Tech Leaps and Twinkies
Yesterday morning I caught myself in a moment unimaginable at any time in human history beyond the last generation or two. I sat parked in my car inside a touch less car wash. Realizing I had upwards of five minutes of downtime I pulled out my Surface Pro, logged onto my iPhone’s wireless hotspot, connected to the Salesforce CRM and modified a quote that I submitted before the car wash moved to the rinse stage. None of these things existed when I last ate a Twinkie, which was, by my best estimate, sometime around 1987 or so.
Sometimes our collective massive leap forward seems commonplace. People watching streaming movies or checking email on a plane flying from New York to Tel Aviv is a miracle, and yet we think nothing of it. We live in a time where miracles happen all the time but we’re so focused on the latest outrage on Twitter that we don’t appreciate the phone we’re reading it on.
I remember being wowed by Sony Walkmans, and Compact Disks, and Cell Phones, and Blueray, and HD, and Wi-Fi, and the Internet… and so on. The march ahead with technology in my lifetime has been stunning. Moore’s Law may have predicted something like this on paper, but just look at what we’ve created in so short a time. Amazing.
The technological leap forward from here is even more striking. Artificial Intelligence is coming fast. Robotics, automation, sensor data correlation, facial recognition, self driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s), Hyperloop vacuum tube travel, and 3D printing are already here in various stages of development or adoption. We’re in an exponential technological revolution the likes of which has never been seen before. Best to take a moment to appreciate the little miracles that happen all the time now. Blink and you’ll miss it.
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” – Bill Gates
And it’s also amazing to some of us when applying all that tech with urgent multitasking skill (developed and acclimated over decades of bosses cracking the whip) to suddenly be used toward our own priorities. Strange how relatively simple and quickly it allows us to achieve personal goals. Think about the glide path to come, when using all that tech to simultaneously enjoy a Twinkie on your own time.