The Age of the Machines

Tra la la la (my ringtone)

Hello...(sleepily)

Hey Jan...check out the new sony ericsson phone gal,w995a,its got a 8.1 megapixel cam man!!or do u think i should go for nokia-E75?

Tat was my dear friend happily chirping away about her latest obsession...yeah,about 75 billion neurons(out of the 100 billion tat is there!) in her brain is permanently thinking of which cell phone she wants now!!

With the big risk of sounding superannuated (which I am not! ) I wish to share my views of the modern generation.Here goes...I look around me and see that we,modern men,have given birth to something here!Technology is no longer used for our service,not for our convenience either.Technology has become a statement!!

We are constantly wanting and getting something more advanced,something more complex and most importantly something more independent with every tick of the clock!!By independent,I mean something that is almost able to think for itself.Do you realize the magnitude of the situation?We have given birth to an evolution!We have successfully breast-fed her and are nurturing her childhood now.My guess is,it wont be long for the adolescent,rebel to walk out on us.People,we are in a Michael Crichton novel!Wake up!!Our time is running out.The end is just around the corner!From the way I see it,we are already in the end of the block,just waiting to make that turn!

Not following me?Think I'm just another cynic?I'll explain what evolution is to you.

Evolution is exponential...For example,

The first telephone was invented by Sir.Philipp Reis in the year 1860.It could cover only a distance of 100 meters.

Sir.Alexander Graham Bell developed on it and 16 yrs later in 1876,introduced the telephone which could cover a distance of 6-8 kilometers on an average!

In 1877,one year later,Sir.Thomas Alva Edison succeeded in enabling telephone calls to be made over large distances by creating stronger electrical impulses.

In 1884, the first long-distance line was laid from New York to Boston and by 1900 there were automatic telephone switchboards almost everywhere in the world.

That is,it took 16 years for the phone to be improvised from speaking just to your neighbor,to speaking to someone in the next block,while it took almost the same time for the phone users to graduate to speaking across countries!Getting our hands on a mobile phone did take a while though [ It was not until 1983 that Motorola presented the first commercial mobile telephone in the world, the "Dyna TAC 8000X". ]But after that block,there is no looking back!!Another 27 years have elapsed and now the mobile phone is not just a phone anymore!!Its amazing what a phone can do now-a-days!From photography,to cinematography,to compositions,to calculations,to anything else you can think of!It can all be done!I can speak to my brother who is insanely far off,in a completely different time zone,at the blink of an eye!!!

It is a feat!I applaud all the great men who are responsible for this!From 20 yrs of research to get me connected to the next block...it took the same 20 years to get all the above said amazing things done!!So mathematically,the speed of invention is
Xⁿ [n=2 or more,x=no. of years]

Even as you read,some brilliant scientist is busy creating something more advanced than what we already have.Once we give these machines a mind of their own [which we already have,to some extent! ] their evolution will spark off at an alarming speed and God forbid what will happen![I suggest you read Micheal Crichton's Prey,he shares my veiws on this one.]

I don't intend to start a revolution against all of the great minds nurturing this evolution,nor do I intend on persuading the human race to stop this insaneness![Homo sapiens are the most non-persuasive of all species,in my regard.]

I want to warn all the poor souls like me out there!Lets pray,hope,wish or do whatever we do just before our big " I have not studied a word " exam,that this Spielberg movie we are in,has a happy ending.

P.S : Tom Cruise,you got to be reading this!