{"id":5127,"date":"2016-11-24T00:45:11","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T22:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.alainveuve.ch\/how-time-fools-us-when-it-comes-to-technology\/"},"modified":"2016-11-24T00:45:11","modified_gmt":"2016-11-23T22:45:11","slug":"how-time-fools-us-when-it-comes-to-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alainveuve.ch\/en\/how-time-fools-us-when-it-comes-to-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"How time fools us when it comes to technology."},"content":{"rendered":"

Nutmeg is probably one of the stupidest products you can trade. I realized this when I discovered a new jar of it in the delivery from LeShop<\/a> last Saturday. My wife had reordered because the old one had practically run out. That’s nothing unusual when it comes to household or food products. What is unusual, however, is how long it usually takes to use up a pack like this with normal “consumption”. In my case, it was 10 years. About the perception of time in relation to technology. <\/p>\n

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(Reading time: 6 minutes)<\/em><\/p>\n

10 years is a short time<\/h3>\n

The expiration date of the old nutmeg is 10.2006, so I or my wife must have bought it sometime in 2004 or 2005. A lot has happened in my life since then. My father died, we bought a house, brought three sons into the world, started companies, built them up, sold them, left them and lost them. Friends came and others left. The nutmegs have always been part of it. I even notice that we moved them from one house to another. No, that we already had these nutmegs before we moved into the first house. I don’t think anything in the household has outlasted the nutmegs. Except me and my wife. <\/p>\n

\"Old<\/p>\n

But when I ask my friends whether 10 years is a long time, I often hear “no, it just flew by”. Or “Look at the children, they were so small just now”. Whenever we look back, people always have the feeling that time went by quickly and then come to the conclusion that 10 years is a relatively short time. <\/p>\n

Routine<\/h3>\n

To be fair, it has to be said that people who have had the same daily routine for the majority of the 10 years now logically feel that time has passed quickly. I believe this has to do with the fact that they can no longer differentiate between the individual “daily experiences” in their memories, as one day is very similar to the next. <\/p>\n

People with a very short daily routine, and I count myself among them, tend to feel that these 10 years, for example, were a long time. <\/p>\n

10 future years is a long time<\/h3>\n

Interestingly, the perception of future time periods is exactly the opposite. If you ask someone what they will be doing in 10 years’ time, they usually say something like “I can’t tell you that, it’s still so long away”. <\/p>\n

On closer inspection, this is not illogical: because we can imagine so many things for the future, our perception of time also grows. As we know, we are always victims of our own perception to a certain extent. <\/p>\n

Impact on dealing with technological progress<\/h3>\n

What this means in terms of dealing with technological progress is that we overestimate short-term developments and underestimate long-term developments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If we go back 10 years and compare the technological “general weather situation” with today, we realize that a lot has happened on a technological level. Advances in medicine, in the digital sector, but also in more mundane things such as vacuum cleaners and the like: the development is enormous. And yet it feels like too little. <\/p>\n

We wanted the flying cars!<\/h3>\n

It is too little because our expectations are based on precisely these 10 future years, which we think is a very long time and would achieve an incredible amount of fundamental change. It is, so to speak, the conclusion from the inverted perception of the past, sorry I know that sounds crazy complicated, that we project onto the future. <\/p>\n

Relax, we have time #not<\/h3>\n

And this is precisely the crux of the matter when it comes to estimating future technological developments. We all wish, or at least many of us do, that groundbreaking things will be achieved in the near future. But our perception of the past leads us to assess things very differently. We relativize. We say things like “realistically, that won’t happen for another 15 years”. <\/p>\n

We have the feeling that development is progressing much more slowly. In relative terms, it is. It is slower than we would like it to be. But it is faster than in the past because technological development is exponential. <\/p>\n

As a result, many companies miss the pulse of development and fall behind. Others, which do not focus so much on the question of timing, are then usually much further ahead or dead, because it is also possible to be far too early with a technological development. <\/p>\n

The new nuts<\/h3>\n

The new nuts will have an exciting time. When the pack is used up, my sons will also be older. 17, 16 and 13. We will perhaps, or more likely, have moved again. And my car will be able to drive itself, the cost of energy will still be half, etc. It’s easy to estimate the fairly obvious things. However, it’s almost impossible to grasp and predict developments across the board. <\/p>\n

\"New<\/p>\n

But there will be technologies and, above all, paradigm shifts that will change our lives and our business once again. And there is a good chance that there will be several such developments in the next 10 years. We shouldn’t sleep through this just because we as humans have the feeling that 10 years in the future will take longer than 10 years in the past. Because the truth is, technological development is accelerating and coming faster than we imagine. And that’s a good thing. Here’s to us getting flying cars one day after all. We may be fewer nutmeg packets away from it than we imagine. <\/p>\n

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