I guess the last real breakthrough was the World Wide Web about fifteen years ago. Aside from that big exception, though, everything seems to be incremental improvements to what we do already. Watch TV, fly on a commercial airline, drive a car. Again, with the exception of the Internet I don’t think there’s anything that someone from the 1960s would look and say, “Holy Futurama, Batman, I’ve never done anything like that. Neato!”
As for whether we’d know: William Gibson and earlier sci-fi authors anticipated the Internet, sorta. Anything plausibly earth-shaking in science fiction these days?
I am working on an interesting article in the August 2011 National Geographic on robots. As they become more functional and human, there could be some interesting applications.
I see the most likely big change being learning to live with less energy barring a breakthrough.
3-D fabrication has some potential to become a huge industry.
But real breakthroughs sneak up on you. The idea that everybody would have a device in their pockets that was a phone and a computer and a location finder and a camera and could grab prices out of thin air and then pay for the goods would have knocked the Jetsons on their astros.
Well, yeah, maybe. But fifty years ago we already had phones. We already had cameras. We could already use the phone to get prices and order merchandise. GPS, well that’s new and sort of neat, but also kind of minor unless you’re a sea captain. The incremental improvement has been to put these functions into a single device, and make associated processes faster. With the exception of the Internet (which also existed in rudimentary form forty years ago) I don’t see anything that really changes the way we live.
I think it was in the 1980s I read that the Japanese government set as a national goal to develop advanced robots. Their (human) population is aging and they don’t think there will be enough young people to assist with the care of the elderly. So they thought that robots could be developed for that purpose. I don’t think the research ever quite got there. But now computer processors are far more advanced.
And perhaps the prosthetic technologies being developed for disabled war veterans will have applications in robotics? (BTW, here’s an article and amusing YouTube video about a cookie-baking robot. It may seem silly, but you can see the various skills that the robot needed to acquire to mix the cookie dough.)
Actually, I wonder about other technologies being developed as a result of the Iraq and Afghan wars, like the unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e., drones) being used in the war. Will they have civilian applications? I’ve heard rumors of sensing technologies that can tell how many people are in a building behind thick masonry walls. What applications might that have?
Cellphones have revolutionized the world in the last 10 years. This is less obvious in the United States, where we had pretty good land line phones, but the effect on 3rd world economies has been enormous. It was like leapfrogging from the 19th century to the 21st.
I suspect the next revolution will be in biotech. What about a plant you can grow almost anywhere for almost nothing that can feed your family? Ditto a system to purify water? A plant that grows into a small house?
We know electronics will get cheaper. What happens when an Ipad equivalent costs $20 and is solar powered to boot?
Batteries technology is also a big thing. If they work the bugs out the lithium air battery, then we are talking about batteries holding over a kwh per kilo of battery and electric cars are cheaper than internal combustion engines.
Cars evolved incrementally from carriages. Airplanes evolved incrementally from gliders and balloons. Computers evolved incrementally from adding machines and punch-card tabulators. Robots evolved incrementally from clockwork automata.
Name one thing that didn’t evolve incrementally and then we can go on from there.
Yes, all of the pieces that compromise a smartphone were there a while back, but it was the coming together (the synergy, really) that made them powerful. Perhaps the biggest thing that made them powerful was the idea that anyone and everyone could develop applications for them.
It depends what you mean by on the horizon. There are lots of technologies on the horizon but many will sink while others will turn out to be speedboats that we barely got a chance to see on the horizon.
One tech which I don’t think will be much practical use for ordinary people (though I could be wrong), but which may impact society a lot is invisibility.
Ever since scientists managed to make a meta-material that could make an object invisible to microwaves there has been a race to repeat the trick with visible light. And by race I mean lots of teams around the world trying to be first. I don’t think it will take very long. But if they succeed, how public will it be?
Automobiles were a civilization-transforming breakthrough, yes?
But the first crop of them weren’t. They were worse than horse-drawn carriages, expensive, prone to breakdown, dangerous, required constant maintainence, and so on. It was only through incremental improvments that the first horseless carriages became the auto-mobiles of today.
So yes, the precursors of today’s smartphones were in place decades ago. The first brick mobile phones, small laptops, innumerable failed attempts at tablet computers and PDAs. And so the iPhone is just the Model T Ford, the model where suddenly incremental improvements resulted in a product that everyone wanted.
Same thing with the history of the airplane. Everyone could see that powered flight was on the horizon, and dozens of people around the world were working on the problem. The Wright Flyer wasn’t a breakthrough, it was in a long line of incremental improvements in the gliders the Wrights had been making, strapping a piddly little engine on one of their gliders wasn’t revolutionary. Then came World War I.
Same story with firearms. The first hand cannons were curiosities, even muskets aren’t dramatically superior to longbows. It was only with hundreds of years of incremental improvements in metallurgy and design that firearms became what they are today. It wasn’t until you got a flintlock rifle with a bayonet that you had weapon system that was superior in every way to crossbows and pikes.
