Thursday 22 July 2010

Google

The other night, I was at my parents place, with the wife away where else would I go to get a meal I didn't have to pay for - and your mums cooking is always good news isn't it? And we got to talking about how people may look back in their lives, at the changes in the world, etc...

Working in the bug bad world of IT, there's always a sense of chasing, chasing the next thing, the next product that will improve peoples lives, that hook early adopters and not the lat adapters. In fact one of my favourite books, The Next Fifty years, by a whole bunch of experts within their own fields, express as futurists what they think we'll know, want to know, and generally what life will be like - it's really interesting, but what about how we will feel, what will we think looking back and how will we be perceived.

Ah old people, you can't legally kill and you can't eat them - as a young boy I'd look at my grandfather with his cheap record player turning Al Jolson records, and that along with the TV were the two most advanced pieces of technology in the house, yet I thought to myself it would have been really interesting to see now how he and possibly his father viewed their world when compared to ours - no they don't have what we had, and what they did have were primitive versions of our stuff, but they began life around the start of the 1900's, the beginning of the century that took us from the first electric street lights to putting man on the moon, an escalation in knowledge and technology that they wouldn't have seen coming.
I think about that now. Amazing things like Moores Law - great guess, but to be controversial, he was probably one of a number of academics at the time that had an opinion on the matter and turned out to be the one that was right. In fifty years, and I'm hopefully (or not) still alive and in my early eighties I wonder how will I view the years that I was in my prime from a technological point of view - will I reminisce about the wonder of mans movements forwards, or because I grew up in a time when technology went from the Vic 20 to the iPad within 20 years, the pace was so fast, that I'll have been desensitised by the speed of change that I won't have an opinion on it, or what opinion I have will be faint?

Who knows?

At some stage space travel, even if it's only just outside of the Earths atmosphere is inevitable - hotelling half way to the moon will happen, as a species we're just that arrogant to do it, and what makes me laugh is that 50 years after the first trip happens, the news of the day will cover it, and young beings will sit and laugh at the oldies talking about it, as by then that will be something that's been taken for granted :)

What an incredible bunch of people we are.