So I got up this morning, turned the computer on, only to have it hang shortly after the bios self-test. This was the point my wife pointed out, matter of factly, that it had done the same to her that morning.
I love that about non-geeks. It’s a problem, and we’ll obviously be able to fix it, you know, no big deal.
So after rebooting a few times and getting the same result, I cursed at the machine. Luckily, I had an inkling, went into the bios, reset everything to default and *poof* everything was working again.
The whole thing made me think though. In front of me I have a machine that was pure science fiction not too long ago. Because of a minor fault, a couple of bits getting switched and a minor inconvenience, I decided it was a piece of shit, good for nothing pile of trash. Like Dark Helmet said “Even in the future nothing works!”
I’m using an incredibly sophisticated, complicated machine…and I expect it to work like magic every time I press the on button.
What struck me most about this is how soon the miraculous becomes commonplace. As a race, we get used to things really easily. When something we only dreamt about when we were kids actually makes it into production, we get bored and take it for granted in a very short time span.
For example, I remember growing up and watching episodes of ‘Star Trek’. I remember thinking how cool it would be when we could actually see the person we’re talking to as we’re talking to them. Today, I can do that on Skype with a couple of mouse clicks…and it doesn’t seem nearly as amazing as I thought it would.
Slightly more recently, I remember reading an article on Digital TV. This was back when the norm for TV was an antenna on the roof, and just four channels. They mentioned how you’d be able to get hundreds of channels, and watch live sporting events and be able to choose your own camera angle. For me, someone who has always been deeply into technology, they might as well have been talking about hover-boards or Trek-style transporters. I couldn’t wait.
Then, of course, digital became the norm and what happens? We bitch about not getting every channel in HD, or occasional outages.
If you really look at this, you can see the pattern. Every day we get closer to sci-fi level technology, then we complain that it doesn’t work exactly right, all the time.
If we jump into out trusty way-back machine, and go back twenty years, we’ll see just how far we’ve come.
It’s 1987. My computer is an Acorn Electron, it has a whole 1k of memory and a 1.5 mhz processor. If you wanted software for it, you’re most likely to copy out the BASIC program from a magazine. If you’re lucky, you have a tape-deck to save it on. The internet is just a pipe-dream. If you want to talk or write to someone overseas, you either make an uber-expensive phonecall, or write an actual letter and wait around 2 weeks for a reply. Flat screen TV’s are years away and VCR’s are the height of home entertainment technology. You can also forget surround sound. If you want to listen to music, you either pull out a vinyl album or listen to a cassette. You can forget about iPods, a big, chunky walkman is the best you’re going to get. If you want to drive somewhere and don’t know the way, you pull out a map and look for roadsigns, you can forget that voice-activated in-car navigation system, only James Bond has one of those.
See what I mean?
Today we have computers that made the supercomputers of the time look like pocket calculators. Making a CD is trivial and VCR’s are now officially obsolete technology. Do we feel like we’re living in a technological paradise? No, because the battery life on an iPod sucks, and that PSP has a dead pixel on the screen.
Maybe at the grand old age of 26, I’m just getting old. I remember in the late 90’s a cousin of mine coming over to my house to use the internet to do a report for school. I sat him down in front of the computer, showed him how to use Google, and his response was:
“You mean I have to go through all these links by hand?”
Yep, the idea of actually having to click the links, read through some pages to find what he needed and press ‘print’ was way to much trouble.
That’s funny, when I was in his grade at school, I had to walk to the library, look through a card catalogue, find a book and actually read it and write it out on paper with an actual pen. Hyper-linked text, a search function and a way to copy the parts I needed without having to write would have been awesome.
The same was true of my dear old mother. She signed up for internet banking, and because we where on dial-up (broadband wasn’t around until a year or two later, unless you wanted to pay about $400 a month for the connection), it was running a little slow because she decided to do her banking during peak hours. (That was also back when if you went on the internet during peak hours, there was a very noticeable slowdown as all the bandwidth got sucked up).
Anyway, she complained and called internet banking ‘worthless’ because she was having to wait a couple minutes for each page to load.
Given that the alternative was to wait until the next day when the banks re-opened, get in the car, drive into town, pay for parking, walk to the bank, wait in line and talk to a teller…surely waiting 45 seconds for a page to load was a huge convenience.
Not to my mother.
The problem is, as a species, we can get used to pretty much anything, and as soon as we’re handed a new technology, it very quickly becomes commonplace and taken for granted. What’s worse is when we have these technological marvels in our grubby mitts, we expect them to work flawlessly all the time.
Basically, when we should just be amazed that we can have a video conference with someone anywhere else in the world, using a laptop and a broadband wireless connection…we complain because the wireless card we got from our broadband provider doesn’t have very good signal strength in some areas. You can take a picture, instantly see what it looks like on the camera’s LCD screen, then look at and edit it on your computer’s screen and print it yourself. Back in the day you’d have had to take the film to a drugstore, pay a few dollars, wait a few days and get what you were given…but the battery life on the camera sucks, and the printer is so slow.
The other big point is that it’s not exactly as if things advance so slowly, we never see a big change in a short period of time. My first ‘real’ PC back in 1995 was a Pentium 75, with 8mb of memory and a 510 gigabye hard drive. Considering my PC now is purely middle off the road, yet has 128 times more memory, a processor that runs 28 times faster and a whopping 313 times more storage space. That’s one hell of a leap forward for just over ten years.
If we assume that computers are going to continue improving at the same rate, in another ten years, a mid-range computer will have a 56ghz processor, 131 gigabytes of memory and over 50,000 gigabyte hard drives. And you know what? We’ll complain about it being too slow to run the latest games.
So, looking to the future, we can pretty much guarantee that our great, great, great grandchildren will be bitching that their flying car doesn’t get good enough mileage, that the transport to the Mars colony was late again and that their personal holodeck causes glitches in far off scenery if you move too quickly.
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