3 times in SF this week, a Cruise AV has driven past my car and triggered my automatic windshield wipers, even though it was totally dry out. (probably the LIDAR interacting with wipers' infrared sensors).
Got me thinking about what unintended consequences can spring up because of new technologies. Anyone have other examples, current or historic?
People see their 5 year old using an iPad and the knee-jerk cliche thought/assumption us the classic "oh wow these kids just get technology!" (recall all the "I need my kid to program the VCR" type stuff from the 80s/90s - it is the same thing of older people assuming current children innately understand the current tech)
Yet while today's kids may know how to stab at a screen to get videos of Peppa pig to play, there are people starting to come through to their mid and late teens who don't know how to use a mouse and keyboard with any level of dexterity, or don't know what a "file" is or what folders/directories are etc because that is all hidden away on an iPad. As a result they struggle to do even the most basic tasks that we all take for granted... and they don't get taught because everyone thinks they already know it having grown up with an iPad in their pram.
I chuckle to my self sometimes when I see a toddler walk up to a TV or video advert and try touching it a few times, then walk away confused because what they thought was a touch screen isn't doing anything when they touch it.
Fascinating.
I also chuckled when my 2yo did this, but stopped chuckling when he actually got it to switch channels. Turns out our tv has small near invisible touch controls beneath the screen and we just didn’t know.
of course, he wouldn’t stop messing with the tv after discovering this, and found a control combination (undocumented) to put the tv in demo mode: superbright, oversaturated and automatically forgetting its settings after a while.
I was not amused.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21241535
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21237540
I really have noticed that elderly people who have no computer experience have a better grasp of computing concepts than most kids. They understand physical media stores sounds and pictures, so it easy to explain that pictures and music lives on their sd card, like a phonograph or roll of film, except much more. They understand that you need an internet connection to communicate, like how you need your phone hooked up to make phone calls, since they have all had to deal with the phone company to get their phone working. And it is really simple to explain that a wifi router is just extending the internet into your living room. They understand sending an email and attaching a picture to it (use the paper clip and pick the picture). I was even able to explain the file system to someone, by saying that instead of just printing out his letters, he can store them inside a "folder", and print them out later as many times as he wants.
These concepts seem utterly lost on so many kids. They will send you a series of screenshots of a website instead of just sending the url. They are constantly losing data. They can not tell you where their data "lives"; whether it is in their iCloud or their phone or whatever.
It's not that horrible, but I am disappointed because I honestly thought that by now we would all be more computer literate. Isn't this what schools are supposed to teach?
The idea is to get him comfortable with older computing paradigms and make him appreciate "new" software via exposing him to low powered hardware and how difficult it is to use comparatively.
He tried doing a raspberry pi computer for the kid but said it was too underpowered to do anything meaningful+setup was a hassle
> at work with a 20 year old intern in the stock room
> clock on the wall above the door
> intern asks "Hey, do you know what time it is?"
> I look at the clock and say, "5:30pm"
> intern says "Thanks, my phone was dead"
I was in shock for the rest of the day a person less than a decade younger than me doesn't know how to read an analog clock.
Wristwatches are underrated. In the trades a $20 watch could pay you $x000 a year if it saved some minutes each day.
Engines are finally entering their appliance phase, just in time to be replaced by electric motors.
It’s okay for computers to become appliances too.
I sure know nothing about engine but can drive.
A computer illiterate needs the minimum of being able to maneuver it.
Files might disappear, they are an abstraction after all.
It seems that the ressources for people who actually want to learn computers are excellent and are getting better all the time, so maybe there will always be enough well trained people coming up to solve all problems.
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We are not forcing her to use tech in any way. The Linux PC and Micro:Bit are just there and it’s up to her own curiosity to explore them when she feels like it.
I think the problem is that TV and iPads are convenient for parents. You can put your kid behind one, and they’ll occupy themselves for hours. Whereas with real computers, Micro:Bits, or even Lego, you have to help them understand.
For first-person "builder" games (current favorite is "Scrap Mechanic") WASD+mouse-look is a lot easier for them than tapping and dragging on a touch screen. Also: larger displays.
Forget mouse+keyboard dexterity...most other kids don't seem to even know about the Esc, Enter, Space, and Shift keys.
I've seen in shopping mall little girl standing in front of aquarium, trying to move around fishes with her finger...
The topic was computer literacy and knowing different, non-computer things is irrelevant and knowing stuff about Fortnite, while computer-related, is not literacy.
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Despite that all the information in the world is available to us, we only seek out what we want to see/hear/read and then get fed new information based on those queries. It doesn't lead to free exchange of ideas and values, it has created polarized societies where we are digitally segregated by our own sense of identity and community.
People talk a lot about the political side of this, the "echo chambers" online. But I think it's worse than that. We see racial segregation on Twitter, feedback loops of content on YouTube that reinforce themselves, news outlets tailoring their content for users that reach them from their own site and optimizing for usage metrics that feed usage metrics... and we all are in love with it.
It reminds me of Farenheit 451 in the sense that this almost-dystopia wasn't created by some fascist dictator or single-party state; we built it ourselves. We wanted it.
That's not to say there isn't beauty on the internet, and we live in an era where more people talk and share and love and fight more than ever with language and ideas. It's just a strange departure from where most futurists thought we were going to be.
I'm not entirely convinced this is accurate. It definitely is in part, but not in whole. We wanted these better search tools and we like recommendation systems. But I know a lot of people are frustrated with algorithms like YouTube's recommendation system trapping them. (e.g. watch one Joe Rogan video and you get firehosed with more JRE videos). The thing is we also don't notice that this reinforcement also pushes us away from one another. But the solution sounds very similar to the solution to the complaint. People are complaining about being walled in by the algorithm (I for one am one of those people). People are asking for new suggestions. As in new topics, not just other youtubers doing the same thing. I think the difference is that it has become so obvious now that we're noticing and saying "wait, that'd too far."
