Today, I am.
Today, I am…much the same as I was yesterday. It’s a very bland and neutral phrase but it’s one of the most apposite that I can imagine to describe the way technology progresses. With the gift of hindsight, mankind has made some pretty incredible technological leaps in its 20,000 decades on this planet. You can imagine the grin of surprise and delight on the face of the caveman who first turned a lightning strike or a wildfire into the first ever barbecue.
Maybe it was corn on the cob, perhaps a hog roast but pretty soon those extra calories from all that cooked food were setting us on the path to become settlers rather than hunter gatherers, and to grow and amass our own food.
The rest is, as they say, history. A quick jump from fire to iPhones with a few colourful characters like Archimedes, Da Vinci, Newton and Einstein along the way to the post-Jobsian era of the early 21st Century. At least that’s the way it reads in the history books.
The history books are our highlighted and artfully edited York Notes to the past. If you’ve ever been bored by a historical tome then you really should be entitled to shoot the author. No one wants to read about the days where nothing happens: the days where Newton went for a jog; washed his dog and cut his toenails.
For all we know that may have been the happiest day of his life. Maybe he had the most mind-blowing sex of his life with his wife / mistress / garden boy that day. But, unless he thought to include it in his journal, and some historical completist trawled through his archive looking for juice to publish, then we’d be stuck with the story of the apple and the principles of gravity.
The same with Archimedes and his Eureka. He must have seen things bobbing around in his bathwater countless times before that day, especially given the behaviour the ancient Greeks were famous for, so what prompted that most famous of light bulb moments?
One day the same may be true of our current century. I was born in 1972 in a very quiet corner of the United Kingdom. I don’t remember technology bothering us much when I was a kid. We had a ride on lawnmower that my brothers and I thought was the batmobile but that was as much as gadgetry intruded on our lives back then.
That would all change, of course. And throughout the 1980s my dad would bring home devices – anonymous wood effect boxes – that might or might not show signs of working after an evening spent pushing and prodding at them.
I remember these evening as being private ones for my dad. He’d sequester himself in the living room with strict instructions that no one should enter until the grand unveiling was ready. At the start of the evening this would invariably be phrased as ‘in half an hour’ and would subsequently stretch until way after our bedtime.
And so we came to be the proud owners of a teletext set (younger readers may have to jump out to Google right about now). Teletext was to dominate my family’s activities for more than a decade. These simple text pages were a prototype internet to my family.
We read the news on them, checked the TV listings. My dad even booked our holidays from its last-minute bargains. To this day I still don’t really understand how it worked. I know that the streams came alongside the TV pictures but quite how the remote picked the pages from the ether, I’ll never really know. Especially as our TV picture back then – especially in the summer – was constantly being invaded by signals from Holland or maybe Belgium.
So, Teletext defined my pre-teens. But we’re unlikely to see any three volume explorations of its impact on society. It touched a few million lives but it’s hardly likely to be remembered as one of history’s major milestones.
Unlike the day that Steve Jobs launched the iPhone and changed the world. In time, text books will tell us that lights dimmed across the planet thanks to the worldwide power surge caused by billions tuning in to TVs and computer screens to watch Steve’s life changing address.
Before that day – January 09 2007 to be exact – our mobile phones just did boring things like make calls and text. Take photos. Access the Internet and email. Do some basic word processing and spreadsheet editing. And only needed charging a couple of times a week.
The next day we threw those tired old candy bars away and camped out at Apple Stores, patiently waiting for our turn to purchase a slice of tomorrow at the Genius Bar. All of us. Roughly 6 billion multi-coloured people at the time, if memory serves.
Because we knew our lives would be completely transformed by apps. Midwives knew that they would deliver babies more safely with an app to remind them of the procedures for home births. Policemen could wave their phone at a crowd and facial recognition software would rank the lurking crims in order of dastardly preference.
NASA suddenly had a computer system it could put in its space shuttles that didn’t run on diskettes. In short, the world changed overnight.
Except that it didn’t. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone we’d ever seen. It certainly was the best, but some of us had been beavering away for a few years already, trying to make a go of devices from Palm and Sony (Palm OS), Dell, HP and Acer (Windows), Nokia (Symbian) that combined the worst elements of telephones and personal computing (ie devices that weren’t really very good at making calls or being a computer).
But we knew that the future would catch up with us and reward our perseverance. And Steve came in and gave us the device we always suspected we wanted but hadn’t quite managed to form in our minds.
And now doctors can use iPhones instead of stethoscopes. They can command robots to conduct surgery thousands of miles away while they watch on an iPad screen over a Starbucks macchiato.
But the world didn’t turn on its axis. The poles didn’t switch. Water came out of the taps and electricity crackled through the walls. In short, everything was much the same as it was the day before the iPhone was launched, or the day before Newton’s apple fell or Archimedes’ submarine bubbled in his tub.
So that’s why, today, I am much the same as I was yesterday, because ultimately our technological jumps are anti-climactic. But if it’s hard to spot them while we’re living them, how do we know the difference between an iPhone and Teletext?
Over the course of this series we’re going to look at some technologies and the possible futures they might bring us. And like all attempts to harness the future, for every steam engine we’re probably going to have nine mechanical donkeys. So, unless someone unveils an anti-gravity pack tomorrow, I can go to sleep tonight safe in the knowledge that, zombies aside, tomorrow will look pretty much like it did yesterday.