I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with saying: “The only constant in life is change.” I’m also reminded of my favorite science fiction soliloquy, which was given by the replicant Roy Batty towards the end of the 1982 movie Blade Runner. I can hear this in my head as I pen these words: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate […]” I can’t but agree with these sentiments because I’ve seen things—in the form of technological evolutions and innovations—that even I didn’t believe.
When I’m talking to younger folks in general, if I tell them about the technologies that were around when I was a kid, it sounds to them as though I lived in ancient times. Even when talking to young engineers about the tools and technologies that were available when I commenced my career, they look at me as though I was making things up.
Take television, for example. When I was a kid circa the early 1960s, we had one huge set with a small screen. This was cathode-ray-tube (CRT)-based and it weighed a ton. We didn’t own it. My parents rented it. If it broke down, a TV repair man came round to the house and fixed it. The picture was presented in glorious black-and-white. The thought of a color television never even struck me until I saw one in a department store window when I was about six years old. I remember standing in the street with my nose pressed against the glass staring in disbelief. I even remember the program it was showing.
There were only two TV channels in England at that time, and these were only on for part of the day. Children’s programs started at 4:00. The news was at 6:00, after which the adults got to watch their programs until broadcasting ceased around 10:00pm (by which time I was in bed). The thought of having high-definition, flat-panel, color televisions in almost every room in the house was beyond our wildest dreams at that time, yet here we are.
And then there were the telephones. We had one black rotary dial phone, wired to the wall, sitting on a corner table at the end of the hall. Also on the table was a 2”-thick telephone directory listing the numbers of all the people in our city. My dad had one sister who lived round the corner from us and two more who had emigrated with their families to Canada. A few weeks before Christmas, my aunt would come to our house, and then she and my mother would attempt to call Canada. First, they would call the local operator, who would connect them with the international operator in London, who would connect them to the international operator in Canada, who would connect them with the local operator in Edmonton, who… nuff said. Now, my mother can contact me 24/7 on my smartphone and we FaceTime for a few minutes every day.
The funny thing is that humans tend to think the technology we see around us is as good as it’s going to get. As the distinguished Roman aristocrat Sextus Julius Frontinus famously said in 98AD, “Inventions have long-since reached their limit and I see no hope for further development.” He wasn’t alone, in 1888, the Canadian-American Astronomer Simon Newcomb opined: “There is little left in the heavens to discover.” More than three decades passed before Edwin Hubble showed there were other galaxies beyond the Milky Way. And then there’s the American Physicist Albert Michelson who proclaimed in 1894, “The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered.” Imagine his face when Joseph John Thomson discovered the electron three years later.
It’s not all that long ago that things like tablet computers, smartphones, GPS, and connected devices were the stuff of dreams. Now we take them for granted and think nothing of them. Many people believe that we’ve got as far as we’re going to go. All I can say is, “The only constant in life is change!”