Future Shock - The Rate of Change and Step Functions
Monday, June 29, 2009 at 7:16PM 
The BBC are carrying this item on a 13 year old kid who swapped his iPod for a Walkman, which is apparently 30 years old this week.
There are some great quotes, one of my favourites being this one:
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
But it did get me thinking about the rate of change of technology again. There's something of a feeling that the rate of change of technology has slowed down in recent years. However, I'm of the opinion that that's a selection effect caused by sitting in the middle of the change and of what the change is.
Some things do tend to plateau: Cars, for example. While in 1949 there was nothing portable like the Walkman or iPod, we did have cars and a person from 1949 wouldn't have too many problems with a modern car - push button ignition might fox them, but it gets me too sometimes. But generally speaking while performance, reliability, efficiency and comfort are all better, the basic design of the vehicle, the controls and instrumentation remain pretty much the same.
However, the technology in the Walkman, the cassette tape lasted just a few short decades before being replaced as the convienient way of storing music by the CD which, itself, is being replaced.
There's an interesting question here: is there an advance beyond the MP3? Or is codec based music the limit? MP3 might change as the preferred format but from now on the core technology of a player for files will remain unchanged for decades or centuries?
Like the CD, the compact camera formats came and went in a few tens of years, muscled out by the abrupt emergence of digital cameras.
The phone is also an interesting case in point. Certainly the technology is backwards compatable. A kid today would find the dial weird but have no trouble working it. You might have to explain the buttons to a phone user from the past but the principle of pressing buttons to "dial" a number is graspable. My 80ish year old mother has no trouble with it.
But what if that changes. We could certainly move away from buttons to more linguistic and IM based IP interfaces. Jason Calacanis has called Twitter the "dial tone of the 21st century" because it is already becoming a communication standard. Now, I'm not making any wild claims about Twitter but there is certainly going to be another seismic shift in communications paradigms in the next 10 years and that might be hard for oldies like us to deal with.
Our neighbours came over for dinner on Saturday. He was saying his teenage daughter sent 5000 text messages last month... I thought I was doing well with 500...
Anyway, I hope I can keep up. And, in case I can't, I've already got dibs on my grandmothers wind up gramaphone with a complete collection of 78s...
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Reader Comments (2)
And based on the topic, I was guessing that this post was from your esteemed colleague, and therefore was surprised not to see anything on S curve vs. exponential.
Although I was amused by the article, particularly the 'normal / metal'. I think I call bullshit. Clearly the analog of an MP3 player is a walkman plus the ubiquitous pile of cassettes in ones bag of schoolbooks or car footwell, therefore I find it hard to believe the 'Oh it has two sides', which reads to me very much like 'now, what are the obvious misunderstandings we can put in the mouth of this made up person - ah yes, turning it over since CDs and DVDs and VHSs don't have 2 sides [except of course that DVDs do sometimes] and ha ha we can say they thought metal was a graphic equaliser'.
By definition any music format will involve encoding and decoding hence have a codec. A popular theory is that one can reverse engineer the music to come up with what is essentially a score and that this will save lots of room - i.e. essentially one generated some sort of MIDI file. When I say popular theory I mean popular in the sense of 'bandied around by people who know nothing about music'. Your esteemed colleague would of course say 'another application for AGI'.
The problem with 'the rate of change is slowing' arguments is that for any given advance you always have
Thesis: This is new and exciting
Antithesis: but x is just really a new sort of y
Synthesis: Profit (oh, sorry, wrong cliche)
The web is just FTP and Gopher with graphics. And yet and yet. Sometimes a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind.
My thinking about how alike things are was more based on the ability of users to work things.
Interestingly with FTP/Gopher, like with a gramaphone - I think a modern kid, only used to big interactive sites with lots of JavaScript and Flash would struggle understanding what Gopher actually was, other than a crippled version of Google, and what the point was. They might also struggle with how to use a wind up Gramaphone too - especially placing the needle.
I'm inclined to give the BBC the benefit of the doubt on this one. But I might try some live experiments on my 12 year old niece next time I'm in the UK to check. I think I have a walkman somewhere.