We have just spent a week with our granddaughters who are three and five. They can operate the remote control for the television, know how to use their iPads and blow me away with their imaginations. I wonder what they will see in their lifetimes. As we stumble into a new year, wondering what might unfold in the world in the next twelve months, I can’t but think back to what my grandmother and even my mother witnessed in their lifetimes.
My grandmother was an immigrant who crossed from England arriving in Montreal to travel to Saskatchewan to begin farming. She travelled by steam engine driven train and then by wagon to their homestead outside of Yorkton. She lived in a sod hut. She witnessed the coming of telephones, electricity to the farm, moving to Yorkton, then Fort Frances. She raised three children in our community and the family was among the first to have a radio and then a black and white television. She flew in a jet when travellers dressed for travel.
I look to my mother who is 98 and built our cabin on Turtle Island with my father. In 1954 theirs was the third home on third street. I was ten years old when we got our first television. Up to then, we listened to the radio and if we were sick often my mother would tune into the Art Linkletter show. She and my father travelled about Canada. The newspaper was part of the family. We watched spellbound at the Bud Hebert cabin as the astronauts descended from the moon lander. We were all amazed that rocket travel beyond on world was now possible.
She didn’t trust computers but recognized their value to the newspaper industry and gave way to do all the accounting with them.
I think of myself who studied software in 1970 and felt that it had a long way to go before it would be adopted by people. Today my cell phone with all its aps is more powerful than the first computers we used in the newspaper. Today that phone can call anywhere in the world and connect with someone in just about every country.
I listened to the president of Nvidia talk about the future of computing in the next few years and wondered at the changes that will occur in our immediate lifetimes. He spoke of the impact these new systems will have on health, and I harken back to Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy on Star Trek who could have a handheld device over a patient that would quickly give a diagnosis of the illness and then by waving the device over the patient a second time would provide a cure. Will AI computer systems mimic those Star Trek ideas?
We may be stumbling into 2025, but I can’t imagine what my grandchildren will experience and see in their futures. Will it be watching the first humans land on Mars by the time they are 10? Will they see major reductions in carbon fuels and the ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere to begin cooling the world.
