A 200-Year Look At Automation And How It Has Improved Our Lives

The following guest post is by Seth Turin, president of Seth Turin Media, who created UBot Studio. 

When Nikola Tesla introduced the first humanoid, people had concerns that robots would threaten people’s livelihoods. Now, over a hundred years later, everything from social media networks to Netflix push the envelope every day, as automated algorithms decide what to show us, sell us, and what we’re worth. Automation is no stranger to controversy.

But its history is mostly a tale of good and, thankfully, today we can all quickly benefit from new technologies as they get introduced, accepted and adopted by people at breakneck speed.

Inventions always have a lot of growing up to do before they make any real difference to people’s lives. When the Wrights first offered to sell the U.S. War Department a flying machine, the brothers met with resistance. And a lot had to happen before the first passenger airplane took flight.

Before email, which takes only seconds, there was the telegraph, which made the 10-day coast-to-coast deliveries of The Pony Express obsolete. It inspired awe in people who were able to send messages over hundreds and eventually thousands of miles in about an hour.

With early cameras, it took several minutes and bulky equipment to take photographs, and up to an hour to develop them. Some people even believed that cameras were dangerous to your soul. Now, digital cameras let us sleekly capture and view the same photo in under a second.

In the mid-90s, there were only 10,000 sites on the World Wide Web. Now there are 146, 482,197 (and counting). And now, we can make sense of all this information, thanks to search engines that use (ro)bots to crawl the Internet and return quality search results using complex algorithms in under a second.

It’s quite humbling when you think about just how much automation has made life better for all of us. Imagine waiting 25 days to get a message from New York to San Francisco in the 1850’s. What would the California Gold Rush have been like if miners were able to send word back east about their claim in under a second?

What’s next: messages delivered at the speed of light, or directly to your mind? Even in the 21^st century, it blows some of us away to think about booking flights into space.

From air travel to the web, getting places both online and offline is continuously becoming easier, faster and safer every day. Walk through 200 years of automation past, present and future with this infographic.