There's nothing more enjoyable than an expert putting his foot in his highly qualified mouth. When it comes to technology, the pleasure is all the greater, since technologists — unlike, say, economists — are meant to know what they're talking about.
Thus we all get an especially smug form of satisfaction from the utterances of such men as a Roman engineer called Sextus Julius Frontinus, who once reportedly declared: "Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development."
I call this kind of declaration — that we have reached terminal velocity so far as technical innovation is concerned — "arrogance of the present". And rooting it out from the past is so oddly gratifying that we will happily make up instances of the syndrome.
I can't actually vouch for Sextus's statement, and a similar 1899 quotation widely attributed to one Charles Duell, commissioner of the US Patent Office ("Everything that can be invented has been invented") turns out to be certifiable moonshine. There is simply no record of Mr Duell ever having castsuch a hostage to fortune.
I invoke these tales of dismally failed or faked punditry to prepare you for a new and growing sentiment of my own, which may well end up with me standing in the corner with a dunce's cap.
The thing is, I have a feeling, as of this moment in the spring of the implausibly futuristic year of 2011, that everything that can be invented has, er, been invented. It's just that since the launch of the iPad last year, there's been nothing significantly new coming out, or even rumoured to be coming out.
I recently wandered the massive halls at the Consumer Electronics Fair in Las Vegas looking for something new and found nothing. It wasn't that there was a lack of fantastic stuff. Many of the 100 or more iPad imitations are superb. The very latest TVs from makers such as Sony, Samsung and LG are stunningly beautiful — extraordinary silvery slivers of gorgeousness barely thicker than a pencil. Super-fast mobile smartphones running on the new 4G system were much in evidence. And, even in the US, it is manifest that electric cars are a whisker from finally hitting the mass market.
But new ideas that take your breath away and make you realise that you will have to reorganise your life to accommodate them — I'm thinking real advances here, such as the Sony Walkman, the mobile phone, the iPod and satellite navigation — seem to be off the menu.
This is the age of existing technology being 'reinvented' or, Lord help us, 'reimagined'. It was interesting that the biggest hoo-hah at CES, and in the technology world over the following weeks, was for last year's 'breakthrough', 3D TV — which continues to fail to enthuse the public as much as it does TV manufacturers.
Hoo-hah number two was for internet TV, which is technically quite clever — feeding hundreds of additional TV channels into our sets via our web connections — but, so far as the public is concerned, amounts to little more than a new and confusing way to get access to more and more rubbish not to watch. It's rare indeed to find a member of the viewing public who hasn't noticed the irony that the more TV channels you have, the fewer there are worth switching to.
So what is it that I am so desperate to see invented? Ha, funny I should ask myself, because I haven't a clue. I leave it to the likes of Sony and Apple to tell me.
The beauty of inventions such as the Walkman, iPod, iPad and so on was that they came from the minds of visionary geniuses who could foresee a desire we didn't know we had. A year ago, I couldn't see why anybody would want an iPad. Yet on a train in provincial China last November, a few months after the launch, I noticed that seven people, including me, were using them.
Apple's Steve Jobs, who realised that the iPad was revolutionary while the likes of me were humming and hah-ing, had effectively made a fool of us. What I actually want is to be made a fool of again. And, in spite of my current scepticism, I trust that I will be. That's what makes the technology business so exciting.
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