Hindsight is a powerful thing. Looking back at things retrospectively, it becomes easy to categorise history into distinct, tangible periods. The Industrial Revolution, The Renaissance, The Dark Ages etc. We learn about these defining periods of human history, their significance, and how they changed the world forever.
In the next couple of centuries, when the internet is embedded within every device in every single home, when Terabytes of data fit onto a device the size of a postcard, they will look back at where it all started, and the beginning of the technological revolution will be dated to somewhere around the development of the internet.
Nowadays, Pythagoras' Theorem is taught to children whose age is barely in double figures. Mathematical discoveries like that took years to research and uncover in the old days, and now infants learn them with ease. The mind boggles at the opportunities that befall those in the future considering the current growth rate of technology. In future centuries and millennia, I am sure people will look back on this period, the late 20th - 21st century as a defining period of technological advancement. They will learn how we learned to harness electricity, how we developed the internet, how quickly it grew, how data transformed from requiring whole buildings and tons of equipment in order to store megabytes of data to being able to fit gigabytes on a persons lap or in their mobile phones. They will learn how we had practically the sum of all knowledge available at our fingertips, and how for the most part, it was inconceivably cheap. And then they will come to learn with disbelief, how we used such fantastic technologies; How we spend hours upon hours sat in front of our screens, looking at pictures of kittens and puppies, sending anonymous hate to each other on sights like reddit, the amount of mindless accounts dedicated solely to the worship of teen idols like Justin Bieber and the rise of the so-called internet celebrities, those who make videos of themselves playing video games for others to waste their time watching, how dictionaries have to be updated to accommodate so-called words like "selfie" and "lol", and perhaps more maliciously how we willingly gave up our personal privacy to governments without a fight, giving them free reign to monitor our every communication.
They will cherish the ingenuity of those geniuses, those pioneers who led the revolution, those like Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Alan Turing and others. They will praise these precious inventions that were born in our times, the doubtless impact they will have over future inventions, and then they will look down upon is with contempt at how we wasted such gifts.
