Since immemorable times, I've admired machines. Respected them, for their ability to ease one's efforts, quicken one's tasks, and bestow superpowers on us mere mortals. Distances we would take hours to walk, cars roll us through in mere minutes. Great expanses of unwalkable water, previous impassable borders, all sorts of boats now ply and float us through at our will and command. With machines we fly, we produce fire, make food, light darked rooms at midnight, mass-produce all sorts of goods, receive constant water supply in any of our homes, automate our liquid waste disposal, build shelters, shape the earth - it's safe to say that machines and tools have made our lives wondrously convenient and comfortable.
And then there were computers. Ahhh, computers. In my opinion, the closest mankind has come to replacing, and enhancing, their own brains. Birthed with the task of automating and quickening arithmetic/logical operations, they quickly found their way through all sorts of applications. Useful at first only for accountants, banks, and scientists, their fame probably spread through to librarians, writers, hobbyists - and then branched and trickled its way into pretty much every cultural stream of modern society. We now push a few buttons, and talk to people on the other side of the world instantly as if they saw us through a little magic window. We send instant, impalpable messages through the tireless electrical messenger, whose effort, where he material, would be vastly larger than even that of the often-ridiculed Santa Claus courier achievement. We store, share, and summon names, numbers, books, faces, voices, and music in little gadgets the size of a harmonica or smaller, and we can access knowledge bases, both public and personal, from any device in the whole wide world that taps into the ubiquitous Internet well. We process thousands, millions of pieces of information in the time that we blink, scratch our nose, or go get a cup of coffee. We delegate the task of charging fares or allowing access to little reading devices. We find any address in an unknown city without asking for help from anyone. We can produce visual art, static and animated, with precision and/or randomness the kind that has never been seen before. We can produce text much faster than any pen allows. We make and mold sounds like a potter does his clay. We can immerse ourselves in shared imagined parallel worlds of adventure and excitement. We shop from the whole world while sitting down. Mankind found a way to mass-produce logic, amass baffling amounts of data in tiny containers, and mass-spread information instantly across the entire world. How cool.
You can see how one can come to admire computers, or machines in general. I sure did. They imitate and enhance so many of our daily activities. What did I prefer - writing my long homework assignment by pen on a sheet of paper, where a mistake would leave a scratched-out word and evidence of my blunder on the paper, or comfortably typing and printing out a clean, crisp, perfectly-neatly fonted assignment? Since immemorable times, I've preferred the automated way of performing tasks, even if that meant going out of my way to find that automation. Because once you automate something correctly, you may never have to do that task, or automate it, again. And because with computers, not only are tasks performed more neatly, but they require much less of a physical investment. Why hire an expensive human toll-taker when you have a cheap wireless reading device? Why keep a large, heavy collection of videos on VCR, or even DVD, when you can make files out of them and have them available online on demand, weightless, nuisance-less? Why... etc.
There is another thing to be considered, though. That is skill. Automating tasks, while enormously useful, can degrade skillsets. Take lightbulbs, for example. Lighting our homes since the 19th century. How the heck did people see at night before this? Fire, of course. Everyone who wanted to see what the hell was going on after dusk had to have candles, a torch, or a little oil lamp. But more importantly, they had to be able to deal with fire. Most everyone was an expert at handling, moving with, and containing small amounts of fire. Over a hundred years later, which layman has to deal with fire besides the occasional cigarette lighter or the even-often-neglected stove? And now the electrical cigarettes, electrical stoves, and microwaves are pushing that boundary even further. Dealing with fire on a daily basis is falling out from the common skillsets.
So is sewing. And cooking. And dealing with numbers mentally. And remembering appointments. And telling stories. And penmanship. Among others. Manual skills, when successfully automated, are thus transferred into the machine's skillset, and often shrunk in ours. Our nature compels us to be skilled at what we practice, and most often to not be skilled at what we don't. Given this, I think it's important to consider skill as an important feature besides convenience, comfort, and mass production. Considering extremes, would you rather be a skill-less comfort prince, served and fed and clothed and sheltered and entertained and transported most perfectly and predictably by servants and machines... or would you rather be an ingenious woodsman, jack-of-all-trades, able to make yourself a living in whichever way you chose? I'd be woodsman. I'd at least know how to make phone calls and use Facebook, of course. Oh, and Bash.
And when you look at the inner workings of most machines closely, and compare them with the human counterparts that used to fulfill their functionality - it is hard not to notice the machines' crudeness. Look at them - you'll see. Their existence has a purpose, and to that effect, they can do nothing else. No rotating motor has the delicacy, the sensitivity of one of our common hands. No camera can capture the full experience of a beautiful landscape in front of our eyes. Music production is an example that has struck me most recently - no machine/computer, with any method or algorithm currently at hand, is able to create pleasing or melancholic or exciting music on the fly, at will, as say, an experienced guitarist does.
