You don’t adopt new technology as fast as you think you do Over the past century, humans have adopted some pretty amazing technologies. Electricity, telephones, radio, television — you get the idea. And in general, we’ve gotten faster at accepting new technologies than we have in the past. But we’re still pretty slow. According to data from the MIT Technology Review, it took the U.S. population 30 years for just10% of us toget electricity (yikes!). That was a long time ago, and the underlying infrastructure was substantial, so we’ll give our past countrymen a free pass on that one. But more recently, it still took us eight years for just 10% of the population to get a smartphone. And at 10.5 years, smartphones found themselves in the hands of only 40% of U.S. consumers.