Can We Learn Anything From the Telephone?

I intended to write an entry each Friday but I have gotten way behind. Life can get hectic at times especially at the end of the semester. So, despite the lapse in time, I wanted to wrap up the thread I was developing for the telephone by summarizing what we can learn from it.

First, technologies that appear to be essential elements of our modern world faced resistance when they were new. So, before we reject emerging technologies we must allow for the fact that they as well might become essential technologies of the future. This is far from a certainty. But it is also far from an impossibility.

Second, people tend to evaluate an emerging technology in terms of the world into which it is emerging rather than the world of the future that it will create. If we want to fairly evaluate new technologies we need to consider their potential impacts on our world and daily lives. Then we need to evaluate them in the context of those impacts.

Third, no matter how compelling an argument may be against a technology being accepted (consider the engineering argument against the telephone) unpredictable things may occur which make what originally appeared to be infeasible in the present, feasible in the future. The telegraph relied on nonexistence battery technology, a technological barrier that was eventually over come. I can recall a conversation I had years ago with a colleague who presenting a compelling engineering argument as why streaming video would never be possible. And yet, Netflix is doing very well with it.

Fourth, people who resist new technologies simply because they are new and different will always bring out what I call 'the talking points'. These are points that are meant to comfort people who feel threatened by new things and are not serious barriers to the acceptance of new technologies.

There are numerous emerging information technologies that are battling or will battle acceptance. There are virtual worlds, video games, intelligent web interfaces, analytics and big data, and artificial life to name a few. There has also been a note or two in the press about holograms and drone delivery of packages. So, there is much to talk about, many patterns to identify, and some tentative conclusions to be drawn.