Technology: how our expectations have changed

My niece complained about not being able to talk to her parents in India, because the phone wasn’t working back home and her parents’ Internet was down too. We have come a long way. Only 30 years ago I could not talk to my folks because they did not even own a phone. Telegram, if it came, usually carried bad news. 40 years ago I used to travel by train packed with people inside, outside and on the roof, because that’s all we could afford. Transistor was invented only 50 years ago. After the discovery of fire and the wheel, this perhaps has had the most profound affect on the modern world. Without semiconductor, there won’t be modern day computer, cell phone, internet, video game, HDTV, live display of a distant war, ipod, Utube, html, C++, and so on. But we have gotten used to it. If you tell a kid that we did not have radio, they would perhaps wonder why we did not watch TV. And I don’t think I am quite that antique yet.

I grew up with longhand calculation, slide rule, vacuum tube, mechanical calculator, chart recorder. Then graduated through heterodyne AM radio, FM, PCM, HF/VHF transmission, discrete circuit, integrated circuit, LSI, magnetic core memory, solid state memory, logic circuits, analog-to-digital conversion, Fortran, Assembly language, etc. Now, hardly anyone talks about those either. Now even babies who can barely talk or walk grow up using a hi-tech talking or giggling toy.

Now we have more gadgets than we know what to do with. There are people babbling on cell phones, chatting on Internet, playing video games, dating a stranger from an alien land, clicking remotes to change hundreds of channels (and that’s not enough) on a huge screen TV, playing poker, sexual predator prowling for innocent victim. People can today relate better to gadgets than they can relate to other people. They love things and use people instead of being the other way around. Parents have no time for children, so they try to make up by showering more hi-tech gifts.

Oh, how far we have succumbed to technology! We can’t live without it. If there is a catastrophe sending us back to primitive era, shall we be able to survive without these modern day miracles? Or shall we disappear like many advanced species of the past? Technology is like fire. It is extremely useful, but if we abuse it, it can burn.