If you are a baby boomer or beyond, this life has been one crazy ride. When we were young, let’s say the in the 50s and 60s of the last century, you may recall living in rural America and the use of party lines as a normal part of our telephone service. When I was first married and living in rural Minnesota, in the early 70s, we had a party line. Oh, the tricks we would play on Grandma Brandt who we knew usually listened in.
Party lines have been replaced by cell phones. Instead of individual lines we have individual phones. Most of today’s youth will not know what party lines are!
When did you first hear the word computer? I worked with mainframe computers with punched card technology in the early 70s and had my first personal computer (PC — an Apple or Mac was/is also considered a PC) in 1981. It had a huge hard drive, 56K! It was state of the art — at the time. Now our computers have gigabytes, terabytes and beyond.
One of our main communication devices is our computer which we also use for information and entertainment. Our home page may contain virtual pets, the latest news from sources we respect, our daily horoscope, the temperature in our area or in locations we only wish we were.
When in elementary school we learned how the industrial revolution changed the lives of our ancestors and what an amazing lifestyle change for the people living then to see and experience. How did those changes impact their life as opposed to the changes in technology in our life? Although we can’t stop the transformation, we often are uncertain the change is good. Such dramatic evolution is difficult for society to embrace yet we have no options. We live and grow and our world changes.
Do you remember: waiting a few minutes for the television to warm up to watch Sea Hunt, Leave it to Beaver, Sky King, or Fury? Home milk delivery in glass bottles? Soda pop in glass bottles? 45 or 78 RPMs? Gas stations serviced your car by checking oil and tires, washing windows AND giving green stamps? Coffee shops used to have jukeboxes on the tables? How about when being gay meant you were happy? Drinking glasses came inside laundry soap boxes? Blue flashbulbs? Mimeograph paper? Ladies nylons – in two pieces? Going to a library to do research? Remember a day without texting, call waiting, or caller ID?
Our foods are bioengineered – for good or bad some technology we cannot reverse.
Today we enjoy virtual worlds, avatars, computer chips in our cars, body, pets and skis. What’s next?
“Computers will have a permanent and enduring effect on our country and her people. This impact will be most profound on the poor. This new computer society can be good or it can be bad. The outcome of the revolution will be enforced with economics, and economics will be largely controlled by the computer,” said Stan Goldberg.
Is your life boring? Get a second life. Create an avatar of yourself and explore the virtual world where you can be anyone and anyplace you desire. Live in your virtual world with your virtual friends and visit virtual worlds.
Social networking sites keep us entertained and informed of friends and family with hookups to our phones that sit in our pockets so we can receive immediate feedback and responses.
Look at medical technological advances: “microscopic devices have evolved from an optic microscope to an electron microscope which allows three-dimensional visualization of intracellular space,” said GiangNguyen for www.brighthub.com. Breakthroughs in prosthetics bring us body parts such as blood vessels, limbs, reconstructive skeletal joints and artificial heart valves.
“Several technologies allow patients to control computers, prosthetics, and other devices using signals captured from nerves, muscles, or the brain. Electroencephalography (EEG) has emerged as a promising way for paralyzed patients to control computers or wheelchairs. A user needs to wear a skullcap and undergo training for a few hours a day over about five days. Patients control the chair simply by imagining they are moving a part of the body. Thinking of moving the left hand tells the chair to turn left, for example. Commands can also be triggered by specific mental tasks, such as arithmetic.”
Shared control addresses this problem because patients don’t need to continuously instruct the wheelchair to move forward; they need to think the command only once, and the software takes care of the rest. “The wheelchair can take on the low-level details, so it’s more natural,” says Jose del Millán, director of non-invasive brain machine interfaces at the Institute of Technology and as reported in Technology Review.
The wheelchair is equipped with two webcams to help it detect obstacles and avoid them. If drivers want to approach an object rather than navigate around it, they can give an override command. The chair will then stop just short of the object.
Medical technological advances in cancer research, heart and brain science are changing people lives forever and with a huge financial cost. But what is the cost benefit ratio of a life and the quality of that life?
The Future
Imagining technological advances is somewhat like reading science fiction or seeing a George Lucas or Steven Spielberg movie. “Given the risks humans pose to the planet, we might someday leave Earth simply to conserve it,” said Lifeboat Foundation in a recent Popular Science article. Also quoted is NASA administrator Michael Griffin who described the aims of the national space program in similar terms. “If we humans want to survive for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, we must ultimately populate other planets,” he said. “One day, I don’t know when that day is, but there will be more human beings who live off the Earth than on it.”
Bigelow Aerospace LLC, who successfully launched two pathfinder spacecraft, Genesis 1 and II, in 2006 and 2007 respectively, recently entered a partnership of EIAST (The Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology) in Dubai to create ”next-generation commercial human spaceflight programs … based on innovative technologies, affordability, commercial sustainability, and strong international partnerships.”
The October 2010 issue of Popular Science includes an article on the rising sea levels and predictions of people building above the not always still waters rather than giving up their seaside residences.
The same issue of Popular Science cites a 2007 U.N estimate “that desertification could eventually affect some one billion people in at least 100 countries.” Architect Robert Perry of Studied Impact Design “proposes that deserts need not be unlivable, or even uncomfortable. His Positive Impact House, a 3,200-square-foot single-family home, is not only designed to draw enough water and cool air from the environment to sustain five people, it will also send energy back into the grid.”
Current Health
Technology
BodyMedia is a product that monitors calories, steps, amount of physical activity, and sleep efficiency with a level of accuracy at 90 percent, according to their web site, along with embedded connections with cell providers.
Live Science reports “For the first time, scientists have reconstructed a three-dimensional circuit of connected cells in the brain’s seat of consciousness. Their new approach, which involves the use of high-tech microscopes and a supercomputer, offers the unprecedented opportunity to unravel the complex wiring of the brain by navigating through the tangled and dense jungle of cells — similar to the way Google crawls the Web.”
Technology is amazing and one needs an array of publications and time to maintain a keen awareness of all the possibilities and actualities.
On the entertainment side of technology, Ubisoft recently revealed an upcoming game, “Rocksmith” that plugs into a real guitar to play along. There exists a great amount of cross-over technology that merges the fun and the work. Science for space equates to science for fun. For instance, the Star Wars movie series inspired medical innovations such as a new product by Nexagon, “a sort of gene therapy gel with the consistency of tooth-paste that accelerates the natural healing process to roughly 6 times the normal rate,” when applied to the skin, according to blogger Gordon McLeod.
The fact that you know without explanation what “blogger” means indicates that you are following the fast learning curve of today’s technology ride. On thing is for certain, there is no going back!
Life and the
Technology
Revolution