Did people throughout history ever acknowledge that their technology was primitive?
The obvious answer is no, because they were making the most innovative advances they could with the materials they had, and could not see into the future.
But we can. We are making new advances every day, to the point where things like invisible cloaks and other marvels are not so far away. In the information age, we can see farther than anyone else the currents of innovation and obsolescence…how what we make today (e.g. cell phones, CD players) is already becoming ancient history with the pace of progress. With this in mind, has anyone throughout history or today ever publicly acknowledged that their modern, “state-of-the-art” technology, was kind of basic compared to what future civilizations might come up with?
I know people in the 1900s imagined what life would be like in 2000, etc, but I’m asking if they realized that their own technology was primitive, saying the exact things we today would say about, say, a “brick” cell phone or an Atari?
I’m only asking this because it’s hard to believe people had such faith in their own technologies if they saw their advances becoming obsolete as fast as we see ours becoming obsolete.
I guess the corollary to this question is:
Have people always predicted the course of technological progress? What did the Ancient Greeks and Romans think of the future? Did they envision flying carriages, etc? I’m guessing that everyone’s visions of the future were limited to the framework of the technology they had available–that their future worldview was shaped by what they saw around them every day.
I think that for the most part you could make 500 year hops through human history and not notice vast technological differences, just moderate improvements, up until the 1800s.
Reciprocally, for most of human history, the things we had created and invented for ourselves were either self-explanatory if you looked at them for awhile or, at a minimum, contraptions that you could take apart and study and see how they worked and realize how someone had had the idea in the first place.
Then we hit some kind of critical mass of understanding; we developed new cool tricks “standing on the shoulders of giants”, deploying increasingly complex processes in conjunction with each other. We became wizards. And our children grow up in a world where their own species does a very wide variety of things that most of them will never even faintly understand at anything approximating a “down to the bones / build it from scratch” kind of level.
Millennia from now, perhaps our descendants will ask whether ancient people like us looked around at our social structures and realized they were primitive or whether we had any premonition of what was to come.
My website, Flying Cars and Food Pills, looks at the way people looked at the future in the past. Awareness of an advanced technological future arrived early in the industrial revolution, as in this letter from Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestly, Feb. 8, 1780.
Even earlier, the 17th century inventor of calculus Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (that dummy Newton invented fluxions) beautifully phrased it in his Monadology, “the present is big with the future.”
At the end of the 18th century came two important utopian works, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit by the Marquis de Condorcet and William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Manners. Both were referenced in the title of Thomas Malthus’ works on population, which set out to rebut their optimism by showing that technology could not keep pace. Godwin wrote a book in return and Malthus revised (expanded by five times) his book. The early 19th century saw a flurry of thick books debating technological progress.
That slopped over into fiction. What we would today call science fiction was then la littérature futuriste, and the French especially put out tons of books, cartoons, newspaper articles, and pamphlets with talk of and images of flight and other coming marvels.
This might be slightly stretching the OP, I’m not sure:
I think for a long time in Europe there was a belief that society and our understanding, if not technology per se, had regressed since the fall of the roman empire (and before that the greek).
Given that, might there have been significant belief in a future time when we could return to such levels of understanding?
Or how about belief in some advanced, far away peoples?
These are both reasons some people may have believed the technology of their day would someday be superceded if it had not already.
I’d say this is a good description of how immersive Virtual Reality is, and has been, seen. You know, the thing with the goggles and motion sensors. In 1990-ish, it was The Thing Of The Future, but people realized that it had a bit of a ways to go. The next 25 years were very disappointing in terms of VR. Yes, it got a little better, and somewhat cheaper. No, it still gives you a blinding headache after 30 minutes.
I think this is the real answer; probably until sometime in the 17th-18th century, there wasn’t even a concept of technological advancement or science as a discipline. Sure, there were advancements, and there were what today we’d call scientists, but as an organized endeavor, there wasn’t much of it around. Even the “scientists” were generally called natural philosophers, indicating that science and philosophy were regarded as more or less the same thing.
Sometime in the 16th century, this changed in what’s called the Scientific Revolution. It started slow, and reached that critical mass that AHunter3 mentions sometime in the 19th century, and has built to what we have today.
But to answer the OP’s question more directly… no, I don’t think there’s ever really been a recognition that one’s technology is primitive. A recognition that it may soon be outdated, sure, but not primitive. Primitive is more of a hindsight concept than a forward looking one.
Look at it in a more recent light- did anyone with an iPhone in 2007 think it was primitive? Based on today’s phone capabilities, it’s a fossil, but in 2007 it was the hottest thing around. Just like the Intel 80386 was a big deal back in the day, but seems about as useful as a wooden spear now.
However, all those people in 2007 likely knew that by 2015, phones would be faster, more feature-rich, etc… but that doesn’t mean that they considered what they had to be primitive because they expected something more advanced to come along.