The Paradox of Technology Abundance

It seems like everyday a new smartphone is released. Folding, some kind of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool, cameras with superpowers, bigger screens, brighter screens. Then there’s all the AI gadgets, for fingers, clipped to your shirt, hung around the neck. Smart fridges, ovens and microwaves to smart composters for the home. And that’s just the consumer market!

While technologies are often blamed for social ills and issues, or hyped for promises of utopian ideals, it is not about the technologies. It has more to do with society and culture. More specifically, our sociocultural systems ability to just absorb these technologies. Technologies are not neutral. It’s about how and where humans use them.

We are in a time where we are seeing technologies evolve at a pace we’ve never before known. Consider that the first stone tools were invented some 3.3 million years ago, the Oldowan tools as they are known. Then, around 1.76 million years ago, we developed better stone tools, like axes and arrow head. That’s 1.5 million years just to upgrade stone tools! Now we get a new smartphone every year with hardware and software updates!

Advances are being made at rapid paces and incredible scale with genetic engineering via CRISPR tools, nanotechnologies, data analytics, even space rockets. Most of this is due to the ratchet effect, a primary means by which humans develop technologies by combining and compounding on prior technologies.

Your smartphone is a perfect example of the ratchet effect. It is a whole set of tools; cameras software, GPS, sensors, that come from other uses (mostly military) to enable your phone to do what it does.

But have we, or are we, reaching a point where there’s such an abundance of technologies that our societies and cultures, simply can’t absorb them all? And if so, what are the implications of that paradox?

To read market forecasts from the big consulting houses and research firms, just about any new technology coming along is going to see splendid growth rates and sometimes whole new market sectors open up. Except most forecasts are wrong. Yet still valuable markers.

Then there’s the famous, though not always useful, Gartner Hype Cycle, where technologies go through cycles of development. A peak of hype, the trough of disillusionment and then general adoption. But in some ways, it’s still informative.

Geoffrey Moore the found of Intel, created the Technology Adoption Lifecycle of innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and finally, laggards. Both this framework and the hype cycle one are helpful in looking at how technologies move through societies.

We can also put the lens of cultural and societal change over top of these. The above methods only consider the economics of technology adoption through the eyes of capitalism. Which is fine and valuable, but culture is always the ultimate arbiter of technologies.

While cultural evolution moves faster than biological evolution, it still moves slower than the development of technologies in our modern world, all of which we enabled by the development of the microchip.

Then there’s the seminal work by economist Dr. Carlota Perez on technological revolutions and financial capital, which takes a more modern understanding of technologies and how they lead to social and economic revolutions. Which, with the invention of the microchip in her cycles of 50–60 years, we may well be in right now.

We are in an incredibly exciting period for technological advancements. We have some challenges with many, but also great opportunities. Advancements in healthcare, life saving technologies, sensors and some very good uses of Artificial Intelligence tools. But is it too much?

In the marketing profession alone there are over 11,000 software apps and platforms. Not all of them can find enough of a market space to become billion dollar companies, or even survive. Smartphone sales in developed nations have plateaued whereas they are still growing in developing nations as cheaper but still viable alternatives appear.

Ironically, it is far easier to develop technologies today than ever before and with the internet, to be able to promote awareness of them at an unprecedented scale. Yet this also means more technologies competing for the attention of societies and cultures. Easier to make them, harder to get our attention. And acceptance.

So we may well be in, or entering, a sort of paradoxical time. An abundance of technology but an inability to adopt them all through sociocultural integration at scale.

There are some amazing technologies coming into our world, all imagined through the creative and innovativeness of the human mind. But business looks for an ROI on the technologies they buy and use. Upgrading entire systems every year is expensive and many companies are already dealing with the compounding effects of technology debt.

Consumers are keeping their smartphones, televisions and laptops longer. There is the growing movement for the right to repair, from industrial tools to consumer products. This is a sociocultural reaction to being overwhelmed by technologies by not finding enough value in constant updates and closed systems.

Other signs of technology saturation in society are the vast layoffs in the tech sector and the number of venture capital funds pressing pause on investments. Including in the AI sector.

While it is hard to predict the outcomes of this technological abundance and the future of many technologies, like always, culture is the ultimate decider. And markets are simply one factor of many that makes these decisions at scale. And markets are often informed more by the invisible hand (culture) than any other factor.

Whether or not we are in a paradoxical period of too much technology is yet to be seen. Time will tell. And culture does not move very fast.