The Constant of Change

Which of us ever thought 50 years ago that 'change' would become a constant in our lives?  The Boomers came of age at the dawn not of the Age of Aquarius, but of the Electronic Age.  Most of us didn't notice.  The only reason I sort of did was my honey was in Numerical Analysis as part of his Math Degree, and he was using a computer the size of a room when he was learning how to program.  We were 20 when we were walking to that building to pick up his 'program cards'.

Now, in just two generations - there has been  a one trillion fold increase in the processing power in our electronics.  I found a nifty website that shows comparison of 'floating operations per second' across various drives and devices.  Not only does it compare the speed, but also the miniaturization of our electronics.  http://pages.experts-exchange.com/processing-power-compared/    I spent several minutes looking and deciphering the comparisons.  The time-lapsed presentation was really effective.  This website illustrates the pace of change.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, extrapolated computers would increase in power and decrease in cost at an exponential rate.  Most people have distilled this to 'processing power will double every two years'.   Now, there's even a prediction that "Moore's Law" will become obsolete about 2020 - physics finally limiting how small our transistors can shrink.  Moore was certainly prophetic, but even he couldn't imagine the speed at which our lives would become dominated by electronics. How many of us feel today we are metaphorically running as fast as we can and still falling behind?

Is this is how people felt as they streamed away from the farming life into the urban life where they changed how they worked, how they obtained the necessities of life, and where they lived?  In two generations in the 1800's clothes were mass produced, food was processed (canned and bottled), housing pre-fabricated and built (pre-cut lumber and pre-made uniform bricks), and mechanics was the electronics of the age.  I suspect those changes must have seemed too fast.  Lots of sentences could have begun:  'In my day...'

Prior to 2007, we could all see the unrelenting march of electronics into our businesses and homes.  Livings were made writing programs which automated accounting, payroll calculations, business forecasting, inventory, job costs and so forth.  Every automation seemed to breed three more.  Entire industries have gone into freefall due to automation: publishing, and the postal service to name two. However, in 2007, Steve Jobs debuted the iphone, and our lives can now be measured into pre-iphone/post-iphone existence.

There's no need to list the hundreds if not thousands of overt and subtle ways the iphone has accelerated change.  Products which have been around for a hundred or more years have vanished seemingly overnight. (Think land line phones, phone books, day-planners, paper maps, calendars, cameras, alarm clocks, and wrist watches.)  All of this is happening so fast, we poor humans just can't keep up no matter how hard we try.  Talk about anxiety producing!

And that's what's happening:  Change is morphing into anxiety.  The more change we personally register, the more anxiety we feel.  And fear is certainly one of the handmaidens of anxiety.  If we are young, we wonder (and sometimes fear) what the world is going to look like as we age.  If we are of working age, we fear loss of our livelihood.  If we are retired, we feel the frustration of being left behind and fear being left out of this increasingly incomprehensible world.  I've always thought change was a positive agent, and part of me still thinks it is, but even an optimist like me has doubts about the rate of change we are all experiencing.

I think the boat has sailed for the retired of this world leaving us pretty much behind.  We can try to 'keep up' to a limited degree, but that's about it.  For the middle aged, staying ahead of the automation curve is the name of the game. For the millennials it's all about how much education can they get.  For the post-millennials, the dice are still rolling.  It's all our jobs to help our post-millennials be 21st century people since the Electronic Revolution (the true revolution which is going on all over the world), has killed the 20th century completely.