We Live in the Future

Written by: Colin Offenbacker AKA BigBirdOffie

Welcome back to the Salt of the Streets blog!

Before we get into our topic for the day and hopefully the discussion that we’ll start to have in the comments section below, I just want to remind everyone that episode 16 of the podcast is available in the post right below this one. If you haven’t listened yet, there are links in the post to a few of the main podcast hosts. It was a great time having our friends from Upper Left come up and hang out with us for a few hours, we had a great conversation so go check it out.

Today we’re going to be keeping it a little light, no hard hitting heavy stuff today, we’ll save that for our upcoming Dissents June 29th, so save the date.

From time to time on the show I am, shall we say, gently reminded that I am a bit older than my co-host Don. I am by no means “old” but sometimes our slight age gap shows and my age manifests itself in hilarious ways. Being almost 31 years old now, I sometimes reflect on how things were when I was young and how they compare to our modern world.

Basically, we live in the future these days. More precisely, a future I couldn’t have imagined when I was a kid. When I think about how far technology has come, even just in the years since I moved out on my own at eighteen, it’s mind boggling. Almost every aspect of our lives is in someway touched by groundbreaking technology. Personally, societally and even on a species level, it has never been a better time to be alive. Yes of course things aren’t perfect but they are pretty good, especially if you were lucky enough to be born in a “modern” country like The United States

Let’s take right now for example. I’m sitting on my couch with a laptop typing out a message to share with anyone around the world wanting to access it. My wife is sitting next to me playing a game on Xbox with some online friends. That one sentence alone has so many examples of insane technology, once only thought to be possible in science fiction, I couldn’t possibly begin to describe them in any manner that would do it justice. My Iphone is on the end-table next to me, which is basically a handheld super computer capable of accessing almost an endless amount of knowledge via the Internet, and of course has the ability to communicate with just about anyone on the planet. And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

The signs of our futuristic world are everywhere.

All of this amazing technology has advanced our species even further up the evolutionary ladder. Advanced medicines have cured diseases once thought to be incurable. Private companies are embroiled in a new form of the 1960’s space race and thanks to things like Twitter we get access to public people once thought impossible, the President of the United States for example.

On that note I would like to pose a question to all of you out there. It’s a question I find myself asking a lot lately. Are we capable of keeping up with this exponential growth in technology on a societal level? I have my own thoughts on this but I’ll be saving them for a discussion with Don on the upcoming Salt of the Streets Podcast.

In the meantime, jump into the comments below and tell us about your thoughts on technology and its rapid growth rate. Is it happening too fast? Can we as a society keep up? We’d love to hear from you so let’s start a conversation!