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Imaginable Tech vs Unimaginable Tech
Voice commands wouldn’t shock someone from the 1960s — so what technologies are we failing to imagine in 2021?
Earlier this week, I asked Alexa — the Amazon-designed voice-activated assistant, which is accessible via a worrying number of Echo devices in my house — to turn the radio on. I do this several times a day, but I’ve been watching Mad Men recently, and part of my brain has been left in the 1960s. And I found myself thinking: it would seem crazy to Don Draper or Pete Campbell if they found themselves dropped in 2021, that we could turn the radio on at just the drop of a word.
But the more I thought about it, the less sure of that opinion I became. Pete Campbell would love Alexa. Pete Campbell would understand Alexa. Alexa is, after all, just a servant — she’s a very limited form of domestic help who can tell you what the weather is like, turn on the radio, send you endless updates about when your Amazon package is due to arrive. She is, in short, a non-corporeal maid.
At some point in my childhood, I visited a home where they had a clap-activated lamp. This was, it turns out, a naff piece of 80s tech called The Clapper, which could be used to activate all sorts of things (and was often inadvertently triggered by dog barks or polite coughing). I experienced this technology in the late 90s/early 2000s when it was already passé, but it still felt oddly futuristic. I suspect that voice commands will feel this way for much of my lifetime. Even as they become more standard, more run-of-the-mill, and, eventually, more obsolete, there will still be that strange alchemy that happens to tech that feels so like tech: that flying car moment, that hoverboard association, that warp speed sensation.
Anyway, that’s enough about Alexa and Pete Campbell. The reason that I’m writing this is that it got me thinking about technology that feels imaginable. Voice command and AI assistants feel so imaginable. It feels like it could come, not just out of any sci-fi of the last 20 years, but from even further back — from HG Wells say. It’s a sort of glossy, technologized tech, a layman-facing vision of what tech is or should be. I could explain it to my boomer parents, for example, whereas I couldn’t explain AWS or Kubernetes (not…
