Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

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.

Posted on by rjonakait

Feed the Monster (continued)

AJ, my non-binary progeny, has had what you might call “difficulties” coming to terms with being a boy trapped in a girl’s body and has written about that on this blog. (“Toy Retreat,” October 8, 2021; “Dinner With Mom and Dad,” December 20, 2021; “Clothes Make the Man-Child,” January 14, 2022; and “Non-Binary Tennis,” August 31, 2022.) Today AJ continues to guest blog about perhaps the most difficult part of that journey–his struggle with body image, food, and the lapse in mental and physical health that made it clear that some critical life decisions were necessary. Here is the third part of AJ’s essay: 

Binging became a way of life, but the binging benders became menacing. Here was my M.O.: after eating, say, a 500g tub of raisins (which equals about 1.1 lbs. of those purple suckers) I’d have to punish myself by exercising excessively and skipping meals for the next three days. I’d skip meals, and when I did eat, I would only allow myself fruits or veggies—nothing more, only hopefully less—and I’d force myself to jump on the elliptical and burn off as many calories as I ingested…or, better yet, more. I started to subsist on a cycle of binges. Even I knew it wasn’t really what you’d call, ahem, healthy.

So, I figured out a new way to binge. This was known as “social engagements with parent(s) or friend(s).” I would concoct opportunities to go out with friends pretending to be all human and social-like. In the guise of broadening my palette and under the pretext of being adventurous and enjoying the foodie revolution, I allowed myself the ingestion of extra calories. Obsessing over restaurant menus became a food porn fun fixation. Once a plan was made and a date set, I would eagerly look at the restaurant’s menu online to calculate the caloric and nutritional makeup of dishes I might realistically consume. Then I would obsess over pictures of each and every dish. I wouldn’t just look at the menu once, no no no, but many times and on an increasingly frequent and frenzied scale as the time of the outing approached. I looked at the pictures of my projected dish and checked its nutritional facts for the nth time. I also perused what dishes my friends might order and got off on that, because I would probably be granted a taste of their food (everyone knows to this day to give me their leftovers).

There were strict dining rules I instituted for myself. Rule 1: never order a restaurant’s “special” because it wasn’t in the original plan, and I hadn’t been able to research its calorie count. Rule 2: never eat meat at restaurants because you never knew where the restaurant got its meat or how much butter they cooked it in—too much fat of unknown provenance. Thus, Rule 3: never eat anything fried. Rule 4: never eat pasta or pizza, or pretty much anything Italian-American or Asian noodle-y. Pasta and noodles were pure evil with no nutritional redemption. Rule 5: eat small plates and portions. Rule 6: eat only a vegetable dish or salad or a low-fat seafood dish, bivalve or crustacean preferred (!). Rule 6.5: dressings were always “on the side” (thanks, Lisa Lillien). Rule 7: eschew the bread basket and dessert menu (sob). Rule 8: drink only red wine or hard liquor; beer was too caloric and white wine had no redeeming value. Rule 9: have fun (LOL). Rule 10: remember that tomorrow you will pay for this.

I was lucid enough to realize that I was barely subsisting on my home rationing of fruits and vegetables, but this binging pattern came as something of a surprise. Why, I wondered, did I need to binge? My answer was an all-American one: I wasn’t getting enough protein, of course! Restaurants became my sole protein source, and because I was afraid of restaurant meat, I started eating seafood in all its frightening forms: bivalves and crustaceans (a.k.a. sea bugs and slugs), and regular old run-of-the-mill terrifying fish (fish have faces only their mothers could love). I ensured that none of my fish was ever cooked in butter, never ever fried, and I naturally eschewed the fatty fish skin (what a waste of nutrients). And fish, well, I could exercise him away. A leafy green salad, and I was all set. Dressing on the side, please.

It appeared to me that I was sculpting a more masculine physique, but looking back, it was only the physique of a skinny little boy or, more aptly, an anorexic pre-pubescent waif of a girl. In thinning myself out, I did decrease my womanly fat pockets, but I still saw them…big and bold. They were still there because that was how I was built. I hadn’t accomplished exercising/exorcising the girl away. She still mocked me in my inner thighs and womb bump (in latin, wombum bumpum).

Shockingly, I wasn’t able to accomplish nearly as much exercise as I previously could. All forms of my calisthenics were looking more like little twitches of movement. I was vaguely aware that I was no longer building muscle, but I didn’t think I was losing any. I was boyifying myself, you see, and that was what was important.

The problem was that I was still friggin’ hungry! Eating a real-ish meal once or even twice a week at a restaurant wasn’t cutting it. Food. Food. Food. Food, glorious food! I needed it. Virtual food wasn’t enough. I needed to see it. I needed to be around it. Mostly, I needed to EAT it, but my mission wouldn’t allow that.  So—new strategy—I became a grocery store voyeur.

(continued October 17)