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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Technical Advances Are Here To Stay

By Rory Mcclannahan/
Mountain View Telegraph
      The first personal computer I ever saw was sitting on my geometry teacher’s desk when I was a sophomore in high school. If you would have told me at the time that I would be using one of these things every day as part of my job, I would have told you I didn’t want that job.
       To get that computer to work, you had to program it first, which took some time and a knowledge of some odd computer language. The software for the machine was a cassette tape that would have problems if you bumped the desk. Our teacher showed us how this thing could be made to add and subtract, and all it took was a couple of hours.
       It made my head hurt to try to figure it out. At the time I thought a desktop computer was pretty worthless and would never catch on. It’s clear I wasn’t much of a visionary at 16. I’m still not.
       Now, the Telegraph has gone to a new word processing and design software, and I’ve been hitting the bottle of ibuprofen pretty hard. Of course, I’m not the only one. Everyone around here is a little on edge trying to learn the new software. But we’ll get through it — we’ve all seen enough technology changes in our lifetimes.
       When I was a kid, telephones were mounted on the wall and had a rotary dial, television remotes were available but something only the elite had. Microwave ovens were around but were seen as an expensive way to reheat food. Video games were a novelty and became boring after a couple hours of watching an electronic dot being batted back and forth by an electronic line.
       Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anywhere close to being a technophobe — technology has enriched our lives in so many ways. It also has introduced us to a whole new batch of problems.
       Take farming. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I can remember horror stories about overpopulation and how we would not have enough food to feed everyone. Technology stepped up, and now we can produce more crops on less land. But now we have concerns about what that has done to the family farm, and we have concerns about genetically altered crops.
       It’s easy to imagine what life might be like in 40 years, what with advances in digital technology and strides made in nanotechnology.
       But we can’t say for sure what will happen.
       In an interview, the great science fiction writer William Gibson, who is credited with coming up with the term “cyberspace,” downplayed his own ability to predict the future. In 1984, when Gibson published his groundbreaking novel “Neuromancer,” no one guessed that everyone would have a cell phone, he said.
       Here’s my predictions for life in 2048:
       We will still need to get from one place to another. We will still need to communicate with each other, although it will never be enough, and we will still choose the wrong words. We will still need to eat and have a roof over our heads. We will still play games, create music and enjoy art.
       And finally, my sons will complain about new technology taking over the world and their difficulty in keeping up with the changes.
       In the end, some things will never change.
       Rory McClannahan can be reached at 823-7102 or online at editor@mvtelegraph.com.>   

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