When I was a kid, the most advanced technology we had was a black and white television with “rabbit ears”. As I became more tech savvy, I received a transistor radio for Christmas and an old manual typewriter in high school. Rich or poor, there just weren’t many gadgets to buy. There were no cell phones or computers or tablets. You shared a single phone line with several of your neighbors which was euphemistically called a “party” line.
When I first started working in a real estate office, listings were kept on index cards in file drawers very similar to library catalogues. We used ledger books to record rents and expenses. Comptometers (manual calculators) added and subtracted columns of numbers. And, I marveled at the IBM Selectric typewriter.
In the ensuing years technology has advanced and intruded more and more into our daily work and personal life. Now I am instantaneously connected with e-mails. My businesses records and information reside in a “cloud.” I can work from anywhere with any computer and have all my business and personal records available whether I am sitting in my office or using my smart phone in some far off place. This has allowed productivity to be increased exponentially.
As a nation we are unfortunately in danger of not being able to take advantage of all these possibilities. Like so much of our infrastructure, our technology is woefully behind our global competitors. Our internet speed is ranked 11th and the cost is three times as high as France or the UK or most of the OECD due to a lack of market competition. This has led to a lack of spending by the internet providers to improve their product. If this continues along with a governmental neglect of the rest of our infrastructure, the U.S. will eventually not be economically competitive.
The more immediate problem today is the lack of skilled technicians to service our technology. We train electricians and plumbers for years both in school and on the job. The person who fixes our computer or diagnoses our connection problem has two weeks or a month of training before being “certified”. The IT professional in your company could have been self-taught and relies more on trial and error than any real knowledge. There is a growing gap between the technology and the people charged with its maintenance.
This is just another symptom of our nation’s failure to confront our problems head on. Many of our governing, educational and social models are no longer capable of providing answers and solutions. We need to rethink and restructure our approach. The world in which we find ourselves today is vastly different than when I was a child or a young adult or even the world at the turn of the 21st century. We can keep our core believes enshrined in the Declaration of Independence but adapt our governance to solve the problems of today and tomorrow.