I was absent-mindedly listening to the radio recently when my attention was grabbed by a remark made by Denis O'Brien of Esat. He said a three-week forecast would now be long-term forecasting in the mobile-phone business.
Modern technology is developing so rapidly it is possible to look clearly only into the very near future. We will also increasingly find that, because of this rapid rate of change, we can clearly remember only the relatively recent past. Will future generations live in a state of constantly developing present, with no sense of history or long-term projection into the future?
I wear a wristwatch that my mother bought for me 35 years ago. I have two clocks at home, each over 100 years old and still in good working order that came from my grandfather's house. Could you buy an ordinary wristwatch today that will still work fine in 35 years' time? Could you buy an ordinary clock today that will remain in good order in the year 2110? The answer is No.
Of course, it is still possible to buy expensive hand-made mechanical watches and clocks that will last for a long time. But the ordinary battery-powered quartz digital watch or clock is not built to last long. The main reason for this is that the manufacturer assumes the product will not be needed for long as it will soon be superseded by new developments in technology.
Computer technology is the pre-eminent example of explosively rapid development. In my departmental office in college we have upgraded four times over the past 12 years just to keep abreast of the main developments in the capacity of the office PC - bigger hard disks, modems and e-mail, zip drives, CD-ROM drives, etc. In a great many other areas new generations of product quickly succeed each other with generation life-time steadily decreasing. The rapid turnover of successive generations in the computer world, and the consequent mindset induced in workers in this industry, is partly or perhaps largely to blame for generating the Y2K problem. This was caused by a computer programming convention, used in the 1960s and 1970s, of denoting the year by its last two digits rather than by using the full four. The year 1967 was programmed simply as 67. This caused no problem until the year 2000 was reached when computers programmed like this naturally interpreted the last two digits 00 to mean 1900.
When the programmers used the two-digit convention to save precious memory space they thought their programmes would be obsolete, certainly within 10 years, and be replaced by new improved programmes that would once again use the four-digit year notation, thus avoiding any problem in the year 2000.
The culture of the computer world, with new systems continually replacing old ones, justified this thinking, but, in this instance, the programmers miscalculated and, for one reason or another, many of the two-digit programmes survived, eventually to threaten us with the Y2K problem.
The short-lifetime, quick-turnover nature of modern technological products extends also to the buildings produced by modern construction technology. Modern buildings do not seem nearly so robust and durable as buildings from ages past. The finest buildings we have in University College Cork date from the foundation of the college in 1845 and shortly thereafter.
Surface cladding on modern buildings is no sooner up than it starts to develop ugly discolouration, efflorescence or mould growth. Much internal construction in the modern building is extremely flimsy: hollow doors, plasterboard partitions and so forth.
When we use things that are old and live in buildings that are very old, and when we make things that we know are durable enough to survive usefully into the medium- to long-term future, it gives us a sense of the continuity of the human story, and of our part and obligations in that story. We are at risk of losing this sense of connectedness in the rapid-fire changeover of modern technology, and if we lose this sense we may well become lost.
In 1386 a dining hall with an oak-beamed ceiling was built at New College, Oxford. In that same year the builders also planted oak trees that would be mature enough after several hundred years to supply new beams for the ceiling when the originals needed replacing. These trees were used in the 1800s to replace the original beams.
Moved by the urge to construct something useful now that will function into the long-term future, Danny Hillis, a computer scientist conceived the idea of constructing a mechanical clock that will work accurately for the next 10,000 years.
This project is being managed by the Long Now Foundation (you can look it up on the Internet). The clockwork device, known as the Millennium Clock, will be as big as a good-sized building and will need to be wound up once per year to keep it going. It will be easy to maintain and any necessary repairs will be possible using tools no more sophisticated than those in use during the Bronze Age.
The dizzying pace of change in modern technology is something that will continue and it presents us with a challenge. If we do not understand the nature of this challenge, and I have dimly tried to outline it in this article, technology will keep us perpetually off-balance and I believe will be psychologically bad for us in the long run. We need to develop counteractive measures to keep ourselves anchored.
William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry and director of microscopy at UCC
The Long Now Foundation web site is at http://longnow.com