Will Future Consumer Tech Still Be Awkward?

Why is it in science fiction films you never see people struggle to operate consumer tech? Will the tech of the future really be flawlessly simple?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says forward this
message onto everybody. I'm Jonathan Stricklin and I'm Joe McCormick.

(00:23):
So hey you too. Hey. You know how in the
past we've done some episodes of this podcast called you
don't see That in sci Fi? I vaguely recall that
we did such podcast. Well, I think we should do
another one today. Well, I agree, because that's what we
have notes on. This isn't perceptive, this isn't the future

(00:43):
of ants. Did we already do aunts? Oh no, oh no,
I think I just copied my notes from last time.
I don't worry, I'll catch up. I'll catch up. Okay,
you don't see that in sci Fi? As a little
sub series we do within Forward Thinking, where we take
something that you often see in science fiction and say,
I don't know if that's what the future is really
going to look like, or something you rarely see in

(01:05):
science fiction, or at least don't see as much as
we think you should, and say, well, why don't they
have more of that? Right? It's kind of like looking
back at say, the nineteen fifties and reading the descriptions
of what they thought the year two thousand was going
to be like, and then thinking, boy, were they off,
you know, and then thinking, wait a minute, are current
visions of the future when depicted in science fiction films

(01:29):
could be just as misguided, right, And sometimes that can
be for really fun purposes, like the fact that explosions
are pretty or Jehovivic is pretty, Etcetera. Exploding in space
makes a noise? Is that how you pronounce it Jehovavitch? Sure?
Probably not? Oh no, no, let's keep it whatever it is,

(01:51):
Mila Mia right now, Mila, I have no idea anyway,
Let's continue. She'll him up again later in the episode.
In the asked, we've talked about stuff like how come
when people speak English five d or a thousand years
in the future, they sound just like people today, Because
if you didn't have them sound like people today, people

(02:12):
today wouldn't be able to understand your science fiction movie. Joe.
That's an excellent point, Jonathan. Okay, well today we want
to talk about consumer technology. So how many pieces of
consumer technology do you have within reach? Don't ask me
that question. Joe, it's embarrassing. Well, it's probably a lot
a lot of If you're listening to this podcast, I

(02:32):
imagine you were listening to the podcast on a piece
of consumer technology, unless it's just wafting through the air,
or a friend listen to it, memorize all the parts
and is now performing that podcast for you, In which
case call us because that sounds fascinating. I want to
meet your friend. Yeah, But I want to ask you
all a question. So, when you look into a science

(02:53):
fiction movie or science fiction book, how is consumer technology
like computers and how blitz handheld devices, phones, things like that,
How does it seem in those pieces of media. Well, first,
let's let's be specific. We're talking about kind of that
idealistic version of the future, not the post apocalyptic Mad

(03:13):
Max version right right now where everything's wrecked and burned. Sure,
but there's no real consumer technology in Matt Max. I
mean consumer salvage. Yea, it's consumer salvage enough. In futures
wherein there are giant corporations that are hypothetically selling these
kinds of things, it's usually so sleek and so well,

(03:35):
I mean whatever our current definition of the word sleek is, right, well, yeah, here,
here's what I'd say. It's typically sleek, fast, responsive, immersive.
It can anticipate what you want, it's easy to use.
The characters are invariably very comfortable using it. Displays are
really gorgeous. Yes, it's like the technology becomes an extension

(03:59):
of the characters. Right, There's there's never that moment where
a character picks up that floating that floating display that
doesn't appear to be made of anything, and they're about
to zoom in on something and sudding, they get a
blue screen of death that never happens. Right, That were
you're getting at flash player has crashed. Yeah, right, do

(04:19):
you want to continue this application? Right? You just get
a bunch of pop ups, like can you imagine Minority
Report with just endless pop ups? Minority Report is a
great one because it's a great example that people often
refer to when they're they're talking about what movies have
really good, probably very realistic, and interesting depictions of consumer
technology in the future. Minority Report is one of the

(04:41):
most often cited, and they actually did good research going
into that film. They they consulted with lots of people
in the tech industry. Well, if you see the interface
that Tom Cruise's character interacts with in Minority Report, where
he's got his hands up in the air and the
displays are all floating around and he can swipe stuff
off the screen. I mean, you can see the user

(05:01):
interfaces and touch screen devices that obviously take inspiration from
that same basic UI design, right, whether it was from
Minority Report or the information that informed the writers and
designers of Minority Report to make sure that it had
that feel, it's very much a UI that we're familiar

(05:21):
with today. It may not mean that we've got displays
bloating up everywhere, but that same sort of swiping to
to get things off of a screen, or pinching or
or moving your fingers apart to zoom in or zoom out,
all of that kind of stuff is commonplace now. Yeah.
Another good example would be Star Trek. Now to us today,
if we watch old episodes of Star Trek, a lot

(05:43):
of the technology might look extremely dated, but it's still
within the universe depicting this kind of very fast, sleek,
very easy to use, comfortable. Uh, it's totally. It works
all the time, unless there's a plot point in which
it doesn't work, or if you're on the Holidack, in
which it never works. Right, Right, there's there's a there's

(06:04):
probably a seventy thirty chance that if you're on the holideck,
something's about to go down and the holidack is going
to try and kill you. Uh. The the interesting thing
about Star Trek is that, again, like you were saying,
unless it's a plot point, the technology just works. And
not only does it just work, but if you ever
pay really close attention, it doesn't make any sense how

(06:25):
how well it works. Because the actors, when they were
not delivering a line, might be staring intently at a
panel and then pushing buttons like a like a crazy person.
Like they'll be like twenty or thirty button presses to
do whatever task that that person is imagining they are
doing at that time. But then when you see a
character actually have to do a task, often it will

(06:47):
involve like a single button press. And then you pull
up all of the works of Charles Dickens. Do you think,
why does that panel have a Charles Dickens button? They
went to the Charles Dickens annel. Yeah, I guess so.
I mean, when you're Patrick Stewart, you gotta have the
complete words of Charles. I mean, I'm sure he has
all English literature defined to specific buttons, hot button keys

