When We WereVery Young
Stephen Fry opens his series on the future of technology by going as far back as he can: to the moment our ancestors picked up a bone, struck a flint, formed a word. The story he tells is not really about gadgets. It is about calories: how we have spent our whole history figuring out how to do more work for less heat.
A Note Before We Set Out
Fry confesses upfront. He is not a scientist, technologist, or engineer of hardware or software, neither by training nor talent. Scientific ideas, he says, come slowly to him. Numbers fill him with the same awe and panic as tigers: beautiful, magnificent, fearsome, and likely to make him wet himself if he doesn't run away.
He thinks this makes him a useful explainer. These talks, he insists, are not aimed at the gifted. They are aimed at the curious, the confused, the fascinated. People, in other words, like him.
So long as we are clear about that, he says, we can proceed on our voyage of discovery. The voyage runs backwards. Before he describes the wave he can see rising on the horizon, he wants to look at how innovation has, from the first, changed our ways of living, our sense of who we are, and what we are to expect from life.
Fry begins with an image. Far out at sea, swells are gathering: quantum computing, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, robotics, gene editing, bionics, brain-machine interfacing, autonomous vehicles, new materials like graphene and nanotubes.
Any one of them would change a generation. They are arriving together. He calls this the great tsunami that will soon engulf us. He sounds neither alarm nor fanfare. He insists, first, on looking back.
The real threat, Fry says, is not any single wave but the way they inevitably collide and combine. Gene editing meets AI. AI meets robots. Robots learn to use new materials. Each amplifies the others. The whole becomes incalculably bigger than the sum.
Yet Fry refuses to predict the landscape. Instead he opens a longer view. Where, he asks, does the story of technology begin at all?
Where does the story of technology begin? Fry reaches for the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An early human picks up a thigh bone, swings it, and hurls it triumphantly into the air. We watch it spin against the blue sky until, in Kubrick's famous match cut, it becomes a space station orbiting Earth, all set to the strains of Strauss' Blue Danube. The cut, Fry says, compresses our entire arc into a single image: from bone hammers to rocketry. In cosmic time, the journey really was as quick as a bone toss.
Pause on the strange thought. Two hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors were already biologically us: same skull, same DNA, same hands. If we met them, we could have children with them. Yet one faculty was missing. They could not yet speak.
To make sense of where every milestone sits in our story, Fry offers a compression. Imagine the whole 200,000 years as a single twenty-four hour day, with this moment at midnight. Almost everything you can name in the human record happens after the sun has long gone down.
Progress isn't a steady curve. It lifts into a swiftly rising upward peak, like the wall of that coming tsunami.
Somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand years ago, something changed. Our skulls did not grow. Our brain capacity did not visibly jump. But suddenly, our species behaved differently. Borrowing Yuval Noah Harari's term, Fry calls this the Cognitive Revolution.
The answer? Language. Not grunts and gestures: real grammar. Tenses, conditionals, metaphors. The ability to say, let's meet in two sunrises at the hilly place where we saw that mammoth last full moon.
Other animals build extraordinary things. Spiders weave webs. Beavers raise dams. Birds construct nests of breathtaking precision. None of them teach. The blueprint is in the genes, refined by natural selection across thousands of generations.
We do not work that way. A human child cannot weave unless shown. Cannot light a fire unless shown. Won't even develop language without parents to speak to. Our skill is not encoded biologically. It is transmitted, generation to generation, by something more flexible than DNA.
Language did far more than label objects. It packaged experience into something portable. A skill no longer had to be re-learned by trial and error every generation. It could be uploaded from one brain to another in seconds. A family could become a clan, a clan a tribe, a tribe a culture with shared memory.
It is hard not to conclude that language was the parent of thought.
For nearly all of our story we wandered. Then, somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates, in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, somebody had an idea. Rather than chase food across the landscape, why not coax it out of the ground in one place?
Fry calls this nameless figure the Barley Mother. Her proposal was small. Its consequences were enormous.
The setting was unusually generous: rich alluvial soil between two great rivers, predictable seasons, native grasses that responded well to cultivation. A drought may have made wandering riskier than staying. Whatever the spark, the same pattern surfaces independently in China, the Indus Valley, and Central America. The Barley Mother had counterparts.
