A few days ago I found out that the frequency my mobile phone uses would no longer be available and that I would have to get a new phone. Fortunately, the phone company I use offered to give me a new phone for free, so this morning I spent a couple of hours running around getting and sorting out my new phone.
None of this is particularly exciting, but it got me thinking again about something that often crosses my mind; namely, how quickly and easily new technologies can seep into our lives until they become so much a part of our daily existence that we just can't imagine life without them.
I'm old enough to remember a time when nobody had mobile phones. When I was a kid, they simply didn't exist for the general public. Smart phones were just a distant science-fiction idea that some computer engineers in a lab somewhere were dreaming about. Nobody in my family owned a personal computer when I was at school, and I didn't know anybody else who owned one.
Life back then didn't seem to be any more difficult or less convenient than it is now, and yet things like mobile phones and personal computers are so central to virtually every aspect of our lives today that it's difficult to imagine society operating without them.
The interesting (and slightly scary) thing is how these devices take over so much of our lives without us really noticing. I certainly don't remember any sudden transition from not using mobile phones and computers to suddenly using them; it just seemed to happen gradually and seamlessly. I guess humans have an amazing ability to adapt to new conditions and circumstances, and the way things were before just becomes a distant, half-remembered memory.
I often wonder that if computers are doing so many of the jobs that people used to do, what new jobs have come along for all those people? Incidentally, my office computer crashed in the middle of writing this Editor's Note and I had to restart it… so perhaps there are lots of new jobs for those people who can fix computers.
Ben Edwards
Editor
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