Transistor powered jet skates: seeing the future from the past

‘Look who it is! Iron Man using his jet skates! Those transistor powered wheels of his can do 200 miles an hour!’

If you are familiar with the superhero Iron Man from Marvel movies, you may be surprised by the idea that he would be travelling using skates, rather than flying. However, if you are familiar with electronics, you may be more surprised by the idea that wheels could be transistor powered.

This is a quote from an Iron Man comic in the 1960s. Some things in the comic are the same as the movies of today: Iron Man is a flawed human in a metal suit which enables him to do astonishing things. Some things are very different: the armour is chunky and does a lot more rolling than flying. And, rather than being powered by nanotechnology wizardry, it is powered by transistors.

In the 1960s transistors were enabling an explosion in miniaturised consumer electronics, as well as being used to transform instrumentation and guidance in the defence and space industries. They had entered public consciousness through the transistor radio, which replaced expensive, heavy, valve-based devices, and achieved a ubiquity which caused people to complain about them in the same way that they complain about people playing music and video from their phones today.

And, like many new technologies, the term ‘transistor’ was used way outside its precise meaning. The people buying transistor radios did not care about the internal electronics of their devices: they just cared that they were cheap and portable and that they could have music on the move. And the creators of Iron Man did not care that transistors didn’t really store energy and weren’t capable of powering jet skates: they just wanted something that sounded exciting and scientific, and which they could use to give their character new powers as needed by the story.

I think that, from the perspective of 2024, we can learn two lessons from the spectacle of Iron Man on his transistor powered jet skates. Both require a little humility.

First, we can temper our smugness at the thought that the creators of Iron Man writers didn’t understand the technology they were writing about (do we really come to superhero stories for scientific accuracy?), and reflect that they may have been more accurate than they knew at the time.

It’s true that you can’t ‘charge up’ transistors and treat them as stores of energy: they are switches, not batteries. But the reason for the explosion in consumer electronics is that reliable, miniaturised switches are incredibly useful, so useful that they are the foundations of modern computing. Once transistors moved onto silicon chips, they rapidly became ubiquitous. If there was anything resembling an Iron Man suit today, it would contain billions, or possibly trillions, of transistors. It would be ‘transistor powered’, not in the sense of energy storage, but in the sense that transistors would make all of its functions possible. I am not sure that 200 mile an hour jet skates would be feasible or wise, but if they existed, they would be controlled by chips containing many, many transistors.

Second, we can recognise that we do exactly the same today as people did in the 1960s. We get excited by new technology, and we imagine that we can apply it to anything. People who are trying to raise money, or sell a product, or simply tell a story, attach the label of new technology to their pitch, whether they understand it precisely or not.

The most obvious current example of this is Artificial Intelligence. While there have been important and fundamental recent advances in this field, the implications of which we have yet to work out, the application of the AI label goes far beyond these advances. If you are a data scientist, or a software engineer, or a technical architect, it’s hard not to read articles about AI and have the same feeling that electronics engineers had when they saw Iron Man’s jet skates: it just doesn’t work like that. That’s not possible. Those words don’t mean what you think they mean. But, as shown by the example of transistors, AI is not the first new technology which will suffer sloppy labelling, and it won’t be the last.

I think that we should respond to these two lessons, and the current hype and excitement about AI, with curiosity, precision, patience and imagination. When we see a claim for a technology which doesn’t quite sound right (transistor powered jet skates), we should exercise our curiosity to ask what’s really going on. We should attempt to describe what is happening on with precision, and be patient with ourselves and others when, as will often be the case, the pitch does not live up to the hype. And we should exercise our imagination to ask whether the technology has the potential to make the hype come true. After all, one day this will be the past too.

(Views in this article are my own.)