DISCOVER asked David Bodanis—a former OxfordUniversity lecturer, trend consultant for BMW, author of E=mc^2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, and motormouth who talks at nearly the speed of light—to investigate the pace of innovation these days in America. He shared his conclusions in a series of missives to senior editor Corey S. Powell.
Dear Corey,
I just finished my research trip for you, hanging out with software developers and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and, boy, am I confused. Everyone here believes that technology is being introduced faster than ever. But in their private lives, hardly anything has changed in years.
The plane I flew in on, for example, was a Boeing 747. It's a great jet, but it was designed more than 30 years ago. There are more movies to watch on board than there used to be, but the basic idea—a metal tube attached to jet engines that burn modified petroleum, carrying a lot of people at around 600 mph—is much the same as it has been for all planes since then.
When I got out of the plane, I used a credit card to rent a car. Well, credit cards are almost half a century old, and although the computer systems behind them are faster than they once were, people have been using this basic technology for decades. The rental car itself was a lot like a car from two decades ago: It got similar mileage, had a similar internal combustion engine, and gave me a familiar driving experience. Clicking a few buttons on the dashboard led me to Motown tunes of 40 years ago. The process was a bit less efficient than putting in a tape, but not too much worse.
