The Tech That Made Us
By Elisabeth Garry
These days, technology develops almost too quickly to keep track of. Every year, Apple releases a new iPhone that can do things that even a few years ago would have sounded straight out of a science fiction novel (and sometimes more in a Blade Runner than an Avatar way). Mark Zuckerberg wants us all to live in the metaverse (can’t he just get a Second Life account?); Elon Musk wants to evacuate the ultra-rich to Mars. We’ve become so used to walking around with supercomputers in our pockets that it can be easy to forget just how futuristic today’s tech would seem from the vantage point of even the early 2000s, let alone the middle part of the 20th century, when computers emerged in our cultural consciousness.