Life beyond where we are stuck in
Getting in a yellow cab from Naia 3 at almost 2 p.m. last Monday, the driver radios asking for traffic situation in Edsa. The dispatcher replied: “Ganun pa rin (Like before)”, meaning, it’s as bad as ever.
At around that time, I received a text message requesting two short articles for an end-report that a friend had to render on a project we were involved in.
Seeing that it’s a long drive from Naia 3 to Shangri-la Edsa, I took out my phone and started tapping my thoughts for those two short articles. We finally arrived at the driveway of the hotel at 5 p.m. just after I sent the two articles through email using my phone. Two articles written using my phone and emailed using the same.
On our flight home late Tuesday night, I finalized my lecture presentation scheduled the following day using Keynote, the presentation app in my phone. The following day was a breeze.
After major technological developments, all upgrades and developments were easily handled by different staff members with job description saying they are the ones in charge.
There was nothing new to explore in the print media, and so I just faded away from the scene. Until social media changed the algorithm of things and the mobile generation required upgrading the brain.
Saturday morning, upon waking up, I checked Facebook and was about to log out when the icon of “iTunes U” caught my attention. It was exactly what I wanted to learn and it’s all there in my mobile. I posted my discovery on Facebook and my friend Mabelle commented that she uses iTunes U a lot to study about her specialization and that it offers a lot of courses and learning resources that will interest me. That was when it hit me... Through my activities online, my mobile phone knew what courses and learning resources interested me, and was thus ready with a list when I clicked on iTunes U for the very first time.
Yes, it’s creepy, knowing that your mobile phone has already profiled you, but then, you realize that that is how it is now and will forever be in the next generation. We are now living the sci-fi novels we feasted on when we were young.
Isaac Asimov was my favorite and I thought his idea of the supercomputer whom he named the Multivac. The idea of the Multivac became real just two decades later and it’s called the internet. Seeing the sci-fi today’s kids are now feasting on, I’m just glad I’m nearer retirement than youth, because I don’t think I would relish living in a world where zombies walk around threatening to eat human brains.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, however, showed me a different perspective... the perspective that Yoda has taken, and I think that was really cool for a sci-fi. It somehow tells us that while we may soon be fighting wars over different universes, our universe will come around full cycle to what has been--harnessing the innate power of the human, and that was just too cool, it was mind-blowing. But then I stop and realize, Asimov blew my mind before, now his Multivac is an obsolete predecessor of what I have in the palm of my hand, which has profiled me up to my latest interest.