Isn't our age amazing?

I can communicate with every person on this planet that has the internet connection.
I can, through several clicks, see almost any place in the world.
I can learn and get in contact with anyone and anything, no matter how far away geographically and historically is it from me.
I can learn pretty much anything about pretty much anything I want.
I can read texts from several centuries ago, in any digitalised library in the world, see and hear all the remnants of thousands of years of history.
I have access to the whole world’s knowledge. (almost)
I have the whole world in my hands, it’s one click away from me, and I don’t even have to leave my house.

Besides that, I live in the most peaceful era ever. The last major military conflict happened 72 years ago, there are no major illnesses and catasteophies, we’re slowly reaching peace and equality we’ve been trying to achieve for decades, perhaps even centurues now, and everyone can find and offer help about anything, considering the ability to connect with other people with and share knowkedge, information and experience. Now, more than ever, humans are united rather than tribalistic. By being interconnected, we’re learning about each other much more, and are becomming more aware of many things that have been hidden and ignored all this time.
Technology is constantly advancing, and we’re now considering what our grandparents couldn’t even dream about. What was fantaasy is slowly becoming reality now.
For the very first time in human history, education is almost completely free and is actually a choice, rather than a privilege, for most of the world at least.

Yes, I’m very, very glad to live in this era, and I wouldn’t change it for any other.

Absolutely.

Anyone who watches Star Trek is unimpressed by your age.

What @Sneki2 said, although I still miss the days when life was simple without smart phones and the internet. Made me appreciate little things more. People also got out and socialized more. Without technology people were forced to physically meet and bond.

Also, speaking of technology, don’t forget that we are overusing it to some degree too. People invent robots to do things human can easily do. Some people are getting dependent on technology for things that they can easily do without special gadgets. Crime is also harder to be detected. Technology isn’t all good.

I mean, I like this area for all the convenience, but I can still see the good in other areas. Each area has something good in it, something we can learn from.

@NomoreY_A I’m glad you can see good things in this area too. I get sick of people seeing only the negative and saying human is devoluting. That’s something the world needs now.

I love all these things and I’m always amazed when I tell kids that when I grew up, there was no DVD player, no computer, no answering machine, no caller ID. (I’m 51)

I love all this technology but I’m really, really glad I grew up in a time where we played outside as kids, got to walk all over unsupervised, and just enjoyed being with each other. I think there are so many advantages to having technology (like the ease with which we communicate and keep in touch) but I love that when I grew up, it was outside, jumping rope or inside reading books and not staring at screens. We watched TV in the evening but there was no 24/7 kids’ channel and other than that, it was drawing, painting or reading books. If I wanted to go out with my friend, I would walk several miles to her house. Now a parent would get arrested for letting their young child walk on the street unsupervised.

I think I grew up at a perfect time. I’m at the tail end of people hwo had the childhood I describe above. When I was a young teen, video games at home came out but not many people had them. People were starting to get answering machines and VCR’s.

My elementary school aged daughter was saying the other day she wonders what it’s going to be like in 50 years. It’s amazing because we’ve come so far since I was her age, I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like 50 years from now.

Forty years ago you could do the same thing with radio, what makes this age special is the nonlocalization of information.

@jca I did all.of rhose things as a child too and I’m 22. Kids still play outside and visit each other’s houses. It’s far from being as common as it used to be before, though.

I know, @Sneki2. I think now there’s the added distraction of the screen, which is 24/7. Also, when I was little it wasn’t a crime for a little kid to walk miles somewhere alone but now it is.

^ True that. It’s kinda saddening to hear a kid can’t walk alone.

@jca it was a crime for me to walk alone when I was a kid. I was only given a little more freedom recently. Maybe it has something to do with culture.

Man, this has to be the most positive thread I’ve seen on this site in a coon’s age.

I get nostalgic at times, but I wouldn’t turn the clock back for the world for all the reasons Sneki, Mimi and jca mentioned.

I do think kids today are getting short changed, though.

I would not want to turn the clock back either, but I think I grew up in the best time period ever. We played outside from dawn to dusk. We knew all the neighbors. We never wore helmets and we rode in the back of pick up trucks. Then I got to witness the electronic age and all the wonders that has brought. I truly am living the wonder years.

Well, we talk a lot about how people were more in touch with their neighbors back when we were kids, but my mother had the same complaint in the sixties.

She was a southerner, and she noticed as air conditioning and Tv entered the homes, people didn’t sit out on their porches in the evenings anymore and talk to the neighbors as they walked past on the sidewalk. She noticed that they cloistered inside their homes in the air conditioning in front of that new fascinating visual source of news and entertainment. She missed the intimacy of her neighbors even then. This isolation has been progressing for some time.

