Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

[anton pulisov]

Apparently it's not the first of April.

I can remember thinking my parents were old fuddy duddies because they could barely use a video player.

It happens to all of us in the end, doesn't it?

Although, I once had a 90 year old neighbour who had a problem with his laptop. There was some kind of virus and I helped him remove it. He then told me he wanted to print something on his printer upstairs, which was next to his old desktop computer. I started explaining to him very slowly about the idea of a USB stick, which is like a disk that will let him take a file to his desktop upstairs so that he could print it. He looked at me like I had two heads and responded, "Why would I do that? I have a wireless printer and I can print through the WiFi network." Fantastic guy.

[Slightly Brown]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

It’s not the technology that makes me feel old as such, it’s how it’s adopted and used in the every day by people younger than I that makes me feel old. (I found a bar using an “app” the other day and I felt like Columbus (I was actually looking for a different bar, too); a story to which the younglings in my work reacted to with gales of laughter.)

[WOM]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Yeah. I had an 'Amish in The City' moment a couple of years ago when talking to a young web developer. He didn't have a home phone, a tv or a car. His iPhone was all he needed; he projected his laptop onto a blank wall to watch downloaded shows and he belonged to a car share. I was like "Huh....".

[Amor de Cosmos]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Yes, it's not technology itself — the stuff and what it'll do — it's that technology has become the dominant cultural framework in contemporary life.

[anton pulisov]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

That's an interesting point. People born in the very late 80s or onwards have generally had mobile phones since they were 12 or 13 and had Facebook at secondary school. I do notice that they have a different way of communicating than, say, anybody born between 1940 and 1987, who I can generally have a good conversation with.

Or maybe people in their early 20s are just like that, and have always been like that.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

My mum (aged 65) has just got the first PC she's ever used, and seeing her failing to get to grips with it has been quite an eye-opener. You forget that iPhones and the shifts in internet usage from static HTML page to social doo-dahs all rest on a knowledge of basics that everyone on this forum takes for granted. Throw Windows 8 into the deal and you've got a right handful.

I think these here new-fangled Google glasses are going to be fairly niche, though. Used for money-generating activities and by people who have "adventure" holidays, but not as part of everyone's daily life.

[garcia]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

the glasses look lame but they're the first generation. i think something like this certainly will be mainstream. at the moment we think it normal to encumber our hands with a phone we then have to stare down at. it's giving me a hump in my neck - bring on the glass!

the historian ian morris wrote a very successful book called "why the west rules - for now" which is not the awful niall ferguson tory boy imperialist suck-up shit it perhaps sounds like, but something more akin to jared diamond's "guns, germs and steel".

he compiled something he calls a social development index, which measures progress in technical areas like energy capture, war-making capacity, information technology etc.

anyway, after he has crunched a lot of numbers, his conclusion is that there will be more social development between today and the year 2050 than there was in the entire 15,000 years of human history leading up to today.

he outlines two possible futures for humanity. one is that destabilising forces like climate change, the competition for increasingly scarce resources and so on lead to nuclear devastation and civilisational collapse. the other, scarcely more appealing from the perspective of this conservative carbon blob, is that humans merge with the technology which within a few years will be far more intelligent than we are to create what is effectively a new species.

either way we're in the end days of human civilisation.

while we wait to become one with the machines, we get to see whether technology really can shape human nature. one possible change concerns the attitude to privacy, which appears to have been altered by social networking.

i wonder is this really a change - are social networks encouraging people to behave in new and bizarre ways, or by giving people the opportunity to record and broadcast the details of their lives in a public forum, are they simply addressing a pent-up human desire to be noticed, or even to be remembered? i came across a quote from the end of middlemarch earlier today in a piece from the atlantic:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

it reminded me of george orwell's less-optimistic thoughts on slaves:

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker's name inscribed on the bottom, ‘Felix fecit’. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone down into utter silence.

maybe then zuckerberg has, in a hollow kind of way, conquered death: as long as his servers don't go the way of the library of alexandria, today's faceless worker drones can theoretically be remembered forever. sadly, nobody will be interested in remembering them - the supertechnohumans who populate the future will have other fish to fry (aside from the odd edmund o. wilson type cyborg eccentric).

