Ed Howker: We must ride technology – or be swamped by it

The year is 2004. You are Karl Lagerfeld. And technology is about the make a fool of you. This, obviously, is a hypothetical scenario.

Being a pre-eminent designer you are ahead of fashion, you know what is stylish, you're celebrated as an artist and, as a result, you have an iPod. In fact, you have 40 iPods containing all your favourite music – you're what they call an "early adopter". Further, you have designed a bespoke Fendi case to contain a dozen of them called an iPod "jukebox" which will later retail for around £1,000. All this, incidentally, actually happened.

Now, here is how the savage terrier of technological evolution is about to nip at the ankles of your handmade boots. By the end of 2004, the hard-disk size of the standard iPod will double from 20 gigabytes (Gb) to 40Gb – meaning you only needed 20 iPods to store your music. By 2008, iPods will be available with 160Gb hard drives. Now you only need eight of them to store all your music and, as a result, your bespoke iPod "jukebox" is too big. It is obsolete. Technology has evolved more quickly than your music collection, more quickly than you have designed for.

So why did this happen? Well, the trouble with Karl's iPod "jukebox" is that it breaks a law: Moore's law. In 1965 Gordon E Moore observed that since its invention, the number of transistors that can be placed, affordably, on an integrated circuit doubled every two years, i.e exponentially. Three years later he co-founded Intel and since then we have seen the similarly rapid evolution not just of integrated circuits but of processing speed, memory capacity and the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.

In fact, the iPod has not evolved exponentially – just too quickly for Karl and his Fendi case. The truly remarkable thing is that the iPod could be even bigger. It could, with only a little price adjustment, store terabytes of music – more in fact than Karl has ever listened to.

In the next year, in the next decades, as technology continues to evolve, its uses will expand beyond what we can now comfortably imagine. And as the role of technology in our society broadens and deepens, so too will the cost of failing to understand it.

From the mid-1990s, politicians and civil servants have been commissioning, at vast expense, IT projects to integrate data about everything from magistrates' courts to hospitals. Virtually every one has been an expensive disaster. The minutes from Parliament's Public Accounts Committee are littered with damning explanations of how hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money was wasted on poorly-written project plans, exploitative contracts and civil service incompetence.

One reason for this is that government, like Karl, does not appreciate that technology is evolving rapidly and that, as it grows more powerful, so too will its abilities expand. The only way to secure value for money for the tax payer, therefore, is to buy technology that is flexible – containing hardware that can be upgraded or readily replaced and software that can be improved at limited cost. Our government, however, has repeatedly purchased the bureaucratic equivalent of Karl's "jukebox"– inflexible, expensive, and ultimately redundant.

To avoid the same mistake ourselves, we will be required to address the point that CP Snow raised in his 1959 lecture, Two cultures and the Scientific Revolution, in which he described a "gulf of mutual incomprehension" between scientists and humanists which was limiting opportunities for breakthroughs in how we understand and shape our world. Since then, some judge that the gulf has grown so wide as to separate science not only from the humanities, but all society.

And there can be no doubt that the gap is most obvious in the field of computing, which surrounds us but which relies on mechanisms using circuits, hard disks, solid-state memory and software.

The challenge will only expand with time if the predictions of Ray Kurzweil are to be believed. Kurzweil played a decisive role in the creation of optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition, and the electronic keyboard. He has written that we are just a few decades away from transcending our human biology and joining with technology to evolve a super-species in a period christened "the singularity". This may seem fanciful, but Bill Gates and plenty of other industry leaders and academics – those better informed than most of us – give him and his ideas houseroom.

"Technology," said Snow, "is a queer thing. It brings you gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other." It is about time we turned and grabbed the knife.

e.howker@independent.co.uk