Keeping up with technology that grows at an increasingly faster pace
How does the internet work? A cellphone? Global warming? How does a gas combustion engine work? How does immunity to COVID-19 work? Do antibiotics kill bacteria or viruses, or both? Do we need to know how our technologies work or should we just accept society will have to rely on experts to tell us about the technologies around us?
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —-Arthur C. Clarke
One in three people cannot explain how the internet works.1
Americans express confidence in their ability to explain the workings of certain everyday technologies. Ninety percent said they could explain how a flashlight works. Seventy percent indicated they could explain the workings of a home-heating system. Far fewer were confident in their understandings of how telephone calls travel from point to point (65 percent) and how energy is converted into electrical power (53 percent). In all questions of this type, men expressed more confidence than women. Sometimes the difference was dramatic: 86 percent of men compared with 55 percent of women said they understood how heating systems operate.2
Algorithms in social media and search engines has increasingly been exposed as using our histories. Even lingering on an advertisement may lead to targeting and shaping what we see on the next search. This social manipulation may be particularly damaging for adolescents and teens, yet we know very little about the extent of this manipulation.3
Artificial intelligence, with its own url extension .ai, is increasingly being used for analysis and even writing. It is not widely known that .ai tools are available or writing research papers and articles,4 and much of the content you see from advertisers was likely created by artificial intelligence, reading millions of articles on the internet to write on a topic. Law students have access to artificial intelligence tools for writing briefs,5 and law firms are utilizing them as well. Resistance is futile. We should prepare our students for that future.
This issue is coupled with the rate of emergence of new technologies, called the “pacing problem”.
The Pacing Problem
The acceleration of the increase in technology and its adaptation into society as a norm, creates an increasingly urgent problem for society to understand their technology at an increasingly faster rate! But instead, education is floundering and falling behind even the standards of yesterday. In a 20 year study (1988-2008), no improvement was found in increasing undergraduate scientific literacy based on the same scientific questions, not increasingly advanced ones.6 In one study of more than 800 institutions in the U.S. 47 percent of the professors who responded said that they had lowered their expectations of the work undergraduates would do, and 46 percent had reduced the number of assignments.7
From the beginning…
The Industrial Revolution began in Europe around 1760 and lasted until about 1840, with the United States following only a couple of decades. The end of the First Industrial Revolution gave rise to the Second Industrial Revolution around 1840-1870, built on steam-power as an energy source that drove transportation and manufacturing. This era also incorporated the use of coal as an energy source. The use of steel for building heavy projects was also a significant contribution to that period.
Those Revolutions covered relatively short periods of time, measured in centuries. Now, it has been observed that the pace has quickened for technological growth.
How serious this problem is depends on whether one believes there is an expanding gap in innovation rates – a tortoise and hare problem. There is evidence that the time it takes to introduce new technologies has been shrinking. Between 1990 and 1995, the time to develop and introduce US products fell from 35.5. to 23 months and the time needed to introduce high-tech products into the marketplace dropped from 18 months in 1993 to 10 months in 1998.8 Taking a longer historical look, Yale University economist William Nordhause has estimated that about 70 percent of all goods and services consumed in 1991 were different from those of a century ago.9
The United States has shifted from its geographical frontier to a technological frontier, probably in the year 1893, when Frederick Turner, a young historian announced the end of the westward expansion of the United States which had been so much a part of the psyche of the country.10
There is a tendency to evoke Moore’s Law --- Gordon Moore’s 1965 prediction that the performance of integrated circuits would double every 18-24 months – as a metric of today’s rapid innovation tempo. Moore’s Law has become increasingly irrelevant because this rate is no longer being achieved,11 mainly because other ways of improving computer efficiency are now being explored. Bhaskar Chakrovorti coined the term Demi-Moore’s Law to indicate that technology’s impact on the market moves at a rate only one half the speed predicted by Gordon More (Chakravorti 2003).
A survey found that 59% of the public believes the changes in technology will be positive and lead to a better life; whereas 30% believe technology will lead us to a place where we are worse off than we are.12
The emergence of new technologies and their adaptation goes through a typical cycle. From refrigerators to mobile phones, we see a similar pattern:
Gartner’s Hype Cycle
• Technologies start with a trigger, fail to rise to the peak of inflated expectations, only to plummet in the trough of disillusionment, from which it can slowly climb the slope of enlightenment to finally reach the plateau of productivity.13
To illustrate this point, here is one of my favorite graphs of all time about human history and technology in a glance. It shows graphically the increasing rate of emerging technologies with increasingly rapid adaptation, in a roller coaster type of line that levels off at the top of the ride.
If our current level of understanding of our technologies around us is any indication then our future means we may know even less. The increasingly rapid adaptation rate suggests we may know increasingly less about them based on our past record of understanding as a society. That may mean more reliance on technocrats, much like we saw in our reliance on Dr. Fauci and public health experts during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are likely to see that model, again. The unintended consequences of leaving society behind in understanding the technologies around them, are yet unknown, but increasing reliance on experts or artificial intelligence advice may be the result.
We are in for a wild roller coaster ride for the next few decades and hopefully we stay at the top of the ride.
If you would like to read more about these ideas, you can find them in volume one of my series on Emerging Technologies Law, and can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0996818669
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/1-in-3-americans-polled-cant-explain-how-the-internet-works/
https://issues.org/realnumbers-9/
Example, jasper.ai
Example is clearbrief.ai
https://www.depauw.edu/files/resources/impey2011.pdf
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/are-academic-standards-falling (I cannot find this study to confirm this reported finding, and it may be behind a paywall, so read this result with that caution.)
Griffin 1997; Tassey 1999.
Nordhaus, 2009.
David Rejeski, “Chap. 4, Public Policy on the Technological Frontier, “The Growing Gap Between Emerging Technologies and Oversight, The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology 7, (Springer, 2011), p. 47-48.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/05/13/245938/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/
Aaron Smith, “U.S. Views of Technology and the Future: Science in the next 50 years,” Pew Research Center Report, Summary April 14, 2015 available at: http://www.pewresearch.org/about/use-policy/ (accessed June 23, 2015).
Tilberg, quoting Fenn, 1995.