8/2/2021 How technology has us moving backwards into our future

Suzanne Livingston

Nejc Prah/Wolff Olins

How technology has us moving backwards into

our future
Suzanne Livingston
Independent Strategy Consultant | Curator | Writer | Coach + Follow
Published Oct 30, 2015

As we anxiously look to the future, are we failing to recognise the

change we are manifesting everyday?

It is the general message of the media that technology is taking us over. The adoption of
technology is faster than ever. Few seem to doubt that robots will be taking our jobs.
Speculation goes crazy in the field of synthetic biology. Doomsaying, god-playing, and
hand-wringing abound. What will be left of us? What will we do all day?

Assumptions about the future are compelling but when did technology ever piece itself
together to fit the stories we tell about it? I wish it did, given the incredible visions of our
great sci-fi writers, but it doesn’t seem likely. Will the future we imagine bear any relation to
the one that will actually emerge?

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A look at the evolution and adoption of technology paints a patchy picture.

Suzanne Livingston

It’s been thirty years since the internet of things (IoT) was imagined at Xerox Parc but I
don’t yet own a significant, lasting piece of IoT tech. Likewise my daily interaction with 3D
printing is scant. As Eric Schmidt recently pointed out, it’s 60 years since the term artificial
intelligence (AI) was coined. I’m still waiting for all of these developments.

The brilliance of these technologies takes time to craft. Their development is full of
speculation, real money and crazy money, commercial realities, regulatory and
infrastructural setbacks. On this year’s Gartner Hype Cycle, consumer 3D printing is beyond
the crest of the wave and on the decline. Where will it go next? Can we still hope for it to
bring hands-on creativity to the heart? It’s hard to tell.

There are trips and stumbles too. Google Glass came and went. The Apple Watch is off to a
slow start. A whole swathe of technological breakthroughs of the last ten years shone
brightly and flickered out – MySpace, HD-DVD, Sega, Microsoft Kin, Google Wave. At a
more infrastructural level, the installation of 4G has not been easy. What about 5G and
beyond? Podcasts drew scepticism, but have blossomed into a vibrant culture. The
innovation invested in one technology can be reborn in a new guise but the twists and turns
are many. Outcomes are difficult to predict.

Economist Carlota Perez helps to explain the cut and thrust of technological progress with
Schumpeter’s idea of gales of creative destruction. These gales produce pain, turbulence and
unpredictability with some technologies destroying the potential of others.

Perez says it takes about 60 to 70 years for a technological era to establish itself and change
the institutional set up of economy and society. The age of steam and railways is an
example, so too the age of steel and electricity. These are deep-rooted framework shifts that
provide groundwork for the next generation.

We’re undoubtedly deep in one of those turbulent shifts. But how much do we control its
outcomes and end point? And, as we look to the future with anxiety, do we recognise the
change we are manifesting everyday? Interestingly, we often don’t notice more profound
and immediate shifts. As we compulsively touch our screens, obsessively uploading every
fragment of data about ourselves, we are surely deep in the very evolution we fear. Many of
us can’t stop. We want technology closer, deeper in our lives and maybe soon embedded

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8/2/2021 How technology has us moving backwards into our future

under our skins. Alongside a fear of the future seems to be a very present yearning for a
Suzanne Livingston
different kind of intelligence. It’s one we are not just ushering in; it’s one we are actively
becoming.

For writer Venkatesh Rao, Facebook is the great example of compulsion and becoming. Few
would doubt Facebook is one of the cleverest technologies around. As it sucks up more and
more of our personal information, we both enthuse and ignore the fact. The irony is it is
laying the bedrock of all the technologies which will shape our future – the exact ones we
fear. It is changing us forever so that we can be ever more changed.

Marshall McLuhan famously said: “When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always
to attach ourselves... to the flavour of the most recent past. We look at the present through a
rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” For Rao today, this is
“manufactured normalcy”, in which new technologies are accepted by our culture so long as
they are only a normalised, incremental step from what went before. On this basis, we are
only ever living in a hyper-extended version of the past: “We are all living, in user-
experience terms, in some thoroughly mangled, overloaded, stretched and precarious version
of the 15th century.”

While we may process the change technology brings along the path of least cognitive effort,
the degree of that real, underlying shift far exceeds our imaginings. We can’t see it until long
after the fact. At the same time, while we busily plot out a future that often feeds our fear
and anxiety, it regularly escapes our plans. Things don’t happen as expected or on time.

As technology pursues both speeds and paths of development other than the ones we plan or
perceive, it might be time to accept that we are lost in the flow.

This piece was published 28th October on the guardian.com. 

http://www.theguardian.com/wolff-olins-partner-zone/2015/oct/28/technology-
moving-backwards-future

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1 Comment

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Graham Price

3y
Great article Suzanne. Puts the march of technology in a much clearer perspective. I like to think we'll
be able to change minds faster than your predictions for technology, and that this could have a far
greater impact on people's lives than technology change. As you're also involved in coaching I look

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forward to a chance to discuss this with you and Wolff's potential involvement. Graham Price,
www.abicord.com
Suzanne Livingston ; www.aaactt.com 

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