“I have it - the greatest invention since the wheel… the axle!"
— The Wizard of Id1
“Day in the life of a mayfly: born eat, shag, die.”
— Not the Nine O’Clock News
What would our forebears, the hunter gatherers have made of all this change? They might even have seen some similarities — the gossip of village life, living in each others pockets, dealing with the occasional disaster alongside the more usual mundane. They had to live by their wits, creating solutions to problems, often with minimal resources. As such they relied as much on their greatly developed brains as the tools they used. Indeed, historical evidence (albeit scant) suggests that our intellect, resourcefulness and general drive to survive are what got us to this point, rather than any particular physical attributes.
The tools we have available are not done with changing. New substances such as graphene enable us to create smaller, stronger devices; quantum computing will change the way we think about both processing and networking; DNA-based structures are able to store terabytes of information. “If I was to start my career again, I would start at the cusp of biotech, nanotech and artificial intelligence,” he says. “The ability to make our future devices intelligent and cognitive is key to sustainability and the advancement of the human race,” says2 Peter Cochrane OBE, futurologist and ex-head of research at BT. Might it be possible for computers to start to ‘think’ for themselves, as in the technology singularity cited[^3] by technology futurists Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge. Once we arrive at such a point of a computer consciousness, they say, there is no going back. Indeed, they have gone so far as to set a date — 2025, or under ten years’ time.
Even if it does not, change is itself speeding up, rendering tools into existence then causing them to vanish at an accelerating rate. A few years ago the term ‘mayfly time’ was to describe how innovations were likely to exist within a 24 hour period, leaving scant time to profit from their presence. The expression was a nod to Not the Nine O’Clock News annual, which described the day in the life of a mayfly. “Born, eat, shag, die.” Such principles are already present in algorithmic trading, which looks for immediate differences in stock prices and deals with them in microseconds. The only rule is that the books need to balance at the end of each day.
Ultimately however, innovations remain but tools, and we saw the same kinds of things being said about radio as about3 the Internet, which is just one more in a series of advances. The mid-term future should be considered against a background of diminishing resources, an ageing population and, indeed, our own very human weaknesses. We are a race of opportunists, of tryers, of exploitative types, of innovators and meanwhile of users, of people who just want to get on with their lives, to eat, sleep, read, play sport, procreate and otherwise accept their lot. And those who are smarter, or who recognise opportunity faster, or who get that it’s not that hard, build the devices and the interfaces that reveal facets of the potential to the rest. Occasionally someone will have a lucky break, but most efforts will fail, in this technological survival of the fittest.
So, we bumble along, just like those before us. For our primitive forebears, death was only a whisper away — from predators, from warring tribes, from desperate people who would kill to survive. And yet, they survived, and flourished.
Even as technology offers such huge promise and yet poses so great a threat on our survival, we can only hope that we, and our future generations will do the same.