I increment my age value by one this month, and the event, though unremarkable otherwise, has got me thinking about the world and how it looks. I’m roughly half way through my life now, with as much time behind me as there is in front of me. As I look in both directions I find myself thinking about how things have changed, and how they’re going to change.

You’re probably thinking ‘Well, don’t you do that all the time anyway? You write science fiction, don’t you? Surely that involves a certain amount of imagining the future.’

Yes, of course it does. But sci-fi – mine, at least – is usually set in a future far beyond my own life. I read too much Golden Age sci-fi where Bradbury or Heinlein or one of those guys imagined the human race living on the Moon in the 1980′s, flying cars and jetpacks and public space travel and such all within their own lifetimes. They were a bit too optimistic.

My lifetime, however, has seen some amazing things. Men walked on the moon the year I was born; today, in my pocket and likely yours, we carry more computing power than NASA could imagine during the late 60′s and early 70′s. Communication satellites litter the skies, giving us the capacity not only to talk to one another from anywhere, but also the ability to figure out where we are, what’s in our immediate area to eat/drink/see/do. We can watch nearly any movie we want to see, any time we want to see it, a pipe dream when I was a kid. LED light bulbs last 20 years and use less power during that entire time than a single incandescent bulb uses in a fraction of that time. Books can be read anywhere, electronically, and each of us can carry an entire library in our hands.

I can go on and on: medicine, construction, finance, every conceivable aspect of our world has gone through massive advancements. Here in Los Angeles, however, where the car is king, travel is seems to be stagnating. Traffic is choking our city, and though we spend billions on expanding our freeways that ultimately will not help us. An effective public transportation system will do a great deal, but our car culture is not going to vanish. Instead, the people at Google have come up with another solution, one that seems to me to have fallen right out of the science fiction stories I read as a youth: the self-driving car.

Many people are not going to trust cars like this at first, which is why the car industry is introducing aspects of it as ‘safety’ or ‘convenience features’ – the stereoscopic vision and automatic brakes on the new Subarus, for instance, or the automatic parallel parking assist on new Fords. Bit by bit, though, cars will become more and more autonomous.

Imagine a future where every car is electric, where every car is capable of driving itself around the city, and you’re just a passenger. Hard to do? It shouldn’t be. It’s right around the corner.

I don’t remember my childhood very well, but occasionally I’ll see something like this and it sparks a memory; I remember having conversations like this with my old friends Yvain Johnson and Gary Davis, in between discussions of school bullies and what was for lunch and whatever tv show we’d watched the night before.

I miss that kid, miss the simple joy of discovery for its own sake, with no external forces propelling me on; I miss the innocence and wonder and joy of growing up.

I think we all do, each in our own way, and things like this are wonderful because they hearken us back to a simpler time, when our worlds were more like an ant’s; smaller, somehow easier and more difficult at the same time; a little scary, containing the promise of eternal quests and amazing adventure around every corner.

Enjoy.

Incidentally, I first saw this on NPR’s website. I would be remiss if I did not provide a link to the original article.

So I made the plunge this weekend and joined the Twitterverse. I know, I know… where the hell have I been? (Somewhere in the back mountains of Patagonia, apparently.)  Of course, of the first 8 people who followed me (actually, as I write this, 14 hours or so after writing, there are only 6) two were immediately recognizable as spam.  I’m 90% sure that four of the remaining are, as well.

But that’s sort of the way of the world, isn’t it?  Nearly everyone has something to sell, and there’s a large number of people who are trying desperately to force themselves upon you.  It’s internet brain rape, isn’t it.  I’ve been violated.  I feel so dirty.

Fortunately, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook provide a way to be un-raped – if such a thing is even possible.  I reported the first two as spam, and will be reporting the others as soon as I determine their true nature.  Meanwhile, I’m locking down the privacy controls, and figuring out ways to connect all my social media together so I can update everything at once if I so desire.

I should ask a high-school kid.  They’ve got the advantage of growing up in a world where this sort of thing is commonplace.  I grew up with this ridiculously clumsy bit of technology called a rotary phone.  (Ok, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration – although we did have an old one when I was a kid.)  Still, I’ve watched the age of computers blossom from virtually nonexistent to everyone carrying the equivalent of a 1985 Cray supercomputer in their pockets, ostensibly as a replacement for that old rotary phone.  It’s amazing how far things have come just in the last 20 years or so, and I’m really looking forward to the next 20.

By the way, you can find me on Twitter @AnthonyCLanni, or just click the handy-dandy link on the right side of the page.  See?  Technology!