"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
The 'Third Law' of Arthur C. Clarke
You may have missed it, but
some time between the death of the 8-track and breakfast this morning
technology blew past what anyone could reasonably understand. Up until that
undefinable point, advancement came - at its fastest - as a swift trot. By
reading magazines like "Popular Science" and "PC Magazine"
or blogs like Engadget.com and Gizmodo.com, an educated geeky person could
actually follow the threads of progress as they wove together to create
incredible new stuff. Now progress races by at Mach speeds and no one knows how
to even try to keep pace.
As a curious kid growing up
in the 80's and 90's, I could pretty much understand anything by reviewing my
copy of The Way Things
Work. Records had little
grooves (you could almost see them if you squinted hard enough!) that bounced a
needle that vibrated out your parents' unfunny comedy records. Compact discs
were essentially the same thing with a laser instead of a needle, and they had
MC Hammer songs on them. I could open up a computer case and poke around at the
processor, the memory, and the sound board. I'm not claiming that
twelve-year-old me actually knew how a Pentium worked, but I could see how the
function of individual components came together to create a multi-faceted user
experience. I could see the trees and the forest interchangeably.
Even the first few iterations of the iPod and other MP3 players were knowable. Somebody just stuck a laptop hard drive in a plastic case with a graphing calculator screen and installed a rudimentary operating system on it. It was a brilliant adaptation (and shrinking-down) of existing technology to provide revolutionary access to a personal library of music. But if you had lived through the early years of the personal computer and paid attention to the shelves at CompUSA, the iPod wasn't particularly magical.
The other night, my wife and I were having a quiet weekday dinner and I wanted to spruce things up a bit. Knowing her love of over-the-top 80's music, I opened Spotify on our iPad and fired up a Wilson Philips tune (thank you 'Bridesmaids'). The amount of time between having the idea and steely-eyed lip-synching into into my fork was about fifteen seconds.
