Color TV and Chat GPT

Sometimes I think technology has hit a bit of a wall. There are lots of every day things that I feel should be solved by now. For some vague definition of solved. The logical part of me, the part that has been building technology products for the last dozen years, knows that there’s a lot of complexity that’s hard to see on the surface. That complexity makes things that seem simple a lot harder to achieve. There’s another part of me that thinks there’s some kind of hedonic treadmill at play. The more we have, the higher our expectations become. It’s made me reflect on a timeline of technology. One spanning longer than my life so far, but not so long that nobody alive remembers it.

Today, roughly twenty percent of the global population is over sixty. Those that are were born in a time before color television. The idea of television had been in the works for almost one hundred years by 1960 but color images beamed into your home weren’t readily available until around 1960 here in Australia. That’s a time well within living memory.

Fast forward to 2022 and the world saw the release of ChatGPT. A widely available AI model, trained well enough to engage with in an interesting and meaningful way. Much like television, AI wasn’t brand new in 2022, it was decades of work coming together. Crystalised into a product that, for the first time, captured the public attention.

Twenty percent of the people alive today experienced both those changes in technology. That’s a big leap in what technology could do in a relatively short span of time. Both of those changes likely felt substantial in the moment. Much like color TV today, both will likely be commonplace before long.

Looking back on my own life I remember similar zero to one shifts in technology. I missed the release of the NES and SNES but the Nintendo 64 released in my childhood. Before that, video games, especially those in 3D just didn’t exist.

I remember getting the internet for the first time. We were probably late to the party on a global scale but this was still in the days where you could either browse the web of make phone calls, not both. Having the internet at home opened up a world of technology that I previously just never had access to. Today, I’d be hard pressed to go somewhere without immediate internet access at speeds that ten year old me would find hard to believe.

I remember getting a giant brick of a mobile phone in my teenage years. Each year phones would get more features, shed weight and become a bigger part of our lives. My first phone had no camera, a tiny black and white screen and just enough functionality to text and call. Within five years we had cameras, color screens and access to the web. Another few years and everyone had a smart phone, packed with data and access to anything you could ask for.

All these little marvels so quickly go from new to normal. All this technology right in front of us. Technology that if sent back in time would give you near super powers compared to the average person.

I’ve been lucky enough in my career so far to work on some fairly interesting applications of technology. Areas that are less commonplace but have seen equal levels of progress in a relatively short period of time. My PhD work brought together medical imaging and radiation therapy. My work at Maxwell Plus introduced me to people on the cutting edge of genetics and immunotherapy.

It’s easy to feel like more should be solved by now. That technology might be doing more hard than good. That the people in charge of these companies don’t have our best interests at heart. Some of that might be true. But there’s also reason to be hopeful.

Technology continues to march forward and we’re living, on average, better lives because of it. There’s room to improve. There always is. Despite that, I remain optimistic. Optimistic that another sixty odd years from now, if I’m lucky enough to be around, I’ll be able to look back on the technology of today and see a rich history. One on par with the jump from color TV through to Chat GPT.