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What we’re seeing today in online spaces is the possibility of people connecting online, forming their own bubbles of people with their own spirals – it has become much easier to sidestep the “general” spiral of silence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence
Technology created polarized society? Before internet search, we were better educated and understood each other better?
In the Soviet Union they kept a tight control on the media, and Pravda was controlled by the ruling party to amplify it's message as a tool of propaganda. It would ignore inconvenient facts and stories based on their propaganda value, or if something inconvenient was too well known to ignore it would mention it only to discredit it.
Today many people get most of their news from sites like Breitbart or RawStory. Doing this is voluntarily signing up for Pravda like propaganda. Yes, we have a free society and you aren't restricted to a single source of news like Pravda, but if people intentionally and voluntarily limit themselves to a site that is manipulating stories in the same way as Pravda and for the same motivations, we just have two groups of oppositely propagandized people, and of course that will increase polarization. There is no expectation that these sites would uphold journalistic standards, be generally honest beyond when it is convenient, and their bias is considered a feature.
Auditory: I can't tell you how accustomed to hearing stuff constantly everyone is. Cars (even just the tires on a busy street), Air Handling, Refrigerators, Beeping timers (ovens/microwaves/calendar reminders).
Visual: Web notifications, web advertisements, billboards, "news," spam phone calls/texts.
Social: Many people have an expectation that sending a message entitles them to an immediate response. In the age of quick answers from Google, people often forget about slowing down for the speed of thought.
Mental: We (humans) can only make so many decisions in a day yet we are overwhelmed with false dichotomies constantly in order to choose one or the other of basically the same thing.
Or just the light pollution. I definitely think this has an affect on people. I used to live in AZ for awhile and the nights were so beautiful. I'd spend hours looking at the night sky. Now I'm in the PNW and almost never look up (something I've done pretty much my whole life). I'd think light pollution has similar effects as cloudy skies. I used to do some of my most creative thinking late at night staring at the stars. But maybe that's just a change in me. Maybe both.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Ultrasonic_scare...
This one honestly bothers me the most. “But I sent you a message! You didn’t respond, you could have been dead in a ditch!”.
Or, you know, I didn’t look at my messages for a few days. If you were worried you could have called any time.
If you need to be somewhere at 8:30 and the journey “takes 17 minutes”, one psychologically sets 8:13 as the deadline for leaving the house. You pick up your keys at 8:13, actually leave a few minutes later, hit traffic or take a wrong turn or two, and end up crossing the threshold at your destination fifteen minutes late.
It’s no big deal and quite a grumpy old man thing to say, and I also don’t know if tech is the root cause, but squeezing travel into unrealistically small and algorithmically created windows of time has killed most people’s sense of punctuality, including mine if I’m not careful.
https://xkcd.com/612/
Eg if you have a 100 mile drive on a 70mph road and you drive the entire way at 85mph your reward is saving about 10 minutes on a 1.5 hour trip.
The downside risk is getting charged for speeding and being delayed for much more than 10 minutes.
I've never though the cost/benefit shows it to be particularly worthwhile.
Their bike estimates are consistently wildly optimistic however. If it’s an easy route and I pedal flat out with no traffic and without hitting any red lights, I can get close to the estimated time.
OK, I don’t have a road racing bike or e-bike, and there are people who are more athletic than I am, but I’d say I’m fitter than the median. Their model seems to assume around 25km/h average speed, which isn’t really sustainable (Or safe) in everyday cycling with other road users about.
In the moment it might not feel lonely. Exchanging DMs and posting on Reddit / HN / social media might feel like real communication. But ultimately there's a sense of emptiness to it, and it can't substitute real flesh-to-flesh human connection.
But it feels like we're always expected to be on our "grind", always bettering ourselves in an increasingly competitive labor market, so it's harder to go offline and just enjoy life because there's always that lingering sense of guilt that one is being left behind in our collective arms race to...nowhere.
It's fine. There's more stuff to do without the Internet than a person can reasonably do, anyway, even if you're pretty picky.
And they can't/won't change again? That seems wrong.
We've learned that data is unreliable. The highest click through rates come from nudity, or totally gross things like gore and trypophobia triggering holes. The highest CTR on text comes from well, clickbait. At this point everyone realizes this but some still don't notice that data-driven decisions optimizes for weird things.
IOT doesn't scale as well as we thought, because hardware doesn't scale at the rate of web software that we're used to. So hardware companies do more poorly than expected. Replace "hardware" with anything else that's hard to upgrade, and you get software-other hybrids like Uber and WeWork which didn't scale as well as anticipated.
I'm struggling to figure out what you mean by this.
Obviously it's not literally true (I've saved my colleagues thousands of hours with some of the tools I've made), but I can't figure out what else you could mean.
After lunch, they reply to some more emails, take a meeting on Zoom (waiting half an hour for that one guy to fix his microphone). Then they have 1 hour of work before the evening scrum stand-up, which is done on Slack or Zoom because half the team is remote.
But the CEO doesn't use Slack and his inbox is always full, so we forward him a report on WhatsApp, which has to be converted to PDF, which he then manually puts in his Prezi presentation for a client meeting tonight.
I think most employers assumed that employees with a 2x faster computer would send 2x the emails (or whatever task) in the same amount of time. In reality, they might send the same number of emails in half the time, then go home early.
There are lots of efficiencies that only show up once you monitor equipment for a couple of years but project leads don't really have that kind of time to show benefits
"This London skyscraper can melt cars and set buildings on fire"
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/london-skyscrap...