"...I would be completely lost." -- Andrew Thompson

     Technology today has affected me in an overwhelmingly positive way thus far. I have made friends and had endless entertainment from Netflix, YouTube, and the like while avoiding anything truly devastating. I have been shaped and molded by the technology I use and I don't think I or the world would be the same without it and, to be honest, if I was born 20 years earlier, I would be completely lost. I would have to turn to desperate measures like going outside or having a social interaction with another human being, and I just don't know if I could deal with that.
   
     Being born maybe 10 years earlier would have been fine, however, and actually in some ways would have been preferable. That would mean I would have spent my time as a teenager in the emerging years of the technology we know today. I would have been at the forefront of the internet age and would be able to tell stories to all the youngsters about my day when we had to use floppy disks and still used CD's. I would have been able to marvel at games like "Doom" and "Quake" that look prehistoric by today's standards. It was a golden time and it would have been sweet to really experience it.

     But looking into the future, I can only see things getting even better. New technology to make us more productive and more connected are on the forefront. Advancements of technology in healthcare, the sciences, space exploration, etc. can only improve out lives. The thing that I am probably most excited about is advancements in AI. The possibilities something like that could bring along are massive, like some sort of robotic police force or army. Looking into the really distant future, I think that AI will eventually take us over. I see them as a sort of next evolution of the human race that are just going to be faster, stronger, and smarter, then us, leading to our demise and the rise of the robots. Now THAT would have been cool to live through.