Futures past

As a teenager I was always hoping for the 'next' big improvement. I dreamed of music players with slightly more storage and phones that could take clear photos at night. Over time, bit by bit, these things have come to pass. Yet instead of being satisfied when progress happened, I always ended up wanting the next thing. For me right now it's better VR screens and smarter AI.

A couple of decades later I am well into a future I could barely imagine a couple of decades ago. Computers can generate entire articles and artworks from a single sentence, fusion power is becoming a reality, and electric cars are quickly becoming normal.

What I was not prepared for, though, was the simultaneity of the future. It's as if progress is pushing on every front at an ever increasing pace. While this is exciting, it is also challenging to consider the wide range of consequences that are difficult to predict as these different advencements interact. It also makes it hard to process any one world changing advancement, as my monkey brain has been trained that this rate of change is just the new normal.

There is a tendency with age to slowly fall behind the firey edge of progress - yet if anything this lifetime will only see those fires burn brighter and further outwards than ever before.

I hope against hope that I can stay on that edge.