I have a son – my wife has requested that I use only his first initial in this blog, and I respect that, so I’ll just call him “T” – who started using an iPad back in February at the ripe old age of 8 years old. My daughter, M, was six at the time. My wife and I are having a third child, due at the end of April, who will likely go through her formative years not knowing that there were once handheld devices that didn’t have touch screens.

But none of this is news. Let’s back up for a minute. When I was eight (Yes, for a blog about innovation, I spend a lot of time dwelling in the past. I realize the irony. Thanks for your contribution), I was pestering my father every ten minutes to work his magic on the computer and turn the C-prompt on the screen of our ancient IBM into Math Blasters (or some such). That was our first computer. Shortly thereafter we got a Macintosh II, which I could operate on my own, to a degree. My brother was born in 1990; he had a computer in his house every day of his life.

So my son is in the same situation that I was in as a kid – old enough to use revolutionary, bleeding-edge in-home technology practically from its inception, with younger siblings who would likely never know a world without it. We are both fortunate in that regard – our births timed perfectly with the adoption curve of the Next Big Thing.

But let’s not forget who built a world where that kind of thing is possible. My father – an admitted gadget-guy and the supplier of the part of my genetic code that makes me crave innovative technology – built that world for me.

Not him alone, of course. He worked for a series of companies that drove innovative work, who built machines that did things no one thought possible – things that had been outside the scope of human imagination in the not-too-distant past. But he brought his work home with him, to some degree, and that had a definite impact on me.

I’m writing this only because it just dawned on me how impactful my father has been in my career tack. I don’t want to say that I’m following in his footsteps, because we both took very different paths to get where we are today. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that had my father chosen a different career path – if he had stayed in the Air Force, for example, or had taken a job selling shoes instead of cash registers when he got back from Korea – I likely wouldn’t be so hell-bent on driving technological innovation.

So when my son is searching for apps in the app store, I smile. I smile not because I want him to be like I was when I was his age, but because I know I am doing my part to create a world where he could follow in my footsteps, if he so chooses. I tell ya, I’m incredibly happy with where I am right now, and I’m excited for what the future holds, both for the world and for my family.

“Making the world a better place for our children.” We hear that all the time, don’t we? It’s usually tied to some activist issue or other, requiring us to be big-picture thinkers about the future of the planet or the economy or politics. We just kind of assume that technology will take care of itself with respect to making the world a better place. There’s all kinds of economic incentive to drive technology forward, after all. But we rarely think about the impact that what we do today has on the ways our kids are able to interact with each other and the world in the future.

I wrote yesterday about the ability of new technology to expand the outer limits of our imagination. If you believe that, then you must also believe is that what we’re building is not simply new technology. It’s a vehicle that will carry us into places we haven’t even considered possible. And we won’t be driving that vehicle – our children will.

When I think about it, I realize that my father’s old Mac II wasn’t just a cool piece of technology. It was a stargazing platform. It was a point of reference for me, and the basis for endless daydreams. “Well, if my computer can do this,” I would think, “then maybe it can do that. And maybe a thousand computers could do that. And wouldn’t that be cool?”

I sometimes wonder what my son thinks will come next, and how closely his vision and mine are aligned. I wonder what he thinks a computer should do, how it should operate. If he could draw a picture with crayons and make it come to life, what would he draw?

Maybe I’ll ask him to draw it when I get home tonight. On the iPad, of course.

–MS