I was delighted today by the video below of a 97 year old woman who wanted to visit Google headquarters. Her assisted living community granted the wish and the short video about the visit is awesome. I love seeing her reactions to technology that is so far beyond what she learned about when she was younger, yet she took it all in with wonder and amazement. I think that it’s sometimes hard to fathom that just a few years ago the type of technologies that we take for granted simply didn’t exist. The other night I came across one of my favorite old cell phones, a Samsung Alias phone that flipped in two directions, and realized that the phone was only 5 years old.

In the span of those 5 years I’ve had multiple new smartphones that have rocketed our connected lifestyle to heights that we’ve never had before. Even in career fields that have nothing to do with technology, a smartphone is often considered a basic tool of communication with co-workers and management. I can’t even recall the last time I’ve bothered memorizing my desk phone number at my job as most people just email me (which I get on my phone), Instant Message me (which I can also get on my phone), or text me (yep, phone again).

If technology continues to advance at the same exponential pace the future will look nothing like today. If I make it to age 97, what will be the technology that will be wow’ing me? Maybe it will be the technology that is keeping me alive to age 97? Maybe we’ll all be slaves of the almighty Google and they will have expanded to using our brains as storage devices for its search indexes? Or perhaps I’ll just be doing the same stuff I do today, but on my iPhone 34s. 🙂