America has been called a Christian nation, a conservative country, a progressive nation, the Great Satan, and a lot of other things. Some flattering, some accurate, and some at times insulting. But throughout the 20th century and into the new millennium, most would agree that America has been an unusually innovative nation. The basis of that innovation has been technology built on a foundation of science. The transcontinental railroad made possible by the industrial revolution, the telegraph and telephone by electro-mechanics, and commercial radio and TV by the solid state electronics that followed are just a few of the notable technologies that changed the day-to-day life of every citizen. A case can be made that we are in large part a science nation, despite long-standing efforts to the contrary when the findings of science clash with the narrow pursuit of profit and power.
If anything, the pace of change wrought by technology has accelerated. There is not one key breakthrough that led to a particular invention that dominated all others. Rather, it is many of them working together that often produced the biggest changes. But here we’ll try to zero in on one each decade that had a huge effect. Often times laboratory prototypes and commercial forerunners had been around for years, but then came into their own in an especially visible way. The 1940s were at first utterly dominated by World War II, but in the immediate aftermath, the automobile may be a good example of this approach. Cars had been around for half a century, affordable ones for years before the war, but it was afterward, with the development of modern highways and other components, that they became so ubiquitous, so necessary, that the social fabric of the nation was radically altered.
That might be the last decade where a purely mechanical gizmo could be crowned king change-maker. Going forward, many and perhaps all of the biggest changes came about because of advances in electronics. Starting in the 1950s when an invention that had been around since the roaring 20s started popping up in ordinary middle-class households by the truckloads. TV forever changed us beyond providing entertainment. It forged a powerful sense of common national identity through programs watched by millions, gave advertisers whole new middle-class markets, and in some sense rekindled a once widely shared experience similar in some ways to the ancient circle, when friends and family huddled around a central fire to stay warm, cook, eat, gossip, and tell tall tales. Every decade has its technological consequences. We’re looking ahead at a new year, in no time, we’ll be looking at the start of a whole new decade. But we have time to look back, and time to look ahead.
One of biggest changes in the 1960s came about because of a revolution in tiny devices: the commercial production and widespread use of the integrated circuit, brought on in part by the Cold War and the early days of the dawning space race. The first patents and designs were developed at the end of the 1950s and had roots going back further. But once companies like Texas Instruments got into the game, the number of transistors packed on a single chip began to march faster and faster to the beat of Moore’s Law. At the start of the decade, it was a miracle of integration to seat 10 transistors on one postage stamp-sized wafer, by the year 1970 large-scale integration was churning out even smaller chips with thousands of logic gates, many from a new upstart based out of San Jose called Intel. The switch from individual coffee-can transistors to large scale integration changed everything, and laid a sturdy foundation for even more incredible changes to come. Especially in computers.
So it’s no surprise that by 1970, large mainframe computers had begun altering the business landscape and those effects quickly trickled down into everyday life. In no time banks, hotels, airlines, and just about every other large corporation had forever done away with clerks manning a chalkboard or a written ledger. They now had terminals tied to a mainframe with futuristic—at the time!—greenish, blocky text that instantly updated deposits and withdrawals, or reservations and delays. By the middle of the decade even smaller firms had gotten in on the action. For large businesses the mainframe was on premises, but for those smaller ones it soon became possible for several businesses to tie in by phone line and time share. An early hint of what would come.
1980-1989: Just as IBM and Intel, and their many imitators, were busy transforming big business in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the personal computer brought the revolution to smaller offices and began to invade our homes. What started as a high-tech toy became an indispensable tool. Cable TV also deserves a mention for the ‘80s even though it had been around for a while. It was in the early ‘80s that channels like HBO, MTV, and CNN changed our lives like broadcast TV did in the ‘50s, but equally important, the infrastructure supporting it, coaxial cable and fiber optics, could pack a lot more of a data wallop than a single pair of copper wires strung by Ma Bell.
While a lot of people might pick the ‘90s as the age of the Internet, a good case can be made that it was actually the development of affordable cellphones with enough coverage that they became practical and, ultimately, indispensable technology. The brick and bag phones first gave way to the slimmer bricks and sporty flip phones. Coverage grew quickly from spotty large population centers to interstate and transnational. Cell phones had a more sustained impact from that decade’s early start to final finish than just about any other mass marketed commercial technology I can think of. And again, cell phone were the seeds of a future decade’s revolution.
But there is little doubt the Internet solidly took over the nation and the world in the awkwardly named “oughts,” from 2000-2009. It quickly rose to popularity in the late ‘90s, but the really big changes and features it brought had fully come of age starting at the dawn of the new millennium, despite the dot-com bust that started the show, and never looked back.
And on our own decade, 2010-2019? While it’s not over yet, and we mentioned cell phones already, it looks like the biggest lifestyle impact will be from the rise of smart phones. The age of the “tricorder” has arrived. Blackberry was one of the first big selling models, then Apple really popularized the idea beginning in 2007 with its first iPhone. I give it to the teens because, like the popularization of the Internet in the late ‘90s, it took another few years to get smart phones into a lot of hands, develop new apps, start up new businesses that revolved around the devices, and ultimately adapt just about every existing business to them in some way.
Which brings up the obvious question: what technology already on the drawing board or being rolled out might transform the world in the 2020s?
Several people I asked mentioned 3-D printing. A technology that definitely has a lot of potential. The printers could end up being like a crude “transporter.” This technology could well change the very materials and design of just about everything, from clothing to toasters to TV dinners, in order for them to be “printable” right in your home or business.
Big Data is another candidate. Not many understand what that’s all about, but a decent example we can all relate to might help. At least half of you reading this clearly remember when we had to memorize physical addresses and how to get there. But now all we have to remember are some basic search engine protocols, and we can find any listed address. Big data does a similar kind of thing on a much wider context; it searches, compares, and correlates or excludes any piece of data from or with others on massive scales. The applications from this could be breathtaking—a treatment for Alzheimer’s hiding in disparate data—far beyond figuring out who would be the best Facebook users to shoot clothing ads at.
But if I had to make a risky prediction, it’s Artificial intelligence. Either on its own or paired with large-scale automation like driverless vehicles, aircraft, and spacecraft. In fact, the combo of AI, Big Data, and robotics would be the trifecta. The latter synergy has the power to really change the economy down to the most fundamental level. To render money as we know it worthless. Or so I’ve argued in the past. It’s a fair bet something like this will happen sooner or later. But when and how that might happen, we can only guess.
And that’s the important takeaway, no one can say. It could go way south: the 2020s could be dominated by plagues or global war, economic calamity precipitated by the US or China breaking up, even environmental or space-based catastrophe is possible. All have happened before.
There could also be a revolutionary breakthrough in alternative energy that would safely power the world into a new and promising age. Perhaps the next decade will see advances in regenerative medicine that can significantly extend lifespans and starts to finally chip away at the shackles of the flesh and the twin curses of aging and death.
Since no one knows, we can hope for the best. A New Year, new plans, new elections, and after all, if you are reading this, you are still here, you are able to take part, and you can still make a difference.
“However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.
Where there's life, there's hope.”— Stephen Hawking