Progress

Introduction

This is another excavation from my Seven Days In blog, and it does contain some interesting observations and concepts, so I thought I would share it with you. My blog is getting nearly ten thousand visits a day, that is a hell of a lot of robots, and no one ever buys anything through the links, even though they do use them:

Progress

Just thinking about what we can do now as opposed to what we could do ten, twenty or thirty years back. We used to buy from the local shop, market or high street, although big business was giving us supermarkets and hypermarkets and shopping malls.

Our phones are communication devices, we can do video calling, share video as well as text and speech. Thanks to Arpanet and Tim Berners-Lee, we have 24/7 to an unbelievable knowledge resource.

Also we used to only have radio, then TV, but although we still have these they also come through digital channels and where there were just a couple of options now thanks to digital, we seem to be unlimited, though the Bruce Springsteen song "57 Channels And Nothing On" sometimes comes to mind, but now that programs are on demand, you can never say there is nothing on.

I remeber having to order anything slightly out of the ordinary from record shops, "No Woman, No Cry" and "Jah Live" by Bob Marley come to mind, but remember being told "We don't sell singles and we only stock the top 20" when asking for a copy of "Ummagumma" by Pink Floyd at a furniture shop that also sold records. These days, you can have your music or video immediately as long as you have the ability to pay for it.

Phone advertisements are always promoting the camera abilities of the device, the sound and connectivity is seldom mentioned, though the thing is that they are generally handheld computers, though we can't use them for transportation ... yet. That's something that always confuses me, when, in Star Trek someone is transported where the atoms are disassembled at point of departure and reassembled at the point of arrival is that just a clone at the point of arrival or the original person, and if the clone has all the memories of the original person, how would it know that it is a clone. The other side of that is that our bodies shed and recreate layers, and we are not the same person we were last year. I'm sure that could be the basis of a short story; it is about time I actually wrote one.

I could go on about driverless cars and other vehicles and Smart everything, but think it's time to share some music.

Maybe we will go with the Springsteen one, while we have hundreds of channels and streams, a lot of it is filled with rubbish, but a lot of it is the highest quality. You can never say there is nothing on.

Conclusion

I know lots of people hark back to the good old days, but I remember two channels on the TV, ice on the inside of the windows at home, having to build fires to heat the hot water and the house, and so many other things that made life a little difficult and inconvenient.

I still wish we could teleport, although I have my issues with that. Will the reconstituted me still be me? That is something I will have to think about as we don't have teleportation yet.

Thank you for reading this, and I hope it has given you a little to think about.