When I was 10 years old, my parents took us to the World’s Fair in New York. It was an amazing, magical trip, full of wonderful and amazing things. At the IBM pavilion, they had a computer! It could play tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses, for you non-American English speakers out there), and it never lost! I think my very favorite exhibit, though, was the “It’s a Small World” ride, with the singing and dancing dolls. It’s a catchy tune, the costumes and dioramas were colorful, it really is an admirable sentiment that despite our superficial cultural differences we all live together and share one planet, and the technology, at that time, was absolutely stunning.
Not amazing, but still pretty cool
When I saw it at Disneyland as an adult in my young 20s, the technology was already considered passé, but I still kind of enjoyed it.
Flash forward a few years, another trip to Disneyland, I think my nephew Don was about 7 or so and we were on the train ride around the perimeter. He was in his dinosaur phase at that point, and so we pointed out the dinosaurs as we passed and he said, with an air of great sophistication “They’re not real.”
Today I took the kids to a Dinosaur Park which is on the roof of a local shopping center because we had free tickets. We enjoyed the animatronic dinosaurs, and the 4D film (the room shook a couple of times), but even Isabel, who is 5, was not amazed or even surprised at the technology. In fact, on a couple of the dinosaurs, there were visible rips in the rubber. The coolest bit for me was a “time machine,” a neat little illusion that made you a little dizzy even though you could totally see how it was done. You walked down a walkway which was not moving, inside a moving cylinder.
The wonders of yesterday are commonplace today. The wonders of today will be commonplace 10 years from now. Driverless cars, robots who can pass for human, bionic body parts which are superior to the original, and much, much more. Of course some questions of ethics will come up along the way but for the most part, I say, bring it on.
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