Pre-internet memories
BIld av Michael Schwarzenberger från Pixabay
When I was a kid, I had a Lego semi-trailer truck that must have been one of my very first sets (I was too young to remember). It was released in 1984 when I was two years old. I cannot ever remember this set ever being built. It had some special pieces with stickers, so I knew it was there. Here’s the catch: The instruction manual was shredded (probably by yours truly), and I only had some fragments but not enough to build the set. This has frustrated me sub-consciously for about 37 years. Until now.
If you are of the internet generation, you might not even understand my problem. It is embarrassingly easy to find instructions for any set online today, for free. Replacement pieces too, should you need any. If you are old, like me, you will understand my problem. There was no internet. The set had gone out of production and when I found the traces of that semi-trailer truck in my Lego collection, I did not know how to find a new instruction manual because I didn’t even know the set’s number 6367. Simple problems like these are thankfully a thing of the past now.
This Saturday, I was playing with my son and once again found those mysterious special pieces with the words “International Transport” divided over eight panels. It was like playing a word puzzle. I decided it was time to finally fix this childhood trauma of mine. I open google and wrote “Lego International Transport vintage” and the FIRST HIT is the instruction manual that has eluded me for four decades. Progress is lovely indeed. We got to work immediately and managed to find all the pieces for the trailer and put it together again, for the first time since two-year me tore it apart.
I know, this is blog just a nostalgia piece, but it is also a good example of much our possibilities have evolved in just four decades. We have tools in our pocket that we couldn’t even begin to imagine back then. I could perhaps even have thrown some of the Lego pieces in a pile on the floor and pointed my camera towards them and the phone would have found the instruction manual. It’s literally that easy now, or at least soon will be. If you haven’t tried image search yet, try it. It is somewhat scary.
Now, if four decades could improve something as pointless and trivial as finding a missing Lego instruction to the point that it cannot even be conceived as a problem anymore, consider this. How on Earth are we going to figure out what the world looks like in 100 years from now? Imagine if you were to take the smartest people on the planet in the year 1921 and let them set up regulations in society on how to achieve a better world today in 2021. That task they would have faced is difficult beyond comprehension. Now consider that if we were to do the same thing today – which we are – the difficulty would increase exponentially. We cannot even predict 50 or 30 years, perhaps not even 10 years into the future with accuracy! Human progress is now so fast, that we could find some game changer that will make all our current plans irrelevant. And not only that, the speed of the growth accelerates and the rate of acceleration accelerates too! This kind of exponential growth is beyond the scope of understanding for the vast majority of us. We tend to extrapolate human progress with the same speed as today. For example, if we were to imagine the year 2040, we would be inclined to compared the year 2000 with today and infer that a similar (linear) progress will be made. However, today we might complete what took two decades in just one year.
An old Lego semi-trailer and a lost instruction manual can point one’s mind in interesting directions.