20 years ago most people had cellphones, laptops, and social media.
Right, and now we have “phones” with zero buttons, microscopic pixels, speech recognition, facial recognition, real time editing of video calls to make you look like a cartoon dog, games, dead reckoning and GPS navigation, artificial intelligence that can help you start a religion or plan a wedding, show you a graph of how much you’ve walked over the last twelve months on an hour by hour basis without you even knowing it was doing so, take slow motion videos in super HD that a sports network would have paid a hundred million dollars for twenty years ago, show you satellite imagery of any point on the planet, or a 3D model of the city you’re in including the buildings, start your car remotely, translate text in front of you like a magic window, warn you when you might be in danger of a fall based on detecting variations in the motion of your pocket as you walk, play first person shooters using realistic weaponry from WW2 with people in your neighborhood, show you a sequence of people in your area who might want to fuck and set you in a chat with the ones you mutually like, order a car and let you specify the temperature and music selection of that car before it arrives, ssh into any server on the internet, pay for tolls without slowing down (thanks AT&T, you were right), open your front door or give you a view through the security cameras in your house, present video games for your fucking cat to play when it’s bored, like, authenticate using a 3D model of your head that it, itself, generated based on like ten seconds of observing your face, survive being fully submerged in water, charge without connecting any wires … it is utter nonsense to say not much has changed in twenty years because — get this — we had pocket phones back then too.
Right, and now we have “phones” with zero buttons, microscopic pixels, speech recognition, facial recognition, real time editing of video calls to make you look like a cartoon dog, games, dead reckoning and GPS navigation, artificial intelligence that can help you start a religion or plan a wedding, show you a graph of how much you’ve walked over the last twelve months on an hour by hour basis without you even knowing it was doing so, take slow motion videos in super HD that a sports network would have paid a hundred million dollars for twenty years ago, show you satellite imagery of any point on the planet, or a 3D model of the city you’re in including the buildings, start your car remotely, translate text in front of you like a magic window, warn you when you might be in danger of a fall based on detecting variations in the motion of your pocket as you walk, play first person shooters using realistic weaponry from WW2 with people in your neighborhood, show you a sequence of people in your area who might want to fuck and set you in a chat with the ones you mutually like, order a car and let you specify the temperature and music selection of that car before it arrives, ssh into any server on the internet, pay for tolls without slowing down (thanks AT&T, you were right), open your front door or give you a view through the security cameras in your house, present video games for your fucking cat to play when it’s bored, like, authenticate using a 3D model of your head that it, itself, generated based on like ten seconds of observing your face, survive being fully submerged in water, charge without connecting any wires … it is utter nonsense to say not much has changed in twenty years because — get this — we had pocket phones back then too.