What We Get Wrong About Technology
timharford.com
timharford.com
If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing.
All the big stuff that we think defines the modern era.
What would probably really impress the hell out of them would be a supermarket, though.
To a person from that time, the idea of being able to eat fresh peaches in the dead of winter would be just as magical as being able to instantly translate Russian into English, and yet it probably wouldn't occur to us to bring it up because fruit at the supermarket is just... obvious.
So as we look forward, the question is, what will be obvious to people ten or twenty years from now?
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/1990-soviet-leader-mikhail-...
For peaches in winter, most people think of botany, refrigeration, airplanes… science. Fewer people would think of joint stock companies or shipping containers as important enablers.
For productivity, it seems impossible that a computer on every desk with modern digital communication, software of every kind and all our gadgets didn’t move the productivity needle. It’s all so technological. In practice, non-technologies like kanban or just-in-time did move the productivity needle. It’s counterintuitive.
There are a lot of examples of counterintuitive bland results. Genetic engineering has not improved crop yields nearly as much as green revolution technology, not even close. Nuclear energy changed very little besides war.
That’s not to say these aren’t impactful technologies. Computers have changed our lives and our work. Modern Agg-tech has changed farming. It just didn’t change total output all that much.
I suppose that in the theme of this article, big technologies work in complexes, and that makes them hard to bang into a narrative and hard to predict.
The same thing might be happening right now. It's widely accepted that online media revolutionized the political landscape. In Europe and the states we saw centrist parties lose control of the agenda, and the empowerment of fringier politics. Trump, LePenn, alt-right, Brexit, etc.
In the middle east we saw a bigger earlier impact: the arab spring protests are widely credited to online media.
This is much more controversial, but I think the ISIS family of religious phenomenon (and many less headline grabbing ones) has a Luther-Gutenberg relationship with online media.
Without the screw cutting lathe, precision parts where impossible to make. Without machine tools, creating basically any other machine that we use today would be impossible.
It’s a good example of weird/unintuitive causation. Standardisation is a byproduct of industrialisation & mass production.
I think the hard part, as noted, is not necessarily the materialization of 'new tech', but very much how that tech plays with all the other new tech to produce a very new society. And in that you are exactly right, the most curious parts of that new society are not the technological tools themselves, but the social capabilities that spring from their convergence - the supermarket.
I work at the convergence of tech and synthetic biology, and a huge 'miss' many suffer is a blindness to just how powerfully the two technologies will interconnect in the near future - and not the tech as the product, but the capabilities of their convergence. It's not that computers, AI and all that jazz will become small and invisible, nor that genomics and biology will become easy, but actually what will occur at their intersection. It's that fun space mixed with both where things get really interesting.
And this is why reading sci-fi is fun for me. It allows an author to explore the clashes, implications and make prognostications on the outcomes of the convergence of multiple technologies with respect to relatable characters' choices in their lives.
From where you sit, what is the impact of the intermix between those two technologies?
As a layperson, I can see tailor-made medications becoming cheap and common over the long run. Not only might that read "goodbye, cancer!", but also mitigate the resultant threat of biological warfare.
After all, if you can cook up tailor-made anticancer and antiviral drugs in a machine at Walgreens, then you can counter a tailor-made bioweapon pretty easily.
Food production is another obvious boost, so we might have a second Norman Borlaug that once again lifts the carrying capacity of Earth. We can probably also assume foods engineered to grow in extreme environments.
From that, you also get biological air and water recycling for spacecraft, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Age (see Constitutional Article 2.1, 14th US Amendment).
Memorizable strings of data worth billions of dollars.
Aesthetic biology around us, and within us as a form of expression.
Wealth (as energy expenditure) driving speed and permanence vs quality or capability (think hill coefficients). Metal & rock as materials of speed, but also waste, whereas literal capabilities are mirrorable with biology, are much more efficient, but 'slow'.
(More) Von Neumann Probes everywhere, but resembling acorns, fruit flies, and yeast.
(Explicit & commercialized) synthetic symbioses for individuals and for societies, and for other life.
And at the same time we are moving towards a world of tailor-made anything. From cars and clothes to user interfaces and lifestyles. If we can handle the complexity of it all.
