Technology Change is Slower Than We Think
It may seem like technology is causing rapid change in society. Not really. Such change takes a lot longer than we tend to think. Why?
If the tech industry hype is to be believed, along with the pundits and prognosticators of the technorati, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already changed how we work. Quantum computing is ready to burst forth and change everything AI changed, but even faster. Except none of this is true. This is, in the end, a good thing.
Significant, societal level macro change as a result of technologies, especially revolutionary ones, is slower than we tend to think.It’s also rather messy, unpredictable and a drawn out process of the technology changing society and culture, then culture changing the technology.
For the overwhelming majority of society, they have little understanding of what Artificial Intelligence is. Many assume it is a singular technology and don’t particularly care that it is a suite of technologies in a toolbox. The majority of smartphone users barely use the incredible amount of features on their device.
According to Zippia, around 15% of Americans still use basic feature phones. Thats around 51 million people. Larger than many countries. In developing nations, feature phones still dominate. Many corporations around the world still use database systems that are over 15 years old. Some older. Fax machines too, are still in use, with the latest estimate suggesting around 17 million in 2018.
Websites haven’t really changed that much over the past 25 years. Design styles have, we can buy things on websites, but even that process can still often be clunky. Reading news online has become an increasingly worse experience. While people are increasingly shopping online and would prefer to, online retail is still low and most of our shopping is done in the real world.
Why Technological Change Is Slower Than We Think
Basically it comes down to one word; culture. When revolutionary technologies come along, like Artificial Intelligence, home computing, smartphones, railway trains, culture tends to react with skepticism if society feels some form of existential threat. Less revolutionary technologies and those combined with the original revolutionary technology that come along later are more successful as culture has by then, decided how it wants to use the original, revolutionary technology.
One example of this is earbuds for smartphones. They are quite a feat of technology, but aren’t really seen for just how impressive they are because earphones, wired ones, had become ubiquitous and we were already familiar with Bluetooth headsets from the days of feature phones.
Revolutionary technologies are named as such because they are positioned as changing core aspects of culture; economic and political systems, power structures, norms, traditions and behaviours. Despite the fact that cultures are mutable and constantly changing, humans tend to dislike change at scale and sometimes, personally.
Revolutionary technologies are seen to pose an immediate threat to some and opportunity to others. Initial changes may be fairly quick, but actually play out over years, sometimes decades. We are well over a year since Generative AI (GAI) was positioned as eliminating millions of jobs, marketing was dead, search engines were doomed, we’re all going to need Universal Basic Income. Yet not much has really changed in any meaningful way.
In terms of GAI in business, the hype hasn’t met with reality. And the reality of GAI or other forms of AI is that businesses are wary of many of these tools. A large enterprise is quite cautious when it comes to highly disruptive technologies. The use of AI and other such technologies tends to start with experiments. As the company becomes more confident and the right use cases are found, the technology becomes more used. This can take years.
One major research firm, Gartner, has it’s popular and oft referred to hype cycle. They’re often wrong, but that’s the nature of predicting anything. But the hype cycle is a useful reference point. Particularly what Gartner calls the “trough of disillusionment” where industry finds the promise of the hype to not meet reality.
Large and successful businesses build bureaucracies. These are necessary to operate the business. A large business means it has been successful at growing and managing itself. Making massive organisation wide changes takes years, not weeks or months. And businesses are run by humans, which are emotional, have egos, are far messier than we think and have their own cultures. All of which create headwinds for technologies.
Older AI tools like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing have been in use for decades. Resulting in more jobs, not less. And adoption has largely been in what many would consider rather boring ways. Improving manufacturing processes, better materials for products. It has taken decades for earlier AI tools to permeate industry. GAI will not be much faster.
If you’re thinking, yes, but look at social media and how fast that took off. Well, social media has been around since the late 1970’s. Originally as bulletin boards. Just because some new platform or digital channel gains hundreds of millions of users in a month or less, doesn’t mean it changes all of society.
Societal change due to digital technologies has sped up in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, certainly. But meaningful change is still measured in decades, not months or years. Access to and the ability to produce mass amounts of information can lead us to perceive rapid change. The hype machine of the technorati is a well designed and high functioning engine. But it is not reality.
In my previous article I wrote about how culture is the ultimate arbiter of technology. Sociocultural change takes time as well. Inventors of a revolutionary technology have a vision for how their technology can make the world a better place. But that is always the opinion and view of the inventor. It is not necessarily the opinion and view of society as a whole.
When revolutionary and even just singular, small impact technologies like a software app enter into the market, things always go sideways. Alexander Bell invented the telephone to share opera music, society decided on a use Bell hadn’t imagined. Twitter was supposed to be for paramedics to communicate with ERs en route. We know how that story went.
It is important that new technologies get air time in our society, but in the end, because humans are well, just wonderful, weird, quirky, opinionated and so varied, that technological change is always a lot slower than we may think. That is why, in the end, technologies do become truly useful to us.