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Health & Fitness

Technology... Is It Ever Good Enough?

It's been a few weeks since my last blog and I've had a number of different topics swirling around in my head. Douglasville's Sunday alcohol sales, real estate and technology.

 

Since I sell houses for a living, technology is a necessary partner of mine. I have to stay on top of the latest tools and technologies that will help folks find homes.  So... months ago, I decided I needed a tablet.  I knew I was not an I-holic so computers with fruit on them were not on my list to buy.  However, I thought a tablet would be the be all, end all of technology.  I figured, okay, I will use this and only this... get rid of my laptop and GPS, maybe even my cell phone.  Boy... was I wrong!

Little did I know that in order to really get full functionality from my new tablet, I needed to download umpteen-million applications.  To print, there's an app.  To take calls, there's probably an app.  To write a document, a slow process on a tablet, there's an app.  And, to view certain documents, I need an app.  When I started to add up the costs of all the apps and then discovered that one of the apps caused some problems with the tablet (solved by deleting all apps), the tablet became a toy, a useful one at that.  But, it did not replace all of my other toys.

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So, more about technology for a moment. 

Why oh why do we human beings demand and even expect supernatural abilities from our techno toys?  The mere fact that I can talk to someone on the other side of the world with the push of a few buttons or by a few spoken commands should astound and amaze.  Instead, most of us get frustrated that the call takes more than one tenth of a second to go through. 

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The mere fact that you can access the internet from just about anywhere on this planet should astound and amaze but it doesn't.  Everybody wants more, faster, easier, quicker, scientific capabilities be damned.  

I took a trip to South Dakota in May.  I was driving up to the center of the nation, a place called Belle Fourche.  When I got there, I looked around, there was nothing around me. I could see some hills in the distance, rolling fields of some kind of vegetation, a barbed wire fence and the dirt road I was on. There was no sign of civilization as we know it.  I looked at my phone.  I had 4G LTE service, some of the fastest service available.  At that point in time, from that location, I could access the itnernet, maybe even play a little bit of words with friends.

I thought this was pretty neat. But so many of us have come to expect it.

I do think it's fantastic and wonderful and so great that cell phone technology exisits. I love my tablet too with it's GPS technology that can find me on this planet, no matter where I am, that's just COOL, not expected.

So, I often think about where all of this is heading.  What is next?  How can things possibly get faster?  Is the next step to have a direct interface with our brain so that all you have to do is think? 

An interface like that would certainly be easier than our antiquated keyboard and touchscreens of today.

So, where does it end?  Will it end when technology surpasses human capability to keep up?   Whatever the case, I'll keep buying new toys and tools and being amazed by them.

This is a wonderful time to be alive and I suspect it's only going to get better from here with holographic keyboards and displays and retina-driven cursors.

Some day, we'll look at the I Phone of today and wonder how we ever managed.

Keep up now... it's coming fast.

 

 

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