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Sometimes I like to think about how much change a 100 year old person alive today would have witnessed in their life. If we take someone born in 1925, they would have enjoyed both silent films and IMAX movies, used both early telephones and modern smartphones, witnessed a computing revolution, and much, much more. Personally, when I view a list like that, I can’t help but marvel at how much they had to adapt. Much like a parent doesn’t realize their child is growing taller, though, I think it is easy to ignore how much the world has changed in my lifetime, and how much it will continue to change. Not even counting the recent advancements in AI, I’ve witnessed the world before and after smartphones, seen quality consumer phone cameras develop, ridden in one of many mass produced electric vehicles, been in a self driving car, and more (just in 21 years!).
What do we get out of acknowledging this? I feel that there’s a cognitive bias lurking in not recognizing how dramatic the ongoing shifts in our life are, one that I’ve personally experienced. Growing up, it’s easy to assume that the world will function more or less the same, and you will experience adulthood in the same way you observed your parents doing. These crystalized ideas of how life should function are hard to update, namely because it's hard to realize how much the world is changing everyday. Bringing back that person born in 1925 for a second, it’d be disingenuous to claim that this person lived in the same world that their parents did. But growing up, I’m sure they thought they would! Recognizing this bias can help us make long-term decisions that possibly fare better as time passes.
I am blessed with long lived grandparents, and one startling piece of this is that they end up being quite blase about technology. I was showing them the picture translation features of new phones, and they weren’t surprised in the slightest! Magic was just getting better…
I'm only just past half that age, and the changes I've seen are ridiculous. My star-trek pocket computer (phone) is many thousands of times more powerful than my first computer, and I was unusual as a kid to even have access to that. There were 5 channels of TV available when I was a young kid, and videotapes went from very rare to common as I grew up. I was cutting-edge with my 300 bps modem in junior high. I was a young adult, out of college, when UUCP/Usenet gave way to universal tcp/ip and internet e-mail. I was part of http and html adoption, replacing gopher and ftp and the like. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. wait, what was I saying?
The last 100 years is the first part in history with recorded media available. It's only been a few hundred that printing was cheap enough that there's a lot of novels and written detail about historical state of the world. There are records and sparse documents going back a few thousand years. It gets even less documented (though there are artifacts and other evidence) for the 30K or so years before that, not much for the 300K or so that probably-conscious beings have been on earth.
It's so easy to forget just how recently everything we take for granted has happened.
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