Technological Obsolescence
Competition is about not just the technology but also the resources needed to develop (or acquire) and operate it. This is especially acute for public infrastructure, from bridges to IRS IT systems. Bridges and IT systems do not vote, and the maintenance and upgrading of infrastructure often lose the political competition for resources to more visible, urgent priorities. It may take a visible disaster like a dam failing, a train derailing, or a software crash for decision makers and citizens to realize what local users and experts long knew or had reason to suspect.
The American Society of Civil Engineers in 2021 rated US transportation and other infrastructure a C−.[4] A recent government study of IRS IT systems found some software 15 versions behind current releases, among other significant problems.[5] The challenge of operating and upgrading legacy computer systems is not confined to the public sector, as the Southwest Airlines meltdown last December demonstrated.[6]
The costs of staying current can be daunting. In addition to the obvious costs of the new technology itself, integrating it with existing equipment and procedures, including educating users, can demand significant time and resources. Major changes may require training, which has its own costs as well as potential uncertainty, confusion, and frustration. When Windows ’95 was released, Microsoft bragged that its customer help lines could handle 50,000 calls a day. Imagine releasing a product so hard to learn that you expect 50,000 cries for assistance every day.
Nor is upgrading risk-free. Most visible are the dangers of technological black holes draining resources and attention (what are the opportunity costs in terms of how the resources might otherwise have been used?). In the classic Arthur C. Clarke 1954 short story “Superiority,” the narrator describes how his side’s weapons, more advanced but also more troublesome and producible only in limited amounts, lost an interstellar war to a foe armed with warships that were less effective but deployable in much greater quantities.[7]
While important, economics are not everything. Linking social status with the latest technology—“Keeping up with the Joneses” (or the more current “FOMO,” fear of missing out)—has historically been a motivating factor for upgrading technologies. A century ago, by encouraging “a certain dissatisfaction with past models compared with the new one,” General Motors president Alfred P. Sloan in the 1920s pioneered the concept of planned obsolescence and its implementation via the annual vehicle model year.[8]
More insidious is “forced obsolescence,” where firms stop supporting and updating old products.[9] Threatening to void warranties or withhold support if the user tinkers with or attempts to repair a product may also encourage users to acquire the latest equipment. But in reaction, the desire to be able to customize, maintain, and fix your technology has spawned a growing “right-to-repair” movement.[10] Keeping and maintaining an obsolete but functioning technology may make more sense than acquiring a newer technology, especially if external factors like competition and customers are not demanding change.
The carrying costs of the old technology might be trivial for the user, who could avoid the investment in changing. In particular, smaller organizations and firms with older decision makers may feel less compelled to keep up with the Joneses. Older people are more likely (and able) to be conservative in their use of technology—that is, they are more likely to continue using existing technology that works adequately for them, especially if they have the authority to decide what technology to use.[11] In 2009 the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan found that its younger members preferred newsletters by email while older members preferred faxes. While I was writing this article, a friend told me his cardiologist refused to communicate by email and faxed his prescriptions to the pharmacist; from the cardiologist’s perspective, communicating by email might be financially costly.[12]
External factors also affect medical decision making. For fax machines, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) provided the legal requirement—and market—for securely transmitting medical information. That, together with the greater acceptance of faxed signatures compared with electronic signatures, has kept fax machines humming in the medical world into the 2020s. Less visible but critical were technological improvements including computer-based faxing that enabled greater automation and capacity than standalone fax machines while still providing compatibility.
In contrast, the theoretically superior electronic health record (EHR) suffered a classic market failure. The Obama administration promoted EHRs but did not require compatibility among competing systems, assuming the market forces would provide a solution.[13] As is often the case, competing systems divided markets into smaller, incompatible segments—and so fax machines continue to provide an inefficient but effective way of transmitting information.
Indeed, incompatible equipment in the 1960s–70s kept the fax market similarly divided until the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) G3 standard of 1980 enabled compatibility for a new generation of fax machines.[14] G3 succeeded primarily because it was universal and flexible, providing a floor of minimum standards but also a flexible ceiling that encouraged companies to experiment with new features that worked only with their equipment. G3 also succeeded because the Communications Industry Association of Japan organized meetings for competing fax manufacturers to test their equipment with each other for compatibility without revealing competitive information.
