I completely agree with you about the unrealized potential, but my greatest regret over the past 50 years is not about the technology, but our ability to harness it. I remember helping to setup a computer show at our local high school when I was still very young. The local vendors had agreed to donate an Apple //+ to the school in return for having space to show off all of their wares. We were thrilled and I can vividly remember my father saying that my generation would be the last one to learn programming as an add-on elective skill. He imagined a world where everyone could harness the power of digital technologies and that programming, building, tinkering, would be second nature to all of us.
We spend our time thinking about UI glitter because we gave up on that dream of having every student learn to program. We took the exercises out of math and science books where we asked students to write programs to use the Pythagorean theorem or convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. It became "enough" to learn how to enter a few numbers in a spreadsheet and perhaps add a trend line.
A few hard working people in a garage can still turn out wonderful things, but if we really want to see the promise of technology then we need to fix the bigger problem of building an educational system that empowers many more people.
I completely agree with you about the unrealized potential, but my greatest regret over the past 50 years is not about the technology, but our ability to harness it. I remember helping to setup a computer show at our local high school when I was still very young. The local vendors had agreed to donate an Apple //+ to the school in return for having space to show off all of their wares. We were thrilled and I can vividly remember my father saying that my generation would be the last one to learn programming as an add-on elective skill. He imagined a world where everyone could harness the power of digital technologies and that programming, building, tinkering, would be second nature to all of us.
We spend our time thinking about UI glitter because we gave up on that dream of having every student learn to program. We took the exercises out of math and science books where we asked students to write programs to use the Pythagorean theorem or convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. It became "enough" to learn how to enter a few numbers in a spreadsheet and perhaps add a trend line.
A few hard working people in a garage can still turn out wonderful things, but if we really want to see the promise of technology then we need to fix the bigger problem of building an educational system that empowers many more people.