Born Into the Future

I was just thinking how weird it must be for people born within the last decade and thought it might make an interesting topic. I'm still quite young but I remember growing up to see technology transform into what is now. I had the first Nintendo Entertainment System but the Super NES will always be my favorite. I've seen computers go from having 8MB of RAM to 8GB being common. It wasn't until I was around 10 that we got our first dial-up internet connection, before YouTube and Facebook even existed. But even I didn't get to see the first computers and first gaming consoles.

Think about children who are now 10 years old, so born in 2007. They were born into a world where YouTube and Facebook were already massive. They probably wouldn't even remember living in a world where Bitcoin didn't exist because it was created almost a decade ago now. The first Sony console they probably played on was the PS3. For them it must seem a bit like they were born into the future and it must seem a bit strange because they haven't had a chance to see technology evolve rapidly. Everything is now standardized and the change is slow and steady, we're already hitting the limits of Moore's Law.

It will be interesting interesting to see if there are any young people on ATS willing to give their opinion on this and whether the future lives up to its reputation or not. For me I'm a bit disappointed we don't have some things we were always told would exist in the future and I'm especially disappointed in our lack of space travel advancement, chemically fueled rockets just aren't going to cut it forever, we need a better form of propulsion. On the other hand I kind of like the fact we're taking longer to reach certain goals than we estimated, like certain artificial intelligence goals.

As a coder I think we'll eventually have to live in a world with conscious machines but I think it's also important that we enjoy what we have now. People fantasize about living in the past even knowing how many modern conveniences they'd have to live without, in fact for many people that is the attraction. I prefer to live in rural areas with open space and fresh air over cities but I also love the convenience and activities available in big cities. A slower pace of change also helps us adjust and adapt to that change instead of being overwhelmed by it.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

lol, i don't think they will feel any different then you did growing up. be it born today or 100 years ago.

Then there are those here who worked with punch cards used to program computers!

While a bit before my time, I did work with magnetic tape and had toggle switches to enter hex code to boot a mainframe.

A digital calculator cost 300 dollars back in the 70s!! Now, it is an unused app on your phone!!

You think these changes are awesome, you ain't seen nothing yet! Quantum tech will blow this away. Our future is nuclear fusion and the stars. I guess ten years all that will pass. We live in interesting times!!!

My wife and I had a similar discussion a while back about our daughter. We both were born and grew up in the eighties, and while there was quite of advanced computing going on it never got as widespread as when the nineties hit, at least for us it didn't. I still remember the first time I dialed into the internet and found bulletin boards; I was blown away.

We talked about how it must be for our young daughter; never having lived in a world without a smart phone or an Ipad or even an internet. Not being able to instantly find information about anything or look up a video at the click of a mouse or tap of a finger.

I have a much younger brother (17 years younger) and he laughs his head off when I tell him about the screeching noise of a blistering 28.8 modem or how downloading a song took hours.

It's only going to get faster and stranger too. I've started feeling 'out of place' lately, as if my brain just can't keep up with how quickly things are progressing and changing right before my eyes. I feel like the old guy struggling to use the ATM.

Every generation must have felt this way - apart and alienated from the one that succeeds it. I can't help but think that this feeling is accelerating though because of our increased pace of technological change. It's pretty amazing and also a little scary. All I know is I want to live as long as possible and see as much as I can.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

We seem to be roughly the same age, I was born in 1982. I ended up experiencing both the low tech and high tech lifestyle my entire life. My parents divorced when I was 1 or 2 years old, and had split custody.

3 days a week I lived with my dad and he embraced technology early. There was a Commodore 64 and a modem, then a 286 and an internet service (Prodigy, if you remember them), and then all the other upgrades after that. By the time I was 3 years old I was already using the internet and reading/writing on BBS. By the time I was 5 I was writing simple computer programs in BASIC. I really don't have any memories of my life from prior to having access to this stuff.

The other 4 days a week I lived with my mom and she didn't have any of this stuff. No computer, no game system, not even a TV. If I needed to type something for school we had a typewriter. It was that, books, and outside playground equipment.

So, I got to live both sides of it and can relate to both pretty equally.

One thing I've noticed is that kids today have really poor technical skills. We've made computers so easy to use (and that's not all a bad thing) that most users don't understand the internal workings of them. There's no file paths to remember anymore, no system commands, no system configuration, and so on. It's all point and click. Mobile devices are especially bad about this, people know about a documents folder and nothing else. The general population, especially kids don't even understand local vs cloud storage anymore.

A large part of me feels like we're headed for a time where we're all reliant on these devices but very few actually understand them and that concerns me a little. But, on the other hand I think about cars which aren't much different. We all use them but few actually understand how they work, or can repair them, and we get along fine there.

