Tonight at our dinner table my 11-year-old son and I got into an interesting discussion about the growth and change of consumer technology. Actually, we were talking about gaming consoles I had as a kid, from a simple 'pong' setup to the Atari 2600 and eventually into my adulthood with the original XBox and then the XBox One. For most of my life gaming has meant computer gaming, whether on my friend Chris' Apple IIc or whatever desktops or laptops I have used over the years.
I guess it got started somehow with a discussion about how YouTube is this version's generation of the VCR. I remember our first Betamax, how my mother would approach it with all the caution of a police bomb squad coming upon an unmarked suitcase. Generally I would have to program it for her when she wanted to watch a show (which was almost never); I told my son that there will come a day in which there is technology in my life that I look at in much the same way. At this point in my life most technology for me is something that I have to learn, while he is still at the age where it simply comes naturally. As kids we seem to be able to pick up almost anything and within five minutes figure something out; as we get older we have to think through the processes a little bit more.
This conversation moved on to talking about computers, where I told him the horrors of having to boot up DOS with a floppy disc, and how I would then have to turn discs over and then change them based on whatever program I decided to run. He seemed more horrified by the idea of having to flip the discs than anything, and so I told him that his most precious piece of current technology, his Switch, would within 10 years seem like something that was so lame and cheap. Someday kids will grow up playing games within their fingers and eyes with little to no exteranl equipment, I believe...and so to have to handle an actual joy-con on his switch or have to wait a whole minute to boot up a game on the XBox will seem so primitive to his kids. The world of Ready Player One will be as real as reality for future generations.
I don't know that there's anything inherently good or bad about the power of this technology...it just is. The moral question, of course, is how we use it. Do we continue to let these things take over our lives? Do we recognize that having them simply become a part of who we are as a person will be considered what humanity is all about? I don't know where it will stop, and I laugh at futurists who try to tell us exactly what these things will look like...we have no idea. Who would have thought a few years ago that we could carry around cheap, almost disposable tablets with access to almost any kind of entertainment?
I'm curious about what the future holds. I don't think that it's necessarily dystopian nor a new age of enlightenment. It just will be what it is.
