Open the pod bay doors, Siri.
If someone had told me when I was a kid that I would grow up to find technology capable of inducing belly butterflies, I would have probably called them a bumface and given them a chinese burn. Yet, last week I joined the global geekgasm on the launch of the new apple OS. Consumer technology is adult diaper exciting. It’s our moon landing, but this time there are seats in the capsule for everyone.
Yeah, yeah. I’m sure the many, many physicists reading this blog are champing at the bit to point out that other human endeavours are moving just as fast and are just as exciting. Any second now the comments section will fill with counter arguments from blah@cern.ch, but hold your horses there theoretical theoretical physicists theoretically reading this blog. String theory may help us understand the origin of the universe, but I can’t ask it to sing ‘Daisy’ to me or ask it to order a pizza.
Every couple of months, technology gives us a something new. A thing that couldn’t even have been conceived of a year previously and within days it’s in the shops or available to download. We leap forward with each new update or model, quickly discarding what came before. You can’t help but be filled with a childlike wonder with each new gadget.
Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Technological progress is so fast that the knowledge gap between the makers and the users has become a gulf of Mexico sized gulf. People already describe their newest gadgets as magic, how long before they truly mean it? Take a look at this video that tracks the progress of progress by showing modern children the technological marvels of the recent past. For these kids technology that’s only 10 years old isn’t just obsolete, it’s alien, a curiosity from a bygone age.