The average technical knowledge is definitely declining once you get younger than the older millennials though.

Op dont worry too much. around 2290 humanity is almost wiped out in global war has poisioned the oceans literally turning them acidic/radioactive. Many forest are covered in a fungus that will literally destroy your lungs in seconds without a respirator and insects have gotten so large they are dangerous to even be around. Oh and dont try to kill one because they swarm to a dying insects side and stampede.

But hey look on the bright side. global warming never happens.

originally posted by: ChaoticOrder
For them it must seem a bit like they were born into the future and it must seem a bit strange because they haven't had a chance to see technology evolve rapidly.

i doubt any of it seems strange to them. i think they seem strange to us, because they don't have the perspective of having seen the change we have. but that's probably true of the last several generations, at least...

As technology and our ability to communicate and more efficiently exchange information advances there are vast cultural differences between the generations.

Boomers to Xers to Mill's to Y's.

You can see the progressive cultural change as the internet get's introduced earlier and earlier into the lives of each generation.

It's pretty obvious to me that we are entering into a world that's about to seriously change.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

I remember my dad bringing home a 300 baud modem and showing me it could 'call' into a system that had text information which other people contributed to. Electronic mail, he called it. This was.. 1982 I think..? I couldnt BELIEVE how advanced I was when my dad brought home a 2400 baud modem!

When my brother and I travelled across canada to see our relatives on our own (as youngsters), my dad previously showed me how to use these 'terminals' at the airports to connect to send email to him to let him know how our journey was going. This was... 1984..?

When I was in Uni, the 'internet' didn't have pictures or pages - it was all green on black in "gopher" and "Lynx" pages.

Then this thing called Mosaic came out which, if you did X then Y then jiggled Z, you had 'pages' display with clickable links in a browser.

Then a bunch of us in the computer labs downloaded this revolutionary new 3d game called 'Doom' from id servers on the day it was released. We installed it and were blown away. You couldn't beat this level of interaction or graphics!

Moving from a Vic20 to a C64 was revolutionary.

I suppose what I'm saying, is it's all relative to the individual. What I just lamented on, there's no doubt ATSers here older than that scoffing with far earlier tech 'revolutions' in their lifetimes.

I've personally shunned social media as I think it's nothing more than masturbation for the ego, but to each their own.

My kids have never known a world without the internet; instant and immediate answers to things, social media, tv shows on demand. They cant conceive of the world I came from...

I vaguely assumed those growing up over the last couple of decades would experience a similar sense of racing technological change that earlier generations have.

Although some areas (like chip speed) have slowed until new discoveries translate into products, overall scientific progress has been increasing exponentially.

The biggest difference, I suppose, is that almost everything was 'invented' by the 20th century: rail, road, air and space travel, telephone, radio, TV, electrical supply, vaccines, computers, internet etc., and now incremental improvement predominates.

Incremental improvements though are transformative when they advance beyond a certain point, for example in the fields of green energy and artificial intelligence.

As has been mentioned, inventions on the horizon, like fusion reactors and universal quantum computers, could be as world changing as anything to date, if they come to fruition.

I remember 3 channels on our TV that took about 3 minutes to turn off.

If you look at the asymptotic curve of the "network", then I think the next THING will be always having the network at your disposal, no matter where you are. (naked even). What ever that is, and how that technology will evolve should be something on everyone's radar, as you just know that those that could possibly pull it off, are working on it right now.

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
Then there are those here who worked with punch cards used to program computers!

While a bit before my time, I did work with magnetic tape and had toggle switches to enter hex code to boot a mainframe.

A digital calculator cost 300 dollars back in the 70s!! Now, it is an unused app on your phone!!

You think these changes are awesome, you ain't seen nothing yet! Quantum tech will blow this away. Our future is nuclear fusion and the stars. I guess ten years all that will pass. We live in interesting times!!!

Cool thoughts.
In school back then, I had to punch my FORTRAN code on an IBM 'O29" card punch. Within that time, never used one again, as the teletype(ASR33) was being replaced by dot matrix and the CRT terminals were just coming out. The calculator to have was the Bowmar Brain.. and yea,.. very pricey.

a reply to: charlyv

The next big thing is probably wearable computers that make heavy use of AR.

Also, probably some more device consolidation. On the workstation front I see phones that can plug into a monitor/keyboard/mouse terminal fueled by cloud computing so we no longer have to carry laptops.

I got a Nintendo for Christmas in the late 80s but SNES was amazing. I would go over to my friend's house and play Super Mario World.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

Technically we are all born into the future.