Guess what. Just because we don’t have flying cars, doesn’t mean we aren’t living in The Future.

It’s fascinating to me how many people refuse to admit any technological progress has occurred since Asimov and Orwell scrawled predictions about the magical, frightening, beautiful, perilous world we would one day be living in. It’s as if unless they see people dancing around floating cities wearing silver jumpsuits and talking to their live-in android house servant Clyde, then by gods we have made no progress.

Well ladies and gents, let me tell you, we have.

Right now, right this very second, hovering above your head is a series of satellites that can tell you, to within a meter, exactly where you are located at almost any point on this planet. To access this magic, all you need is a device about the size of a deck of playing cards that you can pick up at your local Best Buy for $100.

In your pocket or by your bed, or socked away inside your glove compartment is another device that allows you to call anyone on the face of the planet, surf the web, write an essay, or shoot HD quality video. This device costs you about $70 a month, and you recently bought one for your 8 year old daughter so you could keep track of her at soccer practice.

Did I mention that we have a massive, interconnected network of computers so vast that all the data ever generated on this planet before its invention could fit easily in a fraction of its bandwidth. Typically, we use this system to play World of Warcraft and argue about politics.

All the while we have tacked about a dozen years onto our lives, have sequenced the human genome, have airplanes that can be flown from half-way across the world, and have a system through which people like me can write pithy screeds about technology on the Internet and reach thousands upon thousands of other people in a blink of a virtual eye.

Honestly, if hover-Porches and robot secretaries were the best we could do I would be bored to tears. Real progress is more subtle than that and far more profound. It occurs in its own rhythm, and sometimes it occurs in such a roundabout fashion that we can be sitting inside a revolution and not even notice its happening.

We live in the wildest and most interesting future that any thinker at any time could dream up. Maybe it’s time to realized that. Maybe it’s time we did something about that.

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