The point is that when a socially transforming breakthrough comes, it doesn’t come because of a technological breakthrough. It comes from incremental improvements that finally push the technology over the hump to where it suddenly becomes indispensible.
People had lithographs for 50 years before they had cameras. And they had camera obscura for 200 years before that and they had wire grids for 100 years before that and so forth. Just an incremental process.
And people had radio and telegraph before they had phones. And they had semaphore and carrier pigeons before that and so forth. Just an incremental change.
Almost no technology emerges fully formed as you seem to think. All technology is an incremental change on something that comes before. The first cameras didn’t transform people’s lives. They weren’t civilization-transforming. Nor were the first railway engines or the first televisions. All these things began as incremental steps on existing technology and only became “civilization-transforming” after decades of slow, incremental improvements.
As for the plausibly earth-shaking, history shows that to be a pointless exercise. Nobody ever sees these things coming. A few researchers working away somewhere for 30 years in a dozen different areas, then then a confluence of inventions and social conditions and a phenomenon is born. Even people working in the field never see the significance of these events. Nobody saw the internet before it arrived. Nobody saw television as a phenomenon before it became one. Most people thought motor cars were a short lived fad.
People simply can’t predict these big changes. A lot of that is because it’s as much sociology as technology. There’s no reason that the internet or the motor car became the world-changing phenomena that they are. People managed quite well without them for millenia. They could quite easily have remained niche industrial applications. They became world-changing phenomena because the world changed, no because of the technology. And as hard as it is to predict technology, it’s much harder to predict society.
OK. Irregardless*, though, I’m wondering when that will come. Smartphones** to me just don’t have that kind of “pop”. Seeing through walls, becoming invisible, taking pills that eliminate the need for sleep, “printing” usable items at home using a 3D printer, uploading data directly into one’s brain – I’m sure that there are primitive Model-T analogues out there, but once they hit the mass market, man, that’s gonna pop!
*I’ve seen at least two posters use this word lately and I don’t want to be left out.
**On the other hand, I understand that relatively inexpensive cell phones do have substantial impact in poorer countries where they can’t afford the infrastructure for land lines.
I think devices that take advantage of locational awareness and/or augmented reality technologies are going to become huge over the next 10 years or so.
But surely you can look at society and get some idea of what new categories of technology will suddenly* become an absolute must-have. The Roman Empire stagnated technologically because there was so much cheap slave labor, who needs a whistling tabletop steam whirligig? – But . . . what if slavery is eliminated, what needs does that create in society? Some sort of . . . mechanical devices to take the place of Frankish labor? Hmmm . . .
Likewise, thanks to Dr. Pasteur we suddenly have children surviving beyond their fifth year in inordinate numbers and the population is skyrocketing. We simply have more people popping up than ever before, their farms can’t support them and they’re congregating in the cities. So many people simply cannot live within such a confined space. We need a way to efficiently convey them in and out of the city so that they may live outside its confines and yet still be able to work in their offices during the day. And there are only so many horses. We need some sort of . . . mechanical carriage? Hmmm . . .
*And when I say “suddenly,” I’m not talking about one wild-haired inventor in a basement: within the space of 20 years aeroplanes went from proof of concept to never-before-seen applications in peace and war. Likewise with automobiles. In a historical context, surely that’s sudden enough?
We’re kind of at a stage where we already have everything; transportation to anywhere on earth, instant worldwide communication, etc that it’s hard to imagine much that would revolutionize our lives and be entirely new vs an improvement on existing tech.
Steam “cars” appeared on the streets of Philadelphia in the 18th century, long before Pasteur was born.
Aéroplane was coined in France in 1855. It was used in English to mean heavier-than-air machine by 1873. People had been working on them for a generation before the Wrights. The flying car was a commonplace in illustrations in the 1890s, before there was flight or cars. Yet virtually every expert swore up and down that the airplane could never be used in war: too slow, too fragile, too low-flying, too easy to hit. Can we now with hindsight go back and pick up the couple of people who were correct? Yes. But we don’t have hindsight onto 2011 yet.
I’ve studied this stuff for decades, and it takes all my time and effort, so I can fairly say that everything you think you know about technological history and how the public viewed the future is wrong. And by “you” I mean everybody.
And the Romans and Greeks had spinning tabletop whirligigs, so equally arguably the “steam engine” was invented 2000 years ago. But that’s not the same as inventing a technology with practical application.
:dubious: Just because people were talking about it doesn’t mean it had been invented yet.
Don’t hold your breath. Those microwave metamaterials fall into a category technically referred to as “really friggin’ cool”, but they rely on structures orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength of light they’re using. But when you go to visible light, the wavelengths are much smaller, such that atoms might even be too big to make those structures out of. And we don’t know how to make anything out of anything but atoms.