What the future holds...

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I can refer one to this and this for perspective. Everything is changing, rapidly. It amazes me that I can still find people who knew life before cars were commonplace. Imagine the changes in one lifetime, from no radio to the Internet, wireless! I, for one, really like central heat and air. I depend on my electricity 24/7. Though I hate trips to the dentist, I much-appreciate his latest technological advances that (presumably) reduce my pain as he toils away.

All that said, I have learned to question anything that seems to promise too much. If we work under the assumption that technology is good for us, that progress is paradise, then maybe we should be putting more of our resources and attention into progressing. If it's true that we have such a bright future, why waste time watching movies and football--billion dollar investments, let alone the actual time invested--and put all our chips on microchips? Let's get with the advancing, already!

Alan Lightman, professor of science and writing, and a senior lecturer in physics, at MIT, also the author of Einstein's Dreams and Good Benito noted ( in an article published over ten years ago. ) this:
"1939 World's Fair, in New York, one could read the following in the promotional literature of the futuristic General Motors exhibit: 'Since the beginning of civilization, transportation and communication have been keys to Man's progress, his prosperity, his happiness.'

He notes that in that one phrase we mixed up just what happiness was to be--and what a prediction that has been! The problem is, are we buying into hype? Are we creating our new version of happiness on this premise that it is bound to progress, and that progress is interpreted as technological advance?

This leads us, sometimes, to have a knee jerk reaction to new technology. As it rolls out, we tend to immediately adopt it. (About the only arena this is retarded by caution is in medical advances, and think of the grousing and complaining about how slowly we release new pharma-wonders!)

"New" is the new "sexy."
Some of this is our culture's sheer consumerism, the insatiable appetite to buy. "I want it all, and I want it now." That is fueled by advertising. It's all fueled by greed. Now I'm ranting again.

The point is, where will all this go?
I've read enough and thought enough to imagine a future where thinking things makes them happen...that is, instead of twiddling our fingers on keyboards to make symbols appear, it would be much more smooth (and not far from possible, even now) to think words into being, to communicate by thinking it out. I am not even yet talking about telepathy. A wetware interface, a bio-computer that lives on your desk or your person...or one that is part of your person...is not far away, and it will out-compute even the fastest Crays we have these-days.

Isn't that cool? A bio-digital gizmo that's low maintenance, that needs no external power, that's as portable as you are because it is incorporated into your corporeal being! Blazing fast! Unlimited storage? We got it coming. We've already been engineering ways to store data on DNA components.

I can see technology sweeping past the written word very soon. Even today, kids use txt msgs to eclipse traditional spelling and communication standards we adopted at the advent of the printing press. Is that a bad thing? Spare yourself the tedium of writing it down, the embarrasment of wording or spelling it incorrectly.

I would venture that sometimes speed and ease are not our allies. Sometimes, at least I have found this to be true, it is fruitful to toil. It is worth it to invest twelve hours in the reading of a novel rather than two in watching an interpretation of it blow by on screen. Sometimes it means more to share a letter with someone (okay, even an email) instead of a voicemail or a qk txt. A real relationship with a warm hug has some potency that no friending on Facebook ever will.

I wonder if we will reach a peak and then react. I wonder if there will be a day in which we bail out of all this wonderment of technology. Like so many doomsayers, I wonder, too, if we will come to this point before the technology has the better of us, as in dystopias like Matrix, Surrogates, Wall-E, 9...