When a new virus attacks the human race, we get our best scientists together and fight back. It’s a horrible battle, but in the end, we win. A century ago, a flu virus killed a substantial percentage of the world’s population. Since then, immunology and virology have advanced by a quantum leap. Had Covid-19 appeared in 1900, it would have been far more devastating—the virus responsible for the 1918 Spanish flu was not identified until 1935. In 2020, science identified the virus right away, sequenced its genome within weeks, and produced vaccines within a year. Technology, more than ever, determines how we live. Yet such triumphs rarely make it to the national income accounts and do not show up in gross domestic product.
One technology that has dramatically advanced in the past century could be called “imitating life”—creating images and sounds that reproduce aspects of reality, making the observer “experience” something that he or she is not actually physically living through. Past attempts to create such a technology rarely pretended to be the real thing: while watching a movie, you knew that it was a movie. It was fake—a virtualization of reality—but if well-done, it worked. The history of imitative technology, much like that of medical technology, follows a “punctuated” pattern: for hundreds of years, the technology is more or less static; then comes a sudden eruption of new knowledge and capabilities—and the world changes irreversibly.
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