The S-curve of change outstrips generational cohorts.

Oh, dear.  Aging is a process of dating oneself.  No, not that sort of dating. 

You read something or say something and then realize that the audience of today does not catch the reference, or worse, doesn't even understand the reference.  Can't, perhaps, understand the reference.  

Of course, that has always been the case.  Our challenge, and blessing, today is that the S-curve of change (the rate at which new technologies, ideas, concepts, systems, techniques, habits, styles, etc. are introduced and then completely adopted) has been steepening at the rate of Moore's Law for the past fifty years.  An idea, a regulation, a social norm, a technology, a style of music; they used to have a life span of perhaps twenty-five or fifty years or more.  Now, they are lucky to remain relevant for five to ten years.  

The upside to this reality is just astonishing levels of efficiency, effectiveness and productivity.  Reach back in to your own life for examples of activities you used to do routinely twenty or thirty years ago to find how many are either now done dramatically differently, or by dramatically different means, or are not done at all any longer because they are no longer relevant.  

Periodically thoroughly cleaning LPs - Gone!  Change for public telephones or parking meters - Gone!  Rotary dial phones - Gone!  Watching one of three TV channels according to their schedule - Gone!  Writing a letter, licking a stamp, mailing a letter - Gone!

All were mere steps along the path towards more and better choices and much higher productivity and therefore far greater prosperity.

It used to be one of the tragic characteristics of growing older was that there were ever fewer people from your cohort, fewer people who understood your age cohort's habits, norms, memories, and preferences.  You faced not only the normal insults of age with reduced capacity, strength, stamina, etc.  But as your peers faded away, you had fewer people who spoke to you in your vernacular.

It was not a critical loss but a sad one none-the-less.

And that cycle has always been age old.  There will always be a fixed cohort who lived through the first showing of Jaws (1975), just as there was a fixed cohort who lived through WWII (1939-1945), just as there was a fixed cohort who lived through the Black Death (1346-1351).  In each instance, fifty years after the event, there were few left who could speak as experienced peers with one another about the novelty and freshness of that event.

What has changed is the steepening of the S-curve, to a large extent driven by the underlying effect Moore's law, but the consequence of several other things as well.  What was once experienced over fifty years is now experienced over ten or even five years.  In this sense, people are living more and living more intensely than at any time in history.  They are cramming ever more into their three-score and ten than could have ever occurred in the past.  Not just volume of experience but novelty of experience.  

And they are living through more cycles of experience.  They have more memories.  And with more cycles of experience, there is also greater fragmentation.  Fewer people (as a percentage) who would have shared the same experience.  Fewer people to talk your talk, know your knowledge as you age.  

There are lots of possible implications if the premise is accepted.  Communities of shared bonds of memory and experience are probably stronger than otherwise.  I suspect that social norms and shared precepts will become more important over experiences as the possibility of cohorts of shared experience begin to become a thing of the past.

It has always been true that we are all individuals.  It has also always been true that it has been easy to see common patterns among individuals and for there to be an inclination to treat them as a group, a category, even when they are not.  

But that will become harder and harder as everyone becomes more and more unique as a portfolio of memories unreplicated among anyone else.  People who speak an experiential language of their own unique to themselves.

All this brought on by the accidental reading of a near half-century old article by James Fallows.

It started innocuously with his substack post, An Early Casualty in the AI Wars by James Fallows.  However, at the end of the article, he has this almost throwaway line:

David Pierce of The Verge has a story on the Neeva shutdown, here.

And, speaking of lost eras in computing, here is a story I wrote in The Atlantic 41 years ago, about what the advent of personal computing might mean. Some of it now seems as if it was from a prehistoric age. Some of it could have been written last night.

The link is to an article he wrote for the July 1982 edition of The Atlantic Magazine called Living with a Computer by James Fallows.  

Fallows is ten years older than I am.  He was 33 in 1982.  Married and with a well-launched career.  I was a newly graduated student from Georgetown, just starting out.  A little bit of work in the oil industry followed by an MBA from Wharton.  

At Lawrenceville (1976-1978) I had learned my first computer language, PL/1.  At Georgetown I picked up BASIC.  Somewhere in there I had some brief flirtation with C Programming Language.  

Fallows was trying to make these software and hardware things work for his own real world need while I was still treating them as academic subjects.  By Wharton, with Compaq, IBM, Lisa and then the Mac, the hardware side of the computer revolution was finally beginning to take shape alongside the software evolutions.  I was of the cohort that actually began introducing these new-fangled devices into offices and office-budgets.  Making them work not just for individuals (as Fallows was doing) but for the business as a whole.

The point is that I can read Living with a Computer and it is very real to me.  All the company names, the experiences, the disappointments, the wires spiraling everywhere, Radio Shack - oh, it brings back not just memories but a whole Broadway production of lived experiences.  I am there again.  I hear Fallows words speaking to me.  

