(How Jon Bon Jovi Helped Me Appreciate the Internet)
I just had a song running through my head – “You Give Love a Bad Name” by Jon Bon Jovi. And I was blanking on the lyrics that came between “Whoa, you’re a loaded gun” and “No one can save me, the damage is done”. So I pulled out my phone, fired up the Google machine, and typed “you give love”. It autocompleted with “you give love a bad name lyrics” and BOOM – I found the missing piece. (It’s “Whoa, there’s nowhere to run” in case you didn’t already know…)
We do this stuff all the time, but for some reason tonight I thought to myself, “How would I have gotten this answer 33 years ago?” (And yes, I just Googled “you give love release date” and instantly learned that it was released in 1986). I could have checked the liner notes if I owned the cassette, or maybe called a friend, or just waited for it to come on the radio again. Or I could have just given up altogether.
These were the ONLY solutions available at the time. No one had access to the entirety of human knowledge in the palm of their hands. No one could casually learn about anything, at any time, for free.
At work, I used to have a 320-page edition of “Effective C++” sitting on my desk. If I had a question that wasn’t in that book – and if my coworkers didn’t know – I settled in for a loooooong research project. By contrast, earlier today I Googled “UIScrollView programmatic stackview height”. Google returned “about 8,900 results” in 0.43 seconds, and the second link answered my question.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate how insanely awesome our world is these days. Maybe we don’t have flying cars like they predicted back in the ’50s, but they couldn’t imagine that tiny boxes in our pockets could contain more computing power than we had in the entire world when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. And they definitely couldn’t picture a person picking up a tiny phone and saying, “Hey Siri…” (As a Star Trek fan, I have to point out that they came close in some cases – but even the communicators in the years 2265-2269 were just flip phones with a couple tiny dials and a singular purpose)…
We’re in the middle of an exponential curve in human evolution, where technological advances compound on themselves. Ray Kurzweil explains it very well in his book, “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”. Read this book. It’s an eye-opening view on our technological past, present, and future that will really get you thinking!
(Things I Googled for this one single post: – “you give love”, “you give love release date”, “UIScrollView programmatic stackview height”, “Star Trek TOS”, “Singularity Kurzweil”, Image search for “old flying car predictions”, Image search for “star trek communicator”)
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Jeff Nordquist is a software developer, leader, coach, and entrepreneur. He loves learning and writing about this stuff! You can reach him on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffnordquist), on Twitter (@jeffnordquist), or via email at jeff@jeffnordquist.com.
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