THE UPS AND DOWNS OF ADVANCEMENT.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: RUNDlES WRAP UP

Recently I visited a friend in one of those ubiquitous new high-rise apartment buildings sprouting up all over the place. While riding up in the elevator, I got to thinking about advancement. I wrote a story about elevators more than 30 years ago in one of Denver's earlier economic booms because it occurred to me that with all of the new skyscrapers then going up, the elevator business must be pretty good. It was.

This time around, I am sure the elevator business is on the rise, but I was thinking about advancement on my recent ride. The elevator I took was nice, but it struck me that it wasn't all that different than the four dozen or so I rode back in the 1980s for my elevator business story. The doors open, you walk in, push a button, and you are whisked to a higher floor in a short time, assuming some kid or giant elf doesn't push all of the bright buttons and turn the express into a local. But back in the 1980s when I was conducting elevator research, I didn't have a phone/camera/computer/video screen/internet portal in my pocket. Considering all of the technological advances the phone has taken in the ensuing 35 years, shouldn't a 2018 elevator simply teleport me from the lobby to the sky deck?

It seems that on some things, we are getting the shaft on technological advancement. I mean, sure, yeah, people have developed driverless cars--car technology is moving swiftly--but when we get our highly artificial-intelligent chauffeurs, they will be taking us around on roads and bridges that have been around for decades with no technological advancement whatsoever. Heck, forget technological advancement--the roads and bridges have no advancements at all. Indeed, some of the potholes in Denver have been around since the early 1980s. And the bridges? You really don't want to know.

The same thing can be said, quite obviously, about trains. The world has high-tech, super luxurious bullet trains capable of speeding people from place to place at a breathtaking pace, but as we have seen at least three times just in the past few months, passenger trains are operating on dangerously outdated rails and railroad crossings. While the train technology advances, the technological advancements on the necessary infrastructure have been derailed for years and years. And often when these trains jump the tracks or go too fast, the word is that there is some newer technology available that could have prevented catastrophe that wasn't...