This is a world that I could not have anticipated, or really even comprehended, when I was 18.
So, we’re in our car, which gets ~50 miles to the gallon. Music is coming from a handheld device that holds enough music that I think we could play songs for something like two weeks without repeating anything. Korean hip-hop comes on, which I’m unfamiliar with, so I start typing the fragment of the song’s name that the car stereo displays, and the computer suggests the full name of the song; seconds later, I’m looking at information about the band, album cover pictures, and things like that. On a display which is higher resolution than any display I had seen in my life when I was 18, with better color reproduction, and which is under a quarter-inch thick. The person driving is a gay guy. We have the right to be legally married in our state, and the federal government recognizes such relationships. There are five devices in the car, at least, which can tell me where I am within a meter or so basically anywhere on the surface of the planet. I have Internet (a thing I barely knew about when I was 18), and my phone has more computing power than the mainframes which served the entire student body when I was in college. The laptop probably has more computing power than every computer on campus did; definitely so if you include the GPU.
Comments [archived]
From: Sherry
Date: 2014-08-24 11:50:37 -0500
This message is in past tense