Freyburg

Back in the mid-60’s Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock all about how change is accelerating so fast that it’s creating anxiety, strife and conflict and that maybe we should just slow down.

As a kid in the 70’s I was shown the film below by concerned social studies teachers who were terrified down to their hippie bones by the evil that was “COMPUTERS.” At the time I thought all the stuff they described in the movie was cool as hell, and I haven’t changed my opinion more than 30-odd years later. The more change the better, I sez, and make it snappy.

Besides the film’s near-panic about technological developments we now find quaint, it also features Orson Welles in an airport, smoking a cigar on a movator. Really, what more do you need in visual entertainment?

Despite the perennial cries of “people don’t want to read books on their phones,” that’s precisely what’s happening according to an article in the New York Times. Everyone has their smartphone with them at all times, making it easy to read on the go and tote a library of titles in your pocket. I’ve read at least 3 or 4 books on my iPhone, and plan to keep doing so until Apple comes out with something better, like their mythical tablet device.

I was recently in Japan, and did indeed see plenty of homeless people, most notably attending a rally put on in Ueno park by Christian missionaries and sleeping in the early morning on the stairs at Shinjuku station. I never went into an internet cafe, but if I had I imagine I would have run into the cyber-homeless detailed in this report.

Fast Company has come out with a well-written but flawed story about how little genetic research has done to improve our health. Which would be fine and dandy, were it true or if the writer of the article, David Freedman, had the slightest bit of foresight. Freedman delineates how many promises were made once the human genome was decoded, and how far we’ve come in the 10 years since that event. And to be fair, there hasn’t been a huge leap in progress…yet. But biotech is roughly at the place computing was in 1980. Today we carry around the equivalent of a Cray supercomputer in our pocket, use cameras that recognize faces, shoot HD video onto tiny cards and network with people around the world. We have made some progress, with recent gene therapy breakthroughs ending color blindness in monkeys and restoring immune systems. We’re on the bottom end of a big curve with genetics and biotech, and I think ten years from now people will look back at this article and scoff, if they even remember it all.