

You Don’t Live in the World You Were Born Into - benackles
http://blogmaverick.com/2011/12/31/you-dont-live-in-the-world-you-were-born-into-4/

======
commieneko
My father will be turning 96 in a couple of weeks.

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...

~~~
BillPosters
This comment is longer than the article it responds to. A good new years
resolution for the interwebs might be to Keep It Short, Stupid! The definition
of "comment" also needs revisiting.

~~~
daeken
This comment is longer _and more substantial_ than the article it responds to.
It gets its point across very, very well. Keeping it short at the expense of
substance gets you Twitter; this is Hacker News.

------
6ren
> We all have the tendency to believe that we are living in a very advanced
> technological period.

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...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-
in-computing-since-1980)

~~~
dasil003
Whether modern technology is advanced or not has more to do with theoretical
limits rather than the current rate of change.

------
reasonattlm
A point that shows up in some of my writing. e.g.:

\---

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.

\---

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.

------
cynest
> Today’s high school seniors were born prior to the World Wide Web

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.

~~~
dangrossman
I don't know why this was downvoted, it's true. The web's more than 18 years
old... in 1994 you could log on AOL and browse the web, or even take a "guided
tour" in a split screen chat room and web browser.

------
tfb
I love the first comment on the article:

 _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!

------
BillPosters
"In reality, everything we are excited about today is going to be incredibly
old and boring much faster than we ever expect".

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.

------
tzs
OnSwipe warning for iPad users.

~~~
rdl
Crashing my mobile safari browser before the page fully loads is usually
warning enough :(

------
antidaily
No shit.