(07:10):
on the bridge of the enterprosem. He's got to print
out a new copy every time he spills t exactly.
It's just Charles Dickens. Yeah. You also put a note
about Wally. I thought that was a great example. Now
obviously not the Junkyard of Earth, but this spaceship out
in space, Ferry Apple inspired spaceship out there where where

(07:31):
technology has reached the point where it's catering to every
single need, so that humans are essentially subservient to the technology,
not not in a a overlord kind of way, but
in a like but not. They don't realize that they
have willingly given up that agency. I think. I think
we're debating the plot of Wally, but seriously, those care

(07:53):
moral of this podcast. If you don't realize it's tyranny,
it's not, but it's they've they've given up their age
and willing. They're not. They're not, and it was terrible
for all of them at the end. Trichy is a
word that you use when you realize how badly off
you are. They don't point like a benevolent dictator, Well,

(08:13):
I want to transition to talking about why we think
the future of technology might not necessarily look like that,
where all pieces of consumer tech are very fast, sleek, sexy,
and perfect, where a lot of the frustrations we have
with technology today you might very well continue to see
even in the future, far down the line of technological development.

(08:37):
So one of the first things I think we should
talk about is this concept in computing performance known as
Pages law right and Pages law is kind of an
inverse of Moore's law. Moore's law being the idea that
that the number of transistors that engineers can cram onto
an integrated circuit is going to double at a steady rate,

(08:58):
like every year and a half or so, right and
by now we kind of suggest that that means the
processing power itself doubles at that rate, because it may
not be an actual doubling of the transistors every eighteen
months these days, but engineers are finding better and better
ways to create architecture so that the processing power in

(09:19):
effect doubles every eighteen months or so, the practical effect
being that your computer hardware, your new computer hardware, is
faster every eighteen months twice as twice as fast as
the as the hardware that existed eighteen months previously. Yes,
of course, the user experience is not determined solely by
what the hardware can do, because the hardware has to
run software. That's where they get you exactly. That is

(09:43):
where they get you. So at a Google Developer conference
in San Francisco in two thousand nine, the Google executive
Sergey Brin coined the term Pages law, which is sort
of the inverse of Moore's law, and it's also been
referred to as Worth's law. Worth with NYE. Worth. Actually
the terminology their predates pages law, but pages law is

(10:04):
essentially a synonym, and it was a popularization for it,
and it was kind of a little bit of a
joke the way that it was presented at this conference. Yeah,
but the idea is, every eighteen months software becomes twice
as slow. So as your hardware becomes twice as fast,
the software you run on it takes twice as long
to run. I assume this was a dig at Larry Page,

(10:26):
the co founder of Google. I'm sure it was, Yeah,
some harmless jest. This law is obviously kind of a
humorous it's it's not like a universal law. Right, we're
not talking about the laws of thermodynamics, just like Moore's
law is not a universal law. Right. We had a
whole other episode about a month or so ago, I believe,

(10:46):
wherein we talked about some of the problems that Moore's
law is currently running into with the development of or
with the physical transistors as we know them. Yeah, yeah,
that's right. Moore's law is not a law of physics.
It's sort of a prediction that has turned out to
be very accurate so far, if even self fulfilling. Yeah,

(11:06):
perhaps self fulfilling, right, because if you set out a
sort of goal post for the industry, they might just
work hard enough to go through it. You don't want
to be an engineer working when you realize you cannot
meet the goal of making a processor that's twice as
powerful within eighteen months. And say I was there when
Moore's law ended, Probably don't want to be that. You

(11:28):
want to be like, no, no, when I was when
I was on I watched UM But but no. I
think that we've all had this common experience of software
bloat and and and this happens for a couple of reasons. Sure,
feature creep is one thing so when when computers become
more powerful, programmers want to take advantage of that power,

(11:49):
and so they cram more and more features into a
piece of software. Features in air quotes because they might
not even necessarily be things that you really want this
program to do, but but sometimes they can be very
helpful and or or pretty well and a lot of people,
a lot of programmers may be working on software that
they have these gray ideas for what the software can do.

(12:11):
The problem is that the the hardware as it exists now,
the state of the art hardware that your average consumer
is going to have access to, would not be able
to support that kind of software. But software development takes
a lot of time. Sometimes a cycle to develop a
single program may take long enough so that by the
time the software is done, there's actually hardware strong enough
to use it. Now to the end user, it just

(12:34):
seems like the brand new computer is running whatever new
version of the program you have at the same rate
that your old computer was running the old version of
the program, because in fact, the software was developed to
take advantage of all that horse power, or that you
might even need to buy a new computer in order
to run the software that you really want like the

(12:55):
number of times that I know when I used to
do some PC gaming, frequently things would come out that
we're just a little bit better than what hardware I had,
and so I had to swap out different bits if
I wanted to play whatever it was, right, right, you
might need to go out and get a new graphics
card so that you can run that new version of
A half Life three. Hey, did you guys hear about

(13:15):
halfway three? Me? Neither, because they haven't announced it. That's
sick ber Yeah, I guess. So I have a feeling.
I have a feeling. I'm not the first and I
certainly won't be the last. But it's related to Pages

(13:36):
law or Worth's law. As a there are a couple
of other similar, kind of humorous concepts, and again these
were kind of meant as tongue in cheek a way
of explaining human behavior, and it doesn't necessarily relate just
to electronics, but it can also relate to that. One
of those is Parkinson's Law, which is created by C.