Guess I'll have to add to the collection!
Like, aluminium smelters are massive...then there's the mining, the rolling, the local, national and international supply chains - all so I can keep a light sensitive chemical in the dark during a 15 minute experiment setup.
I mean this is all true if you use it in the kitchen too (which is amazing) but what struck me was the weird way that progress was enabling progress - something had to go from non-existent to consumer-cheap, and suddenly a whole bunch of science is possible to do easily and en masse.
You did not name any specific antibiotic products, or car manufacturers, because those are not really that significant.
The underlying inventions though are the real technological leaps forward that, as you say, are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time.
Snapchat is just a product, I think the real invention that you overlooked is the internet.
When I think about, I suppose it would be almost simpler to explain Snapchat than the Internet to a 18th century person.
Though, like you, I think I would try first to explain the Internet.
I think it's probably more of a big deal there than in towns / cities because they at least had communities where utilities could be shared. If you live miles from clean water that's a good percentage of your week wasted walking to and from the nearest well / whatever with buckets.
Depends on the region. Around here for example (rural Eastern Canada), a lot of people are drawing still their water from wells on their lands.
Hot water and indoor plumbing you can go without. But the lack of clean running water is a massively big deal.
At the end of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's film Tout va bien there is a very long take, a panning shot that sweeps back and forth across a Carrefour hypermarket from just outside the cashiers, showing you the whole breadth of departments: fresh veg, canned goods, clothes, etc. I was amazed by this – the whole hypermarket format commonplace to us today and seemingly a development of modernity, was already completely in place by late 1971 and virtually nothing has changed since (except bar-code checkout).
So, maybe development on that particular sphere of human existence stopped for a long time. We in 2017 know that we might be on the cusp of drone delivery, but if someone from that near future went back in time to the 1980s and showed it to a customer in a hypermarket, that might have blown their minds just like your 1750s guy.
I know them since I can think.
What has changed in the consumer market is delivery.
I mean I can buy a huge amount of stuff from all over the world via Amazon and get many thinks delivered at the next day for just 60€ a year prime costs. This is as insane as the hypermarkets were back in the 70s I think.
And it gets better every year.
With self driving trucks we will get even more stuff around the world for less money.
I think this is especially interesting, because it not only gives us much nice things, but also it makes the world smaller. We start to identify more with people around the world, because we can reach them more easily.
The author, Tim Harford, has been running a podcast for the BBC called 50 Things that Made the Modern Economy. If you feel inclined, you should suggest this to him as the last development to cover: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4Y4Gn8gbQvp4X87wGLV...
You should also listen to all the episodes of the podcast:
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b1g3c/episodes/downloads
And this reminds me of the definition of "progress" that goes something like this: All the things you can do (or accomplish) without thinking.
This would apply to so many things that, as you say, we overlook: Making phone calls or video calls and not worrying about all the servers, cables, wireless technology, audio components, processors, and more that comes to together all at once to make that possible. Or as someone else here mentioned the supermarket where you can go and buy far more than your basic necessities and not really concern yourself with all the various manufacturing and processing and shipping and sourcing that it took to get the products there, not to mention the machines and technology and people it took to make them all.
At a far more macro level, perhaps one of our biggest forms of "progress" in human history has simply been our shift away from the need to constantly spend all day, every day, hunting for sustenance to get thru the day and the next day and so on. We live in a world where we have a tremendous amount of automation and low-cost forms of scalable agriculture that we have freed ourselves up so much to do so many other things. We overlook this all the time because it is the very nature of progress (we don't have to think about it because we are busy thinking about other things... hopefully better things).
This is probably a myth. Studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies likely spent between 20 and 40 hours per week obtaining food. They are still believed to have been plagued by high infant mortality, disease, and warfare, so they were still leading relatively unstable lives when compared with today. But the average hunter-gatherer may have largely been better off (healthier, with more leisure time) than the average worker during the Industrial Revolution.
While we're near the topic, the five-day work week itself is something that a lot of us take for granted, but it has only been adopted nationwide in America for 80 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_spe...
