The Importance of Zooming Out

In order to better imagined future possibilities and innovations, it's useful to zoom out your view of human progress. Your lifetime is way too small; hell even you and your parents lifetime's combined is a relatively short amount of time. My father is hesitant on the idea of full electrification of cars because of limited electricity generation capacity. This is certainly a valid concern that will have to be addressed in the early future, and it's very possible to have an entire discussion about just this topic. But if you instead zoom out, you can better imagine how impending this progress is and just how minor this roadblock is to innovation.

The first commercial power station opened and NYC on September 4, 1882. That was a mere 141 years ago. Now, every modern home is not only electrified but also has cable TV and high-speed Internet. Just think about the rate of innovation that that progress presents. In my 26 year lifetime, I've watched computers evolve from being boring, commercial/industrial machines to now an ultra-prevalent technology that consumes large portions of the days of everyone I know. That was only 26 years; now use your imagination and think 50 or 100 years into the future. Do you really think the norm for society will still be millions of people driving personal, huge, metal boxes containing gallons of expensive, scarce, explosive liquid that spew polluting, smoky fumes everywhere they go? Don't forget that car accidents are the leading cause of death for most American age groups. Consider the growth of population and how unrealistic it will be to commute in this way when already we have problems with traffic. For me, these thoughts make my imagination jump to ideas of improved mass transit, electrification, and self-driving; all the typical tropes you see in sci-fi works. And if any of these seem unrealistic to you, think about how a person from 1923 would react if dropped into today's world. Only sci-fi writers/readers could have predicted futures where people spend hours a day staring at glowing, pocket-sized rectangles or that people could own their own vehicle which they can use to go 100+ mph whenever they'd like. I recently watched the movie Little Women, which was based on an 1868 book; they needed a ride to the train station and were lucky enough to have wealthy neighbors with a couple of horses and a carriage. What a joke that seems like today!

All of this is not to say that conversations about future technologies are useless. I just want to stress the importance of zooming out next time you doubt a certain innovation. Other conversations where zooming out was handy for me include the potential banning of gas stoves, the use of drones for last-mile delivery, and the raising/abolishment of speed limits in an electrified/self-driving future.