A lot of young people, including me, seem to be getting a lot of "man, we're really living in the future" kind of emotional reactions relatively frequently. E.g. I remember that as a kid, I imagined having a Star Trek-style combined communicator and tricorder so that if someone wanted to know where I was, I could snap them a picture of my location and send it to them instantly. To me, that felt cool and science fictiony. Today, not only can even the cheapest cell phone do that, but many phones can be set up to constantly share their location to all of one's friends.

Or back in the era of modems and dial-up Internet, the notion of having several gigabytes of e-mail storage, wireless broadband Internet, or a website hosting and streaming the videos of anyone who wanted to upload them all felt obviously unrealistic and impossible. Today everyone takes the existence of those for granted. And with Google Glass, I expect augmented reality to finally become commonplace and insert itself into our daily lives just as quickly as smartphones and YouTube did.

And since we're talking about Google, self-driving cars!

Or Planetary Resources. Or working brain implants. Or computers beating humans at Jeopardy. Or... I could go on and on.

So the point of this comment is that I'm having a hard time imagining my 40's and 50's being a letdown in terms of technological change, given that by my mid-20's I've already experienced more future shocks than I would ever have expected to. And that makes me curious about whether you experienced a similar amount of future shocks when you were my age?