A taste of today´s technology

It’s a dog gone drone’s life

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As we go about adopting, and adapting to, new technology, there’s always human resistance and a need to find usages of said technology for ordinary people before that resistance disappears.  Once we find those use cases, it lowers the paranoia created by hyperbolic news stories, and increases our tolerance for accepting certain things as normal.

I remember first encountering a fax machine.  My goodness!  What a marvel it was to me then!  And then they were everywhere in the 80s and 90s, and they became normal.  And then they weren’t.  Admittedly, the benign fax machine was hardly a threat to anyone’s job.  But no one could have foreseen its spectacular emergence into popular use (from a 1974 launch) and its rapid decline into obsolescence.

The truth is, no one really knows where our technology will take us or what is going to take off nor what is not.  A list of spectacularly wrong quotations by experts on the future of certain technological advancements, courtesy of Robert Szczerba CEO of X Tech Venturesthat is proof of this:

1876: “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — William Orton, President of Western Union.

1903: “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.” — President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.

1946: “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months.  People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox.

1961: “There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States.” — T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner.

1966: “Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop.”— Time Magazine.

1981: “Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems.” — Marty Cooper, inventor.

1995: “I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” — Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com.

2005: “There’s just not that many videos I want to watch.” — Steve Chen, CTO and co-founder of YouTube expressing concerns about his company’s long term viability.

2006: “Everyone’s always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone.  My answer is, ‘Probably never.'” — David Pogue, The New York Times.

2007: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” — Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.

The thing to note about the date (as an aside, Kofi Annan’s graph about the speed of adoption does a good job of showing the acceleration in each of these) of the quote versus the point at which it became a source of embarrassment to the utterer, is that there’s rather a long lag from when these forecasts were made and when the item being discussed hit mainstream use.

We are now at the point of prognostications and proclamations with so much technology: the value of digitised data, the volume of the stuff, AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, AR, VR, nanotechnology, gene therapies, and the list goes on.  Much fantastic lab work has occurred and the news sources are talking about them all.  But I do not believe, for a lot of these technologies, there is a maturity yet for wide-spread adoption.  It’s coming, for sure.  But for that to happen, we all still have to see a benefit that it brings to us and, in a lot of cases, that’s being sold by snake oil skin sales blurbs.  But once benefit is seen, it will change our attitudes.  And we will do the slavish adoption things that humans have done for a very long time.

There’s a small piece about drone usage by Californian police in the IEEE Spectrum, the mouthpiece of international engineers.  At the end of the article is a lovely quote by two cops who get the need to win hearts and minds before you talk tech:

‘<William> Seymour <from Tulare County Sheriff’s Department> says drones should be thought of in the same way as police dogs. Tulare County, he says, treats drones like a canine unit; they travel in specially marked cars as officers go about normal duties, then the team is called in as necessary. And, like canine crews, sometimes the officers involved take a little extra time for public relations, <Charles> Werner <Acting Deputy State Coordinator of Disaster Services at Virginia’s Department of Emergency Management> said, because public acceptance will be key. “If I have to spend five minutes after deployment talking to kids or giving a free demo,” he said, “I always will, because anything we can do to preserve our ability to use this tool we are going to do.” Werner had some advice for the law enforcement attendees just beginning to add drones to their operations: “Do fire rescue, search and rescue, finding Alzheimer’s patients first,” he said. Publicity around these operations will help bring public opinion along.  Said Seymour: “The ultimate thing we are trying to do is save people’s lives, not see who is around your swimming pool.”’

Wise words indeed.  We all need a little guidance seeing the benefit of change.  And anchoring it to something normal like a dog seems like a sensible way to demonstrate this.

About the author

Michelle

I buy technology. I am curious about how technology has changed, and its impact in the workplace and upon society. I also like street art. And dachshunds. Especially dachshunds.

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