Not Disappointed By Technology Since 1970

In a recent column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman said "I have basically spent my whole professional life in an era of technological disappointment." And he quotes investor Peter Thiel bemoaning "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." While I am a contemporary of Paul Krugman -- and have been disappointed by many things -- technology is not one of them. 

As an example of how, since 1970, technology has failed to "produce rapid, unmistakable improvement in just about every aspect of life," Krugman cites the failure of cars and airplanes to become faster, but speed is not the only metric of interest. 

In the 1970s, the US lost almost as many people in traffic fatalities every year as in the entire Vietnam war. According the the NHTSA, In 1970, 52,627 Americans lost their lives driving; in 2013, it was down to 32,675. Taking into account growth in population and in traffic, the risk of dying per vehicle mile travelled has actually been divided by 4.43.

Even it too many people still die on the road, this risk reduction is an improvement I celebrate, and much of it is due to technology, from seat belts, airbags and car body designs that protect passengers, to more effective tools to enforce traffic laws. 

The airplane story is similar. Yes, today's airliners are no faster than in 1970, but there are more of them around, and they are safer. Supersonic transport technology was developed in the 1960s, but failed commercially. Rather than small numbers crossing the Atlantic in 4 hours, the market wanted more passengers to cross it in 7. It made the Concorde a commercial failure and the Boeing 747 a success.

In passenger miles air traffic in the US increased six-fold from 1970 to 2013, while fatalities due to airliner crashes in the US went from between 100 and 200 per year in the early 1970s to 3 in 2013 and none since.   And jet engine fuel consumption went down by two-thirds for the same power. 

We should not consider the "technology of things" only in terms of consumer products but also, for example, manufacturing processes. Steel making, for one, has dramatically changed since 1970. When I visited the Yawata Steel Works in Kitakyushu, Japan in 2009, it produced as much steel with 3,000 employees as it had with 45,000 in the 1960s. 

Much of the innovation since 1970 has been in information technology, but it does not mean that the impact on our personal and professional lives has been negligible. Yes, as Paul Krugman puts it, "We are still living in a material world," but much of the work we do is related to information.  

The water pipes into a house are material, and maintaining them is physical work, but knowing which ones are made of lead is essential to solving the lead poisoning crisis in Flint, MI, and it is urgent. The data, however, is in the form of thousands of handwritten index cards in file cabinets.

Water System Records in Flint, MI

If it were instead kept in a reasonably structured database, as it should be with technology developed since 1970, a query would retrieve the list of affected homes in a split second. This means not only that work could start immediately but that engineers could assess its scope, the time required, and the resources needed. 

In 1970, the primary means of business communication was the typewritten letter. The omnipresent typewriter was a 19th-century invention that did not improve writing productivity over long-hand. In fact, it added work because business people still wrote by hand, and had others type the text afterwards. The typewriter's only merit was that its output looked machine-produced and therefore modern. When companies started sending out typewritten letters, their business associates and competitors felt compelled to follow, or else appear obsolete. 

Managers and executives felt it beneath them to learn how to use these noisy contraptions themselves. This gave rise to the profession of typist, in which millions of women were paid low wages to spend all day typing other people's words, and measured on how fast they could do it. 

Typing Pool at BMW in the 1970s

The advent of word processing and computer typesetting in the 1980s changed all this. Professionals learned to use keyboards and format documents themselves. Not only did typewriters and specialized typists vanish from offices, but so did the obsession with typing speed. Almost everyone today can type faster than they can compose sentences in their minds, and therefore their output is not constrained by typing speed. 

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer flying cars and jetpacks to stay in science-fiction rather than appear overhead when I step outside. And I don't tweet much. On the other hand, I value carrying hundreds of ebooks around in a tablet when I travel. It includes the complete works of Victor Hugo that I bought for $0.00 in the Kindle store and that, in 1970, would have occupied an entire shelf.