A Place for Hype

Edward Tenner

  • The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton
    Profile, 270 pp, £18.99, January 2007, ISBN 978 1 86197 296 5

A new golden age of technological hype seems to be dawning. This January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a small unfurnished booth cost $24,500. Some 2700 companies proved willing to pay the fee, and 140,000 people visited the show. To coincide with it, Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO, launched the iPhone in San Francisco: a mobile phone with a touch-screen and other familiar functions: web browser, camera, MP3 player. Apple shares went up more than 8 per cent that day, though the phones won’t be released until June, will sell for between $499 and $599, and hadn’t been independently tested. In January’s issue of Scientific American, Bill Gates predicted ‘a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day to day lives’. According to Gates, the South Korean government plans to get a domestic robot into all its households by 2013, while the Japanese Robot Association expects there to be a $50 billion a year worldwide personal robot market by 2025.

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[*] Warfare State: Britain, 1920-70 (Cambridge, 380 pp., £19.99, December 2005, 978 0 521 67231 3).

† Creating the 20th Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact by Vaclav Smil (Oxford, 368 pp., £19.99, September 2005, 978 0 19 516874 7).

Vol. 29 No. 9 · 10 May 2007 » Edward Tenner » A Place for Hype (print version)
Pages 33-34 | 3250 words