The future’s not what it used to be

Do you remember when you had to turn a record over to hear the other side, and you had to look for the little line to pick out the start of a track you wanted to listen to?

Do you remember when you had to rewind the video back to the beginning before you took it back to the store?

Do you remember when you had to plug a cassette player into your computer and wait for five minutes for it to load before you could play a game?

All of these things can now be done at the click of a button if not automatically. It’s just not the same. I’m not being nostalgic – I think it’s amazing. I love technology.

My life has been enhanced in so many ways by technology. For example, if it wasn’t for the fact that my iPhone has a built in map facility, I’d still be driving around Somerset trying to find my way home from my visit last year.

The rate of progress has been phenomenal. Many of the things we saw in the sci-fi movies of our youth are starting to look possible. You can now get contacts that send a computer feed straight to your eyes like the Terminator. Even hoverboards look feasible, although probably not in time to catch with when Back To The Future promised.

The sci-fi writers are going to have to come up with more and more ideas for what humanity will think it needs to invent in the future.

I am excited by our constant progress. My mind really boggles at how men who used to live in caves and hit animals with clubs to survive have managed to send a machine to the big red planet next door.

It doesn’t seem possible when you think about it in the grand scheme of things. I mean, dolphins are supposed to be the next most intelligent species on the planet and they’ve not even invented the wheel yet.

If I’m lucky, I’ll live another 40 years or so and I can’t wait to see what has been invented by the time I die. I fully expect the world to have changed almost beyond recognition. When I was in primary school, for a project, I once envisioned a system that would allow me to view TV programmes when I wanted not just when they are on. Around 15 years later, this was released to the public and is something I now couldn’t imagine living life without. Yet at the time, when I had an 8-bit computer, it seemed like something that would be invented in the year 3000.

I am also frightened by technology advancements. Partly because I’m scared the machines will rise up and enslave us (although as soon as I realised we just need a really really big EMP that fear subsided somewhat) and partly because I know that at some point I will struggle to adapt to the new technology. I know that there will come a time where there will be something I just don’t get how to use.

We all remember how our gran struggled to work out how to program the video recorder. I have seen my own parents get confused by their laptop when the solution to the problem seems self-evident to me.

There will come a time when they invent something amazing but which am confounded by. As someone who considers themselves adept with technology and embraces it with open arms, that is terribly frightening.