Interesting Patterns In The Mainstream Adoption Of Technology

Mainstream society has been making steady progress thanks to the adoption of technology. As the scientific discoveries and technological achievements continue to increase, society at large continues to slowly but surely adopt the innovations. Sometimes the adoption at a large scale turns out to be advantageous, sometimes it turns out to be detrimental. But whichever the case, this adoption of technological innovation seems unstoppable.

Up until very recently, the bottleneck in adopting the innovation has been the mainstream society. That has been happening for variety of reasons. Those reasons vary from economic, to cultural, to merely a pattern that boils down to the basic inertia of the large societal groups. Large groups are, as a rule, extremely difficult ot mobilize. Usually, when a new patent gets proposed to the mainstream society, it takes a while before it gets adopted en masse.

Take for instance the adoption rate of such technological breakthroughs as telephones, radios, TVs, fax machines, personal computers, email accounts, etc. Even though such useful technology was offered to the mainstream society in a ready-to-consume state, it typically took a prolonged period (sometimes even years), before the society would take full advantage of what’s been offered.

It is only recently that this trend has been reversed. Today, we see a lot of the mainstream media getting excited about technological achievements that are still in the nascent, if not even in the pre-conceptual stage. Consider the excitement and the readiness to adopt Artificial Intelligence tech. The mainstream markets seem primed for that adoption, yet we all know that such technology still does not exist (despite the fact that it has been under development for almost 60 years now).

Similarly, we are all excited about self-driving cars. However, such technology doesn’t really exist yet. It is therefore interesting to observe this reversal in the adoption patterns. While in the past the mainstream society was inert, barely responding to the new and exciting developments in the tech world, today it’s the exact opposite. Mainstream society is eagerly awaiting the long promised benefits of technology that doesn’t really exist. It’s all snake oil at this point. Similar to how we may get excited about the prospect of making a contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life forms, we are all eagerly awaiting the arrival of AI technology. And similar to how no one has seen, so far, any evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, no one has seen, so far, any evidence that AI exists. Of course, same can be said about self-driving cars and many other much touted exciting promises of high technology.

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