What is the Greatest technological achievement of all time? That question has all the hallmarks of a good pub discussion. The curious blend of subjectivity and objectivity. A changing, meandering answer depending on the context and how many pints you’ve had. It’s timeless - you can revisit it year after year, chewing over it for hours.

Hang on, I’ve digressed slightly. I was thinking about the greatest technological achievement of all time. You see, the problem is, I don’t know. If you ask me again next week, I’ll probably give you a different answer. But I have some contenders.

Stephenson's Rocket. It’s my namesake (sort of). What? You need a better reason than that? Okay. The birth of the train. That’s pretty damn good Technology. And if you ever feel that trains are old fashioned or boring, book yourself a ride on the Shinkansen in Japan; you’ll change your mind quicker than you can say “a ticket to Shin-Yokohama”. Travelling on the bullet train is truly one of life’s greatest experiences.

How about supersonic flight? There’s another remarkable achievement. Travelling quicker than the speed of sound. Once available to us all due to Concorde, now a military privilege only. Speaking of military aircraft, there have been incredible achievements in this sphere: the SR-71 and the F-117 Nighthawk are icons. The SR-71 came out of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. Forget OpenAI, DeepMind, Bell Labs, or Microsoft Research, the Skunk Works is the best named R&D centre. It’s such a good term it’s become a synonym for internal R&D.

But flying around the earth is a bit … limiting. Getting humans to space and the Moon is probably our greatest effort. The Apollo Space Shuttle is a testament to human imagination and ambition, but above all, it’s a testament to the development and application of science, technology and maths. Once a relic of the past, space travel is back in a big way (back with a bang feels inappropriate in this context), with SpaceX leading the way. To explore is to be human. To create life where there once was none is the pinnacle of exploration. And by that measure, nothing is better than the International Space Station (ISS).  It’s a shame there’s only one. I long for the day when everyday commercial space travel is a reality and when more of us can experience the overview effect.

We’re all familiar with Asimo, Honda’s humanoid robot, but robots are everywhere. You’ll see robots everywhere if you’ve ever been to a warehouse like those by Amazon (or a fulfilment centre, as corporate types would say). We’ve come a long way since I watched Robot Wars in the 90s. Although, watching Razor and Hypnodisc battle one another may never be topped in robotics. 

We’re along the journey to building an algorithmic world. Perhaps that’s more apparent than ever as AI has hit the mainstream. Generative AI is all the rage. AI is used extensively in software. As part of our endless strife to achieve Level 5 automation, AI in driverless cars is an exciting AI deployment. Though these are narrow AI deployments, we still have more achievements to come when we build strong AI.

I could go on, but a whole list of things could be considered our greatest achievement: nuclear power and weapons, a force so powerful it’s almost unimaginable. TV and radio, broadcasting around the world. GPS is a pretty useful thing. 

But if you trace all the subsequent innovations and achievements, it’s impossible to not mention the semiconductor. When Bardeen and Brattain invented the transistor, they would have probably not believed you had you described everything that would come from it. Speaking of subsequent innovations, the computer must be in the running too. Add (open source) programming languages to the list, and Gutenberg’s printing press, and electricity.

The personal computer revolution of the 1970s changed everything that followed: Jobs, Gates, Wozniak and Allen. Names that changed the course of human history. A less well-known invention is the relational database and SQL, but to those that know, they know. The relational database and SQL have been incredibly important in powering the modern world. Add Edgar Codd to our list of names from before.

I once did a podcast where my answer to the question was the iPhone. Having the sum of human knowledge available at my fingertips is amazing. I know it’s horrendously cliched, but there is more computing power in my pocket than on the Apollo 11 rocket that went to the Moon. I’ve known that fact for an eternity, and it still blows my mind. Being able to easily access it is thanks to the internet, particularly the World Wide Web, so thank you, Tim Berners-Lee, we’re forever grateful. 

All these innovations are the manifestation of science, technology and maths, propelling us along the continuous arc of progress. What we might call “deep tech” nowadays. The desire to increase knowledge, travel quicker, go higher, and do better. To paraphrase Fatboy Slim, we’ve come a long way together. 

Once groundbreaking discoveries are now the everyday norm.  I remember keeping hold of my data using a floppy disk. It seems quaint. Thank god for the cloud. I remember dial-up broadband! Google Search was revolutionary; anyone who used Lycos can tell you that.

In fact, so much of our daily lives not that long ago only existed in sci-fi: facial recognition to log into our phones; being able to travel across to the southern hemisphere in a few hours. Only when you take a step back 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago can you appreciate and marvel at how much technology has changed everything. 

We can travel the world. We’ve sent astronauts to space. We’ve sent astronauts to the Moon. We can travel faster than the speed of sound. We can watch an event on the other side of the world. We can speak to someone in Australia perfectly. It all seems magical, but if you stop and think about it, it’s the polar opposite of magic - it’s the beauty of intense scientific rationality. 

And all because one day, someone woke up and thought we could do better. Steve Jobs said, “because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.” Jobs knew a thing or two about changing the world.

Mathematical rationality - the science, the technology and the maths which power and propel our modern world forward. And, my god, it's exciting. It’s as exciting as a Cold War technothriller. Like a wide eyed, small child, still gazing at the world, we’re going to eclectically explore and amaze ourselves with it. We’re going to geek out at it. We don’t have to peel too far behind the surface, to dive deep into the modern world's technology to see how beautiful it is. We’ll peek into the future to see how technology will change everything, again.