Thursday, January 27, 2011

Musing on the pace of progress (?)

Must stop looking at the Illinois Supreme Court's Twitter feed, waiting for its decision on Rahm Emanuel.... I have to get some work done....

And isn't it amazing that the Illinois Supreme Court even has a Twitter feed?

A few years ago, it seems, we were adequately 'with it' as long as the clock on our VCR wasn't always flashing "12:00, 12:00, 12:00...." Now, though, the VCR is about as common a household appliance as a butter churn. And I don't even know what I need to know in order to get back to merely 'with it.'

When I was a kid, only the richest and most powerful people had car phones. Now car phones are "mobile" phones and everyone has at least one. Computers were monstrosities in the early 1960's. They required separate, climate-controlled rooms. In fiction, computers were not just monstrosities, they were likely to become monsters. James T. Kirk did battle with a megalomanical computer every other week. Then, all of a sudden, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs smote the ground, and along came desktops. Every high school kid had access to more computing power than NASA did when it landed men on the Moon. Then came laptops. Now, it seems, desktops and even laptops are increasingly the province of old fogies like me -- my kids do most of the things that I do on my computer on their phones.

On the other hand, IBM has invented Watson, a computer that will do battle with Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter next month. But James T. Kirk has become a lonely old man spouting $#*! on CBS. Leonard Nimoy has officially retired. Will Ken Jennings be able to save humanity without Mr. Spock?

Maybe I don't want to get back 'with it' -- even if I could.

1 comment:

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