SPEED OF CREATION

March 26th, 2021

One way to define technology is the discrepancy between creation and imagination.  More specifically the speed at which each comes to fruition.  

Good ideas are not rare.  In fact, they are as common as coffee.  Regular and unremarkable people have good ideas everyday.  But execution is everything.  Imagination is the human superpower, our birthright to the future - one that might be spectacular, strange, but at the very least, very different.

But the speed at which that brilliant or terrible new future arrives is not dependant on imagination, it has everything to do with execution, with execution, and innovation and technology is what speeds up that process.

It was only a few years ago that an entire room of draftsmen were required to produce schematics for a three dimensional machine.  Now that sort of thing can be generated at comparatively warp speed by a single individual who knows a cad program inside and out.  Proficiency in the program isn’t even necessary.  A few years ago I had an idea for an item that I could knock together in a 3d printer and had the thing materialized in a cad program I’d never used within about twenty minutes.  The longest part of the process from idea to using the actual product was the shipping time required to receive the 3D printer.

This is what technology does - it extends our ability to manifest imagination faster and faster.  No code platforms make the same promise.  Even a phenomenally talented coder requires a good deal of time to throw together a complex app, but even this will get faster  as time goes on and technology invents a better ratchet to tune itself with.

While predicting the future is a finicky business, one thing we can be fairly confident about is that our abilities will increase, and they will grow faster with time, meaning that even if we do head down a dark pathway, our ability to pivot toward something radically better, much faster will come with that trembling territory.