do not know, understand or appreciate the new technology to die off, making room for younger people who are familiar with the technology to reach the top of the ladder. In fact, the real effects generally begin to appear about 30 years after an invention, but they remain less than totally clear until 50 years after the invention was first set loose in public.

Consider this 1884 essay, describing how a New Zealand lighthouse keeper’s life might be changed for the better, by the application of the telephone, a device that was invented in 1876, and thus well-known and talked-about by then, but little-experienced at that time:

We have been in the habit of thinking that no life was so lonely as that of the keeper of a lighthouse, and are apt to compassionate the men who are cut off from all intercourse with their kind for weeks by stormy weather or by the difficulties of their position. But the telephone (says a New Zealand paper) has cured all that as by a miracle. Let the storm rage how it may, the lighthouse keeper at Tiritiri can speak in a whisper to Auckland or Waiwera. He is not permitted to forget the days of the week as they slip by, or when the Day of Rest comes round, for the clerks in the Auckland office, when discharging Sunday morning duties, can connect him through, and in his lonely watch-tower, with the moaning sea all round, he can hear the Salvation Army band in Shortland-street and Queen-street playing ‘The Sweet By-and-by,’ or some other of Moody and Sankey’s airs. From the same place he can, too, hear every morning someone in the office at Waiwera read the newspapers. All this through several miles of cable at the bottom of the sea, and, by the detour as it goes, some sixty miles of land line.

It conjures up a pretty picture, but one that would fall foul of the dreadful acoustics of the early telephones, not to mention that the clerks’ telephone in Auckland would be bolted to a wall, far from the band. In other words, the journalist must have made it all up as he went along.

The telephone was slowly winning acceptance in some offices around 1900, but it had apparently led Sir William Preece, the chief engineer in the British Post Office to say, some years earlier, when asked if the new device would be of any value:

“No, sir. The Americans have need of the telephone—but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys”.

By 1914, people in New York could talk to people in San Francisco by telephone, and it became common in at least the wealthier homes in the western world around 1930, 54 years after it was invented.

(There is an amusing side-story here, known to all those who have worked in surveying and statistical sampling: in 1936, the Literary Digest surveyed its own subscribers and automobile owners, followed up by a phone poll, and concluded that Landon would beat Roosevelt in the Presidential elections. FDR won by a landslide, and the error happened because all three sample groups were well-off or rich, and so less likely to vote for Roosevelt.)

After 20 years, people have mostly heard about a new idea, after 30 years, the technology is growing popular but still developing. After 50 years, we can call the technology mature. It does not matter if you look at printing, the telescope, the telegraph, the railway, photography, cinema, radio, heavier-than-air flight, television, or the internet. Within a tolerance of a few years, the 30-year/50-year effect holds in every case.

It is no coincidence that the books produced in the first 50 years after Gutenberg started using the printing press are called incunabula, a term that refers to the clothing of infants. It was only after one full human working life that the idea of printing had been taken on board by both scholars and the people in the printing trade. It had become a mature technology.

When he produced the second edition of his second book, the Mainz Psalter in 1459, Gutenberg had proven the technology of printing. Even so, he could never have anticipated two books published 400 years on, in 1859, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species or Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities—or those books’ effects.

Equally, he could not have anticipated that a woman, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) might publish Adam Bede, nor could he have anticipated Isabella Beeton’s Household Management, or John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, all of which came out in 1859. He most certainly would have been utterly confused by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, conceived in 1862 and published in 1865.

Gutenberg was content to have created a system that could produce 180 bibles in the time that a diligent penman needed to complete a single copy by hand. He could never have dreamed that in Mainz in 2008, outside a museum devoted to his work, newspapers from many nations would be sold to foreign tourists on the day of their publication, after being flown in. Museums, newspapers, tourists and flying would have made no sense to him at all.

There's more, but you'll have to buy the book :-)