While machines allow for enhanced strength, speed, and predictability, we humans inadvertently possess incomparable amounts of versatility, and very, very importantly, UNpredictability, an important subset of which we call creativity. Imagine machines could model every different way of doing things that man has been already capable of, every skill - imagine that someone achieved that tremendous feat. What, then, of everything that man has NOT yet been capable of? Would we be able to teach these machines, when teaching a machine is a skill in of itself? Could we develop new skills on top of others, even after having delegated and forgotten our previous ones?
Not that I don't like machines and computers. Heck, I love 'em. They're awesome. They light up my room. They let me watch movies in bed. They allow me to travel to far-away lands without getting my feet sore. They let me listen to music from all over the world. I find housing, I buy furniture, I meet friends, I learn new knowledge, I communicate through the whole world with them. I wash my clothes with them. I make a living with them. I LOVE all this technology. Do I want people to stop using it? No. Do I want to stop using it? No. Do I think that people should stop developing technology? No.
So what the hell were those four paragraphs about? Well, as usual, they're about awareness. People, myself included, are often plagued by a lack of awareness. Basically, all I'm saying is that we should be aware of what part of our skillset we're delegating to technology, and that there are skills out there of which we are probably not even aware of because they are so superseded or obfuscated by technology. Again, penmanship comes to mind - I wonder how much less the newer generations know how to handle a pen than the one I grew up with.
Beyond skillsets, consider action for its own sake. I used to think that it was always better in any situation to delegate a task to a machine than to do it myself. Why risk the fatigue? Why risk failing? I realized why. Because we are meant to act! Our bodies' purpose is to generate action! We people are capable of such a vastly rich space of actions - and it is such a joy to indulge in the world, to sample of the delicate, or of the subtle, or of the fast, or of the beautiful - not only to observe it but to create it! When you observe something beautiful or colorful or wondrous or fantastic or bizarre, do you ever feel a desire to create it? "Oh man! I would SO like to be able to to do that!!" I do. I think we all do. It's our imitative nature. How pleasing I find it to learn and play a beautiful piano piece!, even if not with the grace of the performance that originally encouraged me. How satisfied I feel when I manage to sew my sock's rip with needle and thread, and can then avoid touching the cold bathroom floor with my uncovered heel in the morning!
Act for action's sake. Tis an often-neglected concept.
Anyway, consider de-automation. It's not always as bad as it sounds.
And then there were computers. Ahhh, computers. In my opinion, the closest mankind has come to replacing, and enhancing, their own brains. Birthed with the task of automating and quickening arithmetic/logical operations, they quickly found their way through all sorts of applications. Useful at first only for accountants, banks, and scientists, their fame probably spread through to librarians, writers, hobbyists - and then branched and trickled its way into pretty much every cultural stream of modern society. We now push a few buttons, and talk to people on the other side of the world instantly as if they saw us through a little magic window. We send instant, impalpable messages through the tireless electrical messenger, whose effort, where he material, would be vastly larger than even that of the often-ridiculed Santa Claus courier achievement. We store, share, and summon names, numbers, books, faces, voices, and music in little gadgets the size of a harmonica or smaller, and we can access knowledge bases, both public and personal, from any device in the whole wide world that taps into the ubiquitous Internet well. We process thousands, millions of pieces of information in the time that we blink, scratch our nose, or go get a cup of coffee. We delegate the task of charging fares or allowing access to little reading devices. We find any address in an unknown city without asking for help from anyone. We can produce visual art, static and animated, with precision and/or randomness the kind that has never been seen before. We can produce text much faster than any pen allows. We make and mold sounds like a potter does his clay. We can immerse ourselves in shared imagined parallel worlds of adventure and excitement. We shop from the whole world while sitting down. Mankind found a way to mass-produce logic, amass baffling amounts of data in tiny containers, and mass-spread information instantly across the entire world. How cool.
You can see how one can come to admire computers, or machines in general. I sure did. They imitate and enhance so many of our daily activities. What did I prefer - writing my long homework assignment by pen on a sheet of paper, where a mistake would leave a scratched-out word and evidence of my blunder on the paper, or comfortably typing and printing out a clean, crisp, perfectly-neatly fonted assignment? Since immemorable times, I've preferred the automated way of performing tasks, even if that meant going out of my way to find that automation. Because once you automate something correctly, you may never have to do that task, or automate it, again. And because with computers, not only are tasks performed more neatly, but they require much less of a physical investment. Why hire an expensive human toll-taker when you have a cheap wireless reading device? Why keep a large, heavy collection of videos on VCR, or even DVD, when you can make files out of them and have them available online on demand, weightless, nuisance-less? Why... etc.
