Living Today

The evolution of technology we are experiencing has been unmatched in the history of mankind. And change continues to snowball ever so rapidly.

         In the 60s, everyone had a theory of what the home of the future would be like. It was predicted that by the new century, robots would be washing floors and preparing meals. It didn’t happen quite that way. The tiles on the kitchen floor may be easier to clean today than the floor coverings in our grandmothers’ days, but the robots are nowhere in sight. The shelves in our grocery stores may be chock-full of products not available to our parents, but we still have to shop and prepare meals.

            In fact, when we look at it closely, despite the numerous improvements that have come our way over the years, home life is still very much the same. Meals may be faster to prepare with the microwave oven and we may have an array of entertainment choices, but we basically live in the same type of home environment our grandparents experienced.

            It seems to me that some of the more important innovations that have come along are serving us mostly unseen. We spend less time waiting in line at the grocery store check-out counter because bar coded prices are scanned quickly. We can now access our bank accounts any time of the day or night, and we can’t imagine that we actually lived in an era, just a few years ago in fact, when we had to make sure we got to our bank branch before it closed.

           I wonder if Alexander Graham Bell had any idea of the impact his newfangled contraption would have on the world. Did he ever imagine today’s smart phones?

            We used to write letters by hand, while today we can send an e-mail that will be read instantly halfway around the world. Yet much of the information technology at our disposal is basically just coming into its own, and most of us somehow managed to have very productive lives without it.

            We will be spending our retirement years enjoying the benefits of the very latest advances, but what amazes me is that, for the most part, we still worry about the same sort of things our parents and grandparents worried about. Like them we worry about our children and our grandchildren.

            In the end, like our parents, we can only hope and pray that the future with all the innovations it has yet to offer the world will be generous when it comes to happiness. In a world in constant and often mind-boggling evolution, it is after all the only measure that really matters for those we love.