Traders in Chicago: trillions of dollars move between continents at the speed of light, but it takes five days to clear a cheque. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images Science advances, said the great German physicist Max Planck , “one funeral at a time”. Actually, this is a paraphrase of what he really said, which was: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” But you get the drift.
I always think of Planck’s aphorism whenever moral panic breaks out over the supposedly dizzying pace of technological change. Which happens all the time nowadays, even though the data says otherwise . If you take as your measure of speed how long it takes a “new” technology to be adopted by 50% of US households, for example, then radios (eight years) and black-and-white TVs (nine) reached that threshold faster than PCs (17) or mobile phones (15).
So when we talk about the pace of change, it makes sense to distinguish between different kinds of innovation. If the change requires the building of infrastructure – the electricity grid or the internet, say – then the pace of change can be very slow. But if it just involves innovations that harness existing infrastructure – new TV formats or smartphone apps – the pace can indeed be dizzying, because they just piggyback on existing infrastructure. This is why Uber and Airbnb took so long to materialise: they needed smartphones, GPS and ubiquitous wireless networking before they became viable, whereas Facebook only needed the web. And the web itself spread like wildfire only because the infrastructure it needed – the wired internet – was already in place. No digging required. Around […]
