The year is 2124 and the clocks have struck 13. No, that’s unlikely, so 1984. It’s 2124 and the time thrums from the skin on your wrist. Call it the new wristwatch. Smart watches were so 2024.
When an upgrade to a device was absolutely essential to my young kids, I used to tell them, half in exasperation and half hoping they might be interested, do you know kids, there was a time when from the moment a person was born until the moment they died, the world didn’t change. Sun went up, sun went down. Nothing changed. There were no upgrades!
In the past, this is all that happened.Credit: Catherine Marshall
There were no phones, smart or dumb, no TVs, no computers, no lights but a candle, no cars, trucks, planes or trains.
They were suitably dumbfounded for a second. I could have joked that a second back then was a long time. A nanosecond later we were back on the upgrades.
The rate of change in society wrought by technology is on, everyone agrees, an exponential curve. Which leads one to consider, at what point does the curve stop? And in what year? And is that point ground zero or nirvana?
What can be said with certainty is that now we live in flux, which is not a country the size of Luxembourg. It is the global village. And given that the beat of a butterfly’s wings is now felt round the globe in a nanosecond, is it possible to have faith in humans doing the right thing by and for each other? History has shown the answer is mixed.
Her wings can be felt from South America faster than ever before.Credit: Carlos Morochz
And given the environment, both man-made and natural, is in constant movement, what then is needed to hold onto and maintain your sense of self. Indeed what is your inner core? To steal part of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark.
Substitute soul for love.
A century ago, time and therefore life moved much more slowly. In 1924, a time signal via radio was broadcast for the first time, Calvin Coolidge broadcast the first radio message of a president. Two American pilots circumnavigated the planet. It took 175 days and 74 stops. The sheet music to Happy Birthday to You was published as was the first crossword puzzle. In Victoria, royal assent was given to legislation from 1923 allowing women to stand for parliament.
These are but random samples of milestones from a century ago. Fifty-five years ago, a pop song grasped the imagination and the charts in its wondering of humankind’s future. In the Year 2525, by Zager and Evans, was a No. 1 hit. It tapped into the zeitgeist, being released two months before Apollo 11 deposited two men on the moon. Heavens, was anything possible? We soon fell back to earth in the 70s. And for every flight to the stars since, there has been but a step to freefall.
In 2024, one of the greatest challenges facing society is how to manage artificial intelligence. Thus the intelligence of humans who invented artificial intelligence is put to the test. Ironic. How long has it taken for this rise of the machine? Barely a second, and in 100 years, what will the landscape both inner and outer look like? Are we on the path set out by WB Yeats a century ago?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
One could despair that is the human who has inbuilt planned obsolescence. But, we also have a remarkable ability to adapt. And have faith in ourselves. Hope.
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With this speed of change, can the centre hold?
15
0
06.01.2024
The year is 2124 and the clocks have struck 13. No, that’s unlikely, so 1984. It’s 2124 and the time thrums from the skin on your wrist. Call it the new wristwatch. Smart watches were so 2024.
When an upgrade to a device was absolutely essential to my young kids, I used to tell them, half in exasperation and half hoping they might be interested, do you know kids, there was a time when from the moment a person was born until the moment they died, the world didn’t change. Sun went up, sun went down. Nothing changed. There were no upgrades!
In the past, this is all that happened.Credit: Catherine Marshall
There were no phones, smart or dumb, no TVs, no computers, no lights but a candle, no cars, trucks, planes or trains.
They were suitably dumbfounded for a second. I could have joked that a second back then was a long time. A nanosecond later we were back on the upgrades.
The rate of change in society wrought by technology is on, everyone agrees, an exponential curve. Which leads one to consider, at what point........
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