New Cycles of Technology

Technology has destroyed all the good metaphors about the grand cycles of life. With our global connections, we can’t say that the harvest has passed and summer is over because we know such a statement isn’t universally true. One part of the globe might be gathering grain into its barns while another is preparing to hit the beach. Although technology has taken away the metaphors of natural seasons, it’s given us a technical season that begins each January with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. More than any other event, CES gives us a chance to take stock, appraise the gifts technology has given us over the past year, and prepare for a new year of innovation. For many technologists, CES marks the start of the innovation year. Last February, I dined with a group of colleagues as we discussed the 2015 show in an e ort to determine the year’s important innovations. We concluded that CES 2015 had identi ed automotive technologies as the predominant new forum for data processing, and then began to follow the fortunes of automotive computing. Nearly a year has passed and the results haven’t quite been what we anticipated. The only automotive sys tem to hold public attention was the selfdriving car. The other systems slipped out of public view. When our group began speculating about the major announcements at CES 2016, a few people proclaimed that automotive technologies would again dominate the show. I o ered two alternative predictions: the industrial Internet and drones, though I know there are problems with both. The industrial Internet, of course, isn’t a consumer product. It’s a set of technologies being developed for the manufacturing industry that combines the Internet of Things (IoT) with factory automation tools. I believe the industrial Internet will have a brief circuit on the stage because the tech world has high hopes for the IoT but is still looking for a compelling application for these interconnected technologies. Drones are probably a more obvious choice for the next prominent product at CES. After all, they’ve appeared in several recent news stories. However, at the moment, drones are part of a relatively small and unimportant class of consumer goods: electronic toys. Although they attract customers, electronic toys can’t expand markets as the best electronic consumer goods have. The most successful consumer goods lead to new markets and have helped organize those markets’ customers. Radio is usually identi ed as the rst great electronic consumer good. Not only did it build a market for home radio sets, but it also created large markets for nearly every other product. Radio almost single-handedly built the consumer market for music. Television and highdelity phonographs followed, both of which also helped organize consumer markets. CES is a reminder of the role radio played in developing consumer markets, as it was originally called the Chicago Music Show and promoted the records, sheet music, and other products of Tin Pan Alley. Computers joined CES in the late 1970s, largely as gaming machines. They grew in importance during the 1980s but became a dominant consumer technology only with the rise of digital networking, when they gained the ability to organize and stratify new consumer markets. Drones might be exciting and intriguing at the moment, but they can’t organize markets. We’ve heard they might be used for package delivery or as farming tools, but such applications don’t expand brands or generate interest in other products in the same way that radio, television, PCs, and smartphones have. If drones are prominent at this year’s CES, it’ll most likely be as a novelty.