In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation a redshirt used a tricorder to check the weather and said they would have to beam up soon because a storm was approaching.

At the time I thought to myself: “Bah, that’s never happening, it’s pure fantasy!”

A few years later I told some friends we’d have to pack up our picnic because according to the weather radar app on my phone we had about 7 minutes until we got drenched… no wait… 6 minutes.

5m:30s later we were standing under shelter watching the storm front rolling in, and I remembered that Star Trek scene.

We live in the future.

I spent most of my youth through the 80s and 90s thinking technology was a bit shit. Computers worked until they ground to a halt with lots of whirring and crunching; we had enormous flat TVs that had terrible pictures; you could store an album of music just about if you jumped through annoying hoops to write it to a disc; MP3 appeared and disappointed because flash memory was limited to 16MB at a sensible price... Then slowly but surely the future happened, until it was suddenly apparent that technology was now outstripping our imagination in many areas. The problem we have now is that society is way behind where it needs to be to make proper use of the tech we have, whilst other areas are woefully underserved by tech at all. We simultaneously have an abundance of tech and not enough engineers to roll it out (whilst struggling with the societal implications of some aspects). Exciting times indeed.

There was a line from the movie 'Ted', that film about a child's stuffed bear coming to life. It was something along the lines of "No matter how special and amazing something is, eventually people get bored of it and move onto something else."

It will probably be like this for us. The children will just take it for granted as they grow up with it, we will be endlessly amazed by it.