It’s astounding to think that a person’s life often spans nearly a century. Even more so when I realize mine has already covered three-quarters of one.
In some ways, the experience of all those years has been futuristic.
As an aside in the midst of this ramble, I wonder if the cave dwellers in our distant past didn’t have that same intimation. When fire was discovered or the wheel, didn’t they feel they were encountering the future?
In my lifetime so far, it’s the digital information that I appreciate as new and fresh. Computers have evolved to help orchestrate my life from the smallest of screens.
AI, like Hal in the Star Trek film, is a real thing. My experience of it has a robot scheduled to assist with my upcoming mammogram (for an add-on fee of $59.) Many other examples of artificial intelligence abound. One, of the many I am only vaguely aware of, is the rather alarming driverless or self-driving car.
At the beginning of my time on earth, there were no such gadgets or doodads. They would soon become a reality but not an everyday presence. When they crept further into our consciousness, computing devices loomed large but seemed vaguely improbable.
Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy contended with one behemoth of a machine and a budding romance in Desk Set.
In 1957, there was room for some skepticism about just how useful such mechanical interventions would be. Not so anymore.
We carry a whole lot of computing power in our pockets now. Who woulda thunk? I mean back in the 1940s?
Ethical considerations about how much data we share and how much of our identities we give up or over to the machine are somewhere lost in the shuffle of convenience and notoriety. Look at all I am sharing here with strangers.
Without the devices we use to post these thoughts there would be no online forii.
The public square would be a sheep meadow in the middle of town. Those of us so inclined would argue our propositions from soap boxes. Others so inclined would be entertained by the spectacle.
There would be no data breach just a lot of shouting.
All The Best 