MARCH 12, TUESDAY

TECHNOLOGY

There seem to me to be two sides to technology based on the computer. One side is the practical side of computer science and coding and inventing algorithms that is taught in technical colleges and universities leading to enormous wealth for the people who are able to master it. It is the world now of artificial intelligence and quantum computers which are impossible to understand.

But the other side of technology is all the things that this computer science enables us to do. It is the popularization the results of computer science, and for it to be popular, to be generally accepted by people who know absolutely nothing about computers it has to be both very simple and easy to do and inexpensive.

While the first technical side leads to practical simple and popular applications, the two sides are almost completely unrelated. I have only the foggiest idea how a digital camera works and no idea how an iPhone computer works except for vague designations like M2 chips. I have very little sense of the degree to which artificial intelligence processes a photograph in the split second after I take it. My only controls, which can be very subtle and depend on my judgment, are the sliders I slide for cropping contrast, brightness, shadows, vibrance and so on.

I think many of us, particularly older people, confuse these two sides. Of course technology is hopelessly complicated, but the the practical applications of technology have to be so simple that anyone, a six year old or an 86 year old, can do them with no instruction.

So one hand we live in a world is which technology is so fantastically complicated that only a trained expert can understand it and which if it breaks down for some reason we are helpless to deal with. But on the other hand we live in a world in which every Indian villager in a mud hut can afford a cell phone which connects her or him to the world with no understanding of how it works at all.

It is in this wide gap between complicated technology and simple applications that I find myself. Nothing could be simpler than on the Vision Pro looking at some icon on a virtual screen and touching your forefinger to your thumb to select it and send a video into action. It is so simple that people who are trying to learn to do it keep reaching around to touch something rather than simply looking and clicking. And of course it is impossible to explain how it works.

Horses pulled carriages, then combustion engines powered automobiles but you had to be a mechanic to understand how, while we still talked about horsepower. Radios pulled words and music from the air and we had no idea how. Television was even more magical. And now for most of us there is no connection between how a thing works and what we can do with it. Everything becomes more and more complicated and at the same time simpler and simpler. Touching your fingers to start a virtual video floating in the air in front of you is as simple as you can get, and is incomprehensible.

So I find myself as an 86 year old in a very odd world indeed, one that no one has had to live in to this extent, a complete split between practical understanding and simple usability.

I am guessing that this has something to do with conspiracy theories. In a world in which we can’t understand scientific actuality we are left in an almost dream world in which anything that we imagine is possible. It is almost like a photo editing slider, you just feel your way along and whatever feels most intense to you is as it should be. In politics whatever you feel is right is right even if it is scientifically nuts. The science is beyond us so will just go with our feelings. If something feels right it is right even when it is completely wrong.