The Future Is Now?
K.L. Orion
The picture you see above is one I took of the Aurora Borealis last night just north of the humble town of Monroe. Since last night was one of the few times you get to see the Northern Lights in Iowa, my family took a minor road trip to get good viewing. Like many youths my age, I used my also seemingly humble smartphone to take this picture. What I found out was that there is nothing humble about my smartphone through this experience. The vivid colors you are seeing in this image are even brighter and more spectacular than what I saw in person.
As a matter of fact, when I initially took the photograph, I was stunned to see the vibrance of colors compared to the somewhat mundane red hue of the sky I was trying to capture in said photograph. Don’t get me wrong, the lights were stunning in person, but they were nothing like this. When I first saw the image that came up on my phone, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that a device had somehow made something more vibrant than the actual thing.
Now I’m sure that there is plenty of science behind how my phone was able to capture such a stunning portrait, but it’s the science that is the mindblowing part. It’s the science of the modern day.
My current phone is just over a week old now. My previous phone lasted me nearly four and a half years. Yes, my old phone outlasted the Confederacy, who lasted just over four years. But it didn’t feel like four and a half years to me. I remember when I got it in late 2019. I was still in middle school, and then it was a “newfangled gizmo.” It was far bigger than my old phone, far brighter, and just far cooler. And it felt that way almost until the day I had to turn it in, when it had run out of storage and had cracks in its screen protector I was too lazy to replace.
I think about all that has happened in four and a half years. Not only the normal teenager stuff of growing up, getting into high school, making friends, blah blah blah. I mean the big events. For one thing, COVID-19. A change in presidents. The January 6th Insurrection. Russia invading Ukraine. The war in Israel and Gaza. And that barely scratches the surface of all the social and world changes that have occurred in just four and a half years. And I had that one phone during all of it.
When I got my new phone, I realized how outdated my old phone was. This one has over four times the storage the old one did. It has a far clearer screen. It has tech savvy features galore. And, obviously, it has a far better camera. And this isn’t even the newest iPhone on the market.
Four and a half years seems like a long time, but it really isn’t in the grand scheme of things. Yet so much can happen. So much advancement.
For those of you who know me, I spend a lot of time in older media than other people my age. Don’t get me wrong, I spend plenty of time in modern media, but not nearly as much as my teenage contemporaries. A lot of kids keep up with trends and things. I do not. I spend a lot of time on old monster movies and researching animals from the deep past. I’ve also never been particularly tech savvy in comparison to other people my age. I’ve never owned a proper video game console in my life. I like video games, but I am not much of a proper gamer.
That’s why I feel a little behind on technological advancement. A lot of my perceptions of the future come from older films predicting what might’ve happened before now. I often call those films out for what they got wrong, but I don’t give reality credit on how it proved those films wrong. Sure, flying cars aren’t readily accessible and we haven’t put a man on Mars yet, so we seem less advanced than cultures in futuristic movies from the past. But in other ways, we are far more advanced than the cultures shown in those films.
Virtual reality still seems like a crazy, futuristic concept to me. It sounds like something that is being tested in some lab somewhere far away from general public use. That’s why it’s crazy when I remind myself that a lot of my friends have extremely advanced virtual reality headsets at their homes. Last year at Solo/Small Ensemble Contest, at least three different people brought their headsets to play on during downtime from my school alone.
Another thing that seems like a far off future thing that isn’t is artificial intelligence. A few years ago, I got really interested in AI, especially the kind that can mimic people conversationally. I knew AI was very much a real thing back then, but it seemed like the kind I was interested in only existed in labs for high tech companies or agencies. Little did I know I was living at the start of an AI revolution.
Now you can’t escape AI. It’s everywhere. Arguably, it was everywhere years before now, but not like it is now. Fairly advanced forms of artificial intelligence are open for public use for free now. AI artwork has taken over the digital world. AI voice technology has allowed people to make covers of songs in different people’s voices (I recently just watched a CBS story on how AI helped famous country singer Randy Travis get his “voice back” using this sort of method). Kids are using AI to do their freaking homework. Chatbots, who are AIs capable of mimicking human conversation to a frightening degree, have skyrocketed in popularity. Things adjacent to chatbots are what got me interested in AI to begin with. Just a few years ago, they felt like a faroff idea. Now, Snapchat literally gave me one overnight one day without announcing it (I discussed some of this in a previous Substack post). If all of that doesn’t sound like the plot of some crazy sci-fi movie, I don’t know what does.
Not to mention modern technological access in general. Almost everyone (at least in the United States) has some access to the internet. The smartphone is hardly a telephone anymore as it is rather the digital equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife. It’s not only a telephone, but it’s a television, an entire arcade, a flashlight, a camera, a notepad, a clock/watch, a photo album, a radio, a calculator, a compass, a map, a radar, a calendar, a book, a mailbox, a computer, and so much more. It’s funny to think about how much our lives revolve around one device alone now, but when you consider all of that, you can see why we’ve become so dependent on them. As a matter of fact, you’re probably reading this on a phone right now, except for those of you who aren’t.
We should also probably recognize how crazy social media is and all of its capabilities. Social media is nuts. It has influenced us in both extremely negative and extremely positive ways. No matter what anyone says, though, it’s a catalyst for social change in ways nothing has been before it. Substack itself is a form of social media, after all.
Sometimes I forget how strange the era we live in is. How extraordinary. I think we all do. Time is advancing fast, and we can either choose to influence that advancement or get left behind. We need to recognize how time changes so we can help mold that change. If we don’t, the world will continue to change whether we like it or not. If you decide to ignore that change, you will get no say in what that change might be.
Now I, for one, probably need to get off of electronics and enjoy the present instead of wishing for the future.
One of my favorite quotes, "No interest is without self interest." So what is really driving the interest in AI and all things techie?
Yes I'm reading on my phone... that is a wonderful sentence of yours which made me laugh!
We saw the northern lights last night also. Saw them at ten pm and they were not amazing. Went to bed.
But, got backup at 1 am and we stayed out to watch till after 2 am. They were spectacular. Simply amazing as the pulsing colored lights of fire filled the entire sky.
Sometimes it's about one's willingness to sacrifice a bit to gain the greater insight.
Keep up the writing gig. It suits you and we need your perspective.
I’ll admit, AI sort of scares me. I don’t want the 1969 hit song by Zager and Evans ,”In the year 2525”that predicted such drastic and dramatic changes for humans to be true .There have even been so very many technological innovations and changes in my lifetime that it is at times overwhelming .When I look back at the fact we had no way to converse long distance other than via a party line telephone and now we have our cellphones. There are many good changes and some that seem to be undermining everyone’s ability to converse face to face.