(13:57):
Northcote Parkinson h that says that we're will expand so
as to fill the time available for its completion. So,
in other words, you could have the exact same task
and tell one person that you need to get this
done in an hour, and tell another person that you
have six hours to do this, and the amount of
work that task is going to take will expand to

(14:17):
fill that six hour period for that second person, whereas
the first person will be able to complete in an hour. Um.
This is just one of those things kind of explain
human behavior, not so much a universal law. Again, same
sort of thing also can come true in the world
of consumer electronics in a way, it's it's a little
bit more of an abstract. There's also the Parkinson's law
of triviality, which can go into software design. The law

(14:42):
of triviality states that if you ever get a group
of people together to discuss an important uh idea important task,
something along those lines, invariably that group of people will
spend the most amount of time on the least important
aspect of whatever that happens to be. Same sort of
thing can happen with software blow, where you'll see people

(15:02):
really focus on things that ultimately may not matter. In fact,
it may be something that just a tiny slice of
the consumers ever even come to contact with. Those animations
of Clippy are so smooth. That's wonderful, exactly the what
I was thinking in my mind while I was saying that. Meanwhile,
the rest of it's not right. I think Clippy is

(15:24):
coming back. That's prediction I'm waiting for, Like Microsoft Bob
two thousand fifteen, that will be I'll be exciting. Okay, Well, anyway,
It's true that things like Pages law or Worth's law
or Parkinson's laws, these things are not hard and fast
rules of reality, but they are observations that we laugh

(15:47):
at because they seem to ring very true to us.
Like this is a very accurate way of describing the
state of technology today, and so it doesn't necessarily hold
the future to technology will always follow the path of
software bloat. But I can see more reason to believe

(16:07):
that it will than reason to believe that it won't,
because it's been this way so far, and something would
have to change for it to really overcome this. And
it's being made by people, right, And these are observations
ultimately about people, not about the technology. The technology itself
is completely separate from this. This is really about our

(16:28):
behaviors as a species, right, right, that the users and
the programmers of Yeah, the stuff I mean it's it's
not likely to change now. Well, even if you get
to a point where you say, what if we reach
a future where machines are making our gadgets for us,
like we're no longer making them ourselves, but a machine
is designing them. Well, someone made that machine, So you know,

(16:51):
it may be that there might be several generations down
that pathway where you get to a point where the
things that are designed really are perfectly designed for a
human being to perfectly optimize what they're doing. Yeah. So
that's so that's a completely natural, seamless integration in our
lives to the point where we never have that awkward
moment where you know, something just doesn't make sense to us,

(17:14):
or we have that issue with whatever gadget we're trying
to make work. Yeah. So what I'm saying in this
point of the conversation is that even though even if
we don't posit, say the end of Moore's law or
something like that, and we say that computers and devices
continue to get more and more powerful, I still think
in Minority Report, we should be seeing Tom Cruise getting

(17:37):
frustrated with memory problems on his big swipy, sexy sleek
screens and there should be things that crash and fail
to load. Right, he should pull he should pull up
a window. Realized, dang it, I I was looking at
Amazon earlier because I needed new shoes, and this is
the Amazon thing. This is totally not that. That file
about that that person who is up out to commit murder. Well, okay,

(18:03):
but even even let's suppose that the technology is perfect, um,
will all of us be comfortable with it? That is
a great point. That's sort of the compliment to the
point we were just talking about, because yeah, you can
look at one of the most easy to use, beautiful
pieces of technology ever made, and some people will still

(18:25):
have a lot of trouble figuring out how to use it.
They're just not comfortable with the new tech. That's sort
of a fundamental feature of human nature is that it's
hard to adapt to new things. Are you Are you
talking about old people? No, I am not talking. I'm
the oldest person in this room. I'm getting a little

(18:45):
sensitive here. I'm not talking. No, it doesn't. In fact,
though I don't know. Age maybe correlated with this issue.
We may talk about that in a minute. But you
can be anybody and have trouble adapting to interfaces that
you're not used to using. I think one thing that
we should see more in science fiction is people being
less at home with their consumer technology that I can't

(19:08):
think of a film that's not satirical in nature where
people are just really flustered and frustrated by not knowing
how to work their different interfaces. Well, I think I
think the reason for that ends up being dramatic rather
than anything else. It's it's one of those things that
it would distract from the story. Therefore it's not a component.

(19:29):
Whereas we would say, well, it's not really realistic. I mean,
your average person would probably have, especially getting something new
out of the box, brand new thing, would probably have
one of those moments where you know, you toss the
instructions away because you don't need those. But but but
it would have been much more realistic, is all. I
think we're saying to have Tom Cruse have just one
single moment where he went, what's that button? Well, you know, well, certainly,

(19:58):
I mean, and the point of all the the storytelling
may not be to go for realism. I understand that totally.
I mean, it might be the same reason you don't
see characters going to the bathroom and movies that it's
just not interesting to the dramatic storyline. And and as
we've talked about in uh several of these episodes before,
I I accept that point of view, as I just
think it's worth pointing out. So let's talk about how

(20:20):
people become acclimatized to new technology and how quickly they
adopt it and become comfortable with it. Sure, and okay,
part of it may in fact be generational. There there
has been some research get off my lawn. There's been
some research out of the Pew Center, which does pretty
good research about the Internet and technology, UM, indicating the

(20:41):
tech is changing fast enough these days that it's actually
speeding up generational differences and making smaller age demographics comfortable
with smaller segments of tech. Uh and UM. There is
an interesting paper kind of to this point by one
doctor Larry D. Rosin, published in the National Psychologist in
two thousand four. It was called Understanding the Technological Generation Gap,

(21:05):
and it pointed out the time frames of previous technological eras,
which I thought was really interesting, like the agricultural era,
which lasted for some three thousand years, or the industrial era,
which lasted some three hundred or the digital age or
information age, or whatever it is that you want to
call it, which has been going on for for a
mere fraction of that, like thirty to fifty years, but

(21:26):
has changed intrinsically the ways that most human people interact
with the world. He generally suggests that we're all adapting
more rapidly these days, but that as as generations grow
up experiencing such rapid technological evolution, they're going to be
able to adapt ever faster. What's interesting is that this
also kind of uh plays into the idea of the singularity,

(21:51):
this idea that we're having these ages of of of
technology and they are transitioning ever more rapidly. Now. Of course,
in the concept of the singularity, you in our an
age where change is the definition of that era. There's
no consistency from one moment to the next. Whether that
ever happens, well, we've done some episodes about it, so

