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Robots Without a Cause
WG55 writes "Have you noticed that more and more technology is more ingenious than useful? Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian writes in his article Robots without a cause that much technology produced today will change our lives little, if at all. He writes, 'Our response to being bored and rich is not to discard our possessions and live more simply, but to buy more stuff to reduce the space in which we might contemplate our shame.'"
...by Hans Christian Andersen, and all the ingenious "automata" of the nineteenth century, show, at least, that there is nothing new about the love of gadgetry for the sake of gadgetry.
It's probably a form of idolatry... that's a sin we're not very conscious of these days...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Yes, there are things mankind should be doing. We should be going into space. We should be defeated viruses. We should be feeding the hungry.
But frankly, every government that has set out to promote equity between people has failed, usually badly. Humans are greedy, so just go with it. It works pretty well.
That's not to say that laws should be unfair; no government should act in an unethical manner. But neither should a government enforce morality, or the spending of the rich SOB's money. Let people buy what they want to buy and let the invisible hand sort it all out.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
I've always wondered what George Boole's fellow mathematicians must have thought about him speding so much time developing an algebra based on only two numbers. And I believe that when Joseph Fourier presented his work to the academy of sciences showing that any function could be represented as an infinite sum of sine and cosine functions, the result was a big yawn from everyone.
While I look at a lot of modern technology as useless yuppie crap, there's something to be said about the relentless pursuit of scientific and technological advancement.
GMD
watch this
The author seems not to have much perspective as to how different people might view particular gadgets. A robotic vaccuum cleaner sounds great to me, since I've got 3 kids under the age of 16 months and hence a titanic workload just to keep the house under control.
The question for all of these gadgets is whether or not enough people find them useful and affordable to make the R&D investment worthwhile. This is inherently a risky proposition, so there will tremendous hits (DVD) and flops (Iridium)...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I recently made a $60 investment in a tiller garden utensils and plants (onions, peppers, tomatoes, mellos, and corn) and planted them a new garden in my back yard.
Granted gardening is far from new technology, but a tiller that weighs no more than 20 pounds and can still cut through 8 inches of earth? That's a pretty good feat of technology. I really enjoy the fact that what used to take an entire weekend now only takes me 25 minutes.
While the technology may not have a huge impact on our lives it does bring about more time for leisure. Some of us spend 9 hours a day at work, come home and clean the house (because we couldn't before work), make dinner, and then notice we have maybe 2 hours tops of free time before we have to get to bed and do it all again the next day.
Technology has made it easier for us to be able to actually relax and release stress from us. To not have to worry about the lawn because you placed a chemical that causes it to grow stronger and less fast or to be able to not have to worry about the house because a new weatherproof paint won't fade peel or chip. It's these "simple" things that we may not notice, but we also don't notice the impact they have on us. It can take an entire weekend to plant a garden, take care of a lawn, or paint a house.
It's technology that makes it possible for us to have more time to enjoy life.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
It's about a cultural obsession with temporary diversion and amusement in novelty.
Shockingly, he supposes that lasting value in life might come from knowing oneself better, and that real sources of happiness are pusued with fewer contemplative distractions.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
He completely ignores the fact that incredible things have been accomplished in this age of gadgets he deems pointless. Does he really think the most inovative thing in this modern era is a wind up radio? What about genetic engineering, hybrid cars, nuclear fusion, nanotechnology, etc...? The scary part is, there must be a lot of people like him for this drivel to be published.
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musings on politics and technol
But it's easy to predict that wallpaper and ring tones for your telephone are highly unlikely to effect that change. That seems to be the sort of "innovation" that Stuart Jeffries is railing against.
--Joe
[P.S. Yes, 'effect,' not 'affect,' as in 'bring about.']
Program Intellivision!
What a whiner.
I made it through maybe half the article and get bored with it. Maybe a robot to read his articles would be something he'd approve of.
We pretty much have our bases covered with things that we need. There are not food shortages in the civilized nations of the world., we are able to provide for everyone on the planet with leftovers on top of that (minus political influences). We have the basic technology to live anywhere on the planet that is inhabitable and many places inhabitable. There are no more physical frontiers beyond space for us.
However, when you figure in that in 8000 - 12000 years we have gone from living from the land we could till to just starting to reach outer space, I'd say we've done pretty well. Its fair for folks to take a bit of luxury in life.
Once food production was not a worry, everything after that has been fluff. Do we need cars? Nah. Do we need anything that specialized labor grants us? Han, but its nice.
