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The Three Revolutionary Technological Innovations of a Lifetime

From a previous barstool conversation, I knew that he had graduated from the same university as I had, but he also had a Ph.D. in political science from there. I assumed that he was smart, knowledgeable, provocative, witty, charming, a chick-magnet, but, at best, a mediocre dancer. He had recently started to work for Meta, that Facebook company, doing some sort of computer work that I only vaguely understood.

After some catching up (I had not been in the biergarten for months), he said that there had been three revolutionary tech advances in his lifetime (he is 33) — smartphones, the internet, and ChatGPT. I said that I could understand his inclusion of iPhones and the internet, but that I did not know enough about AI to have an opinion about its status on his list. He said that he used it every day at work and pulled out his smartphone to give me an example of ChatGPT’s marvels.

 He asked what the most important technological innovations in my lifetime were. I had not thought about this before. I did not have an immediate answer. Instead, I said that I knew of many things that were better than when I was a kid, but the improvements seemed to have been incremental or evolutionary not some giant leap in technology. Cars, for example, are better than decades ago. Microwave ovens are nice but not transformative, and so on.

Then I did think of a technological change that had big impact on the spouse. She was writing her Ph.D. dissertation. Her writing until then had been done by hand or on a typewriter and drafts were time consuming and often messy. However, she found that she had access to a clunky new machine that was dedicated to a new task, word processing. Her life had changed, and, of course, that made me realize that one of the important innovations during my lifetime has been the personal computer.

The Meta friend said that he had been told that one advance that had been incredibly important during my lifetime was air conditioning. I agreed. While AC was invented before my days, it became widespread after I was born. And it changed this country tremendously. Places that are now heavily populated would not be, and this has had many consequences.

Our conversation continued to resonate after I left the bar. I told some friends about it, and this led to other interesting discussions. I realized that the Meta friend’s three innovations are, in a sense, not three separate advances. They are intertwined. Smartphones are amazing. They do allow for interpersonal communications that did not exist before, but their real power is that they connect to the internet. Without the internet they would not be so revolutionary. I still think it is too early to know the importance of ChatGPT. Many things have been hyped in our lifetimes that within a decade or so are largely forgotten—iPods and CD and DVD players in the entertainment fields, for example. AI was barely mentioned a few years ago, so I hope it is all right for me to keep on open mind about its importance. However, conceding that I know little about it, I believe that its revolutionary power depends on computer programming and the internet. In other words, one technological advance is at the core of all three of his innovations—the internet.

The discussions about these innovations regularly brought up where to draw the line between revolutionary and evolutionary advances. Smartphones have meant that we can bring a personal computer with us wherever we are. Much of what we can do on these devices, however, we could do before on a personal computer, but not as easily or conveniently. So aren’t personal computers the real revolutionary technology and smartphones only an incremental advance on them?  Possibly, but I do believe that smartphones have been transformative. Their impact on society in such a short time is remarkable. It is hard to remember that iPhones only came on the market in 2007. Imagine the effect on society if smartphones were magically banned. And if ChatGPT were banned? I think few of us would know what the consequences would be.

Many conversations on these topics considered advances that were important to this country throughout its history, not just during the most recent decades. Transportation was a frequent theme. For the first quarter of America’s existence, passenger and freight traffic predominantly went by water. Locations not by the coast or near navigable streams were isolated. The Erie Canal was revolutionary by putting water that could bear passengers and freight where it was advantageous. The result changed the country and made New York City the country’s dominant metropolis.

The innovation, however, that truly began to tie the country together geographically was a network of trains. Distances closed and locations without water transportation were settled more often. We have seen many improvements in transportation since the beginning of the train network. If we hold in mind the major impact of trains, are planes revolutionary or evolutionary? Are jet planes revolutionary compared to the previous planes?

We may not agree on those answers, but I think there would be more consensus on the transformative power of automobiles. That leads to the question of whether the interstate highway system built during my lifetime has been revolutionary.

Another frequent theme in my innovation discussions concerned communications. The telegraph, I believe, produced revolutionary changes in the country. It, like the trains, tied the country together on commercial, informational, and personal levels that the nation had not had before. In a museum a few years ago, I saw the many extras that the New York Herald produced after the assassination of Lincoln. Because of the telegraph, news was in readers’ hands only fifteen minutes or so after the event. It seemed only a bit short of the you-are-there television coverage of Kennedy’s assassination.

If the telegraph was revolutionary, how about telephones? Merely evolutionary or something more?

Radio, which directly entered homes unlike the telegraph, also seems revolutionary. Radio did many things, but it tended to give the country a widespread popular culture that it had not had before. Then along came television. And movies. And cameras.

The discussions of revolutionary technological changes were primed with mentions of smartphones, the internet, and ChatGpt, and the conversations naturally tended to center on what we personally use. There could have been revolutionary advances, for example, in the construction industry, and few of us would have been aware of them. If there have been remarkable innovations in the production of concrete and plywood, for example, I and my discussants were not aware of them. Perhaps surprisingly, none of my New York conversants mentioned the modern skyscraper or elevators, which together transformed cities.

