‘The truth is that technology has been a bit disappointing’

Now I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t people walk, indeed actually drive on the Moon 50 years ago? And didn’t they do it with a spaceship that had the computing power of an iphone or something? It’s true. They did.

The truth is that technology has been a bit disappointing, hasn’t it? Like, I don’t want to be demanding, but I suppose I expected a bit more from the future. Lots of us now have in our pockets a machine that has in it enough computing power to send a man to the Moon. And what do we do with it? We take pictures mainly. Sometimes we apply filters to said pictures.

And of course, we use it to buy stuff, to look at porn, to read non-stop news, and to indulge in social media. I’m not suggesting it’s our fault that technology hasn’t changed our lives as much as you might have thought. But you’d wonder if we are using it to the best of its capabilities. And somehow, in the meantime, with all our fancy new tech, we are having trouble doing something we did 50 years ago with a spaceship that was more or less made of toilet rolls and tin foil.

You could blame the market. Tech will only be weaponised to give us what we think we want. So for example, in the last dotcom explosion, there were a whole raft of companies that competed to become the dominant player in the online laundry ‘space’.

Some people put it down to the fact that a lot of new young tech guys were suddenly living away from home and laundry became a burning issue for them. And so different bunches of lads raised millions to get into the ‘collecting, washing, and delivering back your laundry’ business.

Some of these start-ups were apparently hampered by the fact they knew very little about the delivery business and very little about the laundry business. The value-added they thought they were bringing was the online system to connect the customer and the delivery people and the actual laundry people.

There’s something sad about the fact that some people look at all the technological progress we’ve made, and think, “This could really change everything. This could revolutionise people’s lives. Forget about feeding the hungry, or education, we could do something really important, like preventing people from having to drop their stuff off at the laundrette or the dry cleaners.”

The biggest difference technology has made to my life today, as I write this, is that I was able to take delivery of a pair of Birkenstocks and immediately book to return them. They will travel for free back to Germany, as they were delivered free from Germany. I also had a load of unnecessary communication today that I wouldn’t have if we didn’t have mobile phones.

I am aware that I am unusual in this regard. The way that technology will have changed most of your lives today is that you will have spent a certain amount of time on social media. It seems that many people now regard social media as more of a problem than an enhancement to their lives.

In fact, a lot of people seem to use social media today to give out about social media. And if someone had asked us all, “What would you like technology to do for you?”, would we all have said, “The real dream come true would be if we could comment publicly on TV shows while they are on, get in fights over everything with people we don’t know, feel slightly empty while looking at pictures of other people having better lives than us, and maybe enjoy some offensive comments from anonymous creeps.”

I wonder if we shouldn’t all sit down and have a chat about what we might want technology to do for us, and maybe try and target the efforts a bit.

And listen, if we get a person on the Moon by 2025, who knows where the world could be another 50 years on?

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