I had a discussion with my wife about why so many kids are staying inside and playing video games. Something we have noticed is when we babysit any of our 12 neices or nephews they don’t play video games until after dark, they’re outside playing in our yard. Then we realized that none of them really have large yards to go home too and there is really no safe place for them to play outside so they don’t. Digging a little further it’s modern house construction, they simply are not “outside friendly” for kids. It forces the parents to hover and not let them play on their own so they stay inside. When both parents work video games are about all there is left. Then we also realized we are now spending a lot more time outside ourselves since moving to a place with acreage.

Years ago, I would work with other people, separated by over half a mile. The first thing we’d do is set up a communications line. This could be pretty quick, or take an entire day, depending on the problems.
My coworker would be waiting for hours for me to find his tone signal, while I would be pumping water out of the manhole, trying to get to the splice case.
Radios made it a little better, but you couldn’t talk on the radio and be in the manhole at the same time.
Then cell phones came in, and that made it much faster. The laptops we got then made it all a breeze.
We got a lot more work done, and still fucked off more than before.

Just consider the role that water plays in our daily lives, and the miracles of plumbing and sewage.

With the ease of turning a faucet, we get clean, hot-and-cold running water. When we’re done using water for whatever purpose, it disappears down a drain. Cholera, and other water-borne diseases, aren’t even a concern in the developed world.

We take these services for granted, but try to imagine your life without them.

Yes, it is amazing, look at what we have gained in a short 20 years or so. One big leap for mankind, but maybe a loss too as @Espiritus_Corvus said. We are not able to access information in seconds that would have taken days, if not weeks to access in the past. pretty mind blowing, absolutely.

I think the race to the moon back in the 60’s was way cooler. The phones (and all of the other electronic gizmos) of today, although quite the thing, are just a easy way for people to become more disconnected.

I do love it. But I miss the other times, too. We were so much on our own.

It is amazing and great, though I think it was being imagined 40 years ago, and quite possible to those who knew about it 30 years ago. 32 years ago, I remember a friend of mine doing school research using Usenet.

And we were able to prank call people before caller ID.
Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Better let him out. Haha

Is your fridge running?......

Edit: We are able to access information in seconds….

@chyna Now only people with phone-number-fakers, like spam companies, can do prank calls.

You could still do prank calls, just randomly dialing numbers.

That’s not the point, @Coloma. That’s how we did prank calls anyway, just by dialing random numbers. With caller ID they could see your number and report it. You’d have to remember to *67 first, so they can’t see your number.

@Dutchess_III Yep. And even the phone company didn’t have a way to figure out who had placed a call, as non-long-distance calls didn’t result in any call history, and there was no way for them to do a computerized search. Parents would have no idea their kids were placing local calls unless they caught them in the act or a victim figured it out somehow and came to the parents.

Nowadays, if the police care enough, they can use computers to figure out who called someone, if the victim is upset enough to make a serious complaints. Also even parents can get full lists of all calls in and out, at least for smart phones.

@Dutchess_III Well…unless you were calling the same number over and over again the odds of someone reporting a random prank call would be extremely small, plus, people often answer inspite of caller ID because hey are curious. Still totally possible to make crank calls.

I love what tech does for the world today, but I am glad I predate so much of it.
It disappoints me that my baby brother had computers in a class, but I did not. When I was in highschool, office staff were being shown how to use them.
Still, being my age, tech is like having a grandchild. You were there to see the family and life experiences which led up to this little, feisty go getter.
Color tv was there nefore me, but most people still had black and white. As I grew up, this kid bragged they got color, then that kid, more, then us, and feeling shocked to find some of my friends still had b&w. One day I came home and found out my mom had gotten that new cable thing! OMG!
Lots of near tragedies in my life made me wonder if this/that had gone wrong how long until they would have found me. Cell phones! Yayyyyyy!
I used to think I had the most unusual pets in the world. Youtube set me straight on that. $700 for encyclopedias? Google!
I watched the world go from playing pong, when I was a teen, to vr.
I love seeing tech like a grandchild, watching stuff grow, and evolve. Kids now see flip phones as old stuff, they can’t know the joy of watching Star Trek for years, and then getting that first flip phone and calling all the friends to play like Kirk.
I bounce these gadgets on my knee, and tell them about when their daddy was new, and we were all so amazed.

What would be the fun of calling the same number over and over?
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“Some kids keep calling and saying, ‘Is your refrigerator running? Go catch it!’ I want them arrested!”

”arrested killed. they sound black, too!”