No one suggested any advances in military weaponry although there have been many in my lifetime. (Are drones transformative?) Perhaps most surprising, no one mentioned one of the most important advances of the twentieth century—nuclear power. (The first nuclear bombs were dropped while I was in diapers.) And in the discussions about an earlier America, I am surprised that no one mentioned electric lights or indoor plumbing. However, a friend did maintain that a revolutionary advance in our lifetime was transistors, which transformed electronic devices, and led to computer chips. There is clear path from transistors to the internet, smartphones, AI, and so much more.

We all know that there have been important medical advances in our lifetimes. I certainly am a beneficiary with my artificial joints (three), artificial heart valve (one), and stents (lost track). I doubt that anyone of these in isolation is revolutionary, but the spouse had a broader perspective and said that the advances in medical imaging have been revolutionary.

Some revolutionary advances, such as in medicine and war, are not in the daily sight of most of us. Other revolutionary advances have been so incorporated into society and our lives that they seem invisible. None of my discussants mentioned two that transformed the world during my lifetime: the polio vaccine and birth control. Just think of the world before and after them.

The conversation started by my fellow alum has produced much thought about technology, innovations, society, and history. What would you say are the three most important technological innovations during your lifetime?

Whatever you select, important change can come without revolutionary technologies. We, perhaps, should discuss them, too. I know, for example, that I am extremely grateful for the increases in my lifetime of the availability of pizza.

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Culture Wars

The scope and intensity of our present culture wars may seem unprecedented, but there have also been discussions of how today’s turbulences compare with those of 1968. I understand the urge to do that, but the earlier time is often brought up in a nonsensical, competitive way—was 1968 worse than today? I, too, have indulged in such discussions, but what is the point of old folks telling younger ones that it was worse or better a half century ago? The words of Alexander Pope should come to mind: “Some old men by continually praising the time of their youth would almost persuade us that there were no fools in those days; but unluckily they are left themselves for examples.”

On the other hand, we should examine the past to learn from it. The adage that unless we learn from history, we are condemned to repeat it is, of course, false. History is not a cycle or circle. It is a continuum. Today was not created this morning; the world did not begin with the sunrise.  The seeds of the present were planted in the past, and an understanding of history helps us understand today. Certainly, many of the present battle zones are just further representations of themes of our history.

One fierce area of contention today is over sexuality. The battle may seem narrow concentrating on the transgender and same sex relationships, but U.S. history is replete with attempts to control sexuality. We have had laws that made fornication, adultery, and sodomy criminal. We have had laws restricting birth control. We have had dress codes, which, of course, were also aimed at restricting sexuality. We have had battles over sex education. And, I am sure, that you can think of other examples that were aimed at sexual impulses and identities. It may be the land of the free, but it has also been the land where some have always wanted to impose their sexual views on others.

Issues about race today may seem to center on the often-undefined Critical Race Theory, but one needs only a little familiarity with our national background to know that issues of race were with us when the country was founded and have been a central focus throughout our history. Pick any historical era, and you will find that concern about race was a driver of what was happening. The Civil War was about race, but only because of what happened before. The Civil Rights Era was about race, but only because of what happened before. The effort to stem Critical Race Theory is about race, but only because of what happened before.

Race has also been a component of immigration battles throughout our history. Our first naturalization law, — in effect for over a century — allowed only whites to be naturalized. This led to tortured Supreme Court decisions as to whether a Syrian or a Sikh was white. Our laws at one time banned Chinese workers from the country (and states forbade Asians from owning property.) Our restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s came in response to waves of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and others from Southern Europe because these people were not seen as really white (leading to the oft-repeated, only half-joking question, Are Italians white?)

The concern over immigrants, however, is also part of another theme of our history, an American concern and fear about the foreign “other.” From the country’s inception, there were strong anti-Irish sentiments that intensified after England’s heartless responses to the potato famine brought waves of Irish immigrants. As Catholics, they could not be American, or so thought many, under the theory that they owed allegiance to a foreign potentate, the Pope.

After the Civil War, the fear of the foreign other shifted. With accelerating industrialization came increased labor strife. Instead of examining the complaints about corporate or monopolistic practices, the owners and government officials dismissed labor leaders as foreign-born or under the sway of the foreign, un-American ideology of anarchism. The country saw something similar as it countered opposition to World War I. Fear of “foreign” ideologies intensified after World War II. Reformers of all sorts were labeled as communists or socialists. These were “foreign” ideas, after all, and those advocating for changes they thought could produce a better society must be under the influence of Russia and, later, China. Adopting a more current term, these reformers needed to be “cancelled.” 

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union came the realization that there was no meaningful foreign-inspired radical movement in the country. For the first time in well over a century we did not have a foreign “other” to fuel cries for patriotic Americanism. But then 9/11 came to ramp it up again, this time focusing on Moslems. The current immigration fears of Mexican rapists, immigrant welfare recipients, and Venezuelan communists have their historical roots in a long, unsavory American history.

