Too Slow Tech

Faster, Please

As I was scraping the ice off my car the other day -- it's been a mild winter, but it's still completely fine by me if it ends soon -- I was left to think, as always, about technology. How nice a remote starter would have been, so my car could have begun the job without me. How close that tech is, really. And lo and behold, when I got to my desk and checked my social feed, there it was: the app to not just remote start your Tesla from your Apple Watch (well, OK, missing both of those things), but to have it open your garage and come on down the driveway to meet you. Next, of course, will be when the car drives me to work, and lets me get more sleep, because hey, more sleep. And it's not as if driving is that much of a pleasure. I'd happily take another half hour nap. Naps are great. (I'm kidding, I'd probably just use the time to do more work. It's a sickness.)

Now, all of that tech is pretty much at our fingertips, and if it was our top priority as a nation, it would probably be legal in months. But it's not, and if I had to bet the over/under on when it would actually happen in my MidAtlantic part of the world, I'd want at least a decade. That will be a decade of unnecessary deaths from driver error and fatigue, preventable fatalities where the car could have taken over for someone who was intoxicated or suddenly ill, increased greenhouse gases from the inefficient use of transportation, and, dammit, a decade of naps that I could clearly use.

It's not just the driverless car that's going to come slower than you might want. Wearable technology has a clear use in remote monitoring in healthcare, but it will probably take a really long time, because, well, inertia and billing and the medical establishment's lack of regard for patient competence, or tech they don't own and operate. We've mapped the human genome years ago, but the clear and present advantages of such a breakthrough don't seem to be very apparent.

Want to go beyond the health sciences? There's traces of water on Mars, and the ability to draw replenishable power from solar panels, and... no timeline for when we're going to have more than probes up there. There's an increasing amount of water on moons in our solar system, which means that there might even be alien life within reach, but once more, no clear timeline on when we might move than from conjecture to proof. 3-D printers and the Internet of Things and all of these next level businesses that you read about in the Gartner Group or see valued in the markets, all of it tantalizing close, but slow, slow, slow. We were supposed to have flying cars and robot laundry and so much more by now, right?

Why? Well, we're spoiled. The tech that's in our hands every day -- phones and screens and the like -- has gotten so much better, so quickly, that we're lost all perspective on how fast things actually happen, and how it all has to be backwards compatible with the existing infrastructure. Also, how many parts of our world are *not* like the Internet, or able to take down years of venture capital before it can exist without clear profit.

Sometimes, the pace of change and technology all seems to be going so bewilderingly fast, especially when it runs against ethics or employment or the environment. But in reality, it's not going fast enough, and we will, someday, wonder how we managed to put up with life as we knew it.

Tomorrow comes fast. With another forecast for snow to clear off my car.

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