{in the not-too-distant future}

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When I was 18 years old, I used to run across campus to the nearest computer lab to check my e-mail and/or log on to ICQ or AOL Instant Messenger to see what my friends were up to.

By the time I was 19 and sophomore in college, I had my own computer, a 1-inch thick laptop, which allowed me to check my e-mail, write my papers, and check AOL IM to see which party my friends were attending on any given night.

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Over the course of one year, my proximity to everyone else I knew was minimized to only a few key strokes. Owning a portable computer added a previously unknown efficiency to my life. Yet, it was simply a microcosm for what was occurring all throughout the world by the end of the 20th century.

The explosion of technology allowing humans to be constantly linked to each other was on the horizon.

Nearly 17 years later…

I’m writing these words on my iPad.

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I’m writing these words on my laptop.

I’m writing these words on my iPhone.

I’m writing these words from my Google Glasses.

{Ok, the last line was a lie. I will never own Google Glasses}

To say things have changed technologically in the last twenty years is an understatement. Now I’m constantly connected to my friends, work, and the rest of the world by a myriad of technologic devices.

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{the array of cellphones I’ve used in the past 6 years}

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Only twenty years ago I was 15 and my family had one PC (personal computer). I had grown up during a technological evolution, owning a Commodore 64, later a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and even starting to dabble in electronic mail (e-mail) before I headed off to college in 1998.

Only half of my life later, I am sitting in a Tim Horton’s using their wifi to type this entry on an iPad. And lounging on the patio of a Panera eating up their bandwith. And surfing the web in my apartment using the HotSpot option on my Verizon data plan.

The world has changed beyond our wildest comprehensions in the past twenty years, if only in the way technology has become ubiquitious in our life. The evolution of technologic existence, from personal handheld devices to electronic medical records has harkened an interconnectedness which was fathomable only by the most forward thinking geniuses of the past.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=8ZmFEFO72gA

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Now if you own a “Smartphone”, which nearly every adult in America does, you may have to be picky in regards to what platform you use to stay conncected, if only because of time needed to maintain your “online presence.”

There’s SnapChat, Whatsapp, Instagram, Magisto, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, and the monolith Facebook. You can be on all of them simultaneously. Or individually. Or one of them. Or none of them (though that’s unlikely).

Forget ICQ (uh oh!) and AOL IM. They were dead and buried long ago. All hail the new regime of personal interconnectedness. At this rate, I sincerely don’t see an end in sight for our limits in technologic advances and how we will choose to use them.

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If I had to guess, people in 50 years will look back at this time in history and view us in bemusement like I do when re-watching the above scene of life in a post-apocalyptic world; bemused by children adorned in an amalgamation of non-coherent technologies.

But it’s not that I particularly think all these advances, or desires to advance, are necessarily good, or even helpful in the ways we intend. As a physician, I am constantly emboldened to become One with the latest advances in Electronic Medical Record systems. As if the cure to diabetes, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and substance abuse are all only a click away; they most certainly are not.

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The rise of technology, particularly the internet, has added a new dimension to our human capabilities, as Asimov so astutely predicted. No longer are we bound by the knowledge we are allowed to know. Today we are allowed to seek out knowledge, the knowledge we desire, not necessarily the knowledge others want for us.

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By my estimation, there is absolutely no telling where technology will take us in the next twenty years. But more importantly, do we need to go where technology is taking us? Only time will tell.