The problem with life-changing technology is that sooner or later you get used to it. When the first iPhone was launched in June 2007, it might as well have been Stanley Kubrick’s space monolith for the awe that it inspired.
Now we think nothing of having a television, library, and shopping centre in our pockets.
We criticise each new model as a merely incremental improvement, and start to kid ourselves that innovation is dead.
Where are the great inventions? Are we condemned only to ever-expanding Uberisation of every chore male geeks still wish their mothers did for them?
I say no. If you raise your eyes beyond the Californian horizon, there is still a world of wild dreamers out there inventing the future.
Imagine a jet so fast it could cross oceans in minutes, hurling passengers from one hemisphere to another in the time it takes to enjoy a drink.
Science fiction fantasy? Not any more: Charles Bombadier, a Canadian inventor, has designed a jet that can catapult you from London to New York in 11 minutes, flying at 12427 miles per hour. OK, so it hasn’t actually been built yet (and would cost more than £105-million to do so), but the blueprint now exists.
Travel has always made inventors dream: how to get to places faster than ever. For all of us who have wistfully fantasised about circumnavigating traffic jams, there is someone out there working on turning those reveries into reality.
Test tracks are being laid for the Hyperloop, a supersonic train which whisks you from London in Britain to Edinburgh, Scotland in 30 minutes via capsules that float on a cushion of air; in Slovakia, engineers have built the Aeromobil, an actual flying car that works, while merely lazy drivers can rejoice in the knowledge that a teenager in Romania has hacked together a driverless car for a few thousand dollars.
Possibly even more mind-bending, the prospect of computers with intelligence and imagination to match that of humans is now real.
Late last month, DeepMind, a computer program built by a former games designer in Britain, beat a professional player at the devilishly complex board game Go – five times in a row.
Putting that into context, the number of outcomes in this 2500-year-old Chinese game exceeds the number of atoms in the universe, and is at least 10 times more complex than chess. Slightly terrifying? Perhaps.
But the technique DeepMind uses could help solve the great problems of our time, from cancer cures to climate change. It’s not just about playing games.
Meanwhile, as they age, the titans of Silicon Valley are opening their wallets to battle the grim reaper.
Google has invested roughly $730-million in a subsidiary called Calico, dedicated to extending human lifespans; tech giant Larry Ellison gives an estimated $45-million per year to such causes. And genetics pioneer Craig Venter has teamed up with entrepreneurs to found a longevity institute that hopes to sequence one million genomes by 2020 in its search for the secrets of death. We grasp more about the human genome every day.
For most of us, these things are the stuff of fiction. But for others, for these virtual seers, these mad inventors, this is their every day.
Because why stop with a pocket computer when you can enable humans to fly?
In one of Apple’s ad campaigns, the company toasted “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes …while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius...”
Look hard, and you may see them, beavering away at the fringes of Big Tech: the people trying to build holographic goggles and supersonic jets. They are the ones turning the wheel of human invention. — The Daily Telegraph