I am always staggered by the pace of technological development and the spread of technology over our everyday lives.

I am writing this post on my laptop, on which i have just watched an episode of battlestar galactica, on an 8gb hard drive the size of my thumbnail. I am connected to the internet at speeds which 5 years ago would have been unthinkable while travelling at 140mph on the East Coast Mainline (Thank you National Express for making wifi free now!). My laptop keeps it charge now for 3 hours not due to the advances in battery technology, but rather due to the miniturisation of the microprocessors and transistors inside of it and the improved software which turns things off if they aren’t needed. The new mobile phone I received yesterday has more processing power than the computer I owned 7 years ago.  It has a digital camera which has almost the same resolution as my fancy digital SLR which was bought barely three years ago. At my home I have a television whose size is nothing new, but its resolution is three times greater than anything previously devised, and this is mid-range. I will shortly have a computing device under this television which has 10000x more computing power than what was used to develop nuclear weapons and the space program (PS3).

And yet, this technology is pretty much only available to a small proportion of the human race. Some countries which are regarded as being not too bad development wise, Cuba, have only, this last month, been given access to this technology and embraced the information age. Countries elsewhere are only being connected thanks to the “Charity” of those in the developed world.

At the same time resources which are needed to produce these valuable devices are becoming increasingly scarce and we as a species are having to delve deeper into the unexplored realms of our planet and dig ever deeper to find more to fuel our need for information.

The thing is, do I as a person, actually need this?

The answer is, unfortunately, yes.

The raison d’etre of our species, if you believe darwinism is to breed, multiply and evolve into ever more efficient forms that can cope with our environment. In order to survive, i must be able to compete with those around me. I need to be computer literate so that I can shine out at work and promote myself a more suitable candidate for jobs over ahead of other people. Socially, I need to be connected so that I can (this sounds so Attenborough) attract a Mate. (Which is pretty much how i met Amy).

All that aside, I honestly doubt that I could live without this which I continue to take for granted. This technology invades every single facet of my live to a point where if something truly catastrophic happened (a Threads like nuclear strike) then I simply do not know how I would cope.

A few people I know have thus created a pact to kill each other should civilisation as-we-know-it come to an end. Although I may find this a bit extreme, it is the most sensible option. If you are dead, and advertise you are dead (signs on door) then you not only save time for those coming to rescue you, and thus help someone more needy, but you save on the anguish of your loved ones. Especially if they also know of this plan. Unfortunately this is not an option for me as I live on my own, and would like a child one day. But it is still perhaps the most intelligent solution to a scenario which still may occur.

In other news, work is utterly crap ATM. I have been put on a project which has no firm deadline, in a team with limited rappour and social structure, with work which I find generally uninteresting. This is a warning to all that I may be grumpy for some time because of this. I will do what I can to request changes, and heck, it probably will get better. But I am very short with many people at the moment, and I do not see how this is going to change in the short term.

I have figured out how to spend money though. Neat!