We have more positive themes in our history and society, but sex, race, and the foreign “other” have been dominant ones that continue in all sorts of ways. Conservatives still respond to proposals for government actions with the cry of socialism because socialism, somehow, always smacks of the foreign. That, of course, is not new. Medicare and polio vaccinations were called socialism. The environmentalist Rachel Carson was said to be inspired by the communists. Martin Luther King was following Russian orders. And now Critical Race Theory is dismissed as stemming from Marxism, even though I am quite sure that Karl, Engels, Lenin, and even Trotsky never considered CRT. Instead of debating the merits of its message, we seek to undermine it by implying that it is foreign-inspired. While these forces within of our history persist, a theme of our early history seems to have been lost. Our founding era was a product of the Enlightenment. This period was not characterized by a rigid philosophical notion or ideology. Instead, it was a way of thinking that encouraged an examination of the world with skepticism but with confidence in reason, study, and observation. Such contemplation and study was to lead to a better understanding of history, nature, and society with the core belief that things could be improved. This should be the primary goal of education, but such Enlightenment thinking seems to have abandoned us.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Rich Get Richer . . . The Poor Get Children (continued)

Kate Simon’s memoir Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, like Bad Girl, also describes working-class, 1920s New York, although Simon is narrating from the viewpoint of a young girl. She and her family were then living in a Bronx neighborhood largely inhabited by immigrant Jews and Italians, and she was struggling to understand the world she was encountering, including the visits of Dr. James. He was seldom seen by the kids because he came when school was in session. No explanation was given for the appearance of this tall, fair “American” in a neighborhood of short, dark “foreigners.” However, Simon noticed, the mothers he visited, who were fine in the morning, were in bed when school let out.

Years later Simon’s medical relatives told her that Dr. James had had a prestigious and lucrative medical practice and came from the prosperous New England family that produced the writers and intellectuals William and Henry James. After his children were raised, Dr. James dedicated himself to poor immigrant women who had “no sex information, no birth-control clinics, nothing but knitting needles, hat pins, lengths of wire, the drinking of noxious mixtures while they sat in scalding baths to prevent the birth of yet another child. Some of these women died of infections, and often when these procedures did not work, the women went to term and then let the infant die of exposure or suffocation.”

To prevent such deaths, Dr. James went from one immigrant neighborhood to another performing abortions. Often charging nothing but never more than a dollar or two, James performed thousands of the procedures. All the adults knew what he did, and according to Simon, so did the police and the Board of Health who generally let him be. Periodically, however, when there was some change in officialdom, he was arrested. He wouldn’t post bail but contacted colleagues. Doctors then thronged the courthouse where “they pleaded, they argued, they shouted, they accused the police and the court of ignorance and inhumanity,” and each time Dr. James was released.

James was a skillful and careful practitioner and would not perform an abortion if it would be too dangerous. Simon had a much younger sister, and when Kate was an adult, her mother told Simon that the sister was unwanted. James, however, would not perform an abortion because Simon’s mother had already had too many and another would be hazardous. Shortly before she died, Simon’s mother told Kate that she had had thirteen abortions (as well as three children) and that other women in the neighborhood had had even more. Why do you think, the mother continued, that the Italian women urged to have large families by the Catholic Church had only two or three kids? “Certainly it wasn’t the abstinence of Italian husbands, no more controlled than Jewish husbands. It was the work of the blessed hands of that wonderful old goy.”

          Viña Delmar’s Bad Girl and Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive, both set in lower-class communities of 1920s New York City, indicate that abortion was prevalent in this country a hundred years ago, and they were common earlier.  Thomas J. Schlereth, in his book, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915, cites data showing that abortions were inexpensive and common in the late nineteenth century, with ten dollars being the standard rate in Boston and New York. He reportsthat in 1898 the Michigan Board of Health estimated that one-third of pregnancies were artificially terminated.

Willful infant deaths may also have been frequent. We tend not to think about infanticide, but the concern in our colonial days over it was so great that special evidentiary and other rules were applied when a mother reported a stillbirth or that a baby died shortly after birth.

One of the reasons for the number of abortions was ignorance about sex. In Bad Girls, Dot’s husband has no idea why she is making monthly marks on their calendar.  In our colonial history, and even into the twenty-first century some men believed that a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm and that a woman could only have an orgasm if the intercourse were consensual. Thus, a raped woman could not get pregnant.

Surely sexual ignorance led to abortions. But abortions and infanticides also occurred because of lack or knowledge of other forms of birth control so that the only meaningful “birth control” was abortion.

Perhaps illegal abortions decreased after the 1920s, but that is unknowable. I knew a couple women of my mother’s and my generation who had abortions before they were legal in this country. These were what most would see as ordinary women. Only because I was close to them did I find out about the illegal terminations of their pregnancies. I can assume that of the many older women I have known less well, some, maybe many, also had illegal abortions.

(concluded May 24)