An extreme case of adherence to an obsolete technology is the devotee. Best exemplified by music buffs who prefer analog to digital recordings of music and photographers who prefer film over electronic recording, these advocates strive to keep old technologies alive often by rethinking and restructuring them in changed environments. They succeed by creating subcommunities and cultures, sometimes with a modest or not-so-modest demonstration of expertise, experimentation, income, and snobbery.[15] Critical to this success is convincing suppliers to continue producing needed equipment and materials. Such groups are not necessarily technologically sterile—DJs created the thriving, throbbing music subculture of mixing and turntablism in the 1990s.[16]
What to do?
Should you keep your fax machine? Definitely not if your business or government communicates large amounts of digital data. Just be sure to make the retirement of your fax machines contingent on your organization’s investment in up-to-date communications equipment, appropriate training, and a commitment for future upgrades. But if a phone-based fax machine meets your needs and you have no desire to invest in more modern, capable technology, keep it. Paying for a backup phone line and fax machine in case the internet goes down, however, may no longer be worth the expense: Larger fax users probably use computer-based fax systems that communicate via the internet.
Should you upgrade your computer and communications software? Definitely. Malware, ransomware, data theft, and other electronic hacks mean you are needlessly endangering yourself, family, and colleagues if you do not upgrade software-based devices. This “arms race” will continue for the foreseeable future—and AI will undoubtedly provide more opportunities for attackers and defenders. Upgrading is an acknowledgment of the inevitable “obsolescence” of today’s ubiquitous software- and internet-based technologies.
As citizens and taxpayers, we should demand that government at all levels—local, state, and national—openly discuss, plan, and invest in maintaining and upgrading essential infrastructure, both physical and digital. The visible cost will be large but the societal costs of obsolescence—whether measured in lead-damaged children, traffic delays, or inefficient tax collection—are larger.
Planning for obsolescence differs greatly from planned obsolescence. If civil infrastructure and tax software[17] exemplify federal government underinvestment, the military, especially during wars, exemplifies how to organize for technological obsolescence. R&D laboratories and experience provide the need and capability to improve or supersede existing technology. Combining separate upgrades into a discrete group of improvements for aircraft, introduced during World War II, enabled military planners to balance the production of improved equipment, user training, and supply of different versions on a worldwide scale.
The Space Development Agency of the newly formed US Space Force provides the latest iteration of block production, grounded in the assumption (and funding) of continual improvement and decreasing cost of building and launching satellites into low earth orbit. Tranches of small- and medium-size satellites with an expected lifetime of five years will be launched with upgraded versions every two years.[18]
Whether you are a Space Force Guardian, an individual, a small or large business, an NGO, or a local government, your prime concern should not be whether you reluctantly throw out old gadgets or eagerly adopt new technologies, but how you and your organization proactively prepare for change and try to shape that change. As the world continues to evolve, what investments do we need to make to evolve with it or face our own “obsolescence”?
Notes
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/upshot/coronavirus-response-fax-machines.html
[2] In the conversation that led to this essay, I learned that the NAE Program Office was considering whether to repair or replace its fax machine.
[3] https://www.monash.edu/business/marketing/marketing-dictionary/t/technological-obsolescence
[4] https://infrastructurereportcard.org/
[5] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-104719
[6] https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2023/02/08/southwest-airlines-december-meltdown-came-after-years-of-tech-failures/
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)
[8] Alfred P. Sloan, My Years with General Motors (ISHI Press, 2020), 265.
[9] Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell, The Innovation Illusion (Currency, 2020), 136.
[10] https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair
[11] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9582456/
[12] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/email-doctor-charged-95432204
[13] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers
[14] “Creating Fax Standards: Technology Red in Tooth and Claw?” Kagaku-Gijutsu-Shi: Japanese Journal for the History of Science and Technology 11 (July 2010), 37–66.
[15] https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/residual-media
[16] https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/the-art-of-turntablism/
[17] For a sense of what IRS tax software could be,
] see https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dreading-taxes-countries-show-us-theres-another-way and https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176417594/irs-taxes-filing-turbotax-intu…
[18https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3345559/space-development-agency-to-launch-10-satellites/
Jonathan Coopersmith is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University. The article was first published on the website of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. The views expressed in this perspective are those of the author and not necessarily of the author’s organization, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies).
