I'm not a Luddite, but.

20/5/2016

We've had millennia to develop convenient applications for day-to-day tasks. Stone tablets, pens and paper, typewriters. Illuminated manuscripts, glossy magazines. Horses, chariots, stagecoaches, horseless carriages.
     Now we've invented digital, and with it, a one-answer-to-everything approach to developing convenient applications for day-to-day tasks. We're going to Harness The Power Of Technology, or some variation on that phrase, to solve whatever problem we have. Okay. Fine. No objection. Anybody above a certain age will have internalised the notion that tech is clumsy, slow, unreliable and stupid, and of course it was, but it isn't any more.
     Code isn't always poetry, but it's easier than English grammar. Apps, smartphones, drones, comms, smart-media gadgets are all designed to be easy to adopt, no brain-work required, and the clumsy/slow parts have been either erased, eased, or hidden behind the smiley user interface. Technology may only be one basket, but it carries a heck of a lot of eggs.
     We're very human in the way we use technology. Apps that should be successful aren't successful; the technology we adopt isn't always the best for its purpose, but we go with the marketing. Blu-Ray, Betamax, whatever. Only technologists solve problems, because there's only one language of solutions these days, and that matters because they're the only ones who get to identify problems.
     What strikes me is our investment in faking ourselves and the world around us. Robots designed to welcome us into banks, like people do now; VR headsets to present worlds extrapolated from the world we live in. All that money spent on bringing artificial intelligence up to something below the cognitive ability of a hungry child.

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A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.

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Also available in English. 'Can I Quote You on That?'

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Categories
(Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

Kitchen parenting

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Man down?

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Thinks: populism

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Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

Not available in Vietnamese. Sorry.

9th May 2014

On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.