Rate of change of technology

by | Monday, January 26, 2009

I just stumbled upon this image from a 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics.


The tag line below the image says:
Because everything in her home is waterproof, the housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose.

Though it is easy to make fun of this image it can be incredibly difficult to make predictions about the future. I am reminded of the following image I use to show just how fast technology is changing, making predicting the future so very difficult.


Note: I picked this image up from the Internets a while ago, getting a citation would be great.

Also, one may ask how many years make up a generation?
The typical answer is 25 years, and the one used in this diagram.
This page discusses this at length.

This is indirectly related to my previous post about The more things change…

Topics related to this post: Design | Engineering | Evolution | Fun | Representation | Technology

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Limerick on Math & Beauty

Image credit: eoliene_pe_campii Mathematical Beauty: A limerick Punya Mishra, Jan 27, 2010 Doesn’t it just gladden your heart to see These games we can play with infinity? How can one stay aloof From the elegance of a proof And remain immune to mathematics’ subtle...

Unpacking TPACK

Suzy Cox is a lecturer in educational technology and educational psychology at Utah Valley State College and also a doctoral candidate at Brigham Young University (working with Dr. Charles Graham). She is currently working on her dissertation which seeks to develop a...

Teaching an old dog new tricks

Teaching an old dog new tricks

I have been playing with Photoshop Beta, a version of Photoshop with a range of AI-powered tools that let you add, extend, or remove content from your images using simple text prompts. This is similar to Adobe Firefly, a web-based image manipulation / generation tool,...

How to identify AI generated text?

How to identify AI generated text?

I think I solved the biggest educational challenge of our time, namely: How do we recognize AI generated text from human-created ones? Just to provide some context, the advent of large language models and generative AI have made it essential that we, as educators,...

Today’s Internet cliché award goes to:

Sara Black, a professor of health studies at St. Joseph's University for the following insightful quote: "The Internet can be a great tool, like any tool, it can also be misused." Check it out on CNN.com in a story titled "#@*!!! Anonymous anger rampant on...

There is no app for that

Ideas.TED.com has a new article titled—There's no app for good teaching: 8 ways to think about tech in ways that actually improve the classroom. It quotes a bunch of scholars and researchers, one of whom is yours truly. I am just posting this, for the record. Image...

MSU Technology Showcase: The Usual Suspects

I have been invited by Patrick Dickson, Byron Brown and Jon Sticklen to offer a lowkeynote address (note emphasis on lowkey!) for MSU's Second Annual Faculty Technology Showcase (more details here). I have created a small presentation to go with my lowkeynote, slides...

I can resist everything except temptation (or marshmallows)

Have you heard of the marshmallow experiment? It is a pretty famous experiment conducted at Stanford back in the 60's. Walter Mischel a psychologist conducted this experiment on four-year olds in which the children were given one marshmallow and promised a second...

Ideas are cool

My colleague and friend David Wong has this cool idea, about making ideas cool. Actually, he has been espousing these ideas for a while now (check out his scholarly publications, in particular The Rebirth of Cool [Word doc]). But now this academic has stepped out of...

5 Comments

  1. 3d photos

    Technology provides teachers with the instructional technology tools they need to operate more efficiently and to be more responsive to the individual needs of their students

    Reply
  2. Andrew Beats

    I was just thinking the other day about how even today technology is changing so much. I cannot see how technology can get that much more advanced, considering we can access the world from our cell phones and watch movies in 3D. I suppose flying cars are next?

    Reply
  3. Bob Reuter

    I find it interesting to read “being digital” by Nicholas Negroponte, because he dared to make some predictions about the evolution of digital technologies in 1993… nice to see what turned out not to exist yet… and what is already a technology-of-the-past 🙂

    Reply
  4. Frenchy

    It’s really not easy to predict exactly the changes in technology in a distant future. While the photo denotes quite far from what we have now, there are more better hi-tech ways of cleaning the house today that having everything to be waterproofed.

    Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. The Casualties of Change – Part 1 | Deeper Life - […] manageable to a rate of change that is spinning out of control. An interesting chart can be found here…

Leave a Reply to Andy Plumber Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *