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Seeing this post on Daring Fireball, and especially this quote:

His legs — sleek, lightweight, and impressively dextrous — were inspiring and beautiful. And they were made using technology that simply did not exist when I was his age, one generation ago. Focus solely on current events and it’s all too easy to despair at the state of the world. But science and progress march ever forward, and the world is a better place today than it used to be.

I was born in 1967. Yes, I know, I'm almost 41. Ready for my ice floe. But reading things like Gruber's post reminds me that, for all the ways technology can run my life into the ground, it has consistently made the overall quality of life better. For example, my son just flew from Portland Oregon back to Kansas City, via San Jose, LA, and Vegas by himself. When I was his age, which is, 1980 or so, that would have meant someone sitting home, by the phone, while the other parent got him at the airport. No cell phones. If something went wrong, the only way to reach me would have been to call my house, have my wife give you my name, then page me via overhead speaker at the airport, so I could go to the desk. That's assuming I wasn't in the car on the way there. Think about that. What now takes a matter of seconds and almost no worry would have involved far more effort and worry. Plane delayed? One quick call lets me know he's okay. Plane gets in really early? Quick call.

People bitch about cell phones, and a lot of it is legitimate, but think of what cell phones give us: The ability to get help from almost anywhere. I know that when Alex was home alone, and younger, the knowledge that he could always call me was beyond comforting. I gripe about my cell phone, but the truth is, it's effectively indispensable. Cell phones save lives. They provide the comfort of knowing that loved ones are never really ever out of touch. They're not perfect, but annoyance aside, you'd be hard - pressed to find legitimate reason to call cell phones A Bad Thing.

I think it's so ingrained in human nature to grump about things, (remember folks, I'm an expert), that we forget all the ways that things get better because of science and its quest to learn more about things. Kids graduating college today have grown up with AIDS. It's a fact of life, hell, it's almost background noise. Condoms are simply a way of life. There's still no cure or vaccine, but its behavior is understood to the point that avoiding it is pretty damned simple. If you do get it, there are palliatives that allow you to live a pretty normal life.

Well, I graduated high school in 1984, when AIDS was new, shiny, and utterly fucking terrifying. It is hard, maybe impossible to describe the fear that AIDS caused when it was first discovered. People would flip OUT if they got bit by a mosquito. You want to have sex? Please to be telling me your sexual history first. The homosexual community was even worse off, (dude, people thought you could get it just by standing near a gay person), and ironically, the Haitian community was in fear too, as for a while, they were right up there with homosexuals as identified carriers. Getting surgery meant you gave your OWN blood, because there were people getting it on a regular basis from blood transfusions. It took a few years to understand AIDS, how to detect it, how to avoid it, how you could and just as importantly, could not catch it. But until that happened, there was fear and plenty of it.

What happened?

Science

The medical and scientific communities hunkered down, and worked like dogs to understand what was going on. They did what they do best, refused to give in to hysteria, and so now, over twenty years later, AIDS is still a very real danger, but it is a manageable one.

CAT scans

MRIs

Try to imagine diagnosing cancer and other diseases without them. Those weren't around when I was born. Detecting cancer "early" was a very different world in 1967. Cancer at that time was the death sentence that AIDS is now, and every bit as scary. Even for other stuff, think about this: how did doctors send x-rays and other information around?

Snail Mail.

There were no other options. If I were to show you what Fax machines were capable of when I was born, you'd wonder if I lived in a cave. Go bitch about the Internet to someone else when you realize how easy it is for the medical community to share information because of it. That "ebul internet" that people bitch about on Oprah and the other idiot collectives? That shit saves lives man. Not in a "Man Saved From Choking in Local Restaurant" kind of way, but it saves lives nonetheless.

On and on and on. Yeah, technology can annoy the shit out of you, but even when people "get away from it all", they really aren't. Lemme show you the state of the art for camping gear in the late 60s/early 70s. After you lug that shit around for a week in the great piney woods, you'll kiss technology on the fucking lips man.

You want to bitch about how hard it is to work on cars these days? Dude, the idea that you can drive a car for over a hundred thousand miles and all you ever have to do is basic maintenance? Change fluids, new tires, standard recommended checkups, and that's it? That was a pipe dream in the 60s and 70s. People didn't work on their cars because they wanted to, they worked on them because they had no choice. No CAD, no CAM, all that shit done by hand and so prone to human error, you never bought a car built on a monday or a friday. When "wednesday" is a quality point, you know something's fucked up. Ask someone like Chuck Goolsbee about the joys of a 1960s auto. Chuck loves his E-type, but he sure as shit doesn't use it as his primary car. He'd be even more nuts than he already is.

We all roll our eyes when the geezers pull out "back in my day", because well, that shit is boring for the most part. Yeah, even geezers like me do it when the real geezers start up. But, it's important to look at how things used to be.

Gruber talks about how that young boy would have not been walking and running and playing so easily when he was a boy.

Well, when I was a boy, that kid would have lived in a wheel chair, and had half a life to go along with his half a body.

Tell me again that we don't need science and technology. Every step that kid takes proves how wrong you'll be.

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