Change?

We're often told that the pace of change in our lives is faster now than at any time in history. Is this true? How much has really changed in the last 100 years. How much NEW has been created, as opposed to refinements of things that already existed at the turn of the last century?

Much as I love cars, they are still pretty well the same design as they were 100 years ago. Internal combustion engine, loud pedal on the right and stop pedal to its left. Sure, we've got better at design and build, and Henry Ford never fitted iPod compatibility to the Model-T, but the basic design is unchanged. The personal hover-car remains the sole purview of George Jetson. Mr Logie-Baird of this vicinity invented a clever way of beaming pictures to a box in the corner of your living room, and Sky now do the same thing at 1080i from near space, but it's still a big box in the corner of the room (Sony Bravia, since you're asking, nice piece of kit). Surely if technology was moving so quickly, we'd have corneal implants and something actually worth watching.

As for society, we still seem to follow the established pattern of the family unit (despite what The Daily Mail may suggest) that goes back for hundreds of years. OK, it tends to break down and re-form a bit more often, but the desire TO re-form still remains. Our sense of community may have actually gone backwards, being more insular and less neighbourly, but then again who really wants Mrs. Miggins at #42 round every day to root through the bins and check whether you're dusting properly. We're still, as we were 100 years ago, drifting gradually from rural to urban, but at least we're not doing 18 hour shifts at t'mill any more. Well, not unless we're an illegal immigrant from the newly expanded EU.

Parliamentary democracy still flourishes as it did at the start of the 1900's - banal, corrupt and autocratic.

Genuine step change has only really been made in a few fields - medicine, where huge steps at combatting killer disease have been made; computing, which has pretty well been invented and become all pervading in 50 years. But I'm still sitting here with a QWERTY and a flattened CRT, despite wireless internet and blogging by mobile.

The field of warfare and destruction of life, however, is our greatest area of progress. 100 years ago, the machine gun was a new invention, augmenting gunpowder as the only way man could kill on a one-to-many basis (bio-terrorism was still in its infancy in 1908). Now we can guide missiles to their target by video-game, kill millions from the comfort of an armchair, and maim any population unfortunate enough to live somewhere near a battlefield for years after "peace" by leaving mines scattered around the place. Oh yes, in the last century we've invented more that's new, innovative and (literally) bleeding-edge in this field than in all the rest of human achievement. Fair brings a lump to the throat, doesn't it.