Technology is powerful. Working for an IVR company, I see it every day. IVR systems are making banking and day-to-day things for most of easier. But IVR systems are also helping cancer patients deal with pain and addicts deal with recovery.

There’s really no way to get around it. Over the history of mankind, innovation has shaped and reshaped our culture in an incredible way, sometimes seemingly overnight, and has transformed the way we interact with the world.

Take the internet, for example.

Last week, Senior Editor Paul Miller of online tech blog The Verge decided to give up the internet for an entire year as a sort of social experiment.

It sounds like an easy task at first, but think about it—the internet is engrained in almost everything we do these days, and I’m not just talking about our obsession with Facebook and Twitter.

Do you remember what life was like before the internet came along? Trying to get directions by analyzing confusing fold-out maps, paying bills through the mail by check, buying bulky boxes of software on scratchable CDs at the store, and sitting through the commercials on TV – what a nightmare!

Paul Miller must be crazy.

It’s clear that tech has a huge impact on our lives, one that we’re not even aware of most of the time.

Every few years an invention comes along that at first seems trivial and unnecessary but then becomes a must-have item for survival. We buy it, love it and then slowly forget about life before it and move on.

The internet certainly followed this path, as did the home computer and the smartphone. Every day companies come up with new and innovative products that make our lives easier, faster, longer and better (or at least they promise to). (We hope we’re doing that with our IVR products.)

Now that the tablet computer has been out for a while and almost everyone seems to have a smartphone, everyone is looking to the next “it” item.

My money is on Google’s Project Glass.

According to Engadget, Project Glass is a major center of attention in Google’s top-secret X Lab (alongside driverless cars and space elevators), even drawing the personal attention of company co-founder Sergey Brin.

After leaks on the blog 9 to 5 Google and speculations about the tech in the New York Times, Google announced the product publicly, launching a webpage, releasing a video and sending Brin to The Gavin Newsom Show to demonstrate the prototype.

…Stay tuned for the rest in “Project Glass”…