Transport Tech Lagging Behind Information Tech Progress. This is Unusual.

wo technologies have mostly followed each other in lockstep for several thousand years of human history. Communications and transportation technologies. The last most significant occurrence that changed the world was the telephone and combustion engine.

Communications technologies have continued to rapidly advance, leading to where we are today with digital information technologies that have and are, enabling (not causing) rapid global change. But transportation technologies have plateaued. This is unusual.

If we have reached a sort of plateau with regard to transportation technology, what are the implications for our world? I believe that this may actually be a good thing and present us with an interesting period of transportation innovations. And I’m not talking about autonomous vehicles.

The reason we’ve hit a plateau of sorts comes down to one word; physics. Any form of engine, diesel, gas, electric or hydrogen can only go so fast. While we have made advances in engine efficiencies in terms of speed, they are only incremental.

As transportation technologies have evolved alongside communications technologies, we’ve seen changes in sociocultural systems. With the printing press more books, treatises and papers could be produced. As sailing technologies improved, information could travel faster and spread farther.

This enabled the advancement of societies through the sharing of information, which lead to periods of conflict, colonialism and the rapid spread of capitalism in the 15th and 16th centuries. As both technologies advanced, so did societies. Our world as we often say, became smaller.

But communication technologies through the process of exponential and combinatory innovations leapfrogged transportation. Yes, we can fly around the world in about 24 hours or less, but we can send an email, text, movie, picture or song in a millisecond.

If transportation technologies had advanced in lockstep with information technologies we’d probably be beaming into each others living rooms by now.

Such concepts have long been a staple of science-fiction, including anti-gravity technology. But we’ve slammed like a well, freight train, into the hard bricked reality of physics.

The innovations in transportation technologies today are more focused on efficiencies and moving more goods in one vehicle. Autonomous driving may never actually arrive, perhaps becoming a journey to experience rather than any sort of destination.

Flying cars are a lot of fun, but are unlikely to be a technology for every household given current limitations and infrastructure that would have to dramatically change along with governance systems.

The upside to this is that while new transport technologies may not go much faster, they will become more environmentally friendly. They already are. There is a race underway to make more efficient and environmentally friendly batteries.

As information technologies advance, we are beginning to better understand their impacts and roles on society and culture is beginning to shape them. First technologies change a culture, then culture shapes the technology in new ways.

Information technologies are being shaped by culture now through political systems, militaries, norms, traditions and behaviours. This is most amplified through the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the global debates we are having.

Culture has been modifying modern transportation technologies for decades such as safety features in cars, for aeroplanes and vessels.

Information technologies have been playing a key role in transportation technologies as well through GPS navigation, infotainment systems in cars and on aeroplanes for consumer travel, military uses and so on.

Anyone driving a more recent model of car likely has a touch screen in their car. These are much beloved by the auto industry not because they really add any value to the customer, but because they reduce manufacturing costs. It’s much cheaper to make software and slap it into a screen than make knobs, buttons and levers. Consumers increasingly report a dislike for screens.

Despite the limitations of physics when it comes to transportation technologies, there is still a lot of room for innovation and this will be better for our planet in terms of the environment. We will get much better with mass public transportation systems and vehicles.

This is a very interesting time for figuring out how to better integrate information and transportation systems into our societies at a much larger scale than ever before. Physics are putting a set of constraints on us that may very well be for the better.

Until someone figures out anti-gravity and how to move faster than a hyper-loop train or beam us around the world in a flash.