Technology

Our Misunderstanding Of New Technologies

We don't always guess right about technology.

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In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the age of automobiles, horseless carriages were supposed to be a godsend. Horse-drawn carriages were long; automobiles were short; the advent of the automobile would thus decrease urban congestion. And horse-drawn carriages left real, tangible pollution on city streets; automobiles sent off only a whiff of smoke into the air; the advent of the automobile would decrease pollution.

Less urban congestion and less pollution! The automobile would be a godsend indeed!

We don’t always guess right about technology.

When Robert Moses was first thinking about his plan to develop New York City, automobiles puttered along at about 20 miles per hour, and drivers loved to look around and enjoy the views. So Moses put the Riverside Drive and other roads along the waterfronts, where drivers of the 1920s could enjoy their outings. (If you live in the Midwest, think about Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Same deal.) In 2021, with cars that travel 70 miles per hour, we feel as though we’ve wasted the waterfronts, and no one in the cars is enjoying the view.

In the 1990s, at the dawn of the age of the cellphone, many people were certain cellphones wouldn’t catch on: Surely, when people made phone calls, people wanted privacy. People would insist on the confines of a phone booth; there’s no way they’d sit in public and talk on phones.

We don’t always guess right about technology.

So, too, with the internet. At the dawn of the internet age, people were certain that the internet would permit anyone to speak directly to large audiences. The intermediaries were gone. Without those intermediaries, a wealth of diverse viewpoints would emerge, to the betterment of all.

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But we didn’t realize that algorithms run by artificial intelligence would cause many of us to hear only our own thoughts reverberating constantly in the echo chambers of our computers. Nor did we realize that one way to attract a readership in the highly competitive internet world would be to become increasingly shrill, insisting that those who disagreed were not just wrong, but evil.

We don’t always guess right about technology.

But we do often recover from those early missteps.

Here’s hoping.

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Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

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