One that stood out for me doesn’t exist yet, but Peter Dia­man­dis and his “X Prize” have placed their bets on some­thing called the Qual­comm Tri­corder Chal­lenger. Remem­ber the Tri­corder from the orig­i­nal Star Trek – a nifty lit­tle piece of hard­ware that could instantly diag­nose Star Fleet crew mem­bers and other assorted alien life forms? Well, the X Prize foun­da­tion thinks we’re at a point where we could turn that par­tic­u­lar piece of sci­ence fic­tion into sci­ence fact. They’ve put $10 mil­lion up for grabs for who­ever can cre­ate a hand­held device will be “a tool capa­ble of cap­tur­ing key health met­rics and diag­nos­ing a set of 15 dis­eases. Met­rics for health could include such ele­ments as blood pres­sure, res­pi­ra­tory rate, and tem­per­a­ture. Ulti­mately, this tool will col­lect large vol­umes of data from ongo­ing mea­sure­ment of health states through a com­bi­na­tion of wire­less sen­sors, imag­ing tech­nolo­gies, and portable, non-invasive lab­o­ra­tory replace­ments.”  The TED com­mu­nity col­lec­tively started sali­vat­ing at the possibilities.

But as most of us had our atten­tion focused at the amaz­ing glimpses at our own clev­er­ness on stage, I couldn’t help scan­ning the audi­ence around me at TEDAc­tive. Here we were, a group of priv­i­leged (and mainly well to do) West­ern­ers, and most of us had tech­nol­ogy in our hands that would have blown away the TED audi­ence of 2002, just 10 short years ago. Imag­ine demo­ing the iPhone or iPad then. A stand­ing “O” would have been guar­an­teed (not that that’s too strin­gent a bar to get over at TED).

It made me real­iz­ing how fickle we are when it comes to tech­nol­ogy. What amazes us today is expected tomor­row and becomes bor­ing the day after. We chew up inno­va­tion at an ever-increasing pace and seem to grow annoyed if we’re not con­stantly fed a diet of “wow”.

I started with a quote from come­dian Louis C.K.  In his rou­tine, he talks about a flight he was recently on where the air­line announced that you could access Wi Fi while in the air.  Part way through the flight, the sys­tem went down and the flight atten­dants came on the sys­tem and apologized.

The per­son in the next seat responded with an exas­per­ated, “This is com­plete B.S.!”

How, won­dered C.K., could you pos­si­ble feel enti­tled to some­thing you didn’t even know existed 5 min­utes ago?

Look, I love my gad­gets as much as the next guy. More, in fact. But at that moment, sit­ting in that dark­ened audi­to­rium, I could help but won­der if our own insa­tia­bil­ity for inno­va­tion is set­ting off a tech­no­log­i­cal arms race with social impli­ca­tions we can’t pos­si­bly fore­see? Are we becom­ing spoiled idiots? Are we so blinded by our own sense of enti­tle­ment that we fail to appre­ci­ate just how amaz­ing the world is today? And, more dis­turbingly, as we under uti­liz­ing the tools that tech­nol­ogy is giv­ing us, going for the easy dis­trac­tion rather than the earth shak­ing poten­tial of inno­va­tion. Do we push tech­nol­ogy down the path of least resis­tance, rather than direct it where it can do the most good for the world, collectively?

Of course, apply­ing tech­nol­ogy for the bet­ter­ment of mankind is right in TED’s wheel­house, so my fears are not so much aimed at what I saw dur­ing TED, but rather to the del­uge of tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion that’s only pur­pose seems to be to make us fat­ter, stu­pider and lazier.

Amongst the nobler pur­suits of inno­va­tion is Seg­way inven­tor Dean Kamen’s Stir­ling Water still, a box about the size of a large camp­ing cooler that allows you to “stick a hose into any­thing that looks wet…and it comes out…as per­fect dis­tilled water.” The box can sup­ply a vil­lage with 1,000 liters of clean water a day.  Peter Dia­man­dis gave us an update on the still, say­ing that hopes are high that it will soon go into wide­spread pro­duc­tion, mak­ing a mas­sive dif­fer­ence in the health and well being of many third world coun­tries. It all sounds great until we remem­ber that Kamen first intro­duced it on the TED stage in (you guessed it) 2002.

I won­der. If Steve Jobs had teased us with the capa­bil­i­ties of the iPhone in 2002, would we have waited patiently for a decade to get our hands on it? Or would we have whined like a bunch of “spoiled idiots” until it shipped? We’ve now had four ver­sion of the iPhone ship since it was intro­duced 5 years ago, so I sus­pect the later is more likely.

Con­sid­er­ing that the major­ity of the world still can’t get a glass of clean drink­ing water, it does give one pause for thought, doesn’t it?

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider March 15, 2012


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.