Technological progress is as messy as Darwinian evolution

There is a famous chart which shows the time it took for various technologies to be adopted by 50 million people. From its introduction, the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users. For radio, it was 38; for television, 13; for the world wide web, merely four.

Online services are faster still. Facebook reached the 50 million mark in two years, YouTube in ten months, Twitter in nine months. Pokémon Go reached the same watermark in 19 days — as did Pornhub. (For the benefit of the uninitiated, Pokémon Go was a 2016 augmented reality game where you used your phone to catch animated monsters; Pornhub is a helpful website which kindly reminds men to set their laptops to ‘mute’ after their wives have gone to bed, to avoid waking them.)

These figures are frequently used as evidence that the world is speeding up. But it takes only a little critical thought to realise that these are far from like-for-like comparisons. Some technologies are free and can be installed in minutes. Others require a large investment in new equipment (early televisions were hugely expensive) or need the development of other forms of technology before they can expand beyond a small ecological niche (video conferencing was long held back by the slow speeds of non-fibre broadband).

In many ways, technological progress is much more akin to the messy process of Darwinian evolution than to anything consciously designed. Sometimes this process is immediate; sometimes a technology lies dormant for years before experiencing a Cambrian explosion. There are very good ideas out there which have yet to become standard. Fridges and washing machines are near universal, but dishwashers reached 50 per cent of American homes only in 1997 and have yet to reach this landmark in Britain.