“When Technology Gets Developed Enough It Disappears”

Information technology shrinks until the hardware is all but gone–sometimes completely gone, and the Encyclopedia Britannica fits on the head of a pin. In particular, the Internet’s goal is seamlessness–to be a part of the architecture, the ambience. That’s both good and bad. The access to data in the cloud will improve processes and provide us with instantaneous answers. But those tubes flow both ways, with our information passing into the ether. In addition to privacy concerns, there’s a worry about the deterioration of deliberation.

In “The Internet of NO Things” at Demos Helsinki, Roope Mokka sees this future of no things being powered by no energy. An excerpt:

As technology keeps developing faster and faster, all the technologies that are now in a smartphone will become the size of a piece of paper and be available for the price of a piece of paper as well.

What we have to understand is that when technology gets developed enough it disappears, it ceases to be understood as technology; it becomes part of the general man-made ambience of our life. Look around you, there are amazing technologies already around us that have vanished. This house is a very typical example of disruptive technology, not to mention this collection of houses and streets and other infrastructure, know as the city, invented some thousands of years ago around where today’s Iran is, and scaled from there globally. Houses and cities are technologies. Our clothing is a technology, the food on the tables is the end product of masses of technologies, from fire to other means of cooking. These are all technologies that have in practice disappeared: they are on the background and nobody (outside of dedicated professionals) thinks of them as technologies.

Similarly digital technology will be immersed into the environment. So that everything built or manufactured will be digital by default. This means essentially digital buildings and digital cars, bikes, trains, and so forth.

This might sound a bit sci-fi, but it’s actually reality already.•

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