Three things that could not happen

Try describing an ordinary evening to someone born a century and a half ago.

First you would have to explain that families now sit for hours listening to and watching people they will never meet. Voices from another city, faces from another country, recorded weeks earlier, played into the living room every night. That alone would sound like a fable. Whole lives arranged around strangers who do not know we exist.

Then you would have to explain the second part, which is stranger. Most of us now spend a large share of the waking day talking, in writing and in real time, with people we have never seen. Arguing with them, buying from them, asking them for directions, telling them about our children. Not one at a time, but hundreds, from the sofa, before the tea has gone cold.

Each of these was impossible until it was simply Tuesday. Nobody voted for either. They arrived, and within a generation people could not picture a day without them.

The third has already begun. It is software that answers back as though it understands the question, and the person asking, and the world they are both talking about. For now it is a novelty people try and then put down.

It will not stay a novelty. The first change took our evenings. The second took the gaps between everything else. This one is built to be there all the time, in every exchange, quietly, at whatever hour we reach for it.

Our grandchildren will find it hard to believe there was a day when most of what we heard came from other people.