(22:12):
we don't need to go into it here. Uh and
and other research kind of does disagree with with the
concept that we're building towards sub kind of weird superhuman
generation like that. There was a critical review of the
literature that was published in the British Journal of Education
Technology in two thousand and eight called the digital natives bait,
and it indicated that the differences aren't so much a

(22:33):
generationally informed as they are socioeconomically informed, which, of course
is is the money and social structure kind of sides
of this. And the others even went so far as
to compare the the idea that digital natives, these people
who have grown up with tech being intrinsically different, to
a kind of moral panic, like like similar to the

(22:56):
kind of thinking a couple of generations ago that Elvis
was going to literally ruined civilization as we knew it
with his wiggly pelvis. Did you know that pelvis rhymes
with Elvis? I did. Greece made pretty pretty good use
of that fact, I recall. But I can definitely see
what you're saying there about the the moral panic idea

(23:18):
that people are very concerned about the digital native generation. Well,
I mean partially because they're their own children and they
don't understand what's going on with them. Yeah, Well, they
see like, oh man, my kid knows how to use
this technology that I don't know how to use, and
it makes me uncomfortable. Probably means it's bad. Well, it's
also it's also interesting in that there have been plenty

(23:39):
of studies that have shown that that kids growing up
with this technology don't necessarily know how to use it,
at least not effectively. They may be able to access
the things they want to access very very quickly, but
when it comes to making any use of it beyond
that that scope, the scope in which they have become accustomed,
like social changing, yeah, well, or to get into angry

(24:02):
birds or whatever, right exactly, whatever that might be, whether
it's to to end up going on call of duty
or to uh send out a message on whatever social
network kids are actually on these days, I don't know
if they even do that anymore. Um, get off my lawn.
But I mean, no matter what it is like, when
it comes down to using this amazing tool for something
along the lines of research, uh, they are not necessarily

(24:27):
shown to be more gifted than people who were born
before the Internet became you know, a household kind of
of thing, at least in the United States at any rate.
So Uh, for example, when I was in school, it
was before the Internet was something that was accessible to me.
I mean, there were research institutions that were on our
pannette and then the early Internet when I was a kid,

(24:49):
but I didn't have access to it until I was
in college. Uh So I ended up adapting to that.
But it turns out that my research skills that I
developed over time as I learned them, um, are not
you know. It's not like the kids who were born
in that era were suddenly on my same level just
by nature of the fact that they were born when

(25:11):
it happened. They have to develop the skills too. So
that's another thing just to keep in mind, is that
even if we get into a future, another argument to
support why consumer technology is never going to be this
incredibly seamless experience, we still have to learn how to
use it. Until we get to a point where the
technology is learning how to react to us. Then they're

(25:31):
still going to be a learning curve, which means they're
still going to be times when you do have that
frustrating moment where you're trying to make the replicator actually
make your earl gray t well. A lot, a lot
can go into those learning curves. It's not just an
issue of a particular humans capacity to pick up a
thing and understand it. It's it's also a societal and

(25:51):
an infrastructural problem. And and I have a rather lengthy,
but I think worthwhile example to talk to you guys
about about telephones. Okay, Um, it took a long time
for them to become truly pervasive within our culture, you know. Okay,
so these days we dial phone numbers using a numerical
keypad or a digital represented representation of one more likely.

(26:14):
But those keypads only debuted in the nineteen sixties. Before that,
it was all rotary phones, which seemed hopelessly outdated these days.
But we're new as of the nineteen twenties, whereupon phone
companies had to hold public demonstrations for an entire decade
to explain how these things worked, because before then, operators
had handled all of the dialing. You would you would

(26:36):
pick up the phone, talk to an operator and say, hey,
connect me to this thing, and they would figure out
how to do it. You never had to dial a
phone previous to the actually like in those old TV
shows where they just pick up the phone and say, hey,
give me you know ethel yeah, right exactly. But but
even even when those non dial phones debuted back in

(26:57):
the eighteen seventies, it took like forty years where the
tech caught on enough that companies could stop publishing really
basic telephone instruction manuals. At one from CIRCA recommended that
you and I quote speak directly into the mouthpiece, keeping
mustache out of the opening. I think that's still a

(27:18):
valuable piece of information. It is for most of us.
Know that it was written specifically for Teddy Roosevelt. Okay, um,
And let's let's look at this in a more quantitative light,
because I know that all of that probably sounds a
little bit circumstantial. So so, in terms of phone adoption
by the general populace, in eighteen seventy seven, Belt Telephone

(27:39):
Company had seven and seventy telephones in existence. By eighteen
ninety nine, twenty years later, they had a million telephones.
That's that's one percent of the population of the United
States with telephones. By nine thirty years later, they had
twenty million phones. That's sixteen percent of the population. And Okay,

(27:59):
some people had telephones other than Bell, but being that
they were the biggest players in the phone industry kind
of by far. It's an alright, rough idea, right, pretty
much a monopoly. Yeah, by it was sent of the population.
Then once we hit the digital age, things sped up
kind of considerably. A Cellular phones debuted commercially in the

(28:20):
early nineteen eighties, and these days, uh, couple decades later,
of the of United States adults have a cell phone alone,
not even counting other types of telephone. So the adoption
of cell phones was much more rapid than the adoption
of phones in general, very much more rapid. In fact,
according to a report put out by the United Nations,

(28:42):
in six billion of the world's seven billion people have
access to a mobile phone right now. Um, and you know,
you could argue that since people were already familiar with
phones in general, it was a really easy switch, or
that it's an infrastructure issue, not a person an adoption issue. Well, quick, quick,
just sort of uh tangential question related to this, did

(29:06):
you guys adopt cell phones relatively quickly? Did you hold
out for a long time? Well, I was, I was
a kid in the eighties, so it's a slightly different question. Um,
but but but I I had one when I first
went to college. I never had a real phone in college,
a landline. I had a mobile phone. I specifically remember
having a conversation on my college campus with friends who

(29:29):
had just recently got a cell phone, which at that time,
you know, early cell phones were pretty much that was
the realm of the executive, right. There weren't very many
people other than executives who had them in the early days.
Truck drivers maybe as well, or like nerds like Fox Molder. Yeah, yeah,
actually he is a real person. Actually actually had a
college professor who was so enamored with X files he

(29:50):
would bring a fake giant plastic cell phone and have
conversations with with a scully on the phone to give
class announcements. What's that Scully? You want to remind me
that Martin Luther King Junior day is is Monday? Al Right, guys, no,
class Monday. That was really well, uh, he was awesome.

