COPING WITH CHANGE
Tuesday Oct. 16, 2018
Rather, failing to cope …
Yes, change. Often we read about retirement angst, accepting disease, injury or disability that has arrived in someone’s life or reality-check of losing a job or a loved one. Someone’s chosen career path, experience and passion – replace by nothing. Their job rendered obsolete. Software doing their job, or it is being done by call center staff half-way around the world. Or by websites whose software works 24/7 – never sleeps, never takes a lunch break or vacation.
Remarkable breakthroughs in medicine, computing science and astrophysics as massive volume of simultaneous calculations boggle – artificial intelligence is still in its infancy. We’ve barely begun to understand. Those driving it are still tinkering without appreciation of thrills and spills ahead.
Seems only yesterday – reading in Wired magazine about Google when it launched in 1998. I emailed my excitement to colleagues – none of whom had heard of Google. Within days they were all using it. Now Google and its offspring/acquisitions (YouTube, gmail, Googlemaps, etc.) dominate each of their industry categories as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter dominate theirs.
I’m just cracking ‘Life After Google’ by George Gilder. He suggests the world of big data as we know it today is failing. Not sure I agree with his argument about the ultimate demise of Google and its Silicon Valley cousins – but fully endorse his assessment of their shortcomings.
Tomorrow pot becomes legal in Canada. Nobel prizes are being handed out in Stockholm, journalists are being murdered and gong-show politics is de rigueur and oceans are awash in plastic – are we watching some b-movie about the future, or have we already raced past it?
Reader feedback:
HELP WANTED
At least a dog is pretty well always on your side!, AN, Calgary, AB
Hi Mark, could have written this myself ! I am sure lots of people feel like this some days. Live with Love and Love Living is my moto…..but there are days……….and we go on hoping for a bit more, every day….and life goes on. C’est la vie !!! DB, ?
