We’re living in a magical age, and we don’t even recognize it.
For example, with a single click I can point you at this article, which was originally in Italian, but Google Translations turns into rough-but-understandable English. Let’s take a moment and count the things that couldn’t have happened when I was a tyke:
1. No machine translation available.
2. No free service to translate dozens of languages into dozens of other languages.
3. No internet at the consumer level.
4. No personal computers to speak of.
5. No mobile devices able to access free machine translation services and display web pages.
6. No visual internet.
7. No blogging.
8. No social media.
9. No such thing as many-to-many communications.
10. No electronic publishing, period.
No, it isn’t a flying car, but it is a whole boatload of change. And this is in just one tiny corner of consumer electronics. Consider that we’ll be looking at the same amount of change in the next 12-15 years, and tell me why there shouldn’t be room for optimism?
If you’d like, you can read the original in Italian via this link.
November 5th, 2008 / 1 Comment »
November 5th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Thanks for linking
Internet and Google are a real progress indeed. It’s a safer and cheaper way to reach every place in the world than a flying car.