This is a small post about some thoughts that recently come to my mind since the beginning of the month.

Note that these thoughts are a result of my personal experience of living in a privileged country.

I am part of Millenials. I grew up without the internet and it was common until I was a teenager. When I was at school and I need looking for information I was lucky as I had an encyclopedia at home. It was funny the process of finding the right book to look for and then, reading pages and paragraphs until I found whatever I needed. Same for dictionaries. Then, when I had my first computer at home one of the first software that I used was a dictionary for checking the meaning of words for homework. It was fast and nice at that time, just put the CD into the computer, run the program and write the word you want. And it gives you a set of complete results, even more detailed -and updated- like the books I had at home. And of course, same with Encarta which was a new experience. Now we have Wikipedia with a huge quantity of information available everywhere from any device in the most spoken languages of the world and not the ones most (like Esperanto).

When the Internet was at home, I was one of many people who used P2P software for downloading things. For me, it was a good point to discover not only new music as there was no need to listen to the latest trends in the radio. It was there, just with a couple of clicks and a bit of patience for downloading the files. Apart from that, it was a nice way to look into music from authors/composers I cannot get on the physical stores. Do you want the strange recording of the Czerny studies? Just look for it. That helped me to discover new music, buy more music and build my music library.

When I was studying music, the only way to get sheet music was at the local stores. That was an easy thing for the common pieces, but for advanced ones, you have to move to another city or request the owners to make a specific order for that. Now we have the Petrucci Music Library. It is like Wikipedia but for music, mainly for sheet music and free recordings. And if not, you can take a look at YouTube with videos with sheet music and the music.

When I started my computer degree Google was a startup yet. Windows XP was the leading operating system. Mobile phones were small, with durable batteries and close to being unbreakable (hello Nokia 3330) but with screen color and bit a bit the cameras were first an external accessory and then they were integrated as part of the device. I remember to leave on the teacher’s desk the 3,14” floppy disk with the homework, as there was no online system to upload the exercises. For some subjects we needed to use some software that was only installed on the campus computers; hopefully most of the time there were a lot of them free so we could do our stuff, but that got a bit more complicated during the exams period. Now we have open source alternatives such as Moodle and a lot of proprietary in-house development platforms for preparing the classes, chatting with the teachers and colleagues and submitting your exercises. We have alternatives such as Google Classroom or Zoom for doing video lessons anywhere.

One of the things I remember at university was a subject related to autonomous robots and computer vision. At that time (~2007) they were doing research and sharing with us that research and the others from other universities with self-driving cars. The closest idea to having that working was to put some sensors in the road that the car could follow with some cameras and sonars, as it was very far to think that the car could have enough computer capacity to understand the real world. Currently, we have systems like Tesla Autopilot and other ones, based on neural networks, vision and sensors. Even my car, which is not cutting-edge from a technology point of view includes a camera that stops the car if a crash can happen with a pedestrian or a car in front. Most of the medium cars have cameras, parking assistants, self-driving (or assisted driving) and tons of software with the magic for doing that.

When my girlfriend went abroad for a summer internship, we had to pay a specific phone rate plan to call outside by phone. Skype and MSN Messenger were there, but the computer there was not always free on all days. The best way and direct was just calling by phone. Now we have smartphones, connected to the internet. In the European Union, we have roaming which mostly we can travel to any country without changing our phone settings, changing to another company or paying more.

With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, we were hit in Spain by the Filomena storm. That was -again, if the pandemic was not enough- one of the most impacting climate episodes that hit Spain, due to the type and intensity of the snow. But the day after the storm finished and it was safe to go outside, I went with my Covid mask to the street and with my mobile phone I called all my family in a Whatsapp group call. On the street, in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of a snowing storm. And it worked like a charm for showing them the effects of the snow in the place where I live.

Regarding the pandemic, more with the same. We have been hit by one of the pandemics that more or less happens once per century. It was a tragedy and apart from the physical impact, it has been very hard for our mental health. In any case, the vaccine was ready a year later. Think about this: a global pandemic and the vaccine was developed and tested after a year. I can barely imagine how many of us might not survive without that currently. And just imagine how isolation could be without the internet, without any possibility of seeing in real-time your friends and family. There are plenty of tools (iMessage, Facetime, Whatsapp, Telegram, Facebook) for communicating with people in live, from any place just with your phone.

Finally, that comes from a friend of mine. Spain is the first country in Europe with the most extensive high-speed railway and the second in the world, just behind China. Despite this, I know there is a lot to do, as there are many regions in Spain without a good regular and high-speed railway connection. But in any case, it is true how we have normalized that we are traveling at 300 km/h on a train, doing a 500 km travel in less than 2h:30 minutes meanwhile you can use your phone with 4G (or 4G+, 5G not fully established yet) to talk with people, watching series/movies in streaming, working on your laptop or just listening music or using social networks. Or if available, using the built-in WiFi provided by the train companies.

And you know what? All of these things are f*** amazing. I cannot wait to see how the world is going to progress in the next 10 years.