A Thought On Tech
Back in the 80’s, my dad bought our first personal computer, a thing of beauty at the time that would now be viewed as a hulking monstrosity. I don’t remember the brand and have only a rough memory of the specs - either an Intel 286 or 386 microprocessor, probably about 512KB of RAM and a 20 MB hard disk.
I remember my dad asking the sales guy whether 20 MB would be enough in terms of the hard disk size and I very clearly remember the sales guy’s response: “You won’t be able to use up 20 MB of space in your entire lifetime!”
Flash forward to the mid to late 2000’s (I can’t recall exactly when), and I remember having a conversation with a friend about our portable devices such as iPods and iPhones and how it was just a matter of time until we could watch whatever we wanted on our devices, including movies. And I specifically remember my friend looking at me with skepticism and saying, “Really? I don’t think that’s going to happen!”
Today, both of those stories are quaint and funny and, of course, we had no way of knowing back then where we’d actually be today.
The fact is that the phones we keep in our pockets now contain more processing power, RAM and memory than the state of the art computers that sent men to the moon decades ago.
It’s also a fact that they’ll keep getting better and better, to the point that we really have no idea where things will be in another 10 or 20 years (though we might hazard a few reasonable guesses).
That’s the thing about technology. Things keep progressing at a pace that, frankly, is unpredictable. Ideas that seem fantastical today will seem quaint in just a few years. Applications and capabilities that today require years of dedicated training and expertise will be practiced by individuals with little to no technical experience tomorrow.
And so, as we consider technology today, we’re presented with three choices. We can ignore what’s going on, we can look at tech with curiosity or we can treat it with disdain. Personally, I’d suggest curiosity as the best path forward and, specifically, that we explore where technology is headed in all facets of life.
It’s easy to write off the value of social media and other connected platforms, or what’s going on in crypto as madness (which it could well be).
But we also need to remember that the signals that speak to what the future holds reside in the areas that perhaps we might not ordinarily look at. (After all, it was the adult industry that trail blazed many of today’s innovations that we take for granted - from high speed connectivity to online payments to streaming and more.)
So, it’s well worth our time dabbling in different areas of tech, and not just reading about them but doing, playing, trialing the tech wherever we can. Social media, Blockchains, NFTs, Virtual reality and so much more. There are leaps taking place in those areas and many others that will shape how we live, work and play in future, in areas that look completely different in the future.
About the only thing we can say about tech is that it will grow and evolve and continue to enmesh itself into our lives, often in ways we don’t even notice. It’s essential that we try to keep pace.
