The book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler proposed
that mankind was psychologically and emotionally unable to adjust to rapid
change; that change, to be comfortable, must happen over an extended time.
Boy was he wrong.
Change did
come slow when knowledge was acquired by trial-and-error.
At the time
of Jesus, the wheelbarrow was cutting edge technology. The
world prodded along for centuries until the invention of the printing press in
the 1400’s. The printing press allowed
the mass sharing of information including the technology of the day.
By the early
1900’s the T-model Ford and primitive airplanes were cutting edge technology. Changes were happening, but they were still
slow.
In 1976’
computers were in their infancy and the Apple-2 with 4 Kb of ram, 5 ½ inch
floppy disk and a monochrome monitor that wrote in upper case only was
available for home computing for around a thousand dollars.
Now in only
forty years we have gone to hand held gigabyte computer phones with hundreds of
apps available. My GPS has the address,
maps and driving directions for everyone living in the United States and
Canada. NASA has probes hurling into
deep space and the internet has connected almost every person on earth.
This is only
the beginning. Computers are changing
our world at such a pace that it is hard to keep up with new innovations. We are on the cusp of artificial
Intelligence (AI) where computers will learn and think for themselves. It is almost unimaginable where technology
will have taken us by the turn of the 22nd century.
The book is outmoded
But still a good read
If only to see
Where we have come from.
the Ol'Buzzard
