on bitching too soon

      Back when cell phones were new but large, and reception was terrible, the comedian Jackie Mason would pretend to be yelling into one: “I’m talking to you from my car.” And then louder: “I said I’m talking to you on a phone from my car!” We laughed. We thought that was what a cell phone was.

      We can imagine future technologies, but we have great difficulty imagining the future of technologies that have just debuted: in acknowledging that they might evolve, in envisioning the iPhone17 with 5G while staring at a clunky, nine-inch-long, “brick” car phone with occasional reception; in envisioning today 2029’s GPT-25. So, we are reduced to judging infants as if they were grownups. (And, yes, AI is still in its infancy.)

      And the infancy of new technologies almost always lasts for quite a while. The first commercially successful automobiles appeared in the 1880s. More than 30 years later most of the cars on the road still had to be started by turning a crank. Seatbelts were not widely used in cars until the 1980s. And television had been around for decades before someone figured out that you could transmit lots more channels through a cable than through the air.

      In the early decades of the automobile, pedestrians and cars often got in each other’s way—with disastrous consequences for the pedestrians. But, over time, walkers learned to stick to sidewalks and drivers learned to be more alert.

      Not too many years ago it looked as if spam was going to overwhelm email. But the tech companies have found ways to weed much of it out. The use of passwords made the internet more secure, and the use of passkeys is making juggling passwords less difficult.

      Expertise invariably develops. Problems are solved. No need to dismiss the potential of artificial intelligence should Claude overlook one 19th-century iteration of the automobile, no need to panic should a package-delivery drone crash through someone’s window.

      Oh, and what happened to the bitching most of us were doing over the past couple of decades about our cell phones: the fear of dropping them, the spam, the robo calls, the unwanted intrusions, the data breaches, the feeling that you could never not be reached? Most of the problems have been solved. And Apple Pay and QR codes, etc. have for the most part turned into great conveniences.

      We did what people have always done: We bitched too soon.

      Would any of us really want to return to a world without smartphones now—a world where friends and family are often unreachable? Where people often get lost?

      There will be bumps along the road. A new technology requires patience.

This post originally appeared in Mitchell Stephens’ Substack, Ideas on Ideas. You can read it here.