(30:10):
It was my medieval lip profess. But anyway, No, I
remember distinctly having the conversation at that time saying I'm
not going to get one of those, because I can't
imagine ever being in a situation where someone needs to
get ahold of me so badly that I have to
have the phone on my person. That's what answering machines
are for. This was in the realm of answering machines. Y'all,

(30:32):
we're not talking about digital voice recordings. So UM, yeah,
of course. Now I've got a smartphone and uh and
and I it would be really hard to separate me
from it. So how much message time could your wax
cylinder record? Uh? It's you know, it depends. Uh. If
the person was not terribly loquacious, I could get maybe

(30:54):
two messages out of one. But mom, it was like
it was like a roll and a half, which was
unfortunate if someone was not there and actually switched them out. Um,
at any rate. So that's also true. I would be
really curious to see what the smartphone numbers are as well.
I bet smartphone adoption is even faster than cell phone was, right,
you would be so. Regarding people's level of comfort with

(31:15):
existing and cutting edge technology, it may be that both
development and adoption are not just speedy recently, but continuously
speeding up. It's getting faster still. Uh. In a two
thousand twelve article for The m I T Tech Review,
Michael D. Gusta noted that recent technologies like smartphones and

(31:36):
tablets might be spreading faster than any technology in human history,
though he explicitly notes that it's difficult to compare all
historical technological trends as well as global data about adoption rates. Nevertheless,
it seems a really distinct probability that these things are true.
So older technology like grid electricity and landline telephones, which

(31:58):
you talked about taking along time to reach saturation, might
have taken longer to reach maturity because they required infrastructure development.
Cell phones and smartphones required less, especially on the part
of the consumer, and tablets required even less than that.
So with smartphones, for the years throughout the two thousands,
the technology dawdled sort of at fairly low adoption rates.

(32:21):
You had some Blackberries and stuff like that. It was
really when Apple released the iPhone in two thousand seven
that the smartphone market really took off. So apparently it's
sold one point twelve million in its first quarter. Uh
and and that was despite having a high price to
goose to notes, but it increased its market share very quickly,

(32:44):
and so at the time this article was written in
May two thousand twelve, he noted that fifty of all
US mobile phone users, which was of the US population,
now had smartphones. And just a little update as of
j Neuarteen, I looked it up Pew Internet reports that
fifty eight percent of American adults had a smartphone. That

(33:07):
is really really fast maturity for a new technology. Now,
there were some even faster developments in the tablet world.
There was some sort of early trip ups early tablets
that didn't really go anywhere. Again, it was Apple that
made the difference. When Apple launched the iPad in April
two thousand ten, it was relatively huge. Within a year

(33:29):
and a half, tablets could be found in eleven percent
of American households, and within two years, thirteen percent of
US consumers owned a tablet. To Gusto noted that that
adoption rate was faster than any other technology he could
compare it to. UH. And that was again in May
two thousand twelve. What are the more recent numbers. This
is astounding again from the Pew Internet Project fact sheet.

(33:51):
As of January, forty two percent of American adults owned
a tablet. That's in four years, less than four years UH.
That's insane compared to these other technologies that took decades
to reach that level of maturity and then eventual saturation
in the American markets. And it suggests that we're incorporating

(34:15):
more and more newer and newer technology into our lives
faster and faster. But it's funny that I feel like
there are two different ways you could interpret this relative
to our question about people's level of comfort with technology.
Does that mean that we're incorporating more and more technology
into our lives before we're ready for it, so we're

(34:37):
going to be even more and more confused and discombobulated
by our devices in the future. Or does it mean
something is changing in society where we are getting used
to new technology faster than we used to, that our
level of comfort with our devices is adapting to become
more agreeable basically that we just get used to it,

(34:57):
or that we're more eager to do it and therefore
put in more of an effort to learn more quickly.
I think, uh yeah, I think that's a big part
of it, Lauren. I think that things like the um
iPad have really set a precedent where it's it's increased
the interest in consumer technology beyond what it used to

(35:18):
be because it was something that was designed very well.
First and foremost, it's a really good design. Secondly, it
was marketed really well, so you had an amazing marketing
push an amazing design um and the accommodation meant that
it had a really positive reception in the public. Like,

(35:39):
you know, if you had told me ten years ago
that there would be people who would take time off
of their jobs, like whether officially or not, in order
to watch an industry event that Apple is holding, I
would have thought you were crazy. But that's what happens there,
to camp out outside of an Apple store for for
a new product release, right That would also I would

(36:01):
have told you you were crazy. I would have told
my wife she was crazy when she did that way
I've had too um. But but no, that's the that's
the world we live in now. And I think part
of that is that this this expectation now means that
we're eager for that next thing that's going to be
like the iPad tablet that will UH kind of give
us that same sort of sense of of wonder of

(36:23):
what technology can do. And I think there's a lot
writing on wearables right now as being the next big
UH form factor for that. And it may be that
once someone has got the killer implementation of that, that
we see the levels of adoption that are similar to
what we're seeing in these other examples. Yeah, so I

(36:44):
think this example might be an interesting thing that actually
runs counter to our thesis that people's relationship to technology
and the future should look more awkward. Maybe it shouldn't.
I mean, maybe future technology trends will be sort of
dominated by this Apple like approach, where it says, look,
user experiences first. Things need to be very comfortable and

