Welcome to the Future but remember the past

The Technology we all use day to day is so much smarter than the supercomputers of the 80’s. My children have learned to swipe a screen before they learned to read or write. Our virtual assistants are just in there infancy. Google assistant is gathering data to power there AI. When The New google assistants are AGI (artificial general intelligence) enhanced we will need to integrate with it. The advancement is so staggering that sometimes I need to step back and reflect.

In 1988 I was in first grade I lived in a small town in the desert of Arizona. My earliest memories of computers and the related tech are in the basement of our house where we had an electronics and computer lab. I have memories of playing Joust and Overdrive on our Atari PC. Oh, how about when I picked up the phone to call a friend and my dad would scream from the basement “NO DON’T TOUCH THE PHONE, THIS WEBSITE HAS BEAN LOADING FOR A HALF AN HOUR AND YOU JUST BUMPED ME OFF. DAMN IT”. I had a cool game in the early 90’s called Zachary McCracken and the Alien Mind Benders. Anybody remember that one? I had a pager in 1998 that was not connected and I thought I was so cool just because I had a device. Those were the days, Parents told the kids to come home or check in at a certain time and they had to just trust them. Payphones and friends land lines were our only option. 1-800-COLLECT, 1-800-CALLATT, or just dial “0” and ask the operator to place a collect call. That Tech seems so strange to my kids. At a rummage sale last weekend I found a cassette player and I tried to show my 5-year-old how it played songs from the tape inside, and it had small motors inside to move the tape. He looked at me with a confused look on his face and said but where is the screen. Ok, memory lane is fun but what are my kids going to say about the smartphones of today when they are my age. ” Remember those old screen phone things with the square screens, we had when we were kids. Those things couldn’t read your thoughts. I love my brain link!”

With automation, robotics, cryptocurrency, the blockchain, AI, IOT, and Quantum computing advancing at an exponential speed we are in for a ride. A ride on the Digital Tech Wave.