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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.

Posted on by rjonakait

Fund the Police . . . And Others, Too

I have avowed or suggested or implied that a police officer was a liar, had been incompetent, had been less than bright, had used excessive force, had been brutal. I have been personally wary and fearful when I have seen a cop. But I respect the police and what they do.

I didn’t have any contact with the police in the small town where I grew up until I was halfway through high school. Then one day I was asked to go the police station after school where I was questioned by detectives. The crime being investigated had occurred in my girlfriend’s neighborhood. I had dropped Wendy off the previous night. (Of course, I had walked her to the door; I was a young gentleman.) I had been driving my father’s two-toned Oldsmobile, and apparently a neighbor thought that the car had been involved in some sort of incident on the previous night. I seldom drove that or any other car, and although the police kept me for an hour, I was eventually dismissed. Perhaps it was my teenage arrogance (which did not necessarily end with my teenage years), but I was never concerned or scared or apprehensive. I was, after all, innocent. I thought it mostly amusing.

My other contact with a police officer in high school was more informal. On summer mornings I umpired younger kids’ baseball games that were held at what was once a minor league stadium. The program was supervised by a police officer, who, after his midnight-to-eight shift, came to the ballpark. He seemed like a nice guy, but I was shy around adults and learned little about him or his work. I regret my inability to talk more with him. I wonder now what it was like to patrol my hometown and the stories he might have shared. I did not think then about who his friends were or about his family. The kids I hung out with came from a wide economic swath of the town. My friends’ parents worked in factories, were tool and die makers, cabinetmakers, barbers, factory owners, lawyers, bankers, tavern owners, manufacturers’ representatives, physical education teachers, insurance salesmen, clergy, and jewelers. But I knew no one whose parent was a police officer. Whatever world this police officer and his colleagues inhabited, it was completely separate from my world.

I had no contact with the police at my isolated university either. I don’t remember ever seeing an officer on the campus. The police certainly did not seek to enforce the drinking laws. As long as we were on college property, we could have our beer and scotch. This only meant finding a senior to buy the goods and carry it across the street from the liquor store onto the campus. (Done in those genteel days without a fee or surcharge other than one beer for the senior.) There were drinking rules on the campus; underage students were not to drink openly on campus, but it was ok in rooms and certain outdoor places. This restriction was loosely enforced by university security personnel called proctors, and violations were usually met with a mere reprimand. Something more severe, such as breaking a bottle or window, might cause a report to a dean. Never once did it occur to us that such behavior could cause an arrest and trip to the precinct headquarters or to court—something I only thought about a decade later when, working as a public defender, I realized that comparable street corner actions in New York often brought out the handcuffs.

In my college years, I did have one contact with the police. I was sharing driving duties with classmates as we drove from New Jersey to Chicago, and I was stopped by an unmarked car for speeding (which I was) on the turnpike in the middle of Pennsylvania. I was asked to get into the cop car and was driven to a Justice of the Peace where I paid a fine while my college colleagues waited for my return. (I was a little miffed that they did not offer to pick up part of the fine since all of us drove over the speed limit.) I was polite and mostly quiet with the officer. As we got to the court, he said, “I could have charged you for going more than fifteen miles an hour over the limit, and I would have, if you were a wiseass, but you haven’t been.” I thanked him and said, “I was being careful to keep it at thirteen or fourteen miles too fast. I only went above fifteen because I saw you behind me and sped up to get in front of some cars in the right lane to pull over and let you get by me.” He smiled a bit. What I most remember about the drive from the turnpike to pay the fine was that this was my first sight of Appalachia and that many of the houses’ sagging porches looked as though they were being held up by a wash line strung between the corner posts.

Primarily, however, as I left college, I had given little consideration to the police, who they were, where they came from, how they learned their job, or the work they did. I, like almost anyone of my generation, had seen the televised police brutality with civil rights demonstrators, but that was in the South. I assumed that the South was a world apart.

I chose to go to law school in Chicago over what some assumed were more prestigious law schools elsewhere.  After growing up in a little Wisconsin town and going to college in a small, isolated New Jersey village, I wanted to live in a city. The University of Chicago certainly provided me with a new atmosphere. It was a beautiful campus in a beautiful neighborhood, but that neighborhood was small and bordered “ghettoes,” which meant black neighborhoods. We were told that these were not safe for university students, which meant young white people. This was the first time that I lived in a community where people were concerned about crime and their personal safety. These concerns, however, did not cause me to reflect much on the police. They did not seem to me to be my protector; they couldn’t really protect me if I were to become a victim. This was confirmed the first time I was mugged.

I lived in a terrible one-room, one-window apartment with a decrepit bed that came out of the wall. There was no air conditioning and the window faced a brick wall three feet away. During that first hot summer, the apartment was unbearable. I got up one night from my sweat-soaked mattress and decided to make an after midnight walk in hopes of catching a breeze. Instead, I was confronted by teenagers with knives who demanded money. They got it, but they agreed that I could keep my wallet when I said that I didn’t want to have to replace my papers. One said he wanted my watch. I said that a friend had only given it to me a week ago (true) and I would not give it up. The leader smilingly nodded to me, and they ran away without it.

It never occurred to me that a police officer should have or could have prevented this incident. The mugging took just a few moments, and it would have been the barest coincidence if a cop had been nearby when it happened. That was driven home twenty years later when I was robbed at knifepoint again, this time on the Brooklyn block where I live. I was walking from the subway to my home after work on a winter evening when a man walked past me, turned, and blocked my path. He made sure I saw the knife in his right hand and quietly, but menacingly, demanded my money. He got it, but again I retained the wallet. This only took a few moments. Other people were out on the block. I could see my next-door neighbor over the mugger’s shoulder. She yelled hello. She could not see the knife held by the man I was apparently chatting with. I merely nodded in response, and my robber sprinted off after getting my twenty dollars.

(continued Sept. 30)