That’s something that still blows my mind, and gives me serious pause when I consider the impacts. Sure, I’ve been involved in technology and the internet since the mid-90s as an elementary schooler, but I’m the exception to the rule. In thirty short years we’ve gone from bank tellers to bank apps, from dreary Government buildings with long waiting times to poorly-designed websites that crash frequently, and from only being reachable via post or landline to never being unavailable unless you’re somewhere isolated and remote - and then building technology to bring connectivity into those areas as well.

In three decades computing went from a toy of the rich and tools of the biggest businesses to a “necessity” of the everyman, but without any formal training on usage, value, or feedback on boundaries. Thirty years to go from only nation states being able to effectively surveil people at scale, to any tech company with a magic pixel being able to gather far more and accurate data than anyone prior could hope to.

This has been a gargantuan shift in civilization in an impossibly short amount of time, and we’re only really just now agreeing that there’s some growing pains that need sorting out. Maybe most businesses don’t need cloud-based services for everything, maybe most humans don’t actually need public social media, and maybe some of the stuff we take for granted as necessary today are actually quite worthless to most people/entities.

Viewed through that lens, I also see the desperation of the AI movement to continue accelerating “advancement” forward, before more people start asking the same questions regarding necessity and importance of existing tools and technologies. Once people start questioning the utility of a purchase, they’re less likely to spend money on it - and there goes your business.

yes, us millennials should be called the "guinea pig generation"