Around the World in 80 Days

1 comment on Hacker News

1. NegativebaneApr 18, 2015

   It's funny how the future kind of crept up on us. I'm at the right age to remember 8-bit computers as an oddity in just a few homes I knew about, to today's always on, always connected, satellite directed super technology ultra modernism. But I don't ever remember passing date where I was suddenly "in the future". I remember think it was going to be the 2000s, and here we are almost a generation in, and there doesn't seem to have been that kind of earthshaking revolution. It's like putting on weight, or getting grey hair, it just sort of happens gradually, and only when you look back and reflect does the magnitude of the change come into perspective.

   But then I think back to how we used to do things and they seem almost inconceivable, even within my own lifetime. When I was an sci-fi reading 10 year old, could I have imagined going for a walk, thinking of something mundane like "I want something to eat" pull out my phone, find a place, read the menu, get dozens of reviews and recommendations, and then have my phone use satellites...in space to give me walking directions? Even the craziest sci-fi I grew up with didn't really predict that chain of events.

   I recently took a job supervising a young crop of engineers, all born in the 90s. They never knew of life without the internet. It doesn't occur to them that you used to have to pick up the phone and call the movie theater to find out what was playing, or look up the playtimes in the entertainment section of the daily newspaper. Most of them have never even held a paper map, have no idea what a card catalog is, or any of that.

   I'm reminded of my departed grandmother, who was born in 1900 before powered flight, and my father who was born after. It's not like early flight suddenly made the world available to her. It took decades for it to become something that she could directly benefit from. Yet my father can't remember not being able to buy a plane ticket to go pretty much anywhere on the planet, and neither can I. It's inconceivable that people would spend weeks on a boat to get somewhere. Around the World in 80 Days seems like an absurd concept for a story today, and when they tried to make a modern movie about the story in 2004, it bombed terribly at the box office.

   I wonder how the younger generation look at old movies, who's central plot device hinges on people not having ever present smart phones and internet connections, how do they think of these absurd stories?