Those of us of the current generation and older are all consumer pioneers in information and communications technology (ICT). Many of us have gone through the early days of punch card input and a computer that took up a whole room or two.

We graduated pretty seamlessly through generations of smaller, faster and more sophisticated information technologies and computers in an incredibly short time. Of course, there are those now in their 60s or 70s who may have completely skipped the computer generation and the Internet, and now are outside of the mainstream of technology. My aunt is an example. She does not even want to think about having to learn about computers and the Internet. She can barely cope with a cell phone. So I do not communicate with her that way. I use the plain old telephone interface.

Then there are others like my mom and dad who skipped computers and the Internet throughout most of their working lives but adopted it once the price fell, it became less mysterious to use, and content became compelling. My father, a civil engineer, graduated from using a slide rule (which was still part of the curriculum when I went to junior high school), to using it in conjunction with a calculator then a computer.

Once he retired he bought a desktop computer and an Internet connection for use at home. It expanded his horizons. Although he moved far away from the north of Ontario, his company still needed his skills as a consultant. He found he was able to telework via e-mail, sending in his finished designs from afar. He is an occassional user of new technology on a social level.

My mother started in on the computer age in her sixties with zero knowledge or experience. Yet she has transformed herself into an Internet freak. She is the typical silver surfer and communicates with her four children almost daily using e-mail, chat, Facebook and Web-cam.

Her experience demonstrates how a complicated technology can be developed into one that is simple and easy to use. One turns it on like a modern car. No crank is needed or a special knowledge of what is under the hood. My parents would not have been comfortable with using the kind of programming language needed to run the earliest computers. Current ICTs, in the main the Internet, has connected generations together in a similar shared experience.

What about the youngest generation, the teenagers who are driving the social networking phenomena, and the coming era of seamless communications mobility? Are they ICT pioneers as well, or are they simply part of the further development of the associated technologies? I go for the latter. Much of the ICT segment associated with the Internet is mature in the sense that the broad field has already been mapped out, more or less.

New uses and products are being developed on top of that broad field, but the basic infrastructure, the information highway and associated hardware and software, is essentially in place for the following generations. Through innovations in the technology of travel, previous generations laid down the maps of the geography of the Earth. We helped map out the geography of the mind.

Technological innovation speeds up with every generation. The time to bring technological innovation to market is an exponential curve, as each generation builds on the innovations of the previous one.

My son Elliott, who was born on January 1 of this year, will in his later years probably look back at my generation as technological dodos, without appreciating the pain and agony consumers had to go through as products developed to reach the relatively low frustration levels we experience with them today. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote.

He will lift his eyebrows in puzzlement at how we let a 'huge' computer take up so much deskspace in our homes and offices. The software games we play will look as primitive and cute as Pacman looks to us today. He will be playing in 3D and virtual reality. His work will probably involve some aspects of 3D and virtual reality technologies.

He will laugh at all the things we had to carry in our pockets to talk to people, listen to music, identify ourselves, pay for things or find our way around a strange city. He will wonder how we ever got by without helper robots to clean up the house, cook and do the washing. His generation will shoot for Mars and beyond, and not just the Moon.

Einstein, in reference to Newton and others before him, attributed his scientific discoveries to the fact that he stood on the shoulders of giants. All of us make up a small part of the broad shoulders Elliott and his generation will stand on to embrace new technologies.

It is up to parents to pass on to their children the curiosity to try all the nascent technologies of Elliott's day, as all generations are pioneers.

I hope he will not be afraid of the next generation of technologies, and will fight for their democratisation. I hope he will guard the right to privacy as a barrier against those who would use technology as a means to encroach on our lives and exploit our preferences.

And I hope I and his mother will keep up with current technologies sufficiently enough that one day, when we are old and grey and sitting by the fire, he will also be amazed, as I am of my parents, that we will know how to use and appreciate the technologies he will consider part of the air he breathes.

Send any comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com