Born Obsolete

In the last few weeks I've been struck at how much I have to do to stay up-to-date with the world in general and with web design in particular. Even though I subscribe to several blogs, watch and listen to news incessently, and read a few trade magazines weekly, I feel more and more behind the curve in what is possible or what I need to know to do my job. I mean, I was sent scrambling to the bookstore for new referrences just so I could keep a new web design up and running for testing - server books, language references, etc.

But it also struck me that here I am, trained to make lithographs ala the 19th century, and I'm running like the Red Queen to stay up-to-date. I mean, there was a time a few hundred years ago when a person could reasonably understand the intellectual tenor of the times. People like Da Vinci, Bernini, Gallileo, Franklin, and Jefferson could understand their times and make learned strides in diverse fields (look at Jefferson, America's most accomplised "Renaissance" man - architect, writer, politician, university founder and president, etc.). But now one is lucky to understand a particular niche in a particular field; specialization is the name of the game. And it seems that the learning curve gets continuially steeper as technology speeds the rate of innovation.

So it makes me wonder if there is a limit - is there a point where the rate of change is so fast that the vast majority of people will never catch up? Will people be born obsolete, subject to the whims of either the few geniuses who keep up? Or worse yet, to technology itself as it blindly drives itself forward? I mean, I have a 14 month old son, and I wonder if he'll ever be able to learn fast enough to understand even a portion of the world I am bequething to him?

And yet, what can we do? Become neo-Luddites and plug in? Become slaves to the machines and plug into The Matrix? (See, it has been a while since I've made a Matrix reference!) I don't know - seems like we can't go back, and we can't afford to go forward. Maybe the future is to be cyborg after all, carrying the Expedia encyclopedia in a CD-ROM pouch in our leg...