Technocrats and technophiles all-- I am not impressed. I'm sure others have made this argument, but here's my personal gripe that Nothing Has Changed (Fundamentally). Although this thought has often occurred to me, it was brought home recently with the passing of Steve Jobs and the ensuing, glowing eulogies. Let me say first off that I'm a fan of what Apple has achieved and the unique level of quality and utility they bring to their products, but when I thought about those products recently, it seems that Apple's and Job's achievement there is more one of refinement. Despite all the accolades that Apple revolutionized the digital/computer world, in my opinion, they took an existing technology (digital music players) and made it much better with the iPod (same for Macs, iPads, etc.). But still, they didn't fundamentally change the basic, underlying technology from the original phonographs (i.e., producing a solid media with "marks" that could be read by a reading decide and translated into sound). Similarly, I can apply the same logic to almost any technology we have today. We have electric cars, but aren't those just souped-up, horse-drawn wagons? We have LED lights, but they're just better lights. For most of our power, we still just burn stuff like our prehistoric ancestors did. Even windmills have been around for a long time. Solar energy is an exception, although I might argue plants beat us to it before we even existed. We have jet fighters and space planes (almost) now, but they're just better versions of the Kitty Hawk. We have cell phones, but they're just better versions of the telegraph. Yes, everything has and continues to get smaller, smarter, more powerful, and/or more energy efficient, but underneath, has anything really changed?
If you take it a level deeper, I would argue we've been utilizing the same fundamental forces or phenomena for all our recent history. All the technologies mentioned above are examples of the same basic "components" of reality being manipulated: light, magnetism, electricity, chemistry at the atomic and molecular levels, sound, mechanics, etc. But nothing new-- no manipulations (even at a micro level) of gravity or time, for example. We've leveraged the low-hanging fruit and are stuck in refinement mode. What I'd like to see (and maybe this is my SF-side showing), are some truly new technologies. Perhaps something manipulating or at least taking into account our most recent understanding of gravity to do something in a novel way (I hate to say anti-gravity, but there, I said it). Or maybe a technology based on all those subatomic and entangled particles and alternate realities I've been hearing about for so long to do something new, that hasn't been done before, in *any* form of technology. Not just a better phone/plane/car/etc., but a dramatically better one, or even something more novel, that perhaps no one has envisioned doing before at all. I'd offer some ideas, but I run the risk of making myself look silly with more SF-inspired tropes like time travel, telepathy, etc. But if I discard those concepts, I still can't shake the feeling that something else must be out there for us to use or do or achieve. Maybe a good example would be some way of reaching the stars in a reasonably short journey (say a trip lasting 10 years or so-- long enough to get there and back within a single lifetime). I have to believe that's possible. But someone's going to have to come up with something new. I'm talking Einstein new. Heck, I'm talking Buckaroo bonzai new. I think they will someday. Call me a techno-optimist.
