Why writing a book about modern technology has become so difficult

The speed of technological change has accelerated so much we don't even see the stations along the way any more as we zoom past.

Shortly after I left RedShark as a full-time editor, I started to write a book about technology. I realise everyone thinks they’re going to write a book at some point in their lives, but I was determined actually to do this; it would have been so easy to have jotted down a few ideas and then abandoned the idea completely when something more pressing came along. I was determined not to do that. What made it easier was that there was no shortage of material. I just treated every chapter as a long-ish article, and it flowed quite nicely. I wrote about two-thirds of it when, inevitably, something more pressing came along (trivial things like, you know, earning a living!), and it got sidelined in that great filing cabinet in the cloud.

But then something far more significant happened: one of my biggest predictions came true. The moment I tried the early versions of ChatGPT, I realised I had to change the focus of my book.

I now have to re-write about half of what I’ve already done. Luckily, several chapters (like the one about the size of things in the universe - big and small) are perfectly okay. Others, about the state of the art (as it was way back in 2020!), are now about as useful as a four-year-old TV guide.

So, I’m happily reconciled to the task of starting again and, essentially, writing a different book.

A runaway train?

But one thing about the book hasn’t changed: It’s not so much a book about technology as how technology is increasingly hidden from us, potentially leaving us with less agency in our lives despite having massively increased powers at our fingertips.

One example I use in the book is how I was once on a train going home from London. On the East Coast Mainline, these trains are pretty fast - they cruise at about 125mph (around 200km per hour). That’s nothing compared to fast European or Japanese trains (not to mention the Chinese Maglev trains!), but it’s quick enough, and remarkably so when you realise that we’re lumbered with a Victorian rail infrastructure in this country.

I noticed on this trip that we’d passed a few stations I’d never seen before. That seemed odd enough for me to ask the train manager whether we’d switched to another route for some reason. He said, “No, it’s just that we’re moving at a third of our normal speed because of congestion on the line”. Apparently, you just don’t see the stations you don’t normally stop at when you’re whizzing past them at 125mph. They’re just a blur.

The same is true for a lot of technology. It’s either too fast, too slow, too big, or too small for us to notice. Here’s an example that’s relevant to the content production and broadcasting industries: How do you get an 8K video of a beautiful sunset (that’s around 35 megapixels per frame) down a cable when all you have are electronic ones and zeros?

To answer that question, there’s no need to get into sampling, logic gates, binary theory or Schmitt Triggers. Nor do we need to talk about jitter, cable loss, impedance and termination. The answer is simple: you send those ones and zeros very, very quickly. That’s it. That’s the fundamental principle. If you don’t understand that, the rest is virtually pointless.

There are other examples, which I cover in the book. One of the most important is the idea of scale and perspective. The speed of light is almost impossible to comprehend, but even that kind of velocity isn’t enough to get us to the edge of the observable universe in less than 13 billion years. Atoms are unimaginably tiny, but electrons are unimaginably smaller than that, and yet virtually all our technology (not to say our sensation of reality) depends on these vanishingly tiny, ephemeral particles.

From SD to 12K and beyond

The forthcoming Blackmagic Ursa 17K

Over the last fifteen years, we’ve gone from standard definition to 12K (and soon to be 17K, according to Blackmagic Design) HDR video, which is over a hundred-fold increase. We went from gigabytes to terabytes, almost without some people noticing a thousand-fold difference between them. This rate of change has enabled the recent frankly staggering increases in the powers of AI. AI is precisely the sort of technology that needs - and is getting - this kind of growth. (When I started writing this book, Nvidia was worth 1/20th of its present value; the increase driven almost exclusively by increased demand for AI chips.)

In just the last few months, we have seen machines with empathy, personality, and extreme conversational abilities that can not only pass the original Turing test but tell jokes about it while commenting on your visual reaction to them.

So perhaps I need to write a chapter where I talk about how not even experts can keep up these days.

tl;dr

• David Shapton started writing a book about technology but had to change its focus after trying early versions of ChatGPT.
• His book now discusses how technology is increasingly hidden from us, potentially leaving us with less agency in our lives despite having increased powers at our fingertips.
• Technology can be too fast, too slow, too big, or too small for us to notice.
• Rapid advancements in technology, such as from standard definition to high-resolution video and the growth of AI, have led to significant changes that not even experts can keep up with.