Credit · What we gained
- Stored calories: silos, surpluses, lean years survived
- Permanent homes, then the first villages, then cities
- More babies, and explosive population growth
- Domesticated animals as engines and partners
- Time enough, eventually, for art, prayer, and thought
Debit · What it cost
- Back-breaking, dawn-to-dusk labor
- New diseases jumping from livestock to us
- Plagues in close, dirty quarters
- Debt and inequality
- Hierarchies of king, priest, warrior, peasant, all locked in
Before he goes further, Fry pauses on a single word. We treat it as the number on the back of a chocolate bar. He insists it is the fundamental currency of the whole universe.
Your eyelashes, your kneecaps, your kidneys, every part of you, was built out of calories you put into the hole in your face. You are what you eat is not a metaphor. It is bookkeeping. And the same bookkeeping applies to the whole rest of nature.
Lions, leopards, cheetahs sit at the top of their chains because they let the antelope do the work. The antelope munches grass for twenty hours a day to build the very mass that makes it worth hunting. The big cat sprints, kills, then lazes for days. The gorger lives off the labor of the grazer. Empires later, the same logic would describe an aristocracy.
Language. Knowledge passes brain to brain. The first calorie-saving leap was a leap of thought.
We sow grain and store surplus. Calories accumulate in silos, and in the hands of overlords.
Fossil calories power machines. Stored sunlight from ancient swamps does our work for us.
Computation, intelligence, gene editing. The wave Fry promises to chart in the episodes that follow.
The currency of nature's economy is the calorie. Our modern world is an economy whose currency is heat, which is to say, energy, which is to say, work.
Agriculture gave us stored calories: silos, surpluses, the possibility of cities. It also took something away. The settled life created the conditions for the first hierarchies: warriors to defend the harvest, priests to bless it, merchants to trade it, peasants to grow it. Fry warns this melancholy pattern will hold for every revolution to come.
The Old Freedom
- About five hours of "work" a day
- Trim, fit, generally healthy bodies
- Tight bonds: music, dance, story
- No bosses, barons, peasants, slaves
- No property in land or animals
- Always on the edge of the next meal
The New Bondage
- Back-breaking, dawn-to-dusk labor
- New diseases jump from livestock to us
- Plagues in dense, dirty quarters
- The strongest take over the land
- Peasants work. Overlords keep the surplus
- But: stored calories, predictability, more babies
For 2,500 years the pyramid was treated as natural, inevitable, even divinely sanctioned. The written scriptures and laws that the upper classes alone could read confirmed it. Peasant revolts came and went. The structure barely budged. What finally moved it was not anger from below but pressure from outside: new energy sources, new tools, new ideas.
Agriculture did not only build pyramids of class. It also built leisure: time to sit, watch the stars, ask difficult questions. Out of that surplus, roughly 2,800 to 2,200 years ago, something extraordinary happened across continents that had almost no contact with one another. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers called it the Axial Age: a global, simultaneous revolution in thought.
Ethics, harmony, the well-ordered life.
Suffering, awakening, the middle way.
Number, geometry, music of the spheres.
Tragedy, fate, the human voice on stage.
Justice, monotheism, moral law.
From within the same Axial Age came another voice, less remembered as a sage but more decisive for technology: Archimedes. Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, he said, and I shall move the world. It would take nearly 1,700 more years before anyone actually pulled one. The story of that lever, and the press it powered in Gutenberg's Mainz workshop, is the subject of the next episode.
Confucius, Buddha, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, and the last of the Hebrew prophets walked the earth at the same time.
Why does every revolution come with a tax? Fry's answer is not political. It is physical. The second law of thermodynamics tells us heat always flows from hotter things to colder things. Energy spreads out. Order tilts toward disorder. Things fall apart.
You can stir jam clockwise into rice pudding, but you cannot stir it back out again. There is no spoon that retrieves jam. The universe levies a small commission on every transaction in energy, and no clever technology has ever quite escaped the bill.
Three things to carry forward
Language is the parent of thought.
Everything that followed (farming, writing, science, AI) was downstream of one biological gift that arrived without enlarging our skulls.
The currency of everything is the calorie.
Bodies, economies, civilizations all run on the same accounting. Technology is the art of buying more work for less heat.
There is always a bill.
The second law of thermodynamics guarantees that no revolution comes for free. The question is never "will there be a downside?" but "is the downside worth it?"