International Law

Thinking long term

The Observer's John Naughton on the First Law of Technology:

The First Law of Technology says we invariably overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies while underestimating their longer-term effects. The invention of printing in the 15th century had an extraordinary short-term impact: though scholars argue about the precise number, within 40 years of the first Gutenberg bible between eight and 24 million books, representing 30,000 titles, had been printed and published. To those around at the time, it seemed like a pretty big deal.

'In our time', wrote German humanist Sebastian Brandt in 1500, '...books have emerged in lavish numbers. A book that once would've belonged only to the rich - nay, to a king - can now be seen under a modest roof... There is nothing nowadays that our children... fail to know.' They didn't know the half of it.

They didn't know, for example, that Gutenberg's technology, which enabled lay people to read and interpret the bible for themselves, would undermine the authority of the Catholic church and fuel the Reformation. Or that it would enable the rise of modern science by facilitating the rapid and accurate dissemination of ideas. Or create new social classes of clerks, teachers and intellectuals. Or alter our conception of 'childhood' as a protected early stage in the lives of young people. In an oral culture, childhood effectively ended at the age when an individual could be regarded as a competent communicator, ie, about seven - which is why the Vatican defined that as 'the age of reason' after which individuals could be held accountable for their sins.

In a print-based culture, communicative competence took longer to achieve and required schooling, so 'childhood' was extended to 12 or 14. All these long-term impacts were not - indeed, could not have been - foreseen. Yet they represent the profound ways in which Gutenberg's technology transformed society.

Today's Gutenberg is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web. In the 17 years since he launched his technology on an unsuspecting world, he has transformed it. Nobody knows how big the web is now, but estimates of the indexed part hover at around 40 billion pages, and the 'deep web' hidden from search engines is between 400 and 750 times bigger than that. These numbers seem as remarkable to us as the avalanche of printed books seemed to Brandt. But the First Law holds we don't know the half of it, and it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on January 26, 2008 (boomark / email).