A dear friend of mine and frequent reader of my essays gave me an essay prompt for the IELTS and asked some questions about what was meant by it: “Earlier technological developments brought more benefits and changed the lives of ordinary people more than recent technological developments. To what extent do you agree or disagree?” I noted, in my response, that the writer of this question does not define what recent or earlier technological developments are in mind, and what timescale we are looking at. If we look, indeed, at the view of the entire span of human history, such developments as the use of tools, must have been very early, and developments in agriculture, metallurgy, and the taming of animals, as well as the development of early ships and carts and chariots must also date of an early nature. How recent is recent, though? Does the telegraph or telephone or plane or car count as recent? Is what is meant as recent developments like the internet or 3-D printing? Let us explore this question, making some assumptions as we go about what is meant by more benefits and change or earlier and more recent developments.

To the extent that we believe that earlier technological developments brought more benefits and had a greater effect on the lives of ordinary people than later technologies, we must ponder how much of this has to do with the nature of the technology itself and how much it has to do with the common processes by which technological developments diffuse throughout the societies where these inventions occur and throughout humanity as a whole. This essay will take the approach that it is the process of technological advancement and its adoption and not the specific technologies that are decisive in privileging earlier technologies with a greater effect, and will also be agnostic on the view of the positivity of these changes in light of the tradeoffs that all change brings and the native human tendency to strongly resist change, especially changes viewed as negative.

At least historically, technological developments have taken a great deal of time to be widely adopted and to bring deep and positive changes to the lives of people. Famously, it took thousands of years for writing to spread from its origins in places like Mesopotamia to the development of the Cherokee syllabary in the early 1800s. Later developments like metallurgy were also not quick to develop, and the domestication of the horse preceded by many hundreds of years the full proliferation of a the pastoralist-herder lifestyle practiced by nomadic peoples like the Turks and Mongols. While we have indeed had our lives shaped deeply by earlier technologies, these technologies have had a long time to spread through the world and to shape the world in which we live. It was decades before the invention of trains and the railroad led to the development of the infrastructure that tied places like Russia and the United States together with their sprawling continental expanses, and also decades for the development of the car to lead to advancements in highway construction that allowed car culture to flourish as it has in places like the United States. (It should be noted briefly that not everyone would consider this to be a good thing, though it is definitely a change from how transportation operated before.)

Among the reasons we can posit for the length of time that it take for technologies to fully mature and have their full effect on societies, there are several that can be discussed briefly here. For one, technologies themselves come embedded in larger processes and must overcome substantial barriers to be fully adopted. New technologies are often too expensive for the common person to use, require knowledge to use them correctly that has not been widely taught to people as a whole, especially older people, and forces changes in behavior that are strongly resisted by people who are comfortable with older ways. It is not always obvious that change is good, and even when change is viewed as good, it is not easy to bring about those changes and to gain the full benefits of a technological advancement, which may require heavy investments in infrastructure improvements in order to fully realize. Even small changes in technological advancement, like new generations of cell phones, require that upgraded cell phone towers be put into place and that upgraded phones be widely spread throughout society for these developments to be viewed as a success. Transitioning from power plants to renewable energy often requires the development and improvement of means of creating power from windmills and solar cells and then bringing this power where it is needed. The adoption of electric vehicles will require drastic improvements to the power grid in order to allow cars to be charged up on a regular basis that will intensify the burdens placed on obtaining sufficient electricity, improvements which have scarcely even been understood, much less undertaken.

Frequently, even the developers of technologies which had a fundamental effect on the lives of ordinary people have often not fully understood how it would be that these technologies would have a massive effect on others. When they were first created, cars appealed mostly to a wealthier audience or those people who were already mechanically inclined, and it was not until the process of making cars was drastically simplified and mastered that cars became accessible to ordinary people, after which the adoption of cars and the resulting development of an infrastructure to support them followed. Similar cost savings would be required to make electric cars equally affordable to the ordinary populace. The CEO of IBM in the period after World War II thought of the market for computers as being in the thousands, which was off by orders of magnitude, though understandable in an age where computers were massively expensive mainframes owned by large corporations and government institutions, rather than portable devices owned by ordinary people as they have been for decades now. Many later developments merely piggyback off of earlier ones, and help those earlier developments have a larger effect than they would have if they had simply remained niche items focused on an elite clientele. Some contemporary technologies may spread far wider when and if they become more accessible to ordinary people of limited means.

Therefore, when we look at the development of technological advances over the course of human history, we ought not to be surprised that earlier technologies have often had a larger effect than more recent ones. For one, earlier technologies have a lot more time to mature, to become widely accepted, to have not only been adopted but also to change the world in which people live and operate. Often, in order to have the fullest benefits, technologies require infrastructure to be built which supports and encourages use, and this infrastructure also takes time and considerable expense to build. Similarly, many technologies are developed first with attention paid to elite or niche customers and are only later simplified and modified so that they are accessible for common people to use, at which point their influence dramatically expands. For all of these reasons and more, we would expect that the process of technological development rather than the nature of recent versus earlier developments themselves is responsible for the greater influence that earlier developments have wrought in the lives of ordinary people.