I think far more useful question is asking what should be obvious right now that you aren't seeing. That is, unless you're trying to gamble on who will win the Super Bowl in 2025 or something equally inane.
Today's tech-bros go for the most obvious nerd-bait, like electric cars, rockets, and solar panels. This is stuff that, if you asked any tech-bro today, or 20 years ago, what would impress them, they would answer with that obvious stuff.
Meanwhile, the ACTUAL world-changing innovations are things like pinch-to-zoom and momentum scroll - stuff that you actually initially had to argue with the tech-bros about - "why do we need that?" - but becomes obvious only after-the-fact.
Innovation is what your grandmother recognizes as innovative, not what the technologists recognize as innovative.
Yes.
> I could totally live without pinch-to-zoom or even momentum scroll, but I doubt we, society as we know it, would survive very long without clean and renewable energy sources.
You can live without solar panels. You likely do.
Meanwhile, you became far more productive because of UX.
It would seem to be magical. Here's this thing that allows you to move huge amounts of power over vast distances, but deposit it in whatever tiny portions you like, in whatever room you want, and it's so easy you run the wires along your existing walls.
The same force allows you to send both signal and power through thin air. And if you don't want it there, you can shield from it.
Or you can make a motor quite elegantly by winding some wires.
And you can manipulate it so finely that you can do calculations with teeny tiny amounts of it. And store the results.
But one thing I was wondering was how much it depends on basic science. Now that we've discovered EM, have we exhausted the basic knowledge about the world? Is every tech going forward just refinements on particular aspects of nature, or is it unlimited how we combine things?
And by the way, I think the lithium battery enhances this dramatically because it makes it practical for EM-based power to be mobile, not just stationary. It's a little like how coal enabled machine power to move away from rivers (i.e. watermills) in the 19th century into factories all over and start moving a little bit on large and/or fixed infrastructure (like ships and rail), and how oil enabled machine power to become completely mobile in the 20th Century.
Lithium batteries (especially as they'll become perfected in the form of lithium-sulfur and lithium-air) enable electromagnetic energy, that most magical form of energy (distinct from mere thermal or mechanical power), to become completely mobile as well and also even for fixed electricity no longer reliant on fossil fuels for prime energy but also able to utilize any kind of inexpensive energy source (wind, solar, etc).
Lithium batteries are to the 21st Century what the internal combustion engine was to the 20th. Smartphones, tablets, drones, electric cars, and into the rest of the 21st century: vast usage of renewable energy, full electrification of ground transport, spreading to air transport, even rocket engines (RocketLab's engines really wouldn't be possible without lithium batteries), cubesats, Hyperloop, etc.
People centuries ago probably asked themself the same question. Let's just assume we are missing massive chunks of informations.
I don't know whether there is more basic science to be discovered, but even if there isn't, there is plenty of technology to be invented within the scope of existing science. Atomically precise manufacturing, for example: we know about atoms, but our ability to work with them is still crude in the extreme.
Another cool step up in terms of technology would be the manipulation of black holes. Black holes are, via Hawking radiation, excellent mass->useful energy converters. If we manage to create some small black holes we could for example travel much faster around the universe, without having to create and store dangerous amounts of antimatter.
I remember reading in Scientific American a few years back, about a study that was very striking and against common intuition. In manufacturing, robots had overtaken humans at a particular task by a long shot. They were able to perform the completion of assemblies much quicker and with higher accuracy; humans coming in afterwards and applying finishes that required small hands, light touches, or hard to explain measurements.
Robots > Humans. Humans finished what robots couldn't.
What wasn't foreseen, however, was that there was an additional step to shave off even more time. Given some artificial intelligence, the robots could actually tell the humans when, and how, to do assembly during and as part of the assembly process. The robot figuring out the most efficient assembly, and instructing the human to do what it couldn't, was a third step of assembly efficiency not foreseen.
It turned out:
Robots + Humans > Robots > Humans.
