Browsing the stalls of a large vintage and antiques fair recently, the Badger came across a battery-operated Sinclair Cambridge pocket calculator in working order. It took the Badger back to the 1970s when he, and many of his student friends, purchased one for £19.99, the equivalent of £290 today! Battery-powered pocket calculators had just become widely available, and they quickly became a ‘must have’ amongst students on science and engineering courses. Unsurprisingly, more powerful multi-function pocket calculators soon came along, and the Badger’s Sinclair Cambridge was replaced by a Texas Instruments TI-57 which provided years of service before being consigned to the back of a cupboard.
Since the fair, the Badger’s reflected on how digital technology has evolved since the pocket calculator of 50 years ago. The powerful, multi-purpose, smartphones we carry in our pockets today were pure science fiction in the 1970s. Since then, however, ‘digital’ has been one of the great achievements of the 20th and 21st centuries, ostensibly because it touches nearly all areas of human activity. Most people will, at some stage, have quietly wondered how its continued advances will impact their life in the future. After all, we can already see that drones have altered warfare, humanoid robotics has reached extraordinary levels (e.g. see here and here), automation dominates manufacturing and supply chains, electric vehicles are changing motoring, services are online-first, hybrid working is normal, social media is an asset and a liability, and that super-intelligent AI has as much capability for evil as it does for good. It’s thus natural and human to wonder about how the continued high rate of digital advancement affects our future.
Can, however, the high rate of digital advancement be sustained? Having retrieved his vintage TI-57 from the back of a cupboard, the Badger reflected on this question. The TI-57 has a semi-conducting silicon chip at its heart, and it’s the speedy development of integrated circuits and such microchips to provide more and faster computational capability that’s fuelled digital progress since the 1970s. Fundamentally, progress in the likes of physics, material science, and micro-engineering/manufacturing have determined the rate of digital technology’s advancement. It follows, therefore, that if progress in such subject areas slowed, then so will the rate at which digital advancement impacts our lives. Is slower progress in these subjects likely? Well, the Badger thinks it takes a brave person to write-off the possibility.
The future we hear about today, especially regarding AI, depends on more and faster computer chips at a time when the scientific boundaries of what’s achievable are being reached using the chip methods of recent decades. Just as it was when the pocket calculator first arrived, it’s scientists and engineers who will find necessary new solutions, and it’s their success in doing so that will really determine the rate of digital progress in the coming decades.