(37:05):
easy to use in your hand, especially before we move
on one more quick point, especially being that the technology
of marketing kind of tier point Jonathan is also stepping
up pretty quickly, and that we are able to know
about new technologies and able to troubleshoot them more easily. Hypothetically,
if if, if the Internet is working at the time

(37:28):
than than anyone was before, you know, you know, like
people don't have to hear about a new Apple product
by going out to a fair in their town and
having someone stand up and present something to them about it.
And they don't have to read a paper instruction manual.
It's all very much at their fingertips. As broken bowns
rheumatitis syphilitis. I have heard that in two thousand and fifteen,

(37:53):
all Apple marketing will be delivered by Carnival barkers. So
I'm just saying I would really like that. That would
be awesome. But no, more to your point, Joe about
the the the assertion that perhaps in the future we've
got these pieces of technology that integrates so easily. And
that's why I don't I think that adopting technology quickly
might be a trend, that does not necessarily mean that

(38:16):
that technology is going to give us this seamless experience. Uh.
And so I mean, I think there be even people
who would easily argue that the iPad and iPhone are
not completely free of of issues that are frustrating. Oh no,
I I have had issues with Apple products before. I mean,
if they I would say, I've had fewer issues with

(38:36):
Apple products than with the non Apple products that I
know and love and am supplied with by my workplace. Well, like,
for example, the iPhone four is the one I liked
to to cite because that was the one that had
a little tiny gap on the lower left side that
represented where the antenna was. And there were some people
who reported that they were having reception issues with their phones.

(38:59):
They were getting really terrible reception even when they would
have another phone on that same provider, and it would
have great reception, and there were multiple reasons that we're
guessed about for this. Apple eventually came out and said
you're holding it wrong, saying that if you were holding
the phone in such a way that your hand obscured
this little section of the phone. Basically, everyone holds their phone.

(39:24):
Certainly anyone who's left handed would hold it where the
left side is against their palm as opposed to their fingers. Um,
so left handers, we just hold everything wrong. I am
a left hander everything. I know this me and ten
percent of the population, which realizes a rough number. But yes, yeah, no,
it's just me. Okay, that's fair, get off my line.

(39:46):
So the but yeah, this is this is one of
those things where again this was a user problem with
an Apple product. So I imagine that we're going to
see this happen in the future where uh, you know
the issues that you can't as a designer necessarily anticipate
all the use cases for the thing that you are making. Right, Like,

(40:06):
if my job is to make the next amazing piece
of technology that's going to be your you know, techno
arm bracer that gives you the redoubts of everything, you
need to know that day and you could just stare
at your forearm and you've got all the information you need.
I'm doing it based upon what I think is going
to be the universal experience. But I can't really know

(40:28):
what the universal experience is going to be. It's gonna
be filtered through my own preferences, um, even if I'm
getting notes from other people. So it's very possible I
could come up with a product that for a lot
of people just doesn't work. I could have a real
problem with that piece of technologies, certainly would. But he
is what he is, So I mean that's just that's
you have that as as a poster right there in

(40:50):
the development team, because if you designed for Popye, you'd
have a very limited customer base. Yeah, but at any rate, Okay,
the general usability and adaptability of consumer products. It's kind
of another factor that we wanted to talk about here, oh,
in that most movies never portray technology as being annoying. Yeah.

(41:14):
Well again, some satirical ones do, but you're straightforward sci
fi action drama kind of that thing. Right, If it's
horror movies, then the technology is always going to to
crap out the moment when you need it most, Right,
that's that's the trope in in horror movies. The trope
and science fiction is the technology works until you need
it to not work. Right, So in a in a

(41:36):
world like Minority Report, the technology is just this amazing,
integrated thing that's part of your life, just as any
other element of your life would be considered like a
defining thing you would you would not be able to
imagine that world without that technology there, though, it is
funny how we've got technology very deeply integrated into our lives.

(41:57):
Are our phones and our computers and stuff like that,
and these pieces of technology still do extremely annoying things.
It is deeply, very much a part of my life
that I use my phone all the time. My phone
has all kinds of terribly annoying habits well. And there
are a lot of issues at play here, right, I mean,
it's not just that a single device might do something annoying.

(42:19):
It's that we don't have Like in the Star Trek universe,
you get the feeling that everything is made by the
same person, the same person. There's one guy who's making everything.
That's everybody's used, the phasers, the replicators, everything is integrated,
whereas in reality you've got all these different companies making
different form factors with different user interfaces for stuff that's
supposed to do the same thing, right, right, Yeah, Tom

(42:42):
Cruise never like goes over to a friend's house and
goes like, wait, wait, I'm trying to swipe the thing
and it's not swiping. Yeah. Oh, it's because the Swipe
Tech patented that particular user interface, and so this one,
because it's not a swipe Tech display, you can't swipe.
You have to blink three times. You know that that.
That's the thing is that when you're able to patent

(43:02):
a process, which you can do with the United States,
then you can apply that to your technology and then
limit what other companies can do. So they either have
to license that from you or they have to figure
out a different way around it, which means there's no
universality to a user interface or form factor. You've got
a lot of fractured landscape going on, is what I'm

(43:24):
trying to set, like right, and and for them were
like like your your Star Trek communicator works with all
of the computers and start because it just does right.
Whereas if you know, we've talked about this with the
Internet of things, if you wanted to have that integrated experience.
Right now, with like all the kitchen appliances that can
talk to each other, you have to get them all
from the same vendor, or you need a industry wide

(43:46):
kitchen protocol. Right. So that's one of the reasons why
technology is frustrating is because we don't have a universal
standard that each form factor has to adhere to, and
we don't really want to have that because then you're
stuck with whatever has been produced. Right, you don't have
any choice in the matter, Whereas with choice, you've got competition,

(44:07):
which at least in theory, means the consumer gets the
benefit because the consumer can pick between whichever form factors
and user interfaces appeals to that person the most. So
there's a trade off here, Right, you have the great
advantage of choice, but the disadvantage of the fact that
the thing you have may not work the way the

