In martial arts, there always comes a point where the student surpasses the teacher. And the student, with the knowledge gained, becomes the master. The knowledge is then squared and so on. Well at least that’s what I learned from the many hours of watching Kung Fu Theater as a kid on Saturday morning.
Today, we are not just passing our knowledge down to other human beings, but in some way we are passing it down to technology. My washing machine knows how much water to add based on data from sensors. In the same way, it knows that it should spin the clothing more to get extra water out. Likewise, the dryer shuts itself off or extends the time if it detects the clothes are still damp. Less than a decade ago, you would have had to check the dryer and curse it for having to turn the knob (Remember that little dial thing – oh the days of old) to add more time.
It is rare we even use our own innate knowledge to get from one place to another. We have become so dependent on our GPS to tell us what to do; we’ve all seen stories of people driving into walls because the GPS told them to. While maybe the GPS was wrong (maybe even self-destructive. hehehe), but who drove into the wall? In you have Microsoft Sync in your car, the damn thing actually seems to get mad at you and mock you, especially if you have an accent. 
Ask most people which way is north these days and they spin around like a top to randomly point in a direction.
We have become so dependent on technology to help us with complicated or even simple problems’ it has now started replacing our basic instincts. There a new dumbing of America on the rise, a dumbing of the physical processing power of the brain. In another 10 years, our appliances may just be as smart as a 10-year-old.
Bryan DeLuca
5 Comments
I guess if you’re around long enough, you get to see things repeat themselves. When electronic calculators first came on the market, people were afraid that everyone would forget how to add and subtract.
But what happened is that we spent more time figuring out how to solve the problem, and let the box do the math.
Smarter devices let us use our time in more productive ways, and the survivors — those who don’t crash into the wall — will be those who figure out how to use new technologies to make their lives better.
Very funny.
I have real problems with the intrusion of microprocessors into ordinary appliances, such as my washing machine. Why? Because this means a part that will eventually be obsolete, that I can’t get from the manufacturer, and that I can’t reasonably reverse engineer. I’m guessing that my current washer (which has a processor in it) will last 15 years, after which I’ll be forced to replace it. Contrast this with my mother’s washer, with a mechanical timer, which lasted at least 30 years.
The other thing that infuriates me with processors in appliances is the abysmal user interface. There’s no wonder your mother’s VCR (another obsolete term) always flashed 12:00… nobody could figure out how to get past the UI. It seems like the people who program appliance UIs are those who washed out of VCR programming.
We’ve already had to toss an oven because the CPU board toasted, and the new one was about 1/2 the price of a new oven, and the repair weasel wanted to order one part at a time as he iterated towards repairing the unit. We bought a different brand instead. Of course, the UI is different, and has its own special way of infuriating me.
I’m a 50-year-old guy who was a 16 year old in 1978 who was given a Commodore CBM-9190 scientific calculator. We were poor and my mother struggled to pay for it. I studied that machine from top to bottom desperately seeking to understand each and every of its 90 odd functions. It was an obsession with me for 2 years and improved my understanding of mathematics considerably. Incidentally, a guy called Chuck Peddle founded the CBM COMPANY. Later in late 1979 at age 17 I took a microprocessor, (again a design of Chuck Peddle) and four preprogrammed E-PROM containing a BASIC interpreter program written by a little known guy called Bill Gates who had dropped out of business college and formed a small microprocessor software company in New Mexico called Microsoft. With the aid of drawings from Practical Electronics I set about building a microcomputer with a full qwerty keyboard which worked on a TV set and used a cassette tape to store it’s programmes with the same specification as the then Commodore CBM-Pet. Which co-incidentally, Chuck Peddle also created.
Amazingly I discovered that earlier, Chuck Peddle had designed the famous 6502 processor which was the CPU found in the CBM pet, the Ohio Superboard and it’s British cousin, the Compukit UK101 which I built. It was also indeed the processor used in the famous Apple and Apple-II microcomputers.
Apart from 8 others sold to the Cable and Wireless postgraduate college in Porthcurnow, Cornwall, I was the only guy at 17 in the whole county who bought and built a build a Compukit UK101 in the whole of the 5 years of the life of the product. When I took it to college next door to where I lived they were all amazed and it kind of made me a sort of celebrity there for a while. BTW this was also the year that the Rubik Cube became so very famous.
I believe that the introduction of calculators inspired those mathematical amongst us to be able to test our understanding and take care of the drudgery of the arithmetic. The old method was by hunting laboriously thorough logarithm tables and performing endless additions multiplications and subtractions only to have to search through anti-log tables to get the answer. It was a pain in the butt but we still did it and the discipline that it instilled in us only really added to the thoroughness required when handling equations any way… I don’t think that calculators are a bad thing for older kids studying mathematical concepts but for young kids still getting to grips with basic numeracy and literacy, I think that their use should be restricted to a period where they are handed out after arithmetic tutorials and tests so that they themselves may check their answers to their basic calculations. Those of us who think that mental arithmetic isn’t necessary nowadays must remember that the purpose of mental arithmetic is to discipline the mind and also to provide a checking mechanism so that the user of calculators may have a feel for the arithmetic and hence suspect that the answer may well be wrong probably because of a key entry error at some stage. Just blindly relying upon the answer given on the little display is indeed taking a bit of a chance especially if you’re calculating the amount of concrete you need to be delivered for the base of your home or a swimming pool. Get that one wrong and it could cost you thousands!
Sadly from those A-level days, my adolescent dreams of a better world have melted away as I indeed see a tremendous dumbing down of all levels of education from the elementary school level right up to bachelor degrees. I was so sad when I traveled back to see my old university. We were the same age as these guys and yet they seem so juvenile, insecure and so shallow. They mince around being more worried about how cool they look with their latest mobile phones and spend disproportionate amounts of their days bashing away on play station consoles or chattering away mindlessly on the internet like little birds on a telegraph line. I could cry when I see this as we now have the first generation of grown men and women who routinely play these mindless beat-em-up and war games on their play station consoles and wii pretty much every day even in front of their infant Children.
BTW Here in the UK I observed the standards of education at my old school recently and was shocked. If you think about it, an old 6502 running with a clock of just ONE MEGAHERTZ from 1978 could be easily programmed to play a pretty respectable game of chess on my Compukit UK101. I thought I could play the game until it kept beating me hands down. The CPUs in today’s washing machines are often far more powerful than this so I have to conclude that the level of skills I think has reached the point where most kids are below the abilities of a washing machine of today!! Let alone the ones, which will be emerging in the future.
I fear that this new generation of people aren’t even going to be able to look after them selves let alone us in our old age.
Who the hell is going to look after us?
God help us all.
We are really going to need him.
@Mark Humphreys
Bitter Much?
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