[San Bernardhinault]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

I am far more entertained than I should be that what has been released are spec specs.

Carry on.

[alyxandr]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

the other, scarcely more appealing from the perspective of this conservative carbon blob, is that humans merge with the technology which within a few years will be far more intelligent than we are to create what is effectively a new species

I'm currently in the middle of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, wherein he argues this. ("Within a few years" == 2045.) I really do miss this sort of late-90's-early-00's Wired/Mondo2000 techno-optimism, as much as my pessimistic nature prevents me from thinking it'll actually happen that quickly, or indeed at all.

[garcia]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

morris leans on kurzweil as he makes that prediction about the cyborg future. is the book any good?

[alyxandr]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Well... he seems to have spoken to all the cool kids & read all the latest (ca. 2006) books in the (popular) physics, computer- & neuro-science, etc. realms, and ties it all together with a fair bit of statistics; has some interesting stuff to say about exponential curves in general. And there's an entire chapter devoted to rebuttals of criticisms he's been given, which is excellent. A bit repetitive though. I get the impression that one will enjoy it in direct proportion to how much one thinks "strong AI" is possible.

Bad: he enjoys the Dialog format, but isn't nearly as good at it as, say, Douglas Hofstadter. Good: he's otherwise a fairly good writer, and both cheerful and diplomatic; contains what may be the politest smackdown of Stephen Wolfram ever committed to text.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

I get the impression that one will enjoy it in direct proportion to how much one thinks "strong AI" is possible.

Fair enough. I suspect I would find Kurzweil's book langweilig.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

I'm very curious about this thing--the Oculus Rift. It's a 3D virtual reality headset, with the proviso that this one is reportedly really quite good.

Of course the addictive potential of virtual reality is foreseeable, if the experience is immersive enough.

[Nefertiti2]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

I'm looking forward to reading Evgeny Morozov. Anyone read it yet?

[Ginger Yellow]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Yeah, the buzz around the Oculus Rift is so good I'm seriously tempted to buy the dev kit. Playing something like Arma using it would be amazing. The consumer version isn't coming out till late 2014, apparently.

[Edie St Pierre]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

I don't really get the pessimism on thsi thread, to be honest. It's only people taking advantage of a slightly different form of accessing information. I genuinely don't see what the big deal is.

[Ginger Yellow]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Fair enough. I suspect I would find Kurzweil's book langweilig

Heh. Kurzweil drives me bonkers. Maybe he's better in book format, but in interviews and op-eds I find him intolerable.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Ginger Yellow wrote: Yeah, the buzz around the Oculus Rift is so good I'm seriously tempted to buy the dev kit. Playing something like Arma using it would be amazing. The consumer version isn't coming out till late 2014, apparently.

Although to be really really good, you'd need to use it in combination with some sort of omnidirectional treadmill, so you can run about and shit.

[Edie St Pierre]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Take it to the gym innit.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Mat wrote: Take it to the gym innit.

If the gym had some sort of omnidirectional treadmill, then yes.

Playing games on a normal treadmill wouldn't be very interesting.

[Edie St Pierre]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Have we all forgotten 'Daley Thompsons Decathalon' so soon.

[Edie St Pierre]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Bear with me on this one.

If it's possible to create thought-activated internet access, would it be possible to create internet access for people in comas or even for people who are technically dead?

[garcia]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

how dead do you mean by dead?

if you're gonna use that thing at the gym you'd have to find some way to protect it from the sweat. the human body is so badly designed.

[Edie St Pierre]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

I honestly dunno.

I don't really know what i'm talking about to be honest.

[anton pulisov]

Technology that makes me feel incredibly old

Mat wrote: Bear with me on this one.

If it's possible to create thought-activated internet access, would it be possible to create internet access for people in comas or even for people who are technically dead?

You mean upload your brain to the internet before your physical body dies?