"For your Technology..."

I was born in 1982. Back in the late 80's, almost no one had cutting edge technology. Rich people had "car phones," an early car-based predecessor to the cell phone. Anybody remember those? What about cordless phones? Intercom systems in large houses? Projection-TVs? I mean, my first computer (in 2nd grade) had no hard drive, and amongst other hilarious specifications, ran at about 1 MHz and had 64 KILObytes of RAM.

I've seen technology improve, as has everyone else. Everyone is always talking about how crazy it is that little children have cell phones and iPods now. It's relative, though. I didn't have my own cell-phone until 2003, when I was 20 years old. I remember discovering what SMS even was, before it dominated the commercial/social/political zones of human interaction. Now I text people more often than I call them.

In the late 1990s, I had a Skytel pager because all the cool kids had pagers. It was like the precursor to the cell phone. My mom refused to buy me one for the longest time because she purported that only drug dealers and doctors used pagers. She still uses hers. I remember getting a "teen line"-landline installed in the house because between myself, my younger sister, and my mother's constant need for telephoning, our single landline wasn't enough. I am the oldest child, so the new phone/phoneline went in my room. I was so stoked. I was 13. (1995)

It got better in 1996, when, at age 14, we got AOL 3.0 for Windows 95. I had a 28.8 Kb/s modem and I was online all the damned time. It was novel and new, I was chatting with people across the country. These things are all absolutely commonplace to society now. But now I can video-call someone anywhere in the world for free, if we both have a webcam and an internet connection.

Before high school ended, cable modems began to enjoy popularity/affordability in homes, and suddenly surfing the web was like watching television. Dial-up modems have become relics in less than a decade. My point with all of this ranting is... what's next?

Touch-screen, wireless internet PDA/MP3 player/digital-camera phones are the now the NORM. Bluetooth headsets still make people look like douche-bags, but they aren't as surprising as they were a year or two ago. I guess I'm just saying, that the technological growth curve has been like that of the human population explosion. Is there a ceiling?

Artificial hearts and bionic prosthetics and stem-cell research... Science and technology will continue to move forward, and I am excited to see what new toys emerge for all of society's business, educational and status symbolic needs.

By 2020, you won't be cool amongst your peers unless you have the Playstation 5 and implants in your corneas to both read email and project your presentations. Is there a point where it becomes ridiculous? Maybe. Personally, I can't wait for affordable space tourism and massive robot armies for wealthy, technologically developed nations.