“100 Most Iconic Technologies”
No this is not another WritingAboutOurGeneration.com list. For one thing, we are not much enamored with the word “iconic.”
This list was conjured up—with the help, apparently, of dozens of experts—by the New York Times’ consistently witty, wise and enlightening technology podcast: Hard Fork, hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton.
I am quite interested in the history of technology. I once contemplated a book on the subject: beginning with stone tools, agriculture and the wheel.
So I thought it might be interesting to share some thoughts on Hard Fork’s rankings—and maybe to get your thoughts. And, at some point, this website may indeed have something of its own to say about the most important technological developments of our lifetimes.
What follows are the top 25 of Hard Fork’s “100 Most Iconic Technologies”—ever. And then my thoughts on their list:
25. Crisper
24. Combustion engines
23. Aqueducts
22. Grinder (precursor of Tinder)
21. Telephone
20. Semi-conductor
19. Wheel
18. Waymo
17. Indoor plumbing
16. WiFi
15. LSD
14. World Wide Web
13. Batteries
12. Birth Control Pills
11. Email
10. Transformer neural-network architecture—AI’s basic architecture.
9. Atomic Bomb
8. YouTube
7. Airplanes
6. Television
5. Penicillin
4. The Printing Press
3. The iPhone
2. Electricity
1. Fire
My thoughts:
1. It hurts me to have to say this, but no, I don’t think LSD was the 15th most important or even “iconic” technology of all time. (It may, however, have been the most “far out” technology ever.)
2. This is clearly a list drafted by people who have spent the bulk of their lives in the 21st century.
Self-driving cars, which they cover with Waymo, will indeed be transformative, but it is hard to see them outranking “combustion engines,” by which I assume they mean internal-combustion engines, by which I assume they mean the automobile. And it is even harder to see self-driving cars outranking “the wheel,” which made everything from carts to Waymo possible.
Birth control pills obviously have been transformative, but why then do they rank condoms only number 52.
They are, however, pretty persuasive on “transformer neural-network architecture.” And Grinder/Tinder may indeed be making sexual encounters easier. But YouTube in the top ten? And WiFi, while a definite convenience, doesn’t seem to make it that much easier to connect than it was just using wires.
3. This list has some significant oversights:
A pretty good case can be made for agriculture as the most transformative human technology of all time, because it enabled homo sapiens to stop their nomadic wandering, in search of game and berries, and settle in villages, towns and cities. They rank it number 29.
The great advantage humans had over other great apes was, of course, language, which is not a technology. It is in our genes. But Stone tools, gave us another leg up. They do not appear anywhere in this list.
The steam engine, which made possible the industrial age, is not mentioned.
The telegraph—the first way for people out of sight of each other to communicate faster than a horse or a pigeon might travel—also appears nowhere on their list.
Radio, which introduced wireless communication and first beamed professional news, information and entertainment directly into the home, is relegated to number 95. (Had the compilers of this list been alive in the early 1960s, the transistor radio might have made the list.)
The sundial is mentioned (number 88) but not the clock.
Writing—which probably transformed human thought as much as any technology—is subsumed under “cuneiform” and appears only as number 27. I would have ranked it number 2. The alphabet, which proved a significant step forward over hieroglyphs, is not mentioned.
Hard Fork is a fine podcast. This is a fun list. Figuring out what technologies have rearranged our lives, are rearranging out lives or are likely to someday rearrange our lives is important work. Their list could have been better.