See, the Luddites are always accused of having wanted to destroy machinery, but it’s been known in scholarship for a long time that that’s not true—what they really wanted to do was to prevent themselves from being de-skilled, and Noble talks about this in his book. The Luddites had nothing against machinery itself, they just didn’t want it to destroy them, they wanted it to be developed in such a way that it would enhance their skills and their power, and not degrade and destroy them—which of course makes perfect sense. And that sentiment runs right throughout the working-class movements of the nineteenth century, actually—and you can even see it today.
- from Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
As a Norwegian I've seen this difference between Scandinavian and American work culture. In the US there tends to be deep levels of management where the people at the bottom have almost no autonomy or power. Yet this is again far worse in many developing countries. There is an excellent piece by an American military officer about why arab armies are so bad. People at the bottom have no decision power.
My favorite is how the robots on the space colony don't believe the humans could have created them, due to how sophisticated they are.
"""The robot approached softly and there was sorrow in his voice. “You are going?”
Powell nodded curtly. “There will be others in our place.”
Cutie sighed, with the sound of wind humming through closely spaced wires. “Your term of service is over and the time of dissolution has come. I expected it, but -- well, the Master’s will be done!”
His tone of resignation stung Powell. “Save the sympathy, Cube. We’re heading for Earth, not dissolution.”
"It is best that you think so,” Cutie sighed again. “I see the wisdom of the illusion now. I would not attempt to shake your faith, even if I could.” He departed -- the picture of commiseration."""
--"Reason" by Isaac Asimov
More generally, I never spot a story where robots have unconscious cognitive processes. It seems everything they do is deliberate, even though the humans around them don't fully understand what is thinking on.
This is another example of "machines should think, people should work.". The computer is the boss. That may be the future.
The voice had 4 speeds, and all the experienced pickers would have it turned up to the top speed.
Once you were experienced enough though, you would learn the confirm codes for the different bays, and speak though the pick to the voice system 5 steps ahead just so it didn't slow down your pick.
Workers that came from a paper sheet pick list in the previous factory prefered the paper as they could memorize the pick sheet with a single reading, and thus pick faster - and if they did want to double check at the end they had the sheet in front of them to do so.
We'll be to machines what horses are to their riders. I'm not sure horses hate their riders.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_navigation_assistant
The article was pretty good overall, but this one's a pet peeve of mine. We're offloading our thinking to computers and this magical "AI" in hopes that all that hard work (and possibility for error!) is going to be avoided. But we're going to find out--or perhaps not, as we slip below the dumbness horizon, no longer able to formulate self-reflective thoughts ourselves--that thinking is joyful, fun, glorious, not laborious or error prone.
And as "soft" AI advances, we just can't admit to ourselves that this, too, will fail to deliver. To wit: if something absolutely must be translated between language A and language B, in 2017 a bilingual person will still _absolutely mop the floor_ with machine translation.
Google translate: "Zum Witz: Wenn irgend etwas absolut zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B übersetzt werden soll, wird im Jahr 2017 eine zweisprachige Person den Boden mit der maschinellen Übersetzung noch niemals stoßen."
Bahaha.
Reminds me of Daniel Dennett's example of the coffee machine that both makes the coffee and drinks it for you.
that thinking is joyful, fun, glorious
Couldn't agree more. Thinking is the only place where we can be truly free.
not laborious or error prone.
No, mistakes are inevitable. This is actually not such a bad thing because if we weren't capable of committing errors then no progress would be possible.
[0] automatic driving "being almost there" is the new "year of Linux on the desktop"
"Das heißt: wenn zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B unbedingt etwas übersetzt werden muss, wird 2017 ein Zweisprachiger den Boden _absolut mit maschineller Übersetzung wischen."
Not quite there yet, but pretty good in my opinion. (German native speaker)
Your point that the AI doesn't "understand" the text still stands though.
It should be noted that we don't know what "understanding" entails, so we don't even know if it's a coherent concept, or even a property humans have.
We have a bad habit of over-estimating our abilities, so I wouldn't bet too much money on that proposition.
You're assuming the only form is the last kind. As a human, I most prefer the electric cycle but I expect most will tend towards some kind of car. For the foreseeable future, only cars and cycles will exist because we don't yet know how to achieve deep understanding.
