This will probably be a long post, if you are a TLDR; type person you can skip over to one of the Recipes (I highly recommend the Baked Curried Chicken). This is a post about my thoughts as I get closer to the end of decade 6 than the beginning. Imagine, how time flies! It just seems like yesterday I was slogging my duffel from the plane to the bus in Cairo! Two more Aprils and it will be 50 years – Wow!
But I digress. A lot has happened in the past 50 years, both to me and to the rest of the world. I hardly think a GenZ could cope in my world of the 70’s, not because of ability but because of the many things we take for granted now that weren’t even on the horizon then.
Computers in the 70’s were in basement rooms with lots of air conditioning, accessible by something called the High Speed Reader using punch cards. A far cry from the power I carry around in my jacket pocket these days! Researching something meant heading to the library and the Dewey Decimal System, not Googling an answer that gets ‘smoothed out’ by ChatGPT before you hand it in as a term paper.
Are we better off than we were 50 years ago? In general I think we are. The birth of the Internet meant access for the planet, levelling the playing field for people in remote or under-privileged countries, I remember one of my first ‘tutoring’ jobs was helping a young lady in Singapore with her computer programming studies. In the end she won a job at Google. We lost track after that but it makes me feel good that she was able to achieve her goal. Imagine a person in Northern Canada remote tutoring someone in Southeast Asia for a job in California. To me that has always been the power of the Internet and NOT the latest anger-fest on FB or propaganda disguised as news put out by the MSM.
While the Internet has opened up many new opportunities, one thing that I think we have lost in the ensuing generations since IBM Big Iron is curiousity. Knowledge is always at hand, just waiting to plucked off a search engine or spit back by an ‘AI Assistant’. In the process we have lost the ‘What if?’, the need to actually explore our surroundings and subjects that interest us. Children today spend their free time glued to a 3 x 5 screen instead of skinning knees climbing trees or playing a game of scrub in a backlot someplace.
This is not one of those bread was a nickel and it was 10 miles to school – uphill both ways – kinda posts. Far from it. This is more a sadness that we have created a world without curiousity and by extension a world without questioning. The current state of the world is a prime example of that, pint-sized potentates seizing power in many countries in fascist fashion, with nary a pushback from the bulk of the population.
I read recently that the average IQ of children has declined in the years since technology was introduced in the classroom. Teachers are now sounding the alarm bells and countries are starting to mandate pen and paper in school.
It brings to mind an encounter I had a few years ago with a company contracted to provide high school literature software. They asked my opinion on the demo version. Basically it was a series of laptops in a circle that shared a common whiteboard so that the students could ‘collaborate’ via the whiteboard.
I tried the demo and sort of scratched my head. The obvious question in my mind was ‘why not just get the students to sit in a circle and talk to each other?’ A flip chart in the middle of the circle and a handful of magic markers and they would be ready to rock.
Needless to say my question was not well received. I have no idea what became of the software but I am sure somewhere there are teachers spending their PD days learning how to ‘effectively’ use it.
Where will we be in 50 years? In some ways I am thankful I won’t have to worry about that question! AI will have either matured to the point where it actually improves the lives of people and not just the oligarchs or it will be shelved in some museum as yet another folly along the way (who remembers Rambus or Transmeta’s microkernel – both good ideas that hit the shelf far too soon). Gas guzzling cars should be a thing of the past, replaced eventually by hydrogen fuel cells after a lengthy experiment with lithium batteries and cars that plug in every night. We will probably still be building a base on the Moon to jump off to Mars from and the oligarchs of today who have caused such suffering will be sharing Forest Lawn with me.
In my twisted heart of hearts there is a thought that one day there will be a great upheaval, forcing people to reconnect with the only planet we can survive on and more importantly each other in meaningful ways. i am following a young lady on Facebook talking about gratitude and starting to think that perhaps that will be the place to start the healing. Simply being grateful for every new morning, every conversation, every squirrel that sits eating an acorn in the tree over your back deck.
It won’t be like a nuclear war, or planet killing asteroid, more like one person saying “This is bullshit!” and turning off the evening news. Then another, then another. then 5 wandering into a cafe and sharing a coffee. It could become contagious.
I won’t be around but I would be curious…
Peace,
Mark
(original photo by garten-gg on pixabay.com)