The Telephone

Once in a while, I think about the many ways in which the phone changed the course of human history. I like to think about it from the point of view of people in the far future, who will divide the whole of human history into two parts: everything before the telephone, and everything after. Before the telephone, communicating across large distances involved things like letter-writing, sending short messages by telegraph, shouting, and, of course, not communicating across large distances. The arrival of the telephone, after the initial teaser campaign ("The telephone is coming! It's the dawning of a new age..." "The telephone?" "Yes, the telephone; it's going to change everything!" "Wow, I'm going to ask my doctor about it!" "The Telephone: ask your doctor about it."), changed the way we communicated forever. After its introduction, people could suddenly have conversations with people thousands of miles away, sometimes hundreds. They could say things to each other, like "them's fightin' words!" or "why don't you come over here and say that," which, of course, led to the development of the aeroplane, and the hula-hoop, which seem completely unrelated, and yet there we are.

In the years that followed, telephone technology led directly to advancements in audio recording, devices for the hearing-impaired, radio, transistors, satellites, television, computers, data compression, the Internet, robotics, artificial intelligence, and, eventually, telephones. And the telephone was, as everyone knows, the precursor to telepathy, which, combined with artiificial intelligence and the successor to the Internet, led to the Singularity. Will lead to the Singularity, I should say. Which is how we'll end up with the robot overlords (don't worry, it'll be a good thing, unless they decide to turn evil).