Do we need to have a cause? Maybe. As a Christian I believe it is serving God in the capacity he sees fit. Do others need to have a cause to believe in for focus on? I dunno. Some folks just want to eat, drink, and be merry for tommorrow they die. Perhaps that is their purpose.
Why does this fellow feel he needs to fire us up for anything? As that does seem to be his issue here. Or more important to me is, why does he seem to think we need firing up, when many already see advances even without groundbreaking advances.
Medicine for instance is always advancing. Personally I think this is a great thing. It may not affect me every day, but it certainly will be important the next time I need surgery or come down with an illness.
I know a couple folks that work on review mirrors that auto tint when a car with its high beams are behind you are blinding you. Is that fluff or a safety measure in this guys book?
Intel and AMD are designing incrementally faster processors everyday, is that fluff or real research? By faster processors we can evaulate and process data faster, maybe to help advance medicine.
Ah, heck, enough. Sounds like this guy simply is a lost soul who is really lacking in life. Maybe he needs to find a cause to live for, I think many other people have their causes to live for.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
I have a Fisher Space Pen, which I love. The Space Pen was created to solve the proble of how to allow astronuts to write in a zero G enviorment. It uses and pressurized cartrige and an ink with and intergrated adhesive. The Russians faced with the smae problem used pencils.
The innovations of the Spac Pen contributed to new uses in comercail pens, and therefore contributed to the technology base.
If necessity is the mother of inventionm, then cleverness is it's father. The fantasical examples of '50s "labor saving devices of the future" are examples of such inanities that proved to inspire good design, by at a minimum counter-example.
The persuit of technology is good, because economic growth is good. What the artical is really railing against is consumerism. it is capital folly to link the eschewing of consumerism to luditeism. Economics in it's basic form is the process of taking resources from lower to higher valued uses. The is only 2 way to do that in my mind, transportation and improvement. Both are inexorably tied to technology. All socailist delusions aside, the best and most effective way of improving everyones lives is through free(ish) markets. The wonder of free markets is that we let people do stupid things with their cash.
Spyder
The one with the best technology will be the only one alive!
I believe that the American experience in Vietnam (1961-1975) rather disproves this canard.
Or instead of going home and plopping yourself in front of some polygons, you could find something REAL that you enjoy doing. Most of these things could eventually land you a job you enjoy. Learn to build something (with wood, metal, circuits, or even code) or become an expert in something thats interesting to you or get out and interact with people that might give you ideas about new things you could be doing. A garbageman is not a garbageman for life, and what is happening now will not be happening forever.
I'm guessing that since you're posting on Slashdot at 3:17 in the afternoon, you're working on a computer. I do, too, and I just can't sit in front of the little screen after doing it all day. David Foster Wallace makes an interesting point about TV which can be extended to computer gaming: Its something you do because of a lack of excitement, and the reason you lack excitement is because you're watching TV (or playing games) all the time. Its an addiction that feeds itself
From your post, it sounds like your life sucks, (if your life is work and video games, your life sucks), and playing more video games and calling successful people "upperclass twits" will not help at all. (Disclaimer: successful people tend to annoy me as well, so I can see where you're coming from). But you're pissed off because he called you out. Its not his fault your a loser, and you need to unplug the computer, yell "I SUCK!!!" (the first step on the road to recovery is acceptance) at the top of your lungs and get into the real world and do something about it.
Thomas Edison seemed to be interested in inventing for the sake of inventing. How else can you explain a mentality that expected a handful of 'minor inventions' per month and a 'major breakthrough' every couple months.
I know I'm oversimplifying, but given that one of Edison's "inventions" is credited with wide ranging life changes (the lightbulb, which he didn't invent but did radically improve the commercial viability of), it seems appropriate to consider his motivations. It didn't seem like he was out to change the world, but rather cast it in his image by inventing as many things as he could. Inventing for the sake of it.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
That's a pretty good point. When you think about it, it doesn't really matter whether a gadget is stupid in and of itself. The technology that is within the gadget is all patented, which means it becomes part of the public record, and available (after 17 years, or earlier through license) to the rest of us.
Take that little vacuum for instance. Would I buy one? Well, ok, maybe I would, but I'd crack it open and hack it into something else, maybe a little patrol camera for my apartment. So, if I can think of that, others can as well. If you've got a little trilobite-like thing that knows how to navigate around your apartment, getting over cables and such, and using sonar to "see", you can go pretty easily from there to a fleet of security bots who can detect motion and automatically capture video of whomever is breaking into your apartment, store, or corporate location.
Ok, next step. