Today I was on a panel — one of those panels where people talk about ‘the future’. At one point the moderator described how odd it felt to come home and see his fifteen year old kids and their friends all sitting around using two thumbs to type onto their smart phones.
“It’s strange,” he said, trying to describe how it felt to encounter this incomprehensible new world, “They are talking with each other, watching TV, doing all these things. They are clearly `present’, yet at the same time they are also continually sending text messages.”
He asked the panel “What do you think kids will be doing twenty five years from now? Gesturing with their hands to conduct things in space?”
I volunteered to answer his question. “Twenty five years from now,” I said, “When one of your grown children goes into their living room and sees their own fifteen year old kids, whatever those kids are doing will be equally incomprehensible to them.”
The Pixar movie WALL*E did an interesting job of extrapolating what continual communication and media consumption would do to human evolution. It wasn’t pretty.
Oh, that’s such a sad thought.