Every May, I celebrate Towel Day.
For anyone unfamiliar with this extremely important cultural event, it's a tribute to Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As any respectable geek knows, a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.
I have a particular affection for Adams. Not just for his books, but for his ability to spot the absurdity in things that everyone else takes terribly seriously.
Including technology.
In the late 1990s, Adams appeared on the BBC's Start the Week, where a distinguished journalist confidently informed him that the internet was a ridiculous fad, rather like amateur radio in the 1950s.
It would pass, presumably, once everyone came to their senses.
Adams wasn't convinced.
In 1999, he published a wonderful essay in The Sunday Times called How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet.
In it, he proposed three remarkably accurate rules about how humans perceive technology.
The first: anything that already exists when you're born is simply part of the natural world.
The second: anything invented before you turn thirty is exciting, creative, and potentially an excellent career opportunity.
The third: anything invented after thirty is dangerous, unnatural, and probably the beginning of the end of civilization.
At least until we've lived with it long enough to decide it's perfectly normal after all.
Obviously, this isn't a scientific law. Turning thirty doesn't automatically transform you into a suspicious Victorian gentleman shouting at electrical appliances.
But it's a remarkably useful observation.
And history provides some rather entertaining examples.
1. Cinema was going to destroy the theatre
On December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers held their famous paid public film screening at the Grand Café in Paris.
It was a technological curiosity. A room full of people paying to watch moving images on a screen.
Ten years later, cinema was becoming something considerably more threatening.
In June 1905, Harry Davis and John P. Harris opened a small cinema in Pittsburgh. Admission cost five cents, which helped give these establishments their name: nickelodeons.
Five cents to watch moving pictures.
By 1908, there were approximately 8,000 nickelodeons across the United States.
For the traditional theatre business, this was a rather uncomfortable development.
A theatre had to gather actors, musicians, technicians and an audience every evening. Everyone needed to be paid. Sets had to be built, rehearsals conducted, performances repeated.
A film, meanwhile, could be distributed to another city and shown again.
And again.
And again.
From a business perspective, the economics were almost indecent.
Of course, objections quickly appeared.
Cinema was accused of corrupting children, encouraging crime and exposing respectable citizens to questionable moral influences. The highly flammable nitrate film used at the time also presented genuine safety hazards.
In December 1908, New York Mayor George McClellan moved to close the city's movie theatres. Cinema operators challenged the decision and secured a court injunction allowing them to reopen.
In January 1909, New York prohibited children under sixteen from attending these theatres without an adult.
The new medium was no longer merely entertainment. It was something society felt compelled to control.
And yet cinema didn't destroy theatre.
It created an entirely new industry, changed the economics of storytelling, and pushed live performance to develop its own strengths.
Theatre survived. Cinema flourished. People continued to enjoy both.
Incidentally, the children's television channel Nickelodeon inherited its name from those five-cent cinemas.
A rather successful afterlife for a supposedly dangerous cultural innovation.
2. Electricity was going to turn cities into death traps
On New Year's Eve in 1879, Thomas Edison demonstrated his electric lighting system at Menlo Park, New Jersey.
Buildings and streets glowed with dozens of incandescent lamps.
It must have seemed like science fiction.
By September 1882, Edison's Pearl Street power station was supplying electricity to customers in Lower Manhattan. It started with just 59 customers.
Then electrification accelerated.
Unfortunately, the infrastructure was considerably less elegant than the glowing advertisements for the future.
New York streets became a jungle of cables.
Telegraph wires, telephone wires and electric lighting wires ran overhead, sometimes with dangerous high-voltage lines tangled among them.
On October 11, 1889, a Western Union lineman named John Feeks was working above a busy Manhattan street when he came into contact with an electrically charged wire.
He was electrocuted in front of horrified witnesses.
The incident became a public scandal.
Newspapers attacked the electrical companies. Citizens demanded action. Mayor Hugh Grant pushed for dangerous wiring to be removed and ordered high-voltage arc lighting shut down.
Electricity had gone from a miracle of modern civilization to something that could kill you while you were walking down the street.
And here's the important distinction.
The danger was real.
The problem wasn't that people had irrationally imagined electricity could kill them.
It could.
The problem was poorly managed infrastructure, inadequate insulation and a rapidly expanding industry that had not yet worked out how to operate safely.
The solution was not to abandon electricity and return to candles.
It was to make electrical systems safer.
Today, we barely notice electricity until the power goes out.
And then civilization apparently ends in approximately fifteen minutes, usually when the Wi-Fi stops working.
3. Mobile phones were going to give everyone brain cancer
In January 1993, a Florida man named David Reynard appeared on CNN's Larry King Live.
His wife had died of a brain tumour, and he believed her mobile phone was responsible.
The tumour, he argued, had developed on the side of her head where she normally held the phone.
There was no established evidence that the phone had caused the illness.
But the allegation was enough to send the industry into a panic.
Shares in mobile phone companies fell. Customers called operators demanding explanations. Manufacturers and industry representatives rushed to reassure the public.
Motorola lost around four percent of its market value in the immediate reaction.
The fear stuck.
For years, the idea that mobile phones might be quietly cooking our brains appeared in newspapers, conversations and popular culture.
Stephen King even wrote a novel, Cell, in which a mysterious signal transmitted through mobile phones turns people into violent, mindless creatures.
An entertaining premise. Not a particularly helpful guide to epidemiology.
Scientists spent decades investigating the possible health effects of mobile phone radiation.
In March 2024, researchers published findings from the large European COSMOS study, involving more than 250,000 participants.
They found no evidence of an increased risk of the brain tumours studied, including among the heaviest mobile phone users.
A separate systematic review commissioned by the World Health Organization reached similarly reassuring conclusions about mobile phone use and brain cancer.
That doesn't mean technology has no consequences.
It means that the particular nightmare which frightened people in 1993 hasn't been supported by the accumulated evidence.
Meanwhile, we've developed an entirely different set of concerns about our phones.
Screen time. Addiction-like patterns of use. Social media. The relentless competition for our attention.
The technology survived.
The thing we worried about changed.
4. And now it's artificial intelligence's turn
Which brings us to AI.
Depending on whom you ask, artificial intelligence is either going to solve every problem humanity has ever faced or destroy civilization before we've finished updating our passwords.
The conversation feels strangely familiar.
Artists worry about their work. Writers worry about originality. Programmers worry about their careers. Teachers worry about learning. Governments worry about control.
And everyone worries about what happens when machines become better at something humans previously considered uniquely human.
Some of these concerns are entirely justified.
AI systems make mistakes, sometimes with extraordinary confidence. They can generate convincing misinformation, create new security problems and expose sensitive data.
They are already changing how people work.
The International Labour Organization's research suggests that roughly one in four jobs worldwide is exposed to some degree of generative AI, although transformation of tasks is a more likely general outcome than complete replacement of occupations.
There are also questions about who owns the technology, who benefits from it, and who bears the costs.
These aren't imaginary problems.
But neither were New York's dangerous electrical wires.
The question is what we do about them.
I spend a considerable amount of time working with AI tools, and I've seen both sides.
Sometimes they make possible things that would previously have required a team, a budget and several weeks.
Sometimes they confidently invent something that doesn't exist and present it as if it were a perfectly established fact.
Occasionally in beautifully formatted Markdown.
So I don't think the useful distinction is between people who love AI and people who fear it.
It's between people trying to understand what the technology can actually do, and people who have already decided what it represents.
A miracle.
A catastrophe.
The end of creativity.
The beginning of a golden age.
Reality is usually less accommodating than either position.
The problem with judging tomorrow by yesterday
What I like most about Adams' essay isn't really the joke about turning thirty.
It's his observation that we tend to misunderstand new technologies because we judge them using the categories of old ones.
Cinema was evaluated against theatre.
Electric lighting was judged against existing forms of illumination and the infrastructure of the nineteenth-century city.
Mobile phones were initially treated as telephones with a suspicious new source of radiation.
The internet was mistaken for another publishing or broadcasting medium.
And now AI is routinely described as a better search engine, a replacement writer, a cheaper employee, or a machine that can imitate human intelligence.
Some of those descriptions are useful.
None is necessarily complete.
The interesting question isn't whether AI will replace the world we know.
It's which parts of that world will change, which will survive, and which entirely new things will become possible.
History doesn't guarantee that every technological revolution ends happily.
It does, however, suggest that we're not particularly good at recognizing what a new technology will become while we're still arguing about whether it should exist.
Douglas Adams understood that rather well.
And I suspect he'd be enjoying the current AI debate enormously.
Although he'd probably be disappointed that after all this technological progress, we still haven't learned to take a towel everywhere.
So here's a question: how much of your reaction to AI comes from what the technology actually does, and how much comes from Douglas Adams' third rule?
Sources
- Douglas Adams — How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (1999)
- Theatre Historical Society of America — early nickelodeon history
- New York Public Library — National Board of Review of Motion Pictures records
- NYPL — organizational history (PDF)
- Thomas A. Edison Papers — Demonstrating the New Light
- NYC Municipal Archives — The Electric Grid
- The Washington Post — the 1993 cellular-phone cancer scare
- IARC — COSMOS prospective cohort study (2024)
- Radiofrequency exposure and cancer risk — systematic review (2024)
- ILO–NASK — generative AI and occupational exposure
- NIST — Generative Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Profile