Call it technoimperialism. In the space of this writer’s lifetime, we’ve gone from a world where computers were rare, huge, and expensive to one in which every aspect of daily life has been captured by cheap microprocessors.
We depend on them for the time [unless you still use a wind-up watch], for communication, transportation. . .in short, it’s getting very hard to find a single aspect of daily life not governed in some way by the processing cycles of a CPU.
Even more troubling, the lifespan of our gadgets grows shorter by the minute, and driven by endless media messages, we’re lured into a frenzied consumerism, eager to grab up the Next Great Thing, be it the latest cell phone, a gaming machine, or the latest personal music device.
At the same time, we’re tolerating an unprecedented invasion of what in our young days were seen as utterly private spaces, and by right free of government intrusion absent a court order. Cookies invade our computers, cell phone GPUs track our every move, and surveillance cameras lurk everywhere, cyberstalkers all, allowing both corporations and government to atomize our every move, want, and subversive thought.
And you know it’s getting bad when one of the gurus of the computer age offers some worried musings, even though they’re mostly about the reliability of all the fast-paced techno-innovation.
Here’s a legendary Apple Computer co-founder sharing his concerns with CNN’s Mark Milian:
The world has mostly caught on to Steve Wozniak’s vision of having a computer in every home. But this digital lifestyle can sometimes turn rotten, he said last week.
Wozniak paused to criticize the stranglehold technology has on our lives.
“We’re dependent on it,” he said at the museum, which holds one of the world’s largest collections of vintage computers and sits about six blocks from Google’s headquarters. “And eventually, we are going to have it doing every task we can in the world, so we can sit back and relax.”
>snip<
“All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control,” he said. “We can’t turn off our internet; we can’t turn off our smartphones; we can’t turn off our computers.”
“You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it’s not God,” he quipped.
Earlier that day, Wozniak said the biggest obstacle with the growing prevalence of technology is that our personal devices are unreliable.
“Little things that work one day; they don’t work the next day,” he said enthusiastically, waving his hands. “I think it’s much harder today than ever before to basically know that something you have … is going to work tomorrow.”
Reciting an all-too-common living-room frustration, Wozniak told a story about the countless hours he spent trying to troubleshoot his media player, called Slingbox.
“There is no solution,” Wozniak said of tech troubles. “Everything has a computer in it nowadays; everything with a computer is going to fail. The solution is: kill the people who invented these things,” he said with a smile.
eats shoots 'n leaves 