Tekmology

When’s the last time you used a map? The last time you used an encyclopedia? Developed a roll of film?

When I think of all of the tekmology I use on a daily basis, it blows my mind.

You don’t have to go to the gas station, buy a map, find the place, then navigate. You simply google the address on your smartphone, and GPS it. Then a machine gives you up-to-the-second directions as you progress, sending and receiving signals from satellites orbiting the planet. You can choose the shortest route mile-wise, or time-wise, if the two are different. Or in my case, I hit a button on my phone, say, “Directions to XYZ,” she responds (ha I call my phone “she”), “Getting directions to XYZ…Starting route to XYZ…Turn right on ___ Street and continue for 3.4 miles.” The music playing through my car speakers fades out as she tells me where to turn, then it fades back in when she’s finished speaking. And the arrival time shown is remarkably accurate. Do you realize how crazy that is? We can’t get lost anymore. We can get directions ANYWHERE in a couple seconds.

Want to throw a party? Take two minutes to create a facebook event and invite your friends. If they accept, their calendars are automatically updated and they’ll receive reminders leading up to it. When was the last time you sent out party invitations in the mail?

Feel like sharing a picture with a family member? Remember when we had to drag a bulky camera around, take a picture, finish the roll of film, take it to be developed (and pay), go back to pick up the photos, then mail them out? You probably paid for doubles so you could have a copy for yourself. Make sure to save the negatives in case you want another copy in the future!

Now you pull your phone out of your pocket, take a picture of higher quality than any compact film camera of the past, and email or text it, or better yet, put it on facebook or other social media. Whoever you want to can enjoy a photo, or even a video, within seconds of your taking it. That’s unbelievable.

Do you randomly muse about, for example, what turtles do to survive in the winter? We used to go home to our encyclopedia sets and try to find the information as we shuffled through the pages, only to find it wasn’t there. Then off to the library where we’d search the card catalog to find books on turtles, and maybe find the information that way. Or maybe not. Odds are we wouldn’t go through the effort for a miscellaneous fact, so we’d simply never know the answer.

Now we push a button on our phones, ask the question, and have the answer within a few seconds. (If you were curious, in the winter, turtles bury themselves in the mud of the lake or river bank, and their metabolism is so low in the cold that they’re able to absorb enough oxygen through their skin to survive the winter without breathing the air. Pretty cool huh?)

We have the cumulative knowledge of the human race in our pockets, quite literally. Anything we want to know is a click away. Amazing. I’ve written about standard tasks we used to do twenty years ago. How about a few hundred? Fires used to keep us warm, and alive, in the winter. We had to hunt and gather to eat and survive. If we showed our technology to someone of a hundred years ago, his head would most likely explode.

These are just a very few examples. I’m sure you can think of a thousand more. What will the world be like in another twenty, hundred, thousand years?