I'd sell my computer before I'd sell my children. But the kids better watch their step. When have the children helped me meet a deadline? When has the computer dragged in a dead cat it found in the back yard?

The Processor Technology SOL-20 came into my life when Darlene went out. It was a bleak, frigid day in January of 1979, and I was finishing a long article for this magazine. The final draft ran for 100 pages, double-spaced. Interminable as it may have seemed to those who read it, it seemed far longer to me, for through the various stages of composition I had typed the whole thing nine or ten times. My system of writing was to type my way through successive drafts until their ungainliness quotient declined. This consumed much paper and time. In the case of that article, it consumed so much time that, as the deadline day drew near, I knew I had no chance of retyping a legible copy to send to the home office.

I turned hopefully to the services sector of our economy. I picked a temporary-secretary agency out of the phone book and was greeted the next morning by a gum-chewing young woman named Darlene. I escorted her to my basement office and explained the challenge. The manuscript had to leave my house by 6:30 the following evening. No sweat, I thought, now that a professional is on hand.

But five hours after Darlene's arrival, I glanced at the product of her efforts. Stacked in a neat pile next to the typewriter were eight completed pages. This worked out to a typing rate of about six and a half words per minute. In fairness to Darlene, she had come to a near-total halt on first encountering the word "Brzezinski" and never fully regained her stride. Still, at this pace Darlene and I would both be dead—first I'd kill her, then I'd kill myself—before she came close to finishing the piece. Hustling her out the door at the end of the day, with $49 in wages in her pocket and eleven pages of finished manuscript left behind, I trudged downstairs to face the typewriter myself. Twenty-four hours later, I handed the bulky parcel to the Federal Express man and said, "Never again."

That was his experience in 1979.  In 1984 I was president of the Entrepreneurial Club at Wharton, in my second year.  We had had a very profitable venture selling HP12C calculators to the new incoming first year class of MBAs.  We had a couple of other hustles going on.  One was . . . Well, what was it?  I don't really recall.  All I remember was that it entailed the transfer of a batch of information from some hardcopy source to an electronic file that was computer readable.  There was some sort of merge and manipulation in there somewhere.  Some value added information or something.  We expected to be able to sell the resulting database to our fellow students and possibly to a broader market.

Oh, but the challenges.  We had our own form of an upgraded Darlene.  He was a 16 year-old high school student there in Philadelphia.  He worked at an hourly.  His principle qualifications were 1) he was familiar with computers such as they existed at that time, 2) he knew enough technical talk to understand our project requirements, 3) he was willing to work at an affordable hourly rate, and 4) he was willing to do drudge data work.  

I undersell him.  He was actually bright, affable and eager.  But for us, his chief attraction was his affordability.  And the chief detraction was that his affordability was tied to his ability to fit this project in around his academic and athletic schedule.

Which led to a pattern which I came to know well in my tech career.  Be careful to keep the mean time of project implementation shorter than the mean time of technology change or mean time of customer demand change.  

It took a whole semester of pestering to finally get the data file and by the time we did, the opportunity we had seen was on its last legs.

The point though is that Fallows is describing experiences that only some small portion of the population experienced circa 1970-1985.   It was a momentous period and the absolute number of people were of course in their hundreds of thousands if not a million or two.  

But that very specific experience of making a new wave of technology work?  Not just work technologically, but work with people doing real world tasks.  Work in office environments where the finding of the On-button was a real barrier.  Work in the sense of being a line item on the annual business budget.  Work in the sense of replacing age-old processes (typing pool, secretaries, schedulers, copy machine managers, etc.) with machines and new processes. 

It happened once and then the revolution moved on.  Ever quicker as it turned out.  Each revolution involving fewer people directly, affecting ever more people indirectly, and each lasting a shorter time than before.

I am delighted to come across the article and be reminded that there are people out there who also knew about Osborne I, etc.  And to be reminded how it was in those challenging but heady days.  

Fallows ends his 1982 article with the hope "for a world in which my sons can grow up to have a better computer than their father had."  

Here we are in 2023 and it is an interesting question.  Did they have better computers than their father?  Of course!  Of course?  

Obviously computers perform every function performed in 1982 orders of magnitude better.  But are our computers better?  

There is a broader philosophical question which could almost not be conceived in 1982.  People like Niel Postman were thinking about it then but it wasn't well articulated.

We are three, four, five technological revolutions beyond 1982.  What actually constitutes a computer is now considered differently, and while the benefits for simple productivity tasks are obvious, we have moved way beyond simple productivity improvements.  We are looking and considering a range of risks and challenges that we could scarcely conceptualize forty-one years ago.

The S-curve of change is steeper.  It comes faster.  We fragment our experiences.  Our cohorts become smaller.  

The need for fundamental truths becomes clearer.  Truths that endure and do not change.