2010: The Year We Did Nothing Special.
Prologue:
Firstly I would like to sincerely apologise to my loyal readers of MikesSoapBox.co.uk as this is my first post since February.
I have pondered greatly as to why this is. I have been very busy lately with other projects. Burning issues of the day, just haven't angered me as much as they used to I guess. Maybe apathy has finally set in and things just do not surprise me any more.
I mean who knew that all the MPs were on the Fiddle? And were you really surprised that your two pound t-shirt from Primark was made from child labour?
Please accept this belated post as an apology and my thanks for your patience in this matter.
Part One:
It is nearly 2010 and nearly nine years into the new millennium (yes nine. Look it up). And nearly two thousand year ago people supposedly nailed a man to a cross for speaking out against how the populous was living their lives. I am in no way comparing myself to the martyred individual of dogmatic fiction. Just merely pointing out that mankind has a tendency to dislike being informed that they maybe wrong.
Part Two:
Thousands of years before they nailed a man to the cross. Mankind made a tool. And once it was perfected. The idea remained. A weight on a stick.
Genius.
The possibilities were limitless for the weighted stick. It could be used to hit prey and eat it as food, destroy competitors or even hit other weights and sticks to make more specialised weighted sticks and then make the computer.
Now the computer is amazing. Never before has mankind chased its tail like a demented canine for a technology so imperfect and so imperfect-able. It permeates every aspect of our modern society. So much so that we have not done anything laudable as a species for about thirty years.
Everyone, myself included has been too concerned with shuffling little bits of virtual information about to realise that there are too many of us and soon there will be no one left with the practical know how to save us from ourselves.
Part Three:
I grew up reading works of great science fiction. Authors of yesteryear like Isaac Asimov promised us all that the 21st century would be the future. It is nearly 2010 and I want my flying car and holidays to the moon.
Two of my favourite authors passed away in the past two years Sir Arthur Charles Clarke and Michael Crichton.
Both had stunning visions of the future and could see where we were going with this new found virtual ability.
The 1968 movie/novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” saw Frank Poole and David Bowman sitting next to each other watching identical broadcasts on separate screens. The Audience of the late sixties got the joke. Meanwhile the student house-mates of today do not realise there is a joke to be had, as they ignore each other's blank yet illuminated faces.
In Michael Crichton's 1995 novel “The Lost World”, is more about behaviour than dinosaurs. In the book Maverick mathematician Dr Ian Malcolm speaks of the dangers of the internet.
“personally, I think cyberspace means
the end of our species."
"Yes? Why is that?"
"Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea
that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist
knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand
birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten
thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for
our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We
innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that
innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee
and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty
people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible.
That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass
media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo
or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benneton on another, a
Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences
vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top
ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species
diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity -
our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But
we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion
people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species.
Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same
thing.”
Part Four:
A bad workman always blames his tools.
What does a good workman do with his?
Stroke them, compare them with his friends tools, be inseparable from them and make sure they never leaves their side.
Of course I am talking about masturbatory mobiles and other “Touchy-Feely Technology” like the iPhone.
Too many of my friends have them now.
No. I am not jealous either. I have a mobile phone that has lasted me three years, and was about four years ahead of the market when I bought it.
Now I just sit in the pub with friends as they stroke and shake their “apps” at each other.
“This ones Awesome. I can calculate the Bill at a restaurant”
“Oh Right. You mean like a fuckin' calculator.”
The user is invited to caress the phone as you scroll through your cherished memories like photo albums and music play lists.
I just feel and inherent danger of getting too intimate with such a tool. Even though it will never be as advanced as the next iPhone.
The iPhone is not really robust enough to be called a tool either. I have seen lots of depressed users with a gaudy spider webs across the screen of their “must have possession”, it having failed to survive the most human of all experiences, the fall to earth.
We live in a twenty four hour society we are too busy. Technology should update itself. We are almost there.
My web browser did it all on its own the other day. “Who's a clever web browser?” (sarcastically stroking laptop)
One day we would only need a keyboard, Mouse and a viewing device. These can be built to last. Their designs haven't changed much in thirty years essentially, so why not. Everything else we do on computers can wirelessly done elsewhere over the internet. You would never have to worry about ROM or RAM or whether sixty Gigabytes is quite enough memory for your photos, music and game saves.
The concept is coming soon, but only if you let it.
Epilogue:
Approximately one thousand nine hundred and sixty years after they nailed a man to a cross, another walked on the moon.
Sadly we have never be so far from home since.
posted by Mike's Soapbox at 18:43
