won’t be a major career problem.”
OUT AND ABOUT
MY FATHER WAS BORN IN 1914 in Liverpool, England. He lived his whole life in Liverpool and rarely traveled more than 30 miles from the city. My mother was born in 1919, also in Liverpool. It was only later in her life that she traveled out of the country for holidays. I was born in Liverpool in 1950. Even then, people didn’t really go anywhere. A visit to the nearest town was a day’s outing. In some regions, dialects were so distinct that it was possible to tell which village or part of town someone came from. I have five brothers and a sister, all born in Liverpool. My brother John has been piecing together our family tree. He found out that in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, seven of our eight great grandparents grew up in Liverpool too, all within a couple of miles of each other, in some cases in adjacent streets. That is how they met. For most of human history, people lived, worked and married locally and expected to live the sorts of lives their parents had led. They were not besieged with media images of celeb- rities and reality stars that made them hesitate about settling for the person they’d just met at the pub.
I now travel so much for my work that I sometimes cannot remember where I have been or when. A few years ago I went to Oslo in Norway to speak at a conference. I flew overnight from Los Angeles via New York. The plane was delayed and I arrived in Oslo five hours late and tired but looking forward to the event. As I was getting ready to go on stage, one of the organizers asked me whether I had been in Oslo before. I told her that I had not but that the city seemed fascinating. A few hours later, I remembered that I had been in Oslo before. For a week! Admittedly it was about 15 years earlier, but even so. You don’t usually wander into Norway without noticing. In a week, you do all kinds of things: eat, shower, meet people and talk and think about Norwegian things. I had been to the National Art Gallery and spent time looking at paintings by Edvard Munch, including The Scream, which is what I felt like doing when I realized I had forgotten the entire trip. It may be a sign that I am on the move too much. I think it’s also a sign of the times.
I used to live in England in a village called Snitterfield (really), which is three miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. Snitterfield is where William Shakespeare’s father, John, was born in 1531. When he was 20 years old, John left Snitterfield to seek his fortune in Stratford. It is almost impossible to grasp the differences between his view of the world and ours almost 500 years later, when business travelers fly across continents to attend meetings for the weekend and then forget where they’ve been. For most of human history, social change was snail-like in comparison with now. As we’ll see later, there were revolutionary discoveries, expeditions and technological inventions during his lifetime. Even so, John Shakespeare’s daily life probably differed very little from that of his parents, grandparents or great grandparents.
“To understand how hard it is to anticipate the future now, we need only think of how difficult it proved to predict the future in the past.”
My father never left England. For work or pleasure, I’ve now been to most countries in Europe, to the Far East and to many parts of the United States and Australia. By their early teens, my children had visited more countries than I had by the age of 40. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, I thought of my parents’ childhood in the 1920s as the Middle Ages: horses in the street, few cars, steam trains, grand ocean liners, no air travel to speak of, no television and few telephones. When we got our first black and white television in 1959, we felt we’d reached the last stage of human evolution. My own children have a similarly quaint view of my childhood: only two television channels, no color or surround sound, no video games, smartphones, tablets or social media. Their world is inconceivably different from those of my grandparents and great grandparents.
The differences are not only in the nature of change but also in the pace of it. The most profound changes haven’t happened in 500 years, most of them have happened in the past 200 years and especially in the last 50, and they are getting faster. According to one estimate:
• in 1950 the average person traveled about 5 miles per day
• in 2000 the average person traveled about 30 miles per day
• in 2020 the average person will travel about 60 miles per day.
Imagine the past 3000 years as the face of a clock with each of the 60 minutes representing a period of 50 years. Until three minutes ago, the history of transport was dominated by the horse, the wheel and the sail. In the late eighteenth century, James Watt refined the steam engine. This changed everything. It was a major tremor in the social earthquake of the Industrial Revolution. The improved steam engine vastly increased the power available for industrial production. It paved the way for faster methods of transport by road and sea and made possible the development of railways, the arterial system of the early industrial world. The steam engine impelled vast movements of humanity at speeds that were never thought possible. Since then, the curve of change has climbed almost vertically:
The revolution in transport is one index of the pace of change, but it’s not the fastest one.
GETTING THE MESSAGE
Human beings have had access to writing systems for at least 3000 years. For most of that time these systems hardly changed. People communicated by making marks on surfaces, using pens on paper, chisels on stone or pigment on boards. Written documents existed in single copies and had to be copied by hand. Only a privileged few had access to them and only those few needed to be able to read. Between 1440 and 1450, about 11 minutes ago on our clock, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Since then the rate of change has gone into overdrive. Think of the major innovations in communication in the past 200 years, and how the gaps on the clock have shortened:
When I was born in 1950, no one had a home computer. The average computer then was about the size of your living room. This was one reason people didn’t buy them: they weren’t inclined to live outdoors to accommodate a largely useless device. A second reason was the cost. Computers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only government departments and some companies had computers. In 1950 the transistor was invented. In 1970, the silicon chip was developed. These innovations not only reduced the size of computers, they vastly increased their speed and power. The standard memory capacity has increased exponentially since then, from a few hundred kilobytes to several gigabytes.
The smartphones in your pocket has more computing power than was available on earth in 1940. In 1960, Jerome Bruner and George Miller founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies: the first institute dedicated to cognitive science. The Institute was well funded and purchased the first computer used in America for psychological experimentation: a PDP4 minicomputer. It cost $65,000 in 1962 and came with 2K of memory, upgradable to 64K.8 Nowadays many children’s toys have more computing power than that. The average digital wristwatch has appreciably more power than the 1969 Apollo Moonlander: the space vehicle from which Neil Armstrong took his small step for man and his giant leap for mankind.
It is estimated that something in the order of 1017 microchips are being manufactured every year; a number, I’m told, that’s roughly equivalent to the world population of ants. I repeat it here in the confident knowledge that it can’t be checked. This prodigious rate of production indicates the vast range of applications for which computers are now used. The pace of expansion in computer technology over the past 70 years has been breathtaking. Here’s a rough chronology:
The Internet is the most powerful and pervasive communication system ever devised. It grows
Ian Pearson, British Telecom, interviewed in
For a brief account of the origins of the Center see Lehrer, J. (2007).
