What We Get Wrong About Technology
I suspect that it is easy to fixate on fantasies of massive technological leaps forward, because the truly revolutionary changes that underpin our lives are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time.<p>If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing.<p>All the big stuff that we think defines the modern era.<p>What would probably really impress the hell out of them would be a supermarket, though.<p>To a person from that time, the idea of being able to eat fresh peaches in the dead of winter would be just as magical as being able to instantly translate Russian into English, and yet it probably wouldn't occur to us to bring it up because fruit at the supermarket is just... obvious.<p>So as we look forward, the question is, what will be obvious to people ten or twenty years from now?