Spring Break
Computers: Any dummy can use them . . . and maybe that's the problem
Daniel Smolkin
Issue date: 4/27/09 Section: Voices
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With a computer, one is infinitely more efficient than otherwise. There's no dealing with white-out, graphics are rendered seamlessly to help us visualize data trends and designs, and any sort of information - movies, music, or text - can be sent around to anyone with a few certain wires running through the house.
Computers are an abomination, aren't they?
By growing too accustomed to computers, we base our whole economy on microscopic bits of silicon. Workers are even becoming more like computers themselves. We're all about 24/7 connections to everyone else, working wherever we may be, getting better, stronger, and faster for the sake of efficiency. And, it's easier to steal millions of credit-card numbers at once than ever before.
So which is it?
Are computers a blessing that trumps all other forms of communication, or do they turn us into machines of efficiency?
I take a position not often heard from a former sci-tech editor. Maybe it's nostalgia (how old am I?). Maybe I'm na've. And maybe I'm playing the crazy guy telling you the end is near. But it's a little scary how much we're digitizing our lives.
I mean, really, computers are in just about everything. Things that used to take skill, care, and practice can be done in the blink of an eye by any lazy jerk.
Skills once used by people everywhere and are seemingly obsolete. Even the lowly taxi driver had to have a certain gift of knowing the roads, but a 5-year-old with GPS can get you anywhere you want to go.
Of course, the skill is never truly obsolete - we just think it is, to our own peril. There are times, like Englishman Robert Jones' fi asco last March, when leaving it to the machine brings you dangerously close to the brink, according to the BBC. And don't forget the couple that got stranded in a desert four days for the same reason, as the AP reports.
These really underline an over-dependence we're all starting to have on touch screens and microprocessors. Even if you don't drive through a fence at an automated command, what will you do if your cell phone stops working?
How will you buy food when the power goes out and the ATM doesn't work?
Power outages themselves, like the Niagara Falls-area black out in 2003, have propagated because of our silicon addiction. The 2003 outage spread to 50 million people because of a software bug, according to securityfocus.com.
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