For thousands of years, humanity was on a very slow and gradual upward trajectory in terms of our human development. That all changed in the late eighteenth century with the advent of the Industrial Revolution (the First Machine age), which delivered unprecedented growth in human progress and population.

The most important technology underpinning this movement was one thing - the steam engine. This allowed humans to overcome the limitations of human and animal power to move things, and allowed us to generate useful energy when we needed it. Without it we wouldn't have factories and mass production, or have  been able to build railways and provide mass transportation. 

Our modern life has been built on the backs of this technology. But as we make continued progress with digital technologies and we can increasingly deliver software globally at scale, we are starting to see the emergence of a second shift (what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call the Second Machine Age).

Currently some large changes are happening on the transportation side of this equation. This has been driven by a re-imagining of how we move objects and people from A to B.