The Good NEW Days
Remember that Youtube video of two seventeen-year-old guys trying to figure out how to use a rotary phone? It was funny to my generation because nothing seems simpler or more obvious to operate than a rotary phone. But to kids who have never worked one, it’s pretty much inscrutable. Early in elementary school a teacher asked our class to draw pictures of what we thought the world would be like in 1980 when we were to graduate from high school. My picture featured people going places in flying cars and zipping through the air via jetpacks. As I grew older, I read a lot of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury science fiction/science fantasy stories in which robots would do all the work for people and where huge computers that took up rooms full of floor space could answer questions. Surely those would be integral parts of our daily lives in the far-off future year of 1980! Well, I got a lot of that wrong. Even in 2022 (1980-plus-forty-two), we’re still not zipping around in flying cars. A...