LIFE COULD BE BETTER
Pick a thoroughfare through any major city in the world—Fifth Avenue in New York, the Champs Elysees in Paris, Knightsbridge in London, Market Street in San Francisco, Avenida Atlântica in Rio de Janeiro—and if the weather’s nice, you’ll see thousands of people strolling along, listing to their portable music player, chatting on cell phones, tapping out text messages, or reading email. Occasionally, a runner may zip past, checking her distance and speed with a GPS device strapped to her wrist. Most are oblivious to airplanes whizzing overhead or the street traffic—sleek modern vehicles carrying passengers who surf the web on their PDAs, watch videos on their mobile phones, or slug out a home run on a Nintendo. Some cars even talk to their drivers, directing them to their programmed destinations. It looks as if we’re in the golden age of technology, a time like none other in the history of the world. Some say there’s even too much, that we’re in a state of technology overload.
But today’s impressive technological gadgets blind people to the fact that more, much more, is yet to be invented—world-changing technologies that we’ve yet to see. Because of the accumulation of technologies over the last several centuries, we’ve become desensitized, fooled into thinking that we are the greatest inventive generation of all time. But we have lulled ourselves into thinking we are greater than we really are. Somewhere yet to be invented are groundbreaking technologies that would make today’s gadgets seem trivial. We’re so complacent with what we have that no one realizes what our lives could be like … if Americans really began to invent.