How We Owe Everything To A Spark Of Pure Genius

Being a baby boomer, I go back to a time when for us poor folk modern technology consisted of a kettle with a whistle to call your attention to the fact that the water had reached boiling point for making a pot of tea. In many ways, we have come an awful long way, and yet I'm not so sure about calling it progress.

Now we have handheld calculators and electronic cash machines at the checkout. And yet I can do simple calculations a darn sight quicker than either. We learned addition and multiplication at primary school by rote and subtraction by playing darts down at the local pub.

Now we have word processing programmes complete with spell checkers and all manner of other wordy wizardry. Back then we learned to read and write with a pen and ink. Funny to think that there was a time when a ballpoint pen was the pinnacle of modern technology. Time was when you could easily write a message or a poem in the sand with a dirty stick. Try doing that with a computer.

Then along came the mobile phone. Somebody once asked me in a disparaging tone what we did without mobile phones. Well, for a start we chatted to each other face-to-face. We also kept appointments.

These days you're lucky if your date turns up, and if and when they do, you are even luckier still if they bother to directly engage with you eye-to-eye. 

I have more than once seen a group of five or six teenagers sitting on a street bench leaning forward with their eyes fixed on a mobile phone whilst they texted a friend. Every member of the group was oblivious to the other five she was sitting alongside. So much for so-called progress in human social interaction.

Back in the day we also learned to sing in tune and play musical instruments. We played with a level of ambidextrous ability far beyond the ken of today's generation of wannabe pop stars who couldn't hold a tune to save their head full of magic lives if they tried.

And the more I think about it, I have come to realise that a lot of today's technology is simply to help life's thickos to get on in life. It's all about the dumbing down of even the most basic abilities, like adding 2 plus 2 or stringing a basic sentence together, to the pressing of a few buttons and the click of a mouse.

Of course, there are those of us who are very far from what you would call thickos, who reap all the benefits of this technological dumbing down, and who are eternally grateful for that original spark of what was nothing less than pure genius.

If you haven't figured out what I am on about, it is without a doubt what is probably our greatest modern-day invention, on-tap electricity. Without electricity, we'd all be screwed. Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison, not to mention Nikola Tesla, have a lot to be thanked for. Without electricity, the entire world would come to a grinding halt. And then where would we be?

 If we were to lose on tap electricity, overnight we would be thrust right back into the dark ages using candles for light and open flame-burning fires for cooking. All industry and commerce, systems of transport, health and welfare, just about everything we take for granted in this modern world, would vanish in the shake of a lamb’s tail. That is a thought we should all ponder upon from time to time to fully appreciate what we have, not what we have not.