🤖 My chat (+transcript) with journalist Nicole Kobie on why the future of tech still hasn’t arrived

My 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist, is based on the idea that we, as a society, are failing to meet our potential: Inefficiency, overregulation, and an overabundance of caution is robbing us of the world we might be living in.

Nicole Kobie shares some of my frustrations in her recent book, The Long History of the Future: Why tomorrow’s technology still isn’t here. She explores the evolutionary history of past technologies and why we just can’t seem to arrive at the future we’ve all been waiting for.

Today on Faster, Please — The Podcast, I chat with Kobie about the role of regulators, the pace of progress, and what careers in journalism have taught us about innovation hype

Kobie is a science and technology journalist whose articles appear in publications fromTeen Vogue, toNew Scientist, toGQ. She is the futures editor forPC Pro and a contributing editor forWired. She is based out of London.

In This Episode

* Repeating history (1:42)

* The American system of innovation (7:12)

* The cost of risk-aversion (16:10)

* The problem dynamic (20:28)

* Our future rate of change (23:34)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Repeating history (1:42)

I'm supposed to forget that I basically wrote the same version of this story a year ago . . .

Pethokoukis: I wrote a book about a year ago, and I wrote that book out of frustration. I was frustrated, when I originally started writing it in 2020, that, how come we already didn't have a vaccine for Covid? And then I started thinking about all the other technologies that we didn't have, and it was that frustration that led me write my book.

I'm guessing there was a frustration that led you to write your much better-written book.

Kobie: So I think it's really interesting that you start with Covid vaccines because here, out in the UK, the vaccine that was developed here — this is not something of my area of expertise, but obviously all journalists ended up having to write about Covid quite a bit — but the reason we managed to create a vaccine so quickly (they usually take several years) is because we have this vaccine platform that they'd been coming up with, and they kind of had this virus in their heads of, “Oh, it would probably be this type of a virus, and if we were to design a system that would help us design a vaccine really quickly, what would it look like?” And they had it mostly done when everything hit, so actually we got quite lucky on that one. It could have been a lot worse, we could have been much further behind.

But you're right, I have been writing about technology for a very long time and I keep hearing things about AI, things about driverless cars, and you just feel like you're writing the same headline time after time after time because news has such a short memory. I'm supposed to forget that I basically wrote the same version of this story a year ago, and that every year I'm writing about driverless cars and how they're going to be here imminently, and then 10 years goes by and I'm like, “Maybe I should have renewed my license.” That sort of a thing. And I find that very frustrating because I don't like hype. I like having the reality of the situation, even if it's a bit pessimistic, even if it's not the most happy scenario of what could happen with technology. I'd rather know the downsides and have a better sense of what is actually going to happen. So it really came out of that.

I was writing a section for a British computing magazine called PC Pro, a future section, and it's a very cynical magazine a lot of the time, so I kind of got used to writing why things weren't going to happen and I had this whole list of these different technologies that I'm not necessarily pessimistic about, but I could see why they weren't going to happen as quickly as everyone has said. So just put it together in a book. So a little bit the same as you, but bit of a different story.

So that phenomenon, and I wonder, is it partly sort of a reporter's problem? Because most reporters you have a certain . . . you don't want to write the same story over and over again. I think a lot of reporters have a soft spot for novelty. I think that's not just true with technology, I think it's with economic theories, it's with a lot of things. Then you have the founders or technologists themselves, many of whom probably would like to raise money and to continue raising money, so they're going to hype it, but yet, history would suggest that there's nothing new about this phenomenon, that things always take longer to get from the breakthrough to where it is a ubiquitous technology, everythin