Many of you will still be alive in 50 years. It’s interesting to think about what life will be like in 50 years technologically and otherwise. Predictions are risky, especially when they’re about the future, but I believe we can make some pretty good guesses. To predict a predictable future, you need to look at the past. What was technological life like 50 years ago? 50 years ago was 1959. The world of 1959 is pretty much the same world we live in today technologically speaking. This is a vaguely horrifying fact which is little appreciated. In 1959, we had computers, international telephony, advanced programming languages like Lisp, which remains the most advanced programming language, routine commercial jet flight, atomic power, internal combustion engines about the same as modern ones, supersonic fighter planes, television and the transistor.
The rate of change between 1959 and 1909 is nothing short of spectacular. In that 50 years, humanity invented jet aircraft, supersonic flight, fuel-injected internal-combustion engines, the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, space flight, gas warfare, nuclear power, the tank, antibiotics, the polio vaccine, radio; and these are just a few items off the top of my head. You might try to assert that this was a particularly good era for technological progress, but the era between 1859 and 1909 was a similar explosion in creativity and progress, as was the 50 years before that, at the dawn of the Industrial revolution. You can read all about it in Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, though I warn you, if you’re in a creative or technical profession Murray’s widely ignored book is even more depressing than this essay. Murray didn’t restrict his attentions to technological progress: across the entire panoply of human endeavor (art, science, literature, philosophy, Mathematics) the indications are grim. You may disagree with the statistical technique he used (I don’t), but you can’t escape the conclusion—things are slowing down.
We are not living in a time of technical decline exactly, but we are also not living in a time of great progress. As such, I don’t think the world of 50 years hence will look very technologically different from the world now. Our rate of progress is fairly small, and I’m not the only one to notice. This is despite the fact that there are more technologists alive now than ever lived in human history before. Some people argue that this is because prior generations did, “the easy stuff,” leaving nothing for modern people to do. I think this is untrue. None of it was easy; it only looks that way after it is done. I could come up with all kinds of reasons why modern technologists aren’t as good as they were: rotten educational facilities, modern tort law, endless bureaucracy, the death of the lone inventor. But in the end, a Kipling couplet will suffice:
None too learned, but nobly bold,
Into the fight went our fathers of old.