(44:28):
thing someone else has, and when you try to get
the two to interact, it may not be a smooth experience,
unlike the world of the sci fi where everything works
together all the time until some catastrophe happens. There's also,
I think a thing that bears mentioning, which is the
gap between the expectations of what technology can do and

(44:51):
what it actually does, which we've experienced many times in
our lives throughout the years. Um, I don't know if
you necessarily expect to see this so much in sci fi,
because that would sort of would have to cover sort
of in the marketing and the media approach to something
and then you see how it falls flat. You wouldn't
necessarily expect to see that in every story. But it

(45:14):
is a very funny feature of consumer tech that I
feel like you don't see in sci fi all that
Often the virtual reality problem, right, the idea, the idea
that you've heard about this technology for long enough, and
by the time you're able to actually experience that firsthand,
you realize that the reality and the hype don't measure up.
So virtual reality in the Nines is the perfect example.

(45:35):
I remember the first time I ever got to put
on one of those helmets and m and play that
Pterodactyl game, and like I was thinking, like, well, it's
really cool that I can look around and my motions
in the real world are being translated into the virtual world.
But but I just vomited five times. Mostly I'm just
nauseating the latency was certainly an issue in those early days.

(45:56):
What was interesting was that you could definitely get the
feeling of a virtual presence, like you could feel like
when you walk over toward an edge in the game,
that you were near a physical edge even though you
were just standing on the ground. That was interesting, but
the actual sophistication was lacking, and so there was this
big gap between what we expected and what what what

(46:20):
was delivered at the time. I played a virtual reality
game at a festival one time in the nineties, and
I remember, I think, you know, when I was a kid,
like every movie I went to see in the theater
was the best movie I've ever seen, and I had
I was very easily satisfied, I guess. But I do
remember after this experience having this feeling like someone wasn't

(46:41):
write about that well. And of course there are other
examples like the one I wrote down here was a
series and voice controls in general, the idea of having
this this voice activated personal assistant, the kind of backlash
after it came out where people were like, this serie
thing is kind of dumb. Yeah, Like at first people
were thinking this is really cool, and they were having
a lot of fun with the stuff that kind of

(47:03):
the Easter eggs that were hidden with was mostly fun
to get cheeky with. Yeah, it was. It was a
diversion more than an actual useful sory. Where can I
do something illegal? Right? Where where can I hide a body?
That kind of thing. Um. And then also I had
the windows Surface tablet, which was really being pushed as
the next like a really viable competitor to Apple's iPad. Uh,

(47:26):
And there were a lot of people who were legitimately
hoping that this would happen because competition, again is a
good thing. Competition pushes companies to keep innovating and to
improve their products. So even if you never planned on
getting a windows surface tablet, you might have hoped that
it was a really good tablet because that would mean
Apple would have to come back and for the iPad
seventeen it would have to be truly amazing that kind

(47:49):
of thing, and that they would continuously push each other.
But the general reception of the windows Surface tablet was
that they just didn't quite It just didn't have the
magic that needed to have to really be a competitor
or the iPad. So again another expectation versus reality. Problem. Cool. Well,
I think we should round this up end by giving

(48:10):
a salute to a few sci fi visions that really
do capture the awkwardness of consumer technology in a very
perceptive and funny way. Sure, as we've said throughout, I
think a lot of the sci fi that does this
best is satirical. I've been trying to think of a
serious sci fi movie that or book or whatever that

(48:31):
does this, and I haven't thought of one yet, though
I'm sure they exist. But but we've got several satirical
ones here, one which I don't know which of you noted,
but I think it's a great one. Brazil, right, and
Brazil that I wrote that one down, But Brazil really
also goes back into that Parkinson's law as well, because
it's all it's not just about kind of a weird

(48:52):
science fiction big brother state world, which it is. It's
a big brother state world that's not efficient at all.
It's it's rampant with bureaucracy. Right. We should say it's
a Terry Gilliam film, Yes, Terry Gilliam film, and it uh,
you know, it brings that Terry Gilliam sensibility. There's a
lot of absurdity and and things are just useless and
pointless and don't make any sense, but they wield power. Right. Yeah,

(49:17):
it's if it's a rule, you have to follow it,
that sort of thing, like the rule doesn't have to
make sense, but the rule has to be followed. And
there's a possibility that no one knows why that rule
is in place at all. Right, that rule may have
outlived its usefulness, but because it's a rule, it's going
to be there. So that describes the government and the
bureaucracy in the movie. But the technology is an extension
of that same principle. There's all this technology that doesn't

(49:39):
appear to have any real purpose the work. Yeah, hilarious
machines that are these giant machines with these tiny little
screens on and uh, it looks like a kind of
a retro version of the future too. There's like there's
a lot of of old fashioned typewriters that are worked
into it. You know. It's it's a mixture of old
tech and high tech sensibilities and also a level of

(50:03):
the grotesque. There's quite a bit of the grotesque, like
the facelift device that is pretty memorable in a couple
of scenes, but um, you know, this is the sort
of stuff that you look at it and it's it's
definitely pointing out the the the kind of absurdities of
technology that we often encounter. Another one is Hitchhiker's Guide

(50:25):
to the Galaxy. Yep I wrote that one down to
this one also has a lot like this is a
universe that you can totally imagine existing, right It's it's
an absurd, comedic universe created by Douglas Adams. And in
this world there's plenty of technology that works sometimes despite itself.
So for example, there's a device that Arthur Dent, who

(50:47):
is formerly a resident of England. Uh contemporary, I mean
like like nineteen eighties to two thousands England, depending on
when exactly, Yeah, which version you're watching sum so if
you're if you're consuming the original version, yeah, nineteen eighties,
early nineteen eighties era England, he was a resident there
and England spoiler alert in the in the story doesn't

