The grand illusion of productivity and earnings growth will stop. Will live sports be challenged by video games, and will politicians seize the chance to mandate higher and higher taxes? Debt-strapped businesses like Macy’s, GM, and Boeing may go bankrupt.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, doctor-patient telemedicine, lawyer-client video-counseling, and grocery delivery are developing as substitutes for person-to-person encounters. Likewise, big social changes are now in the offing. Will physicists develop teleportation of material, as in Star Trek? Entire medical industries are sure to disappear like oversized dinosaurs when replaced by the unimaginable machinations of invisible stem cells and nanotechnology.īack in the mid-1700s, old Rip no longer saw King George’s profile swinging on a pub shingle but President George Washington’s instead. Just think of the enormous industrial impact when nuclear fusion replaces gasoline combustion engines. Today, however, after the steam engine, horseless carriages, and rockets to the moon, technology changes faster and faster, exponentially doubling every 18 months (Moore’s Law). Oldsters in the mid-1700s woke to circumstances that had barely morphed in 10,000 years. Today, a million times more computing power lodges in cell phones, which can feel overwhelmingly complicated. When I was an undergrad studying engineering, a large room housed a metal frame computer filled with glass vacuum tubes.
RIP VAN WINKLE NOSTALGIA QUOTES PC
I know seniors who understandably neglect or avoid using a PC computer or iPad. But it’s also worrisome - dare I say disturbing - to oldsters like me who daily face the challenge of new-fangled gadgets. Such rapid innovation is startling and wondrous. Our standard of living has improved more in the last 100 years than in all recorded history. Sometimes I feel like Rip van Winkle waking from a 20-year sleep to find drastic changes, not only social but technological as well.
0 kommentar(er)
