EcstaticObsessive said:
Jonluw said:
EcstaticObsessive said:
Sometimes it seems like technology is just going backwards. Remember the days when all you had to do to fix a game was blow into the game cartridge? Yeah, me neither.
Neither can I.
Oh, wait, you mean the time when you had to blow in game cartridges to remove the dust that accumulated in them in order to play?
Yeah, those games weren't broken. They just had a design flaw
that we now have eliminated.
When those "good old" games were actually broken, there was nothing you could do, aside from getting a new one.
Today, when a disc is scratched, you can actually get it rebuffed and repaired. Of course, if you break the game in two, there's still nothing you can do about it.
Oho, touché sir. Perhaps I didn't phrase that right. Just back in those days, if something was broken or failed to work due to a design flaw, it was a lot simpler to fix. I remember my dad fixing our old VCR one day all by himself, a few blue moons ago.
Nowadays, since our technology is that much more advanced, it's a lot more complicated to get it fixed, or repaired. Like you said, you can get disks rebuffed, but compared to 'the old days' (forgive me for using that term rather loosely) in some cases, just getting things repaired is an inconvenience.
Indeed, more advanced technology requires more advanced knowledge from a person in order to repair or create said technology.
That you can't do something about though. If you want society to progress, you're going to have to deal with that.
If we take it to te extreme: Back in the day when the only technology we had was fire, sharpened rocks and animal hides, everyone would know how to sharpen a rock and skin an animal (fire can be seen as an exception due to religious superstition, fire might have been the secret of the shaman, etc.)
Society progresses, and we learn to process plants into four and flour into bread. Again, this technology doesn't require much knowledge or specialization in the field. Moving forward, we have now invented metals: Everyone owns a sword or a farming tool, and if it goes blunt, they have a whetstone and the know-how to sharpen their tools. If they straight up break, however, not everyone has a smithy; but some basic smithing was still quite a common skill on larger farms.
Now we've invented the automobile. Everyone has one, and many can fix basic problems like a burnt-out spark plug. Still, the vehicle is so complicated that stranger problems require us to take it to someone with specialized knowledge in the field. Still, gaining some of this knowledge isn't too hard. There are plenty of hobby-mechanics who can fix most of your problems, provided it isn't something really complex.
Then we reach today's world, where a lot of technology, like computers, is so complicated most people don't even know how it works. There is even technology that isn't corporeal, but only exists as numbers within the computers which you still don't know how function. These two technologies require completely different skillsets to work with, even though they funtion in symbiosis; and not many know how to handle and repair these technologies at an advanced level.
If we were to draw the progress to its logical extreme, we would end up in a society where everyone uses ridiculously complex technology and only one person in the world knows how each piece of technology works.
I don't think this will happen though. Mostly due to the fact that education moves forward as well. A teenager fifty years ago would have no idea of how nuclear fusion works, but these days we do.
The problem that really seems to bother you is that the new technology is unreliable. And as I said, that is only owing to the fact that it is new and not fully established yet. When telephones were new, that was incredibly unreliable too, and large parts of the world were without contact to the telephone network. However, now that the technology has become mainstream and we've worked out the kinks, the system is almost foolproof. When was the last time you had problems with your cellphone other than when you dropped it on the ground? The problem is that the internet and mp3-players and such are still relatively early in their development and integration into society. So long as you insist on using infantile technology, you will have to deal with certain kinks. The problem only comes when you use infantile technology for essential tasks without any backup.