(51:10):
exist anymore because the Earth was blown up, but Arthur
happens on the third page. Arthur. Arthur is obsessed with
getting a nice cup of tea because he's a real
he's British, he's British. He's extremely British, and so a
cup of tea is sort of his way of dealing
with the world. Ending like he's got some stressed to

(51:30):
to deal with. Uh, And he encounters a device that,
in the words of Douglas Adams, is something along the
lines that's able to produce something that is almost, but
not quite entirely unlike tea. So it's almost the opposite
of whatever t is, but not quite. It's just on
the side of tea enough for it to be identifiable
as being almost completely wrong. That the automatic doors in

(51:51):
this universe before they will let you into or out
of themselves, need to talk to you for a while
about their feelings about open They thank you for for
for for walking through them every single time. This is
a specifically on that feature. It's on the Heart of Gold,
the Heart of Gold spaceship. Yeah. No. And then you've
got Marvin, Marvin the paranoid android. I mean, is this

(52:16):
what we really want when we say we want general
artificial intelligence? Do we want to be able to really
simulate the human mind to program manic depression into a
into a robo. Actually, I guess it's not even mannic
depression is just depressions. He has the size brain, the
size of the planet, and he's standing on a car
park for a thousand years. Um, yeah, it's It's another

(52:38):
one of those examples where the technology is another element
of absurdity on top of an already absurd story. But
it really does point out that in this version, in
this world, this universe that Arthur Dent goes through, the
things we've talked about with consumer tech and the pitfalls
associated with it, at least in this particular book, are universal.

(53:01):
They're not not limited to the human experience. And then
because everyone's ridiculous. Sure, I guess, I guess Another example
of that would be the Fifth Element. Yeah, I wrote
this one down. Um, I filled up this one. I
was as I was thinking about it, I was trying
to think of of science fiction movies where the technology,
at some point or another just is giving people problems.
And the Fifth Element has a couple of moments like that. Particularly, Uh,

(53:24):
there's a moment where Bruce Willis's character there's a knock
at the door, doorbell rings, and he goes to answer
at the door and there's a would be robber at
the door who's holding a gun. Pointing at Bruce Willis's
character and the he's really twitchy robber guy, and Bruce
Willis's character just very casually reaches over and says, you've

(53:45):
got the safety on and turns the safety off for
the robber who just kind of just like uh, and
then and then he Bruce Willis pulls his own gun
on the robber is like, why don't you just hand
that over here, and gets like okay. But it's one
of those moments where like, like the technology is not
you know, you could you would imagine then the future world,
everything that is designed to do something is supposed to

(54:07):
do it really really well, even weapons, even weapons, and
even weapons, especially weapons in some cases, especially in the
world of the Fifth Element, which is pretty violent. UM.
But yeah, the technology and the Fifth Element ranges from
really useful to unreliable. So it's seems pretty realistic. And
also the vision of the future, and that is not

(54:29):
the pristine, glorious, glimmering future that you've see in a
lot of other, like you know, far thinking science fiction films. Yeah,
though that one, I would also say, though I wouldn't
strictly call it a satire, it is UM does have
strong humorous undercurrent. Say it's a comedy adventure with an
emphasis on the comedy. Yeah, you can't. You can't have

(54:53):
the characters in that movie and not comedic comedy. Uh no,
we straight future RuPaul is certainly a thing that happens.
Uh no. And and it's that one in particular I
find pretty interesting because it's again a very cobbled together
version of the future that incorporates a lot of historical

(55:15):
technology and historical looking technology, and different characters from different
characters from different social strata have access to different types
of technology, and there's a little bit of a discussion
about the economics of all of that. There's a lot
of different cultures represented, including alien cultures as it turns out,
which is really interesting that you you see this kind
of mishmash world and there is still like a social structure.

(55:38):
Like you were saying, it kind of falls in that
the lower in the world you are, the lower floor
you live on. Essentially, it's it's kind of a kind
of a direct correlative there. So what do you all think,
I mean, have we been too hard to do? Maybe?
Uh maybe these movies have some good reasons for making

(56:00):
all the future technology the consumer technology looks sleek, sexy, fast,
easy to use, perfect Or should they make an effort
maybe to show more of the foibles of the consumer electronics.
I think, uh, I think if it's not distracting, um,
then it's perfectly fine to throw in a couple of
little moments, if that's not even the point of the movie.

(56:21):
Like even let's say you've got a plot of a
movie where technology is part of the setting, but it's
not the focal focal point, so it's not like the
technology has risen up against the humans. But I think
it's still fine to have. Like, even if it's just
a background thing where you see someone who's clearly struggling
with something, I think that could be a moment where
you think, oh, yeah, I guess in the future, will

(56:41):
will still be human? Yeah yeah, it's a humanizing moment,
And I think it it can. It's a great potential
for levity, which I I personally enjoy very much, even
in very very action, blow stuff up all those serious
things kind of movies, and especially in those. Really I
think it's a terrific little salt to to the dish.
I kind of negatively in terms of what's actually going

(57:03):
to happen in the future, and this is kind of
a cynical outlook. I suspect that that this is going
to be a social strata economic kind of issue, wherein
the upper classes are going to have perhaps the more sleek,
more wonderful technology, and that there might be more of
a divide unfortunately between the halves and have nots in

(57:23):
this sort of discussion. Yeah, when you talk about is
technology some extent, it is very much like that today.
And so I guess the question is will it get better?
I mean, uh maybe maybe, I hope. We definitely want
that future, right, we want the future where people have
uh more affordable access to that kind of thing. If

(57:47):
we ever hit the Star Trek future, then money doesn't
matter anymore and everybody has access to everything, which would
be nice. Also jumpsuits also, never forget the jumpsuits. Yeah, so, um,
I guess they're wraps up this discussion. If you guys
have any suggestions for things we never see in science
fiction that you want us to cover, maybe you think, hey,

(58:08):
you know what we never see anymore? Ruby Rod? Can
we see more Ruby Rod and science fiction? Let us know.
Send us a message on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.
Our handle is fw Thinking, and you don't have to
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(58:33):
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