Something occurred to me last night: I can’t think of any huge, earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting, society-disrupting technological shifts that have happened in the past 15 years. The very last instance I can think of where the introduction of a new technology cleanly defined our world into Before and After was in 2007 when the iPhone (and its subsequent legions of copycats) came out, and transformed not only the nature of computing, but the way we interact with one another (or fail to) on a global basis.
For most of the 20th century, world-changing tech dropped on a fairly regular basis. Automobiles. Powered flight. The assembly line. Antibiotics. Multiple vaccines. The discovery of DNA. Radio. Television. Nuclear fission power, nuclear fission bombs, nuclear fusion bombs. Jet engines, rockets, ICBMs. Manned spaceflight, landing on the Moon, space stations, space probes visiting every planet in the Solar System. Computing mainframes, personal computers, the internet, the worldwide web.
But somehow, it feels like everything since 2007 has just been variations on existing themes. Remixes. Yes, we have reusable rockets via SpaceX now, but so did the Space Shuttle back in the 1980s. We’re going back to the Moon later this decade, but that’s just revisiting an achievement that was made, and subsequently abandoned, years before I was born. 4K TV is a remix of HD. Starlink is just satellite internet with the satellites in LEO instead of GEO. The fastest Wi-Fi today is an iteration of its predecessors, all the way back to the original. Same deal with 5G. The iPad is basically just a big iPhone. The Apple Watch is basically just a small iPhone. The iPhone 14 is just the original iPhone with a better CPU, screen, camera, etc.
I am oversimplifying, obviously, and I probably have a too narrow, reductive view of what counts as “revolutionary” when it comes to a new technological, engineering, or biomedical feat. But that still doesn’t stop me from feeling as though, societally, as a species, we hit an innovation wall 15 years ago and have resorted to iterative evolutionary improvements rather than revolutionary improvements.
Maybe it’s a problem of all the low-hanging fruit having been claimed already. For example, it’s easy to be blasé about the “miracle of flight” when you’ve never known a world without it, and the idea of getting on a plane and soaring through the air holds very few romantic notions and honestly sounds like a major pain in the ass instead (you mean I have to take off my shoes before I can enter this aluminium tube and go hurtling 10 kilometres above the earth at nearly the speed of sound, winding up on the other side of the planet in less than a day? Ugh, what bullshit). And how many people out there even know that we have had a continuous, uninterrupted human presence in low Earth orbit for almost this entire century so far?
Maybe some stuff has just flown under the radar a bit, and its true impact has yet to be felt. CRISPR has been in testing for a while, and if that lives up to its promise it has the potential to be the most revolutionary change in medicine since… well, medicine. We may look back and see the introduction of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion as the foetal stage of “true” AI. mRNA vaccines may lead to cures for everything from the common cold to cancer. And maybe these achingly slow steps we’re taking toward a permanent settlement on the Moon will turn out to be the very belated beginning of ours becoming a truly multi-planetary species.
I do think there are some major developments just over the horizon. The recent breakthrough in fusion research has the potential to be absolutely huge in terms of our global energy needs and the fight against climate change. The James Webb telescope has the potential to find Earth 2.0 out there, leading to what I would like to think would be a big change to the way our society thinks about our place in the universe and our role within it, but will probably turn out instead to be just a big species-wide shrug and a swivel of the head back toward whatever vapid thing Harry and Megan have got up to this week.
But everything that I can think of that might be a huge, revolutionary, society-altering change is 10, 20, 30 years away. Everything in the near term still looks like more of the same: remixes, remakes, reboots.
I have to wonder how we got here, and why it feels like nothing much has changed on a fundamental level for the past 15 years. Is it that the low-hanging fruit was indeed all harvested? Did Facebook et al throw a major ADHD spanner into the works? Is it the fact that we’re staggering blindly and half-crazed through late-stage capitalism, where the only thing that truly matters is TEH STONKS? Is it at least partly because the country that drove the majority of revolutionary innovation through the 20th century is now, in almost every way that counts, a shrivelled husk and a shadow of its former self?
All of the above? None of the above? I don’t know. Maybe we haven’t actually just been spinning our wheels in place for the past 15 years, doing donuts across the face of the Earth and flipping the bird to the stars… but it certainly feels like we have to me.