This is Stephen Fry's Great Leapiers, the stories behind inventions.

Episode 1. When We Were Very Young

You will have to have been living in a Wi-Fi-free mobile network dead zone in the middle of the Goby desert,

wearing a blindfold, ears stopped with wax, hog tide in a deep dark hole, not to have been made aware,

over the last year or so, of the coming tidal wave of technology and innovation,

under headings like the rise of the robots, the dawn of superintelligence, the coming singularity,

and Humanity 4.0, articles, blogs and books on the subject have seeded, fruited and proliferated everywhere,

while titans of tech and science like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil have been beating the war drums

and urging the world to prepare.

For far out in the ocean of discovery, huge swells have been gathering and combining to create the great tsunami that was soon in Gelfus.

Stranded, frozen and hypnotized on the shore, we watch these waves conjoin and build on the not so far horizon.

Quantum computing, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, robotics, gene editing,

biotics and biological augmentation, brain machine interfacing, autonomous vehicles and weaponry,

revolutionary new materials like nanotubes and graphene, each of these is poised to bring transformative change on their own,

but even more profoundly in their ineluctible convergence with the others.

We will come to why this should be happening now at a later time, but rather than attempt to sketch a prophetic landscape,

whether in order to sound a joyous fanfare of welcome or a terrified claxon of alarm,

I want first to look back at how innovation in technology has from the first, changed our ways of living,

our sense of who we are and what we are to expect from life.

So welcome and first I'd better come clean with you.

You may know that I've had a lifelong interest in technology, but you should understand too,

that I am not a scientist, technologist or engineer of hardware or software, neither by training nor talent.

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