Greg Morris: The Wonder Of Tech

Perhaps Casey’s right, it could be a long way off, but Ai advancements will provide a real change to the way the world works. What won't provide it is Apple putting widgets on my lock screen, or being able to shoot a photo at 3x instead of 2x. My world of tech has slowed, and it is perhaps no longer about world-changing moments and instead slow progress forward which can mostly be ignored.

It's hard to overstate how monumentally significant the past 15 years have been, not only in terns of technology, but in the ways that technology has shaped the world around us. The personal computer and the internet changed things as well, but the smartphone was like pouring fuel on the fire.

The explosion of bloggers and YouTubers and podcasters and social media…ers all came up in this massive explosion in innovation as well as social changes created by those innovations, and we've frankly gotten spoiled by having such massive change all the time to talk about.

This isn't to say we're at the end of the road when it comes to technological advancement, far from it, it's just to say that I think the smartphone massively changed how the world works, and we were lucky to be here while it happened.

Also, it's definitely worth mentioning that when this tech was still fresh, it was easy to talk about. Remember when Instagram was doing that thing where they would upload your photo in the background as you wrote the caption? That was lauded at the time as a great usability innovation since it made the posting experience feel instant, even on a slow internet connection. We just celebrated it because it was new and things were less…complicated.

Today we need to reckon with so much more, especially when it comes to products designed to absorb our time and attention. Data privacy is top of mind, as is social well-being, especially for kids and teenagers, and the list goes on. You can't just ignore these issues, but it certainly was more pure fun to talk about this stuff when we could be for surface-level with our praise and criticism.