Of Age

I was thinking about how we all assume that older people are out of touch with current technology. (“What’s a Twitter?”) We like to laugh a little bit about how we know how to use our smartphones to do our taxes, while our grandparents never could get the hang of using a VCR.

But I think as we grow older we’ll find ourselves in an even worse position than older folks today. I don’t know whether the Singularity will ever happen, but it’s pretty easy to see the accelerated growth of technological development. Whereas they look at a computer and think, “Okay, this is like a television that connects to that internet thingy,” we won’t even have a beginning point of reference to conceptualize the devices like the portable boxes that raise your consciousness to another level, or the floating orbs that are beings of pure thought. We will be totally lost. So they’ll probably just plug our brains into the Matrix, so we old fogeys can pretend it’s still 1999 and party accordingly.

Comments

Lizzy said…
I didn't care for 1999. Can I choose another year?
May 4, 2011 at 11:54 AM
joel said…
As long as it was after you were born, according to Quantum Leap.
May 9, 2011 at 7:50 AM
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