One of the problems of living in The Future is having to mentally rearrange your mind so you have to say, "This book was written in 1986 and set in The Present, which means that people don't carry phones around with them, and computers tend to have old-timey ASCII interfaces which you type at."
Of course, if you've grown up with iPads and the like, the idea that there are people who don't have a little portable computer that you just wave your hands at and it does what you want is still a bit alien. All teenagers today, for example, have grown up with having access to Google. They're used to automatically having their minds augmented with a little bit of typing, and suddenly being an instant expert on any field that comes up in discussion.
That kind of thing just blows my mind. I've gone from living in an era where color television was, although widespread, still pretty neat, to living in an era where everyone potentially knows everything about everything--simply by reading the Wikipedia page which of course exists. Here's an example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minami-Urawa_Station)--that's the Wikipedia page about my local train station. Of course, the Wikipedia administrators have decided that the article is a stub, although it says all I think that needs to be said about some suburban commuter train stop. Perhaps they're hoping for some juicy gossip.
The point is that from here in THE FUTURE, the world already looks completely different than it did in the 1980s, when I first started realizing that I lived in THE FUTURE (that computer in my home? Holy crap! My own computer! My previous experience with computers was something the size of a largish closet that spit out vast quantities of punched paper tape and chad). Now computers are so common that I have three in my motorcycle, and one of those is so unimaginably futuristic that I merely have to tell it where I want to go, and it will give me detailed directions how to get there, with a constant play-by-play based on its understanding of where I happen to be at the moment. If that's not living in the future, I don't know what is.
Oh, in case everything does go horribly wrong, I did take the precaution of purchasing a no-computers-required motorcycle as a backup measure.
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Of course, if you've grown up with iPads and the like, the idea that there are people who don't have a little portable computer that you just wave your hands at and it does what you want is still a bit alien. All teenagers today, for example, have grown up with having access to Google. They're used to automatically having their minds augmented with a little bit of typing, and suddenly being an instant expert on any field that comes up in discussion.
That kind of thing just blows my mind. I've gone from living in an era where color television was, although widespread, still pretty neat, to living in an era where everyone potentially knows everything about everything--simply by reading the Wikipedia page which of course exists. Here's an example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minami-Urawa_Station)--that's the Wikipedia page about my local train station. Of course, the Wikipedia administrators have decided that the article is a stub, although it says all I think that needs to be said about some suburban commuter train stop. Perhaps they're hoping for some juicy gossip.
The point is that from here in THE FUTURE, the world already looks completely different than it did in the 1980s, when I first started realizing that I lived in THE FUTURE (that computer in my home? Holy crap! My own computer! My previous experience with computers was something the size of a largish closet that spit out vast quantities of punched paper tape and chad). Now computers are so common that I have three in my motorcycle, and one of those is so unimaginably futuristic that I merely have to tell it where I want to go, and it will give me detailed directions how to get there, with a constant play-by-play based on its understanding of where I happen to be at the moment. If that's not living in the future, I don't know what is.
Oh, in case everything does go horribly wrong, I did take the precaution of purchasing a no-computers-required motorcycle as a backup measure.