A Few More Tech Observations
My previous post was inspired by watching Millennials at a wedding. I’m
surrounded by that generation at work, so I see the slight technology
disconnect daily.
The rapid pace of tech advances does make it more difficult for boomers to adapt to the changes, but some things we considered normal in the 1960s and 70s were still astonishing to our parents.
Examples:
My parents grew up before television was invented. In fact, radio was a brand new technology in their youth.
Automatic transmission wasn’t even an option in my Dad’s first three cars.
Dialing a long-distance phone call without operator assist was unusual for my parents, even early in my life.
Some random tech observations from this week that are already close to normal:
Hands free toilet flushing in the Men’s room. Don’t have to use your hands to wash your hands either. Future humans probably won’t have hands because they don’t need them.
Cars that drive themselves. A neighborhood friend has a car that parks itself. At present, I’m skeptical, or afraid, of self-driving cars. But I have to admit that after only one year of owning a car with a backup camera and a lane departure warning feature, I am already dependent on that technology.
So that’s enough boomer tech talk for today. Except to point out that in my youth I wrote essays and poems using paper and pen. I wrote this, and nearly every blog post for the past three years, on an iPhone. I could probably dictate these musings to my phone, hands-free with Siri. She, or is it it, could probably copy and paste the paragraphs to this blog, simply reacting to my voice commands.
Look ma, no hands. (That’s a boomer reference for some, an X-rated phrase from Urban Dictionary for others).
The rapid pace of tech advances does make it more difficult for boomers to adapt to the changes, but some things we considered normal in the 1960s and 70s were still astonishing to our parents.
Examples:
My parents grew up before television was invented. In fact, radio was a brand new technology in their youth.
Automatic transmission wasn’t even an option in my Dad’s first three cars.
Dialing a long-distance phone call without operator assist was unusual for my parents, even early in my life.
Some random tech observations from this week that are already close to normal:
Hands free toilet flushing in the Men’s room. Don’t have to use your hands to wash your hands either. Future humans probably won’t have hands because they don’t need them.
Cars that drive themselves. A neighborhood friend has a car that parks itself. At present, I’m skeptical, or afraid, of self-driving cars. But I have to admit that after only one year of owning a car with a backup camera and a lane departure warning feature, I am already dependent on that technology.
So that’s enough boomer tech talk for today. Except to point out that in my youth I wrote essays and poems using paper and pen. I wrote this, and nearly every blog post for the past three years, on an iPhone. I could probably dictate these musings to my phone, hands-free with Siri. She, or is it it, could probably copy and paste the paragraphs to this blog, simply reacting to my voice commands.
Look ma, no hands. (That’s a boomer reference for some, an X-rated phrase from Urban Dictionary for others).
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