What happens when you give a modern teenager a Walkman? You get some interesting insights about technology. It’s amazing how far technology has come — and a reminder that yes, there really is such a thing as paleotechnology. (For us children of the 70s, the fact that cassette tapes have two sides is completely intuitive. For someone seeing a Walkman for the first time, perhaps not.) For how many other forms of technology might we forget some of the nuances, or even some of the important things?
Fellow paleotechnology expert DOSquatch writes about the subtle yet extremely important art of troubleshooting. He definitely has a point. I would also add that it’s important to document technologies as they are developed, lest we end up having to reinvent them all over again to get them to work (or end up breaking them inadvertently).
Actually, the comparison between a Walkman and modern mp3 players is a good example of how technology is not only progressing, but accelerating. When my grandparents went on a trip to Japan and brought back one of the first electronic calculators, it was definitely new — but easily understood in a few minutes. When cassettes started to take over some of the role of record players*, they too were relatively easily understood. Increasingly, though, the capabilities of new devices are breaking down old barriers and requiring new ways of thinking about things. (This isn’t necessarily a Bad Thing, but it bears mentioning.)
For instance, try explaining the subtle relationship between mp3 files and playlists to someone who doesn’t truly grok filesystems, shortcuts, and links. You might be able to explain it, but it will take a lot of explaining. Try a more advanced topic, like why a satellite-modem connection works fine for streaming audio but is horrible for interactive websites — and the explanation can take much longer. Bring DRM, P2P, streaming, file sizes, bitrates, codecs, protocols, IP addresses, connectivity, lag, bandwidth, Bluetooth, AC3 and oversampling into the conversation, and suddenly you’re speaking a foreign language.
Technological progress is definitely accelerating, and every year, I hear more and more people talk about the Singularity. I’m even starting to believe it myself. A lot of it does sound farfetched — yet technical progress in many fields is starting to look asymptotic. We definitely live in interesting times: they say that by 2025, supercomputers should be sufficiently powerful to run realtime simulations of the human brain. With computer speeds doubling every year or two, we could well end up as spectators to the fastest and most profound changes in history.
As long as we can control the direction things take, though, I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
* Yeah, yeah. Nobody, least of all me, is going to claim that cassettes beat LPs for audio quality. I draw the line at CDs, though. Maybe 44.1kHz/16bit isn’t optimal, but it sure beats dragging a rock through a plastic groove.
