here i am in my garage building my bike watching Baja racing from mexico live on a smart phone.. in my lifetime i ve gone from 3 channels black and white telly to live drone footage from the Americas on a telephone!!.. what else will happen in the next 30/40 years!

Is your keyboard broken?

Where is my hoverboard? I was promised hoverboards!
*sulks*

actually it’s watching you

so no it isn’t brilliant at all

It is impressive but im not sure its brilliant. It seems that nothing can be fixed any more and all service people do is randomly change things and bill you until it works 🙁

My dad was a farmer. In his lifetime he went from everything on the farm being done by hand or powered by horses to computerised systems.

The change in the last 100 or so years has been amazing: at the start of the 20th century there hadn’t been powered flight. Within sixty years of the first powered flight there was the first man in space. In sixty years or so we’ve gone from computers the size of houses “we might need three or four for the whole country” to each person carrying several smaller than a bar of chocolate around with them.

“we might need three or four for the whole country”

I remember in the 80s ICL coming into our offices to demonstrate their new concept of “one on a desk”. They said everyone would have their own computer attached to a network. Oh how we laughed.

And a nuclear restor in every Home!

And where are my Space Chicks!

I remeber Tomorrows World showing a video of a 240 volt drill working underwater after being sprayed with a WD40 type spray. 😯

It really is although there are some downsides.

It is increasingly being used to manipulate, control and coerce you into meekly accepting unfair terms. It enables easy money making rackets (dynamic Pricing etc), after all it is the greedy humans who commission these things.

thats deep man

Or we are getting much more transparent pricing, endless ability to compare and contrast before booking a flight that would have cost a small fortune 30 years ago.
I can keep in touch with family and friends all over the world, I did feel a bit annoyed this morning when 2 clock changes meant the morning to evening window for a Skype call closed but it’s a tiny thing in reality when I can make international video calls for nothing.

what else will happen in the next 30/40 years

Take a look at the Shell scenarios. Whether technology is good or bad is not something most people will be worrying about.

Technology is brilliant, yes.

Being logged out is a PITA..

From: A telephone system where, if one needed to call, let’s say Paris, you’d need to book the call a week in advance with the local operator, who’d probably be listening to the whole thing. And a Telly with one channel in black and white with a fifteen minute gap in between programnes. IF you managed to get a signal.

To where we are now, and all in my own lifetime.

What. The . Actual….

Technology has always been brilliant. Now it is just brillianter. You mention just one telly channel without mentioning the lack of any just one tiny moment in time before,
Get some perspective. And maybe consider what is being done with this tech.

It’s not just in electronic devices or communications
My first car was a 1977 Mk 1 golf 1600. It weighed about 900kg and did less than 30mpg most of the time.My current car is a 2015 petrol Golf. It weighs nearly twice as much, it has four times the power output, is quieter, safer, faster and is unlikely to rust away after 10 Years

and does 36-40mpg

That’s 38 years of progress for you

No its not because we didn’t miss it. And we need bugger all now. So what if we have 50 channels or can speak to you mum in real time. That’s good?
Don’t get me wrong, I embrace some of it. First GPs in 1999 for example but I could live quite happily without most of it. Where would I draw the line though?

I remeber Tomorrows World showing a video of a 240 volt drill working underwater after being sprayed with a WD40 type spray.

I remember Tomorrows World showing a CD covered in jam…Now if one of my Audiolabs see’s a speck of dust it has a hissy fit

I do appreciate the progress my current computer has 64gb of RAM with is probably more than all of the combined Apollo missions compared to my first computer a ZX81. What I don’t like is the way technology is taking away common sense – Parking Sensors for instance…learn to f–ing park.

We, as a rule, don’t drive many places, so our Van is for it’s age going rather nicely we got hit by a car and whilst it was in repair got a replacement…I have never in my life seen so much ridiculous distracting technology in one place in my life!

I do however like the fact I can smash out a Sketch on my iPad and upload it to illustrator, I will give the bastards that.

I remember Tomorrows World showing a CD covered in jam…

Alas Smith & Jones (I think, might’ve been NtNoCN) parodied that. “The compact disc… you can smear it in jam… etc etc… in fact, there are a hundred things you can do to amuse yourself with a CD whilst you’re saving up for a CD player.”

I do appreciate the progress my current computer has 64gb of RAM

I have two hundred and sixty-seven times more storage on my keyring than I did in my first PC.

I love the convenience of pressing a button and my phone tells me when the next bus will arrive . Excellent for when I’m late for the school run. Saves loads of wasted minutes….ha.
#simplethings.

From: A telephone system where, if one needed to call, let’s say Paris, you’d need to book the call a week in advance with the local operator, who’d probably be listening to the whole thing. And a Telly with one channel in black and white with a fifteen minute gap in between programnes. IF you managed to get a signal.

To where we are now, and all in my own lifetime.

What. The . Actual….

Yeah well…my generation is going to get to witness us go from the walkman to our capitulation to robots.

Yeah well…my generation is going to get to witness us go from the walkman to our capitulation to copulation with robots.

our capitulation to robots

That was two or three generations ago!

That was two or three generations ago!

Sshhh.. blue pill!

I was at Maker Faire UK at the weekend and as usual I was struck by how far things have come in my lifetime. The enormous drop in price of electronics and microelectronics has led to some crazy stuff.

I saw:

– £30 prenatal ultrasound machine
– £5 computers
– USB programmable microcontrollers for ~£2
– a cheap functioning replacement hand
– pulse monitor so cheap that they were giving them away free
– affordable desktop 3D printers (everrrrrrywhere!)
– becoming affordable home laser cutters
– palm-sized drones with HD cameras and live first-person views
– homemade self-balancing motorised unicycles
– toy robots that can judge your mood with facial recognition
– immersive VR convincing enough to make people scared and fall over
– an umbrella that tells you what stars and constellations you are pointing it at
– amateurs building their own manned rocket!

Not to mention the price of this technology and how it’s fallen. I recall a decent VHS video player costing £599 in 1984, now even their replacements have been replaced. I think iPhones are still the best techno around, what you are able to do with such a small portable device would have been completely mind blowing, only a few years ago.

Edit (Oh, just seen Graham’s post!)

I wrote this a couple of years back, on a similar thread to this one.

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/boring-old-fart-blathers-on-about-something-everybody-under-40-takes-for-granted?view=all#post-6498584

Went out in London, meeting my OH for dinner.

Being a Northerner, the Tube is a mystery to me. No bother, run the Tube Map app and it tells me which trains to take, where to change and when the next one is due.

Get out, need to find the OH. Fire up Google Maps, I have a route to where she is. En route I needed a large Boots to pick up something. There’s a couple nearby, I don’t know which will carry what I need so with Google Street view I can look at the store fronts and work out which one is a big store rather than a corner shop.

Meet up with the OH, need to find a decent restaurant. Google again, find a few likely suspects. No idea if they’re any good, so on to the Trip Advisor app. Find that the nearest has really bad reviews, but the next one looks good. Hit a button in-app and it auto-dials them so I can see if I need a reservation.

On the way, my phone works out where I’m going, and I get a discount voucher for 10% off the meal.

I love living in the future.

For me, it was a bit of an epiphany. I’ve bought various ‘smart’ devices over the years, and the early ones promised so much and failed to deliver. WAP browser, anyone? Wandering round London that day I realised we’d finally arrived, the technology had matured and this thing in my hand was finally doing what I’d hankered for since sitting in a pub logging in to a BBS using a Psion 5 hooked up to GPRS via an infra-red link to a Nokia 6510.