Future Shock

From 1965 up until 2003 BBC aired a Television programme called 'Tomorrow's World', on which the latest technology and predictions for the future of technology were shown.  Looking back on the show there are many things they got completely wrong and there are many things that we would now laugh at.  However there is something we forget quite easily - we live in The Future.  That is The Future from the perspective of someone who was alive in 1965.

Recently the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il passed away and when he did the attentions of the world once again focused on the most secretive Nation on Earth.  One of the interesting things I saw during that brief time of media fixations that made me think was the story of how defectors - people who flee North Korea to the South - have to attend re-education centres.  Reason being they have lived in a country that for so long has been decades behind the rest of the world - even third world countries.  There are starving impoverished nations in Africa, yet even those nations have Internet access and Electricity.  North Koreans perhaps have one of the greatest juxtapositions to overcome when defecting, in that they defect to South Korea, a nation which for all intents and purposes is one of the most technologically forward moving in the world.

I can't imagine trying to explain how to use the Internet to someone who I also have to explain what a Computer is, a Keyboard and a Mouse etc.  When you stop and think about how technology has enveloped our lives, to someone from a 1960's mindset we are quite the conundrum.  Can you imagine what our phones would appear to them?  Roll back 20 years alone and Mobile Phones weren't that common, in 1992 Tim Berners-Lee's baby the World Wide Web was only learning to crawl.  Roll back 50 years to 1962 and ARPANET [the precursor to the Internet] was only just being developed.  To imagine telling one of those researchers, 50 years from now people will hold devices in the palm of their hand that lets them use this Network anywhere in the world, to communicate instantaneously with billions of others around the globe.  The technology we have at our fingertips, the amount of information so readily accessible and the ease of communication across continents are things that we never really stop and appreciate.

To think without technology you would never know I existed - me specifically; yet here you are reading my thoughts, seeing what I think about life, love, money, happiness and all manner of things.