There is another thing to be considered, though. That is skill. Automating tasks, while enormously useful, can degrade skillsets. Take lightbulbs, for example. Lighting our homes since the 19th century. How the heck did people see at night before this? Fire, of course. Everyone who wanted to see what the hell was going on after dusk had to have candles, a torch, or a little oil lamp. But more importantly, they had to be able to deal with fire. Most everyone was an expert at handling, moving with, and containing small amounts of fire. Over a hundred years later, which layman has to deal with fire besides the occasional cigarette lighter or the even-often-neglected stove? And now the electrical cigarettes, electrical stoves, and microwaves are pushing that boundary even further. Dealing with fire on a daily basis is falling out from the common skillsets.
So is sewing. And cooking. And dealing with numbers mentally. And remembering appointments. And telling stories. And penmanship. Among others. Manual skills, when successfully automated, are thus transferred into the machine's skillset, and often shrunk in ours. Our nature compels us to be skilled at what we practice, and most often to not be skilled at what we don't. Given this, I think it's important to consider skill as an important feature besides convenience, comfort, and mass production. Considering extremes, would you rather be a skill-less comfort prince, served and fed and clothed and sheltered and entertained and transported most perfectly and predictably by servants and machines... or would you rather be an ingenious woodsman, jack-of-all-trades, able to make yourself a living in whichever way you chose? I'd be woodsman. I'd at least know how to make phone calls and use Facebook, of course. Oh, and Bash.
And when you look at the inner workings of most machines closely, and compare them with the human counterparts that used to fulfill their functionality - it is hard not to notice the machines' crudeness. Look at them - you'll see. Their existence has a purpose, and to that effect, they can do nothing else. No rotating motor has the delicacy, the sensitivity of one of our common hands. No camera can capture the full experience of a beautiful landscape in front of our eyes. Music production is an example that has struck me most recently - no machine/computer, with any method or algorithm currently at hand, is able to create pleasing or melancholic or exciting music on the fly, at will, as say, an experienced guitarist does.
While machines allow for enhanced strength, speed, and predictability, we humans inadvertently possess incomparable amounts of versatility, and very, very importantly, UNpredictability, an important subset of which we call creativity. Imagine machines could model every different way of doing things that man has been already capable of, every skill - imagine that someone achieved that tremendous feat. What, then, of everything that man has NOT yet been capable of? Would we be able to teach these machines, when teaching a machine is a skill in of itself? Could we develop new skills on top of others, even after having delegated and forgotten our previous ones?
Not that I don't like machines and computers. Heck, I love 'em. They're awesome. They light up my room. They let me watch movies in bed. They allow me to travel to far-away lands without getting my feet sore. They let me listen to music from all over the world. I find housing, I buy furniture, I meet friends, I learn new knowledge, I communicate through the whole world with them. I wash my clothes with them. I make a living with them. I LOVE all this technology. Do I want people to stop using it? No. Do I want to stop using it? No. Do I think that people should stop developing technology? No.
So what the hell were those four paragraphs about? Well, as usual, they're about awareness. People, myself included, are often plagued by a lack of awareness. Basically, all I'm saying is that we should be aware of what part of our skillset we're delegating to technology, and that there are skills out there of which we are probably not even aware of because they are so superseded or obfuscated by technology. Again, penmanship comes to mind - I wonder how much less the newer generations know how to handle a pen than the one I grew up with.
Beyond skillsets, consider action for its own sake. I used to think that it was always better in any situation to delegate a task to a machine than to do it myself. Why risk the fatigue? Why risk failing? I realized why. Because we are meant to act! Our bodies' purpose is to generate action! We people are capable of such a vastly rich space of actions - and it is such a joy to indulge in the world, to sample of the delicate, or of the subtle, or of the fast, or of the beautiful - not only to observe it but to create it! When you observe something beautiful or colorful or wondrous or fantastic or bizarre, do you ever feel a desire to create it? "Oh man! I would SO like to be able to to do that!!" I do. I think we all do. It's our imitative nature. How pleasing I find it to learn and play a beautiful piano piece!, even if not with the grace of the performance that originally encouraged me. How satisfied I feel when I manage to sew my sock's rip with needle and thread, and can then avoid touching the cold bathroom floor with my uncovered heel in the morning!
Act for action's sake. Tis an often-neglected concept.
Anyway, consider de-automation. It's not always as bad as it sounds.
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