The Next Next Things

The Washington Post

With its power to send knowledge around the globe at lightning speed, information technology has vastly changed our world — unleashing the Internet along with a global economy of knowledge workers and even, some would say, sparking the fall of communism and the rise of terrorism. Computer power has increased exponentially since 1980, when machines less sophisticated than your cellphone filled entire rooms. And we can expect similar mindboggling advances in the coming decades.

... boggle your mind a little with the Washington Post after the click.

My comment: Its hard to see the changes from day to day. It seems you have to step back a little to get a bit of perspective. My father was born in 1912 and passed away in 1991. During the course of his life he witnessed two World Wars, The Great Depression, the Atomic Bomb, the advent of the computer age and man walking on the moon. When he was born, flight meant a noisy biplane with a flight range on the order of the wing span of today's 747 and an altitude you could throw rocks at. In 1990, the year before he died, the SR-71 set a flight speed record of 2,124 mph and a sustained altitude record of 85,069 feet on a coast-to-coast, NY to LA flight. As a boy, he made hay and plowed fields with a team of horses. Today, the family farm is pretty much a thing of the past in "developed" countries; replaced by "agri-businesses" and factory farms. The house he lived in as a child was heated by wood and the wood came from a twenty acre wood lot at the far end of the 140 acre farm he lived on. The "bathroom" consisted of an outhouse behind the wood shed and a galvanized tub filled with water boiled on the wood cook stove in the kitchen. Running water involved a pump handle that one exercised in an up and down motion ... with some effort. I know because that's where my life started in 1945.

My generation invented the Internet, digital watches, compact discs, MP3 files, cable and satellite TV as well as a host of other "necessities" that didn't exist, even in dreams, when I was born.

The change that occurred during my father's lifetime was significantly faster and more far reaching that the change that effected his father and the previous generation. But as different as things were comparing life at the beginning of my father's journey with the way things were at the end, the change we are experiencing now is even greater and moving much faster ... with no sign of letting up any time soon.

I wonder what price we've paid for the gain.