When Technology Gets Boring it gets interesting

Image by Ri Butov from Pixabay

Chances are, one of the first things you do every morning when you get up is look out a window. It’s a basic survival technique, even if we don’t think of it that way. What’s the weather? Anything I need to see? Our primordial brain is also looking for danger. Then maybe you look at your smartphone. Perhaps you wear glasses so you put those on. Glass. It’s everywhere. So much so that it’s really quite invisible (pun) to us. When was the last time you sat down and thought about all the glass in the world and its various uses? Glass is an example of an invisible and boring technology. It fundamentally changed the world.

Once we created mirrors, we could look at ourselves in detail. It fundamentally changed our perception of “self”, revolutionized art, fashion and more. Then there’s the telephone. By the way, there’s one inside your smartphone. Today, the telephone is an invisible technology. It’s boring. So is an oven, a fridge, even cars. They’re boring because the fundamentals of the technology are embedded, they change little. Car tires may evolve, but they’re still tires and you still need them to make a car move, along with the engine. Electric vehicles are here, but they still need wheels. The shapes may change. But the technology that is a car is boring. All smartphones are rectangles. Boring.

When technologies get boring however, is when they start to get interesting. As cars evolved, we eventually created paved roads. Today, roads are just there. Electricity. Books. Radios. All there, things we use and don’t think about very much except when the power goes out. Or wars break out.

Once we adopt technologies at scale and integrate them into our daily lives is when they become boring and we start to do interesting things and changes in our cultures and societies start to happen. It’s hard to cover it all in a short post, but here are some.

• Conflict: Following revolutionary communications technologies, conflict is never far behind. The printing press lead to the Christian Reformation, the telegraph and World War 1, the telephone and World War 2. The internet isn’t quite boring yet, it’s not invisible. But it’s getting there, so…
• Compounding Enablement: The smartphone you’re using, perhaps to read this, we see as a single device, but it’s a combination of technologies. GPS, camera, software, processors and so on. Baseline technologies start by harnessing some sort of phenomena (fire, electricity, wheels) and then we combine them with other technologies. Humans are very skilled at combining and compounding technologies to up the game.
• Cultural Changes: Non-sapient animals use genetics to adapt and evolve. Humans chose to use culture. Technologies always impact cultures in different ways. The mirror changed our sense of “self”, art and literature. The mobile phone connected to the internet is changing how different cultures connect and share ideas. We can’t fully understand the impact of smartphones on cultures, but we’re starting too. They aren’t boring enough yet.
• Human Evolution & Adaptation: As we invented and shared various farming technologies, we became, over thousands of years, more agricultural. Today, we have massive industrial farming (it’s horrible) and we can ship foods around the world in a matter of hours with planes, trucks and trains. We have adapted so much in advanced countries that the idea of hunting and foraging for our dinner is ludicrous when we can use SkipThe Dishes or DoorDash. This has also helped us become morbidly obese and encouraged diabetes and other related diseases. So that’s not a good adaptation. But we do adapt.

We have a lot of boring technologies in the world today; phones, cars, trucks, roads, electricity, boats, planes, computers. They have enabled us to adapt our world and us to better adapt to living in the world. Humans after all, can only survive in an incredibly small area on Earth. Now, thanks to these boring technologies, we are combining and compounding on top of them and we’re entering the Cognitive Age as we shift from just physical augmentation technologies to augmenting our mind.

It’s an exciting time. Filled with moments that will be astounding, along with scary moments. But all of that is for later. Humanity will survive. It’s just a matter of how.