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What inventions/issues have occurred since 1968 that did you not see coming?
Are you kidding me?!
I am still OUTRAGED that they took kick starters offa Harleys. How IN GOD'S NAME are we supposed to start them?
Now, they even have cars that don't even need a key! Just sort of wave the key around the car and it'll start!
And you can't even BUY most cars with a stick shift.
REAR VIEW CAMERAS?! WHAAAAAT?!
I shoulda seen it coming. '68 was the year they took Star Trek off and left The Flying Nun on.
And in 2016, we had a GIRL running for President - Of The United States!
Regarding the analog clock. A friend just had one of those annual wellness checks where they ask if you are falling these days and to recall three words, etc.
One of the tests was drawing a clock face. Apparently, certain kinds of mental troubles are detected if you cannot do that.
Guess they'll have to come up with a new test for this group coming up.
I grew up around a lot of WWII vets, ad thought I'd never live to see the day that people would be marching down the street waving flags with swastikas.
Disregard for basic privacy expectations and for copyright laws, thanks to the ridiculous ease of obtaining, dispersing, “modifying, copying, and stealing intellectual property.
I was born 9/4/186, but let's not forget another issue: finding loopholes that allow for copyright restoration of movies that have entered the Amer. public domain, which includes invoking the still-copyrighted source material that movie was based off. Retroactive copyright extensions and trademarking public domain images, sounds, or names also act as a perpetual copyright, a form of copyright that the Constitution forbids. The length of "limited times" is up for debate, but life+70 years for post-1978 foreign and domestic works effectively is perpetual copyright as that type of copyright does also involve a duration that lacks a finite length. Practically speaking, this "public domain infringement".
Disclaimer: I frequent pirated scanlation sites and fan translations of Japanese light novel sites (I am aware of the unethical, immoral, and illegal practices these are), so anytime I rant about the public domain is essentially a moot point.
It did not come into existence until the very end of the 1960's.
Before the 1970s, they were all mechanical with a few notable exceptions, like electric and tuning fork watches.
Quartz watches put many Swiss watch companies out of business... many people thought they might go extinct.
Didn't happen and there was a resurgence in the 1980's that has continued to the present day.
Now many people think smartwatches are going to do the same thing quartz nearly did.
There is no chance of this happening. Patek Philippe have been in business since 1839... they're not going away.
Way too many people appreciate wearing something of highest quality, not throw-away junk.
But I can see smartwatches eventually delivering a knockout blow to the quartz watch.
* Digital music - all the time I spent as a kid waiting for my favorite songs to come on the radio so I could press "Record" and get them on a cassette tape, and now I can buy them for $1-2 (w/o annoying DJ commentary over the beginning/end) with a couple clicks.
* This is probably my youthful nostalgic rose-colored glasses (it's probably always been like this to some degree, but you don't see it until you're an adult), but I never foresaw the widespread acceptance/apathy towards not following rules/laws/etc.
* GPS/non-paper maps. Internet. All portable on a smartphone.
* Already mentioned, but the decline of interest among teenagers in driving (though no doubt driven by the ability to communicate via smartphone, so don't need to be in the same physical location), and the decline of respect for intelligence and learning.
* Digital/online banking (which I love, btw).
* Google/search engines - all the time I spent as a kid with my grandparents' encyclopedia set.
* Openness of discourse. There were so many topics you didn't dare talk about or was very hush-hush when I was a kid (sex, medical and health issues, etc) - now it seems like almost nothing is taboo and everything is fodder for disclosure or discussion.
While reading about the latest environmental warning that says that humanity either might be or probably will be basically doomed due to climate change in about 60 years or so, I was thinking how much has happened in the past 50 years that I either did not foresee or did not think would happen so soon.
What can you add to the following list that YOU did not foresee?
- Smartphones
- Personal computers
- The rise of Neo Nazi groups
- Legal same-sex marriages
- Kindles and other electronic books
- The International Space Station
- The Internet and social media (i.e., Facebook)
- The end of so many daily newspapers and the "dumbing down" of most nightly newscasts
- Many more highly over-protective parents
P.S. This thread is NOT meant to start a discussion about whether global warming is real or not, or to start a debate about the pros or cons of any issue or invention. There is already a thread on this in the P&OC forum about the global warming issue -- Trump Administration’s Strategy on Climate: Try to Bury Its Own Scientific Report -- and I would guess for any other issue that might come up, also!
Lots of great answers for sure!
I think added to your list would be social media and how public people are. I never saw that coming and still would rather post using a user name then my own name like at a forum called nextdoor. Unfortunately for me, I've been using Roselvr since 1999. Most profiles of Roselvr belong to me which leads to me being able to be easily stalked online!
As for global warming, a thread without Trump may be needed because it's a huge problem.
I once saw an interview by one of the original cast members of Star Trek. The person was asked which of the technologies used on the show they are most surprised is common place today. Surprisingly, the person laughed and said they all used to joke about the auto open doors where you would walk up to a door and it would just open. They thought that was such a great thing but would never happen, LOL.
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