I remember a discussion I had many years ago when I was a teenager. It was in my parent’s kitchen and one of my dad’s friends – an intelligent guy who I respected because of his independent streak – was trying to convince me that we (people, the world, mankind) had already discovered just about all the major inventions that were ever going to be discovered.

This conversation couldn’t have lasted more than about 5 minutes, but I remember it because I was so surprised. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I’ll never know whether he was just baiting me or actually believed what he was saying.

But what I do remember was that here was a guy who I respected, going against one of the fundamental beliefs – one of the most obvious “facts” – of post-World War II western society. We had been taught that the discoveries of the first half of the century were just the beginning, and that there were amazing things ahead we could not even imagine.

That was presented to us in those days as a self-evident “fact” – one which I believed then, and still believe now. Many things in life may very well be the same 10 or 30 or 40 years from now. But it is impossible to predict how things are going to unfold when you have no idea what new discoveries are going to take place tomorrow or the next day, or ten years from now.

Today we usually think of the big changes in our world coming as a result of the computer revolution. But some of the most important changes of the last century took place well before the computer revolution. The way we viewed society and the world was the most important one.

We talked about the “generation gap” back in the 60s and 70s. That’s because our world looked and felt a lot different from that of our parents. The really important differences were in the way our social lives were organized. And most of these differences were the result of developments in technology – mostly as a result of television.

In the span of about 20 years much of North America changed from a mostly rural society where our social lives were organized around local institutions like family, church, school, and small town. Suddenly in the 50s, 60s and 70s everything became urbanized. People were moving from small towns to larger ones, and everyone was watching the same things on television, listening to the same music, and watching the same movies.

All of these things eroded our loyalties to family, school, church, and town and made us all citizens of a much larger world. Most of these changes were because of technologies that opened up the world to ordinary people: television, better cars and highways, more effective phone systems, and cheap air travel, just to name a few.

Now when we look back on it, the computer revolution of the 1980s and 90s just accelerated this process, and its gradual evolution as a communication device could hardly have gone any other way.

In the first few years of the computer revolution the personal computer was a tool – in many ways like a lawnmower or typewriter. But not just any ordinary tool. The personal computer absolutely revolutionized many work places, replacing older labor intensive technologies with smarter, more powerful ones.

In the process millions of people were displaced from their old jobs, and often the skills required in the old jobs were rendered completely obsolete. This may be hard for people to imagine if they haven’t gone through it, but in virtually every area of employment technical skills that highly trained technicians had spent years learning and refining were suddenly of no value to employers. They either had to adapt – learn the new skills required by the new technology – or they would find themselves sweeping floors or flipping hamburgers.

Now we’re well into the third technological, cultural and economic revolution I’ve experienced in my life. This one is the “globalization revolution”, and the internet is at its heart. I’ll have a few more things to say on this later.