Needs Precede Technology

I stumbled across an interesting idea that was written down in 1832: a network of posts and pulleys driven by steam engines that would deliver bags of messages among cities.   It was a slightly preposterous idea even at the time, and totally unnecessary in the modern world - but I was stuck by the notion that the author recognized a need and conceived of an idea to address it.

This stands in contrast to the practice of dreaming up some new technology and attempting to convince people that they need it.   I see this all the time in television infomercials (Have you ever wanted a square hard-boiled egg? What if there were a way to polish your doorstops?  That kind of thing.) It's also common among promoters of zany website and mobile applications.   They all offer a new way to do something that nobody wants to do in the first place - and most of them fail to have sustained success as a result.

Products that find sustainable markets generally serve existing human needs, and typically needs that are already being fulfilled by inferior methods.   The mailbag network described was certainly an improvement over human couriers ... though it would have been commercially unfeasible and made obsolete a few decades later by the telegraph.   But at the time it would have been a faster way to do what was already being done.

It goes back to the notion that human needs have been about the same since the species evolved - it's just that the means by which we fulfill these needs is constantly improving.   There are very few technologies that enable people to do things they had never been able to do before - the vast majority enable us to do it faster, better, or with less cost and effort.  Those are the innovations that thrive, survive, and make their inventors rich until someone builds a better mousetrap.

In the end, this leads to a critical questions for any new technology:  What does it help people to do better than their current solution?    If it's not better than their current solution, it's not going to take.  And if it is proposing to do something that people don't want done badly enough to have already figured out a way to do it, it's likely to be a failure as well.