The other day I was listening to the show “Science Friday” on NPR and as host Ira Flatow said goodbye, he recited the different ways listeners could contact the program on Facebook, on Instagram, on X, and then he ended by saying, “Or, you can email us the old-fashioned way” and he gave the address.
Imagine, email already is “the old-fashioned way.” I guess most people knew that. I didn’t. I’ve always been a slow adapter.
So what does that say about the fax machine?
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the fax. Until now, I thought that was the newest “old-fashioned way.” When I worked as radio commentator Paul Harvey’s editor a lifetime ago, the fax in its earliest incarnation is what I used to transmit transcripts from our studio in Chicago to ABC Radio’s newsroom in New York. One at a time, I’d attach a single piece of paper to a horizontal drum, then I’d flip a switch and the drum started rotating at warp speed and, via a telephone line with a high-pitched screech, sent an image of the transcript to the home office. In today’s world it seems laborious but it seemed pretty cool, then. Back in the day, it was light years ahead of what came before it, like the telex or the telegraph. Now of course, even if some people still list the fax among their modes of communication, it isn’t just old-fashioned, it’s ancient, only a few steps removed from the carrier pigeon.
Every piece of technology has its moment in the sun. Until it doesn’t.
To me, the epitome of technology’s relentless influence on the modern world was summarized in “Nothing Like It In The World,” the great book by Stephen Ambrose about building the transcontinental railroad. “Until the invention of the train,” he wrote,” no one had ever moved faster than the speed of a galloping horse.”
It is said that in the early days of railroads, people stood on tracks to watch trains coming and didn’t move out of the way in time because they had no concept that anything could move that fast.
Today there are seven astronauts and cosmonauts circling the earth in the International Space Station at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour.
And yet…..
There are so many problems man has not yet solved. Some are huge, some are inconsequential. Medical science has made more strides in the past hundred years than it had made in the history of mankind before the 20th Century— from penicillin to chemotherapy to new knees to new hearts— and yet some day a future generation, maybe some day soon, will look back on our era in history and think we were barely a step ahead of the caveman.
Probably some day people also will look back with the same deep sense of sympathy for all of us who do everything on the iPhone. They’ll do it all with a chip implanted in the brain. But for now, although we take the iPhone and its imitators for granted, these pocket-sized computers still are pretty amazing. Just think, once people took pictures with something called a camera, and that’s all it was good for: pictures. You couldn’t make calls, you couldn’t check messages, you couldn’t post on X, you couldn’t ask Siri.
You don’t see many single-use cameras anymore, and you don’t see many phones that don’t fit in a pocket. But the old-fashioned contraptions are still out there. The National Center for Health Statistics says that between inferior cell service where they live and superior security in a storm, about a quarter of American adults still have landlines. No surprise, they’re mainly seniors. The newest technology is not the answer for everyone.
When something simple doesn’t work or some simple solution to a problem still hasn’t been found, I sometimes joke, “Well, we can put a put a man on the moon, but….” The thing is, we did put twelve men on the moon half-a-century ago, but some of that technology is lost to the ages and we’re not really quite sure about the best way to pull it off again. However, having covered the space program and seen the brilliant innovation of the scientists and mathematicians and engineers who drive it, I have no doubt that we will.
But the cautionary tale is the unmanned moon lander called “Slim” (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) launched in January by the Japanese, who are no high-tech slouches themselves. Slim made it to the moon— just the fifth nation to land on the lunar surface— but came down at the wrong angle and tipped over on its nose and became essentially useless.
Putting down a manned vehicle, then getting it home again— between abort-and-evacuate mechanics and life-sustainable inflight systems and return-to-earth technology— is of a magnitude many times harder.
Then again, while one day we’ll make it back and use the moon as a launch pad to explore the solar system— its low level of gravity makes it a much lighter lift than any liftoff from planet earth— we’re in no hurry. As former NASA boss Charlie Bolden once told me in an interview when I asked why we’re not racing to return to the moon, “Whoever gets up there next will find that there are six flags on the surface, and they’re all ours.”
And yet… I’m a skier, and I’ve looked high and low for any kind of solution for goggles that fog up inside the lens. I’ve tried cloths, I’ve tried sprays, I’ve tried creams, nothing works. Like I say, we can put a man on the moon, but….
All in all, I’m pretty happy where we are. The newest high-tech asset, which also is the newest high-tech threat, is Artificial Intelligence.
The upside is, it will make many jobs easier. The downside is, in the wrong hands it could destroy democracy and won’t defog my goggles. But we’d better make the best of it because it’s ubiquitous and until something even more insidious replaces it, it’s not going away.
Still though, although AI probably could be a new tool for distributing my columns, they still come to you the “old-fashioned way”… and until someone pushes me kicking and screaming into another new technology, they will continue to.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Good piece Greg.
As a mechanical engineer, I’ve always had a lifelong interest in science end technology. It truly is incredible what the digital age has given us, particularly in the last couple of decades. I’m in my 40s, and grew up with computers and technology. But still, it’s absolutely incredible to me what my iPhone and library of apps are capable of. I spend a lot of time overseas for work, and translation apps make my life so much easier compared to thumbing through translation books 20 years ago!
Unfortunately there is now a major anti-science shift in society. I never thought I’d see large numbers of people believing in crazy conspiracy theories and turning their backs on scientists and intellectuals. Scary stuff.
Great job, as always, Greg, thanks. Some of us read your “columns” (another reference to ancient technology, newspapers) not on email but on the Substack app. You’ve already been pulled into another new technology beyond email!🥴