As I sat in a circle with my six grand kids and listened to them talk about their lives, their friends, their toys, their challenges and their joys, I couldn’t help but contemplate what their futures might hold. They could easily live to be 100 or more years old, and what will the quality of their lives be for the next nine or more decades?

Hopefully, they will all have an opportunity to get an education, and they’ll probably have a lot more intelligent advice along the way than was available to me in the 60s. But what about the rest? What else will be resolved, improved, repaired, destroyed, invented, or resurrected?

Will the climate continue to deteriorate? Will food become less plentiful as the world population zooms to 10 billion people? As I dug deeply into the past decades of my life, the single most dramatic technological change that has occurred (to the point of seemingly attaching itself to our bodies) is the smartphone. It’s still a little difficult to comprehend the power of this device and the impact that it’s had on our lives already, but there’s no more dramatic technological advance to pedestal-ize than that minicomputer.

“What percent of fat, proteins, or carbs should I consume, Siri?” “Let me check on that,” she politely answers. “How many angels can fit on the head of a pin, Siri?” “An infinite number of angels can fit on a pin, Nick,” she replies.

We have our clocks, our schedules, our email accounts, our message systems, our phone directories and contact lists, our weather reports, our bank and credit card accounts, our word processors, and that’s truly just the beginning because everything that has ever been recorded in human history can be searched via the web on our smartphones.

But these amazing devices have also both increased and simultaneously marginalized our ability to communicate directly with each other. Supposedly, 85 percent of what we do in face-to-face communication is lost in emails and texts.

Any time there are teenagers at a family gathering, they are, for the most part, non-communicative. It’s as if they are lost in space, and unless you accost them directly by standing in front of them and peppering them with questions, they can be completely removed from the room. On the other side of that coin, however, is FaceTime and Zoom and a half a dozen other face-to-face software programs. Wow, what a difference that can make toalonely grandfather staying in some remote part of the world without his family.

We’re already seeing the use of nano particles and chips implanted in our pets to identify them and nano healing delivery systems, space travel, driverless cars, and talk of a colony on Mars. Will my grandkids enjoy the amazing products of science and engineering in a Brave New World of wonder and beauty, or will they be subjected to the continuation of the tribal mentality that is currently sweeping the world?

Will we eventually eliminate prejudice? Will we ever control our greed enough for them to know world peace for even a decade or two? Will we ever embrace a philosophy that cares enough for our fellow man to ensure that we can all have a decent life?

I’m hoping that we find new antibiotics through the discovery of the benefits of microbes, that we continue to make discoveries in mental health, cancer and heart disease, and that we restore our overall commitment to education and the arts in this country.

The good news is that I’ll be a memory. The rest of the news is, while I’m here, I’m going to do everything that I can to make sure that every one of these good things at least has a chance to become reality. Purpose Driven Lives…learn those words. Let’s focus on making things better.