We used to ring peoples doorbells and then run off. More fun and immediate than making prank calls, LOL

My favorite prank phone call was one a friend and I made. This lady answered the phone.
I said, “I want a hamburger, french fries, milkshake too!” Only I strung it out so it sounded like one word, “Iwantahamburgerfrenchfriedmilkhaketoo!!”
There was a pause, then the lady kind of laughed and said, “OK. Which one of my crazy kids is this?”
We spent 5 minutes convincing her that we were not one of her crazy kids! She drove US crazy in the end by refusing to believe it wasn’t one of her crazy kids! (payback!) We had so much fun. She was such a neat, neat lady, so good natured and easy going, the exact opposite of my own high strung mother. I wanted to go live with her.

Personally, I liked filling up mailboxes with shaving cream but yeah, doorbell ditch was a great game too and TP’ing houses. haha

Never did TP anything. Never did the mailbox thing either.

This derailment is a buzz kill. I was enjoying the thread in context.

@Patty_Melt It’s all good, fun and games, just fun and games. Bringing back some silly memories

I agree @Patty_Melt. So many threads are derailed these days it feels like some people think Fluther is their own personal chatroom. I wish people would use the chatroom rather than posting streams of posts, and often irrelevant posts.

We boomers used to be a fun bunch back in the day, before we all got so damn stiff and serious.

And…that’s the end of THIS thread. Again.

Earthbound_Misfit Sorry, just musing here. You do have a valid point, however I cant ever seem to get into the chat room. So, guilty as charged, I reckon.

@Dutchess_III Yup, as Porky Pig used to say, Bedee bedee bedee, that’s all, folks! (Que Merry Melodies Theme).

Didn’t know I was surrounded by an an army of Bart Simpsons. :D

Just how much free association is okay in social? My perception of social sort of lends itself to taking that fork in the ford. LOL

Oops, seems like I started the derailment. Sorry.

@chyna That’s okay, I am easily led astray. haha

Edit above: ....fork in the road, not fork in the ford.

the little criminals from the boys and girls club on the corner ring the doorbell daily in the Summertime. They don’t bother to run. Last Summer I arrived home in the car just as a little fat boy broke away from a group of 5 of his companions and strolled over to press my doorbell. I wheeled into the driveway as he ran off to join his companions. I checked my watch. 5:12. At 4:45 The next day, I dug out the long extension ladder, planted it on the deck in back and struggled up to the roof with a full bucket of water. Walked the length of the roof to the front of the house and set up the bucket at the edge of the roof approximately above the gate with the doorbell. Then off to the corner of the roof to watch proceedings on the sidewalk.

Most excellent Stanley. The stealth dinger meets with the, even more stealthy, bucket master. ;-) haha

Sorry to be a party pooper (does anyone use that phrase any more?), but there is something unsettling about the advances being made in AI. A number of prominent people, including Stephen Hawking, have called attention to the potential dangers For a chilling account of where things may be headed, see this article by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. If it gets to the point where we become dependent on machines and no longer can keep track of how they arrive at their decisions, then they will have in effect taken over.

AI is not what people think. AI simply cannot take control over something we don’t give it and especially if we keep it fragmented and application specific. Honestly, yeah the future will not need our labor like it did in the past. I see it as a good thing.

I just recently heard of the movie Robot And Frank. I bought a copy, and I love it. I want one!
If I fall, and can’t get up, I want a robot, not a button.

I’m 66 years old and am scrambling to keep up and that can be fun, astounding and painful. A couple weeks ago I finally hooked up wifi in our house (that was painful). Now it feels like I’m on vacation staying at an expensive hotel. Remote printer/scanner/copier/fax machine, iPad, stereo system, TV, laptops, cameras are all on line.

Just 6 days ago I bought a new 2017 Ford F150 pickup with sync onboard. Fun learning all about it.

Last night I bought an apple watch not because I need it but because I’m fascinated by it and it’s another way to help me keep up with technology.

I wonder what the world of technology will look like in 50 years when I’m long gone. I’m sure it will be mind bogglingly awesome.

@gondwanalon Me too, I would like to hang around and play with all those new gadgets, but in 50 years I will be pushing up daisies.

I saw a picture once of people in the future who wore helmets all the time. Displayed on the view screen was a beautiful world, just the way it should be. But, in reality, on the outside of the helmet’s screen, the world was a toilet bowl of filth and garbage. But no-one knew, because all they could see was what was on the screen.
That’s what the future world will look like, I imagine.
Enjoy that tech!

I’ll bet flutherother has some stories about how much shoe leather they went through for a news story back then vs what they get through their desktops today.

I can do in fifteen minutes what it took a week or more to do in a decent reference library, if they even had the proper books. Any subject can be accessed now from libraries all over the world at a few clicks of the mouse. I’ve probably gathered more factual information in the past couple of years alone, than I have in the previous 62 years. It’s really incredible, still unbelievable to me that I can do this. Anyone who lived before this tech was even dreamed of probably feels the same way.