Toe in the Water

What Now?

What Now?

I watched an episode today of The Cleaner (British TV comedy about a crime scene cleaner but not important to this post). It centered on the differences between life in the 1980s and the present, which reminded me of an old theory of mine.

Everyone knows that scientific progress is accelerating all the time so that there is more change in our lives than ever before. There was a time in my life when computers were near-mythical constructions that took up whole rooms in office blocks and phones were anything but mobile and were limited to phone calls only. I was alive when the first practical television services came into being.

My parents saw the movies get voices and their parents had the first experiences of moving picture shows. And before that, the generations saw little change apart from gas lighting becoming electrical and the invention of planes and the car. A couple of generations previous saw steam power begin the process of change.

Other than that, there was very little that changed for hundreds of years. The industrial revolution started an accelerating pace of invention and change that transformed our lives in ways that our ancestors could not even dream of. And this continued until we became accustomed to change and the demands to adapt that it forced on us.

Until the computer, that is. The computer was the last invention that seriously altered the way we live. We fool ourselves into thinking that things are still developing because we improve and tinker with the great inventions of the past, imagining that things like the internet, social media, driverless cars, GPS and robots on Mars are new inventions. But they’re not. They are merely refinements of ideas that were born over fifty years ago. The internet was not possible until the computer had been invented, mankind walked on the moon in the sixties.

To develop a thing is not the same as having the initial idea. To continue the pace of development, we would need to have a very important and culture-changing invention very soon. And I don’t see that happening. To me, it seems that we’re entering a period of decreasing change, of refining what we have and coming to terms with the changes that previous inventions have made.

So my theory is that it’s over. This grand advance into the future that we call progress is grinding to a halt as we run out of the fuel that is imagination. Not only do we find it impossible to think of some new breakthrough that will change civilisation beyond recognition, I see little evidence of a desire to venture beyond our present limits.

Which may be a good thing. It is certainly time for a rest, a chance to sit back and ponder just how much of the change we have wrought is really needed. We cannot uninvent anything, of course, but it might be advisable to consider some of the changes we have made that were not beneficial to any of us.

Not that it concerns me greatly these days. With a bit of luck, I’ll be long gone by the time progress turns out to be a monster that is out of control.


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