The algorithms understand in the sense of a set of rules to follow, transforming inputs to desired outputs. The rulebook doesn't merely consist of a look up table of all sentence pairs therefore at least some kind of understanding must be present. The algorithms can't turn words into stories with actors and predictions about their internal state, so I agree the understanding is shallow and far from human like.
Humans can often, even if not all choose to, step outside the system by integrating various modalities, propagating errors, to realize they're being forced to learn garbage. The machines can't reason outside the system. Compare with an animal of pure instinct (which are less common than many have supposed) whose behavior displays an implicit understanding of its environment's statistics.
DeepL translate: Das heißt: wenn zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B unbedingt etwas übersetzt werden muss, wird 2017 ein Zweisprachiger den Boden _absolut mit maschineller Übersetzung wischen.
At first I accidentally left in the underscore with Bing Translate I got:
Zum Witz: Wenn etwas absolut übersetzt werden muss zwischen Sprache a und Sprache B, in 2017 wird eine zweisprachige Person noch _absolutely MOP die floor_ mit der maschinellen Übersetzung.
Removing them, Bing Translate: Zum Witz: Wenn etwas absolut übersetzt werden muss zwischen Sprache a und Sprache B, in 2017 eine zweisprachige Person wird immer noch absolut wischen den Fußboden mit der maschinellen Übersetzung.
I don't speak German but mixing and matching between the three, I'm guessing the ranking for this example is Bing, DeepL, Google.
It is not a good idea to rank translations that you do not understand. That's part of the problem I am trying to point out here. "Zum Witz" is not correct--at all. "_absolutely MOP die floor_" makes no sense; it's painful Danglish. And, again, the literal translation of the metaphor "mop the floor" is not a good translation.
For what it's worth, I consequently ran this by a native german speaker. It's perfectly reasonable to rank them, understanding is not a binary proposition.
This shows exactly why machine translation is bad. It doesn't actually understand anything. It does really well translating very commonly occurring phrases and grammar because it is based on parallel texts. It does absolutely terrible when one wanders outside this "mainstream".
This is why you need a human; they understand metaphors. In fact, the "mop the floor with" metaphor has a literal translation but few Germans would use that as their first choice. Instead, it requires a choice of a different metaphor that expresses the same intent.
Machine translators don't even use a dictionary. FFS "mop the floor with" can be defined to a first approximation as "trounce" and that does have some reasonable German translations.
Stupid machine. (and it doesn't even understand mockery either).
It didn't want to be about everyday technology (though it had to pay some lip service to that). So it didn't want to invest the reader's mental energy in the replacement for phone booths.
(I think the author's point still stands, but that example doesn't support it).
The phone booth makes perfect sense.
This is actually something I liked in contrast to earlier futurism. If I look around me here in Europe I see that buildings rarely get removed once they stand. The last time the face of cities here changed was after the Second World War. If I look at pictures from the 60s rarely anything changed, except maybe the introduction of some pedestrian zones.
Over the past few decades, urban regeneration programs have been widespread to remove the bleak post-war prefab concrete monstrosities. Unfortunately what is replacing them is cheap and uninspired compared to pre-1900 architecture so I can't see us valuing it that much in 100 years.
"THE human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep tomorrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun."
[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b1g3c/episodes/downloads
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-YBYzo4XUY
Deckard calls Rachael on a public videophone.(yeah, yeah, I know that many countries still have outrageous prices for networks, be it fiber or mobile).
The reality, 35 years later, is the cheap, ubiquitous, high-speed, mobile access to the world's knowledge and in fact, access to most of humanity. When I press 'add comment', nearly 4 billion human beings can immediately upvote it.
Similarly, the point was a metaphor for the blurring between real and fake. So, easily distinguished fake would ruin that.
"In his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack goes as far as to suggest that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet developed (particularly the World Wide Web), after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks "[w]hat if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?" (269)."
Rather than Blade Runner, I think Children of Men will turn out to be a much more prescient vision of what's to come. (Not the main plot line but everything surrounding it.) But like I said... we don't know.
Tech advances are always a series of lateral moves. Where the last innovation allows for the next new thing. Or more commonly a massive expansion of an existing concept.
I could think of a few scary ones.