You know things, you child of the 21st century. You may not stop to think about it, but you know stuff to get along in the year 2000 that your hallowed progenitors could never have dreamed of. You know how to delete. You can pull down a menu. You know how to change the channel on your TV without getting out of your overstuffed chair, a luxury your grandparents did not enjoy. You know — or should know — how to keep your kid from downloading porn on the Internet. You even know the word download. You know other words too. Scary words. Ebola, mad cow, West Nile virus. At the very mention of these words, your mind knows to give you the creeps.
As always, knowledge is power. What you know gets you through your day. Protects your family. Keeps them safe. And what you need to know has changed — a lot. Twenty years ago, you took notes with a pen, not a pointer pushed across the face of a personal digital assistant. Twenty years ago you still thought a mouse was just a rodent. Had some prescient soul sidled up to you on the street in 1980 and said, "Listen, buddy, soon you're going to need to know how to operate a big glowing box on your desk by sliding a plastic thing around," you would have seen him as a madman, not a prophet.
By the year 2020, you will need to know stuff you can hardly guess today.
You've heard all this before. You're hip to this technology thing. You know the drill: Gadgets change; you adapt to the gadgets. You learn new buzzwords, talk the talk, and keep on going as humans have for millennia. But in doing so, you reduce technology to a heap of glorified hand tools, the equivalent of sticks chimps use to extract ants from a hole.
In 20 years it should be painfully clear that technology never just hands us tools; it grants us a passport to a world where choices multiply, desires are ignited, and new moral decisions confront us. Like an odyssey-starved traveler, you'll wander through a kind of exotic street fair, senses assaulted by too much information. You'll find yourself frazzled just trying to draw a bead on all the options, while a numbing calliope tune insists it's all great fun. A lot of what you'll encounter will just be cool, requiring nothing more than nimble minds and fingers.
