Technological Milestones

The writer Arthur C. Clarke postulated three laws, the third of which is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

The users of technology and the people that engineer it will be likely to have a different view on the accuracy of that law, users will very often be enchanted by a technological advancement whilst engineers understand its foibles and intricacies.

Technology often doesn't move at quite the blistering pace that many believe it to, technology often advances via small increments while the ideas of how to utilise it is what experiences rapid advancement.

But sometimes giant leaps forward are made that mark milestones in what is possible and the magic that engineers can demonstrate.

Solid State

The fundamental building block of the entire modern world is the solid state transistor. The ability to fabricate these building blocks in ever smaller dimensions has driven the development of ever more powerful computers and all the other advancements in electronics we have witnessed.

The ability to use semiconductors to engineer structures like transistors evolved during the 1950's and 1960's and led to the development of the first computers.

The technology was further refined with the invention of the integrated circuit, or chip, and via the application of Moore's Law has driven the development of the modern world.

Moore's Law, named after engineer Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors that can be fabricated in a given area doubles approximately every two years. 

The simple view of this is that the processing power of a computer doubles every two years, this proved to be true for the best part of forty years with the rate only slowing in recent times.

Solid state electronics truly is the genie that can't be put back in the bottle. 

The Internet and the World Wide Web

Solid state electronics gave us powerful computers that could accomplish many tasks, the next advancement came when we developed technology to allow these machines to work together and broke down the barriers around data and its uses.

All though the terms are often used interchangeably the Internet and the World Wide Web have very different histories separated by many decades.

The history of the Internet, the ability to connect computers over large distances, dates back to American military development during the 1960's and 1970's.

The World Wide Web, the ability to organise and make available data over the network the Internet provides, has its origins during the 1980's and 1990's as part of the World Wide Web project at the CERN research institute in Switzerland.

The pre-Web world is now almost unimaginable even for those of us that have memories before web-sites, apps and social media.

The ability to connect, share and interact on a global scale has changed the world forever, never has so much data, covering so many topics been available to so many people.

An interesting side note to this is that the protocols that control the movement of all this data such as TCP/IP or HTTP have changed remarkably little since there inception given the importance they now have to how we live our lives. Proof that not everything move at break neck speed.

Artificial Intelligence

It is often difficult to predict the next great step before it happens, the difficulty of doing this could well be what defines the genius of those that takes these steps forward for us.

If I was asked to predict now what in decades time people would look back on as a milestone it would be the emergence of Artificial Intelligence into the everyday world.

Whilst the dream of building Artificial Intelligence stretches back for many decades it is only in recent years that applications of the technology has started to become relatively common place.

We are still only touching the surface of what the technology will be capable of delivering and as this unfolds fear around these capabilities may grow.

An untold number of sci-films have predicated disastrous consequences leading from the invention of thinking machines, while these stories are built on a misunderstanding of the technology involved perhaps we are seeing the birth of a technology that proves Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd law and will cause many to classify it as magic.