The Machine Is Us

History repeats itself

 I recently attended a lecture in the UCLA Film and Television School about “Navigating the World of Narrative”. The speaker for the week was Bran Ferren, Co-chairman and Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds. He is a designer and technologist working in entertainment, product development, engineering, architecture and the sciences. What impressed me the most about Bran was that he had a clear vision of the future of technology and the impact it would have on narrative and the way we communicate with each other. I walked out of the class knowing that I had witnessed a great speech by a true visionary and I remembered the comment he made about technology that really struck me the most.

The often misunderstood term in the modern dictionary is “technology”.  What exactly is technology? One definition is that it is anything that innovates or radically changes the way things are done in any walk of life – from art to science to commerce. Today, it is hard to imagine a life without the various technologies we currently use. But it is important to understand that a lot of the stuff that is second nature to us today was at some point “technology”. For instance, the wheel, which radically changed how humans moved around on the planet and was the genesis of our colonization of the planet, was unthinkable by the masses at some point in history. A more recent example is the internet that has fundamentally changed the way we think about a lot of things in our day to day lives. Go back 50 years in time and most of the things we do and the way we do them were unthinkable. Fast forward 50 years in future and you can imagine that we will be doing things that we do not even know today, using “technologies” that do not even exist today to solve problems that have not been created yet.

Another example is the television, which has now become one of the basic necessities of living. In the early twentieth century it was hard to imagine a device that would bring all the greatest content from around the world right in to our living room with a click of a button. But as we all know, that did happen and has been a quantum leap in the way we entertain ourselves. And this will happen again; over and over again. Because we, as humans, are wired to constantly change the way things work and make them better. The human desire to perpetually innovate is why we dominate the planet today. And the bottom line is this – technology is really a relative term. Tens of thousands of years ago growing crops, so you could feed on them, was technology because it was unheard of before. Today nanotech, artificial intelligence and the semantic web is “technology” as we have never heard of it before. So the next time you hear about an idea that sounds absurd because you think it has never been heard of before – think again! History does repeat itself.