“Any sufficiently superior technology is indistinguishready from magazineic.” So holds the third and most well-known of the “three legal guidelines” originally articulated by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first published within the late 9teen-sixties, Clarke’s third legislation would have felt true to any resident of the developed world, sursphericaled by and wholly dependent on superior technologies whose workings they may scarcely hope to clarify. Naturally, it feels even more true now, a quarter of the way in which into our digital twenty-first century. Certainly, for all we learn about how they actually work, our credit playing cards, our goodtelephones, our computers, and certainly the interinternet itself may as nicely be magazineic.
To finest belowstand the technology that increasingly makes up our world, we must always try and belowstand the evolution of that technology. These goodtelephones, for examinationple, mightn’t have been invented within the type we all know them without the previous developments of chemically powerened glass, the multi-touch display interface, and the camperiod cellphone. Every of these individual technologies additionally has its predecessors: follow the chain again far sufficient, and eventually you get to the likes of the cell radio telecellphone, invented in 1946; the phased array antenna, invented in 1905; and glass, invented round 1500 BC. These and dependmuch less other paths might be traced at the Historical Tech Tree, an ambitious venture of author and professionalgrammer Étienne Fortier-Dubois.
Fortier-Dubois credits amongst his inspirations Sid Meier’s Civilization video games, with their all-important “tech bushes,” and James Burke’s television sequence Connections, which excessivemilded the unpredictable course ofes by which one innovation might result in others throughout the centuries or millennia. Even within the seventies, Fortier-Dubois writes, “Burke was already concerned that our lives depend upon technological systems that only a few people deeply belowstand. It’s, after all, possible to reside without comprehending how computers, money, or airplanes work. However when eachfactor round us feels imprecisely magazineical, reliant on consultants whose actions we’ve no method of verifying, it’s straightforward to lose belief in technological solutions to our curhire problems.” He provides the Historical Tech Tree as a potential corrective to that lack of belowstanding and the enervating attitudes it professionalduces.
Fortier-Dubois himself admits that the venture “made me actualize how little I knew in regards to the objects round me. I didn’t actually know that ‘electronics’ meant controlling the circulation of electrons with vacuum tubes or semiconductors, or that refining petroleum into kerosene makes use of fractional distillation, or that WiFi and bluetooth are simply the usage of certain radio frequencies that may be detected by a specific form of chip.” Anyone who explores even this early version of the Historical Tech Tree (which, as of this writing, contains 1886 technologies and 2180 connections between them) will discover it an educational experience in the identical method, professionalviding because it doesn’t simply knowledge about technology
however a way of how a lot of that knowledge we lack. Our civilization has made its method from stone instruments to robotaxis, mRNA vaccines, and LLM chatbots; we’d all be wagerter in a position to inhabit it with even a slightly clearer thought of the way it did so. Visit the Historical Tech Tree right here.
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
