The Dawn of a New Technological Era

The great technological revolution has begun. The modern man has now reached a stage in his evolution that empowers him to use his technology to conquer his environment. No more is the modern man shackled to the whims of Mother Nature. The modern man's destiny is getting less and less controlled by the laws of nature; the modern man's technology has effectively allowed him to rewrite the laws of nature as he sees fit. This is the dawn of the information-on-demand era.

To put this into perspective, consider the following scenario: You are somewhere far away from campus and the weather is scorching hot. You need to return to campus. Now, the options are bleak for the man untouched by the information-on-demand revolution: he is forced (by nature) to walk back to campus in the scorching heat, or, he is required to carry an array of local bus schedules with him and has to further look them up in order to compute a dignified route back to campus.

Something about those scenarios should strike the modern man as insulting. The idea that the modern man has to walk any further than the distance from his house to his car must certainly come off as an assault on his technological dignity (after all, he should have been able to use his technology to ameliorate a humiliating walk in the scorching sun).

Likewise, the alternative of having to fumble over a bagload of bus schedules in order to successfully avoid such a humiliating walk must also come off as equally insulting. Why should the modern man have to bother himself with laborious calculations in order to live the technological life? Shouldn't his technology be already able to achieve this feat? Is it possible for the modern man to avoid the humiliating walk, and at the same time not carry around those schedules or perform tedious calculations?

The answer, in 2009, is, yes, and the solution is the iPhone 3GS. That entire stack of bus schedules can be replaced with something better -- far better. That something is the Internet. Throw in GPS, a directional compass, and the armada of features that Google Maps provides and you've got yourself a mobile navigation system that allows the modern man to shield himself from yet another insult that Mother Nature tries to inflict upon him. No manual calculations required -- just select the place you want to go to and the technology figures it all out.

But this is just the beginning. Such a level of "life simplification" would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. It is incredible to observe how much technology has advanced within a span of just a few years. Who knows what the next few years will have in store for the modern man.