These combined also meant that the product was extremely expensive. Here, though, there were two fundamental problems: there was no roadmap to get them from something that filled the trunk of a car to something that you could carry, and there was no roadmap to use spectrum in ways that allowed millions of simultaneous calls in a city instead of dozens of calls. The first car phones appeared in the late 1940s, and were deployed across many cities in many countries. But the breakthough of 1903 was enough to take us forward for decades. Jets delivered the power and efficiency to create mass air transport, and make flight truly cheap as well as practical. That something else turned out to be jets, and you might not have predicted jets in 1903 (though ships already had turbines). There did come a point at which piston engines could be taken no further and we needed something else - you could not use them to build a 707, let alone a Concorde. It was plenty of work to get from the Flyer to the Constellation, but there was no barrrier of principle to cross. You could have plotted the next couple of decades, and indeed people did. Blériot flew across the English Channel just 6 years later. Move from wood and fabric to aluminum, and make more and bigger engines, and there was a clear roadmap to the Dakota and the Lancaster. But it was a theoretical breakthrough, and it was entirely clear that it could be expanded upon to get to something that could carry several people several hundred miles, and perhaps more. It was small and flimsy, and it could only carry a single person a few hundred meters. Let's start with whether it can work. Imagine if you had seen the Wright Brothers’ Flyer in 1903. How can we predict whether something will change? On the one hand, it cannot do what it is supposed to do because it is incomplete, impractical or expensive, and on the other, even if it does work no-one will want it, or, perhaps, even if they do it won't matter. These are all effectively assertions that nothing will change: the product won’t change, or people’s behaviour won’t change, or the things that are important won't change. So, what do we mean when we say that some new piece of technology is a toy? It seems to me that there are two parts to this: either it doesn't work, or it won't matter even if it does work. But it's also unquestionably true that there were always lots of things that looked like toys and never did become anything more. So how do we tell? Is it that 'toys' occasionally turn into something else through some unpredictable chance? Do we throw up our hands and shrug? William Goldman famously said of Hollywood “Nobody knows anything”, but that feels like an abdication of reason and judgement. Even video games, which literally are toys, are also largely responsible for the GPUs that now power the take-off of machine learning. The problem with both of these lines of argument is that they have no predictive value. It is unquestionably true that many of the most important technology advances looked like toys at first - the web, mobile phones, PCs, aircraft, cars and even hot and cold running water at one stage looked like faddish toys for the rich or the young. That’s just survivor bias - this one really is a toy Successful things often started out looking like toys However, these conversations tend to follow a fairly predictable sequence, and quickly become unhelpful: As we create more and more - as 'software eats the world', the urge to dismiss seems only to get stronger, and so does the urge to defend. I've always liked this quote in its own right, but it's also very relevant to talking about new technology and the way that people tend to dismiss and defend it. For as long as people have been creating technology, people have been saying it'll never amount to anything. If it cannot be falsified - if it does not make some prediction that could in theory be tested and proven false - then it does not count as science. For a theory even to be wrong, it must be predictive and testable and falsifiable. Pauli remarked sadly "It is not even wrong”. There’s a story told of the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli that a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist that he suspected was not very good but on which he wanted Pauli's views.
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