Technology

Just five short years ago, Samsung released the first mainstream folding phone with their debut Galaxy Fold. It had some quirks — a small, slim, external display, thick bezels, an odd asymmetrical notch and an unprecedented $1,980 price tag — but what mattered most was the screen. Open the slim, TV-remote-shaped phone and you gazed upon a great, wide, 7.3-inch screen, bigger than any you could carry in your pocket before, with a folding crease in the middle. You could multitask, watch full-screen YouTube videos and browse the web as you would on a tablet. That is, you could do so temporarily. Early review units catastrophically broke at even the mention of a grain of sand, creating a run of viral tweets and videos.

Western governments seem ill-prepared to grapple with rapidly advancing technology. Watch any congressional hearing where a crusty congressman tries to keep pace with Silicon Valley’s top “autists” if you need further evidence — and read Spencer A. Klavan’s analysis of the high-skill but low-status rejects uniting into a formidable social class. The Silent Generation and boomers simply cannot keep up. The Space Race is back on — and tycoons are eager to cash in on the final frontier. Shane Cashman dives into the new wild west of explorers and entrepreneurs commercializing the great unknown. Lionel Shriver brings us back to earth with a look at the electrical grid and our government’s push for green energy and electric vehicles.

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the first and biggest tech convention of the year, took place earlier this month, where the strangest, newest products were shown off. As usual, there was a lot of fluff — pointless gizmos that work on a show floor but never make it to stores — but there were also core signs of the technology trends we’re going to see this year, and products I’m excited to try. Screens are always a strong point at CES, and this year proved no different, from pure quantum dot prototypes, translucent televisions and yet another laptop with a glasses-free 3D display; but it’s the arrival of great OLED screens to mainstream laptops that truly excites me.

In the Phetasy.com book club, we recently read the famous social science tome, Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam. In it he examines the decline of social capital across various facets of American life. Based on his 1995 essay of the same title, the book was groundbreaking when it appeared in 2000. Putnam had noticed a trend: Americans were spending more and more time alone. His book analyzed the data and contemplated what it meant for our democracy and humanity. Although his observations were a harbinger of the oft-cited “epidemic of loneliness” we are currently living through, in our post-Trump, post-pandemic pre-maggedon reality, Bowling Alone reads like a nostalgic look at the good ol’ days. Days when people still interacted at all.

Several years ago — long before Elon renamed it X, restricted most features behind a paywall and made it altogether less pleasant to use — I uninstalled Twitter from my phone. Then, on my laptop, I set the Minimal Twitter extension to hide all interaction counts. I still have no idea how many followers I have.  I wasn’t hopelessly addicted to the site, nor was it enraging me on a frequent basis. Put simply, though a Twitter-using liberal, I was not a “triggered lib.” But whenever I wasn’t doing something else, or waiting in line, or walking to make some coffee, I flicked through it. When I should have let the silence breath, I pulled out my phone and refreshed my feed.

Consumer technology is, usually, profoundly dull. I love technology, but even I must concede the undeniable. A new pair of light gray, plastic cupped, noise-canceling headphones are functional, and often great, but they hardly get the blood rushing. Yet another gray Windows notebook has released! I struggle to stifle a yawn. And then — worst of all — are the phones. In the sixteen years since the first iPhone debuted, smartphones have become ubiquitous; the market is so large and flooded that innovation is no longer worth the risk. Phones are not cool new devices, but tools. You don’t care how a hammer looks; you care about the price and if it can hit a nail. The latest iPhone is a tool for accessing the internet and taking selfies. Most Android phones are the same but cheaper.

Whether on British television news panels or late-night TV in America, it is hard to get away from talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Even the president of the United States has weighed in on AI, introducing an "AI Bill of Rights." The popular thing is to amplify the current media narrative — that AI will render millions jobless. It will eventually become more powerful than humans and destroy its creators. Just Google “AI doomsday” and then run and hide under the covers. I will be the first to admit that all technology has a dark side. Email came with spam and scammers; mobile phones came with robocalls and endless tracking by companies like Facebook. Artificial intelligence, too, will be used for nefarious purposes.