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Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Magic
7/28/2004
The current lead contender is the Mojave Aerospace Ventures team which just gave the Ansari X Prize folks its official 60-day notice that it will make its first flight on September 29, 2004, and intends to claim the prize with its second flight on October 4, 2004 - the 47th anniversary of of the launching of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.
How magical can you get? I can recall standing in my back yard in East Liverpool, Ohio at the age of ten-years-old and tracking Sputnik as it moved visibly among the stars. I get the same feeling thinking about private individuals getting out into space . . . finally! Read more
Remember the first hundred times you browsed the World Wide Web? In my case, a few moments of browsing was inevitably followed by exclamations like "Wow!" and "Amazing" and "This is wonderful." Consumers of information technology nowadays take it for granted. Every time you turn around, it seems like our technology is "smaller, faster, cheaper," we are treated to more leaps in storage capacities, and connectedness becomes more of a given. But those of us who work in IT or study IT get to see behind the curtains. I hope that each of you still finds moments in your work where you, or someone you work with, or someone you read about, discovers or creates something new that you can learn about in a magical moment. (And I'd love to hear from others about nifty scientific discoveries or technology applications that feel like magic when you learn of them. Thanks.)
We know that IT isn't magic, but that d'esn't mean we can't feel the magic.
People just like you and I are working on new information technologies that
will feel like magic when we first experience them, and then we will take them
for granted. That's one of the nice things about working in a field that is
experiencing such a time of rapid change and growth. Maybe the next magic will
come from Berners-Lee's "Semantic Web" concept. Maybe it's already
here in the form of Apple's new AirPort Express with AirTunes. All you have
to do is look around, there's plenty to wonder at.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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