BLIND FAITH
While reading Apple: The First 50 Years I was struck by how much Steve Jobs and his company, Apple, had enriched my life. He gave me a way to write through word processing on a computer that is much easier to do and much easier to correct than writing by hand, which I had been doing for years in yellow legal pads. It was also much easier to keep private and out of sight. But that was only the beginning. After that came the Internet, email, digital photography, streaming movies, world wide free video calls, GPS and on and on and on. Every year there was something new and miraculous.
But what strikes me is how little I understand of how the computer works and about the skills and knowledge needed to program a computer to do one thing after another. I noticed the big changes in hardware such as touch screens and the what new programs would let me do. But I didn’t understand any more than a seven year old about how this was being achieved, with the seven year old being able to master each new feature faster than I was.
I don’t understand or even wonder how a car works, either. I just put in the key, the motor starts up and I steer down the highway. But these computer programs are much more complicated than putting gas in the car and turning on the engine, though I guess even cars, especially electric vehicles have become drivable computers.
But the thing that strikes me is how ignorant I am of how most technology works. I have utter faith in it and operate it entirely intuitively, which a seven year old can do as easily as me. But this blind faith and intuitive operation means that I am just feeling my way along and making decisions on how blind intuition. I have faith in the operation of a car in the same way that I have faith that an enormously heavy plane in which I am sitting can glide up into the sky.
What I am realizing is that this blind faith in the almost virtual world around me is very similar to religious faith in a god that I don’t see or understand, in political beliefs that simply feel right to me and which I am willing to base my identity on or even conspiracy theories with no proof at all which feel right to me or to others.
I am open to faith in anything that feels comfortable and helpful to me. This blind faith means that I can very easily be misled and often am.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 