Researching in motion

The 07.14am train from Princeton into New York Penn Station used to take just under an hour and, for a while in the mid-2000s, I convinced myself that technology had somehow found a way of giving it back to me.

Armed with a BlackBerry, I could answer emails before reaching Manhattan, tidy up loose ends on the journey home and arrive at both ends of the day feeling strangely efficient, as though the railway timetable no longer applied. At the time it felt like one of those moments historians would eventually point to as evidence that work had fundamentally changed. Looking back, they probably will, although not for the reason I imagined while sitting in that carriage.

The smartphone didn’t simply make work more mobile. It quietly dissolved the boundary between work and everything else, a consequence that seemed almost invisible until it became almost impossible to reverse.

I’ve thought about that journey more than once while reading the increasingly confident predictions surrounding GenAI because, after almost thirty years in the workplace, I’ve begun to suspect that technological revolutions all follow a remarkably similar pattern.

Perhaps it’s because I’m Gen X. We’ve spent our entire working lives watching one supposedly transformative technology after another arrive, disappoint, mature and eventually disappear into everyday life. We’ve learnt to distrust the headlines and watch what happens next.

The future rarely arrives looking like the future

When I first started work in the mid-1990s, many offices were only just embracing computers and home internet access remained sufficiently unusual that my first email had to be sent from a shared terminal in the library at Unipart in Oxford because I didn’t even possess an email address of my own.

A few years later, while working at Photosound, internet searches were still an exercise in frustration until one afternoon one of our two IT specialists wandered over and suggested trying something called Google instead. It was cleaner, faster and somehow more intuitive than the alternatives, although I don’t remember anyone reacting as though we’d just encountered one of the defining companies of the twenty-first century. It was simply a better search engine.

The internet itself offered a similar lesson. By the time I had dial-up access at home, friends occasionally complained because nobody else could use the phone while I was online, although if I’m honest we weren’t connected very much anyway, not because the connection was painfully slow but because there simply wasn’t much to see.

There was no streaming, no social media and no endless algorithmic feed demanding attention. Looking back, it seems extraordinary that something destined to become the operating system for modern life spent years feeling like little more than an interesting curiosity. The technologies that end up reshaping society rarely feel historic at the time. More often they feel mildly useful.

Technology changes the wrong thing

At one point I travelled everywhere carrying a Palm Pilot, a MiniDisc player, a digital camera and a camcorder, each representing the cutting edge and each requiring its own batteries, chargers and software. The arrival of the iPod instantly rendered around forty carefully labelled MiniDiscs obsolete before the smartphone quietly absorbed almost everything else. Technological progress, I’ve gradually realised, often has less to do with adding devices than quietly making old ones disappear.

Even digital photography, miraculous though it seemed at the time, came with frustrations that now feel strangely nostalgic. Images had to be transferred laboriously via cable and there was no elegant way of organising thousands of files, meaning I’ve probably lost more photographs from the early 2000s than I ever misplaced on rolls of film. Technology preserved everything while somehow making it easier to lose it.

Creative software tells much the same story. Learning Photoshop in the late 1990s felt less like learning an application than learning to fly an aircraft, with endless palettes, adjustment layers and hidden parameters rewarding hundreds of hours of patient experimentation before anything approaching fluency emerged.

Every new version became more powerful and more complicated until, quite suddenly, I found myself producing stronger starting points by describing an image in plain English to a GenAI model before making a handful of finishing adjustments in Apple Photos and Affinity Photo. Whether Adobe remains the default creative platform in another decade feels a far more open question than it would have done even three years ago. If Kodak could lose photography and BlackBerry could lose mobile communications, it would be a brave person who confidently predicted that Adobe will dominate creative software indefinitely.

The idea that technology changes where value sits, rather than simply replacing people, is something I’ve explored before in relation to communications teams. As execution becomes cheaper and increasingly automated, judgement, originality and taste become more valuable, not less. History rarely eliminates entire professions overnight. It quietly redefines what expertise looks like.

Around the same time I was commuting into New York with Jack Morton, I found myself working on a client pitch for Research in Motion (BlackBerry) itself. I vividly remember recommending that Twitter should become part of the communications strategy because Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign was demonstrating the extraordinary potential of it in his election campaign - coincidentally with his own BlackBerry.

Looking back, the irony is almost perfect. We were pitching the future of BlackBerry while simultaneously pointing towards the platform that would go on to reshape journalism, politics and public discourse. Viewed from 2008, BlackBerry looked inevitable and Twitter experimental. Viewed from today, the story reads rather differently. Even those of us working close to technology could recognise that something significant was happening. What we couldn’t recognise was which part of the story would ultimately matter.

The future never wears a name badge

The same was true of podcasts. In 2006, while living in the United States, a friend introduced me to these curious new things and I became an immediate convert, synchronising my iPod overnight so I could listen to Frank Skinner and David Baddiel discussing the World Cup on the following morning’s commute. I couldn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t doing the same, although the answer turned out to have very little to do with podcasts themselves. Smartphones were still evolving, mobile data remained expensive and wireless headphones barely existed. The invention wasn’t waiting to improve. The world around it simply hadn’t caught up.

Living through repeated technological revolutions has also made me wary of permanence. Kodak once defined photography. Polaroid did too. Sony represented the pinnacle of consumer electronics. Compaq stood among the biggest names in computing. Netscape, AOL and Yahoo all appeared, for a while at least, to occupy positions that looked almost impossible to challenge before quietly fading into history. It makes me smile when people confidently predict which GenAI platform will dominate the next decade because history suggests technological revolutions have a habit of replacing not merely products but assumptions.

I doubt the IT team at Photosund (Khodad and Stuart) went home that evening believing they’d introduced the office to one of the defining companies of the century. More likely they thought they’d simply found a better way to search the web. Looking back, that feels like the perfect metaphor for every technological revolution I’ve lived through. The future rarely arrives wearing a name badge. It slips quietly into the room, solves a small irritation and only years later reveals that it has changed everything else.

That’s why I remain sceptical of the increasingly binary debate around GenAI. It will undoubtedly eliminate some tasks, reshape some roles and create entirely new ones, but if the last three decades have taught me anything it’s that we’re probably looking in the wrong place. The biggest consequences are unlikely to be the ones dominating today’s headlines.

Somewhere, quietly and almost unnoticed, another Google is probably being dismissed as merely a better search engine, another BlackBerry is being mistaken for the future because it solves today’s problem so elegantly and another shift in the nature of expertise is already underway while we debate whether machines can replace people.

History suggests the more interesting question isn’t whether GenAI will replace communicators. It’s what being a great communicator will look like once everyone has GenAI.