You Don’t Live in the World You Were Born Into

In his life time he's seen two world wars (he fought in one of them) the Cold War, numerous "police actions" and the recent unpleasantness in Iraq and Afghanistan. His father was born at the beginning of the Civil War and living in the Southern U.S. it was still very much a shadow over the landscape.

When he was a boy, weapons of mass destructions were war gases. During WWII it was saturation bombing. Then plane dropped atom bombs. Then boat delivered H-bombs. WWIII would be over in days. With the advent of missiles it would be over in minutes; most casualties would not even be aware a war had started yet.

There were movies when he was a boy, but they were for the most part silent, black and white, and used a narrative structure that modern audiences find difficult to deal with. There were color and sound movies then, but they were experimental, novel, and rare. There was also experimental television, he remembers boxing matches being shown via extremely primitive video equipment in theaters in large cities during the 1930s.

My father learned to drive when he was 10 years old. His uncle was a doctor and he would have my father drive him on his rural rounds on the dirt roads in his Model A. (Try imagining modern doctors doing this.) There were no driver's licenses, though some communities did have an age limit of 12. In those towns his uncle would swap places with him till they reached the city limits.

He learned to fly in a propellor driven biplane in the 1930s. Standard flight training in those days included doing loops and other interesting acrobatics. By the time he was pulled into the army, just before WWII, the aviation industry was already starting to become a real transportation and shipping industry. Airports were more like sea ports and less like train stations.

Mass communication when he was born meant the newspaper. Every city of any size had several. Often with morning and evening editions. And there were "Extras" put out when there was big news. By the time he was a teenager, radio was on the rise. Every family of means had a large piece of furniture in their living room that they would stare at while they listened to dramas, music and news. My father, being handy and bright, built his own receiver for his bedroom out of an oatmeal box, some wire and a mail order crystal. The unit required no power other than that provided by the radio waves themselves.

My father studied business technology in high school. He learned to type on a mechanical typewriter and work cranky, literally, mechanical calculators. Abacuses were not unknown. In high school engineering classes, yes, you read that right, he learned to use a slide rule. Design was accomplished with a T-Square and compass on large sheets of velum in pencil and ink. He taught himself to program computers in his late 60s, writing his own spreadsheet software and a primitive CAD system for making floor plans.

(Oh, he graduated high school at 15, because teachers advanced students based on ability rather than age. He graduated college in his 30s because the Great Depression and WWII limited his educational opportunities. Before the GI Bill college degrees were much rarer than now.)

I could go one, but I think I've made my point. This rapid rate of change has been going on for generations. None of us can remember a time when the world didn't turn upside down every 10-20 years. But that's still slow enough that many busy, preoccupied people don't notice a lot of it for a while. And it is sometimes a mild shock to them when they do.

My father currently lives in the local Veteran's Home. The other day I was with him at a doctor's appointment and the nurse, in her late 20s, was talking to him like he was an idiot, trying to explain the ins and outs of a web based application she didn't really know how operate. She finally said something to the effect that she didn't really expect him to understand what she was talking about, it was all just a "computer thing."

My father just smiled at her...

Not me. For example, clock rates maxed out about 10 years ago, and instead we went to smaller less powerful devices: netbooks, smartphones, tablets. There's generally so many layers that today's computers are about as fast as what I was using 30 years ago (though GUIs were impressive at first.) By Moore's Law, we should be up to cheap THz machines. Recent video games are especially boring, becoming more like cookie-cutter movies. I'm even bored by near-future science-fiction/cyberpunk - e.g. Rainbow's End. It's obvious, trivial; nothing fundamentally new or mind-expanding.

100 years ago seemed more exciting, when telecommunications was relatively new. Trains, planes and automobiles were much more fundamental advances that today's new "technologies".

But today's layers are important: they enable customization and adaption to new applications and changing applications. That's very useful for adoption. And so I believe we're currently in a consolidation phase more than an advancing phase, pushing known tech out to the consumer. I hope things will change soon. Perhaps consumer-level DNA synthesis will shake things up...

EDIT Alan Kay thinks there haven't been any advances in computing in the last 30 years (he hasn't accepted "the world wide web") http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...

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I'm not going to try to convince you that the foreseeable future is a wondrous place: either you accept the implications of the present rate of technological progress towards everything allowed by the laws of physics, in which case you’ve probably thought this all through at some point, or you don't. Life, space travel, artificial intelligence, the building blocks of matter: we’ll have made large inroads into bending these all to our will within another half century. Many of us will live to see it even without the benefits of medical technologies yet to come: growing up without the internet in a 1960s or 1970s urban area will be the new 1900s farmboy youth come 2040. Just like the oldest old today, we will be immigrants from a strange and primitive near-past erased by progress, time travelers in our own lifetimes.

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But fundamentally the issue is that most people live in the world of their parents and grandparents, their [views] shaped by what has happened to people who did not have access to the technologies that will exist in 20 or 40 or 60 years time. [People] expect the course of life they have seen happen already to those they know best, not the course of life that is possible with [technologies] that will be developed over the next couple of decades.

More like before mass penetration of the world wide web. I can't recall a time in my life where I've lacked internet access, and I've graduated high school.

Very insightful. That’s why the true entrepreneurs are considered crazy.

Like other entrepreneurs, I've always thought outside the box with pretty much everything... always questioning the why, the how, and what can be done to make improvements. Or sometimes I even gravitate towards seemingly outlandish ideas about the nature of the universe... things like that.

I can't count the number of times people have either looked at me like I'm crazy or just blatantly said, "Dude, you're insane." And it's hard to respond with something like, "Don't you notice that pattern throughout history? Every true innovator was considered crazy in their time!" without seeming like an egotistical prick, so I just respond instead with something like, "Yeah you're probably right." Even so, I've convinced myself that a large ego might even be required to believe that you can do something great enough to change the world for the better. And at this moment, I wonder, why is it that we're raised to believe that a large ego is a bad thing? Surely, tying ones ego to productive aspects of life can't be a bad thing as long as it is in moderation and no others are harmed in the process.

But anyway, thanks fellow hackers and entrepreneurs for helping me feel like I'm not so alone in my "craziness" after all!

Um.... speak for yourself.

I still appreciate and wow at the simplicity and brilliance of the humble transistor radio. It all depends how much you can appreciate the science and manufacturing details of these devices, their development history, design, performance, evolution, applications and use. Get into the details, and NOTHING gets boring.