The Digital Rabbit Hole by Larry Kilham

Author:Larry Kilham [Kilham, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FutureBooks.info
Published: 2015-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

Choices

Today’s younger generation will face some major choices about their coming lifestyle. Will they have a house? A big place with lawns? A tiny house or mobile home? An apartment? A tiny apartment? A shared living facility—perhaps even lives in their parents’ house. When I was at that stage an apartment or a starter house were the predominant choices. You were happy with a refurbished 10-year-old car, a clunky black dial telephone, and possibly the newest thing—a snowy black and white television with a wobbly rabbit ears antenna.

Constraints and opportunities faced by the new entrants into the social economy have drastically changed. Lower real income has revived concepts such as shared living and transportation, and the all-enveloping Internet with its new paradigms of thinking and living have changed everything. Then, there will be the robots.

We will be entering a new world of transition over at least two generations. This will start with the young adults in today’s “millennial generation” who are more excited about iPhones and cool social media than about automobiles and big houses. They tend to trust gadgets, apps, and social media more than the retired generation does. We are going through another technological and economic generational cycle.

How well I remember the ‘50s and ‘60s; a time of unbounded optimism carried over from winning World War II. Everyone in all walks of life imagined that everything was possible. Breathless releases about new technologies like Picturephones and personal airplanes appeared in Life and other family magazines. Lewis Strauss, the Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission under President Eisenhower, famously said, “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter...”

It was a time of anything-is-possible enthusiasm which bubbled over even to excitement about flashy car designs. The tailfins! The chrome! The white sidewalls! The four on the floor! We felt good about life. The buoyant ads of the large American family, all smiling, going to the lake or beach in their “woody” beach wagon reflected the optimism of the times. This is what mattered when I was growing up. This is no longer the case. Now cars are all the same featureless shapes, without excitement or distinction. They are all optimized for fuel economy and low cost. That is not a bad thing but they are not very thrilling. In addition, robots make them. Soon robots will drive them.

Recently, out of nowhere came the smartphones, which serve as our portal to our friends and connect us to the Knowosphere worldwide. All that matters now is our lifeline of connection to everyone and everything.

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