Looking at the relatively recent explosion of technology advances can be quite staggering. Will it ever stop or is every generation destined to keep up the pace?
I feel older all the time. It seems like technology is flying faster and faster. At dinner last night one of my kids made a sarcastic comment about Bob Barker's game show being on TV for 85 years. When I immediately retorted that TV wasn't even invented 85 years ago, it hit me that the pace of technical innovation is staggering.
It was a few short years ago, with my ten year old son (bright enough to have just graduated from the US Air Force Academy) that we stopped at a garage sale. We browsed the various items and he walked up to me with an old telephone with a rotary dial. He looked up at me quizzically and said, "Dad, this looks like a phone ... but how would you use it?"
That's when I first felt it!
Just a few days later, we were moving into an older home without a microwave oven. This same son asked me how the previous owners could cook anything without one and I heard these words come out of my mouth,
"Well, when I was your age, we didn't even have ..."
I wanted to reel those words back in as soon as the realization hit me. "I've become my father!"
Seriously, do the words telepresence, bluetooth, haptic interface and neural network even mean anything to you? If they do, then you are in the thick of the progress. If your not quite sure what most of these things are, then welcome to my world! As a history geek, I have been accused of living in the past and I can live with that. I just hope that all of this technology doesn't lead us down a path where there is no past for me to live in!
