The computer age has brought access of all sorts, to people who would normally be left in the dark without them. Medical advances are too numerous to list, but the swallowed pill-sized camera I had to introduce into my body a while ago seems to me much better idea than too much poking around. So does the research going into connecting damaged body parts to machinery that may help those in wheelchairs walk again. Or brain stimulation as well.

Scientists, medical people, designers and those at any edge of any sort of research must feel well satisfied with current energy and excitement. As always happens to ordinary people like curious me, I have no real way of assessing/imagining what life will be like in 50 years. Exciting times.

But before I get carried away, it’s been the same I suspect for each generation. My dad didn’t hear a radio until he built one himself. He never flew in a plane until his early 20s … and even I didn’t see television until I was 17. By the end of his life, he had succumbed to his computer and would have loved Netflix and YouTube.

I suspect he would have also enjoyed a small household robot for company and protection, driverless cars and especially those visual reality things.H e could have gone skiing without the disadvantages!

Someone reminded me recently that You Tube only started in February 2005. Computers were things of wonder (and fear) when, in my 40s with kids and all, we had to start to learn a new language. I first sought out teachers from computer nerds who seemed to accumulate knowledge by osmosis and this was a mistake. How they learned was a mystery, but I needed a teacher who had a foot in both worlds. I found one who explained that a computer was basically a filing and information system with creative potential. 

There are huge areas, though, where there seems to me to be little or no change and that causes me a great deal of anger, frustration and incredible sadness. Poverty, discrimination, inequality and war seem to go on their merry way over generations and, to be perfectly honest, in all my reading I have never really read any explanation about why people treat each other so badly.

I have said before that I think mayhem of all sorts happens as a result of a need for power. The fear of powerlessness, which seems to me to be a primeval drive, is yet to be civilised. It probably served an important protective feature of man’s early development, but it seems incredibly out of date now. Some nations seem to be doing better than others at becoming civilised.

Social change appears to be revving up a bit but, with the aid of my meagre understanding of history, it probably looks and sounds better than it is. I am very pleased about marriage equality, care for single mothers and disadvantaged families and compulsory education as a general idea. But a look back to the invention of the wheel, electricity, penicillin, votes for women and other incredibly significant events, I think that all our advantages considered, our achievements can be put into perspective.

Not that I’m comparing really. I just feel sad that social change hasn’t solved more of the world’s problems when I know we have the answers and the goods. Somehow corruption, lack of will or education seems to interfere with problems that should be able to be solved considering the overall wealth and skills that are available on an international scale. Even if I believed that it is not actually possible for mankind to create an equal playing field, it could at least behave better and elevate the health and wellbeing of those on the so-called bottom rung just for the sake of decency.

While others starve or are shot to pieces in war, we do not yet really live in decent times. We have not learned enough or made enough progress despite technology, education, good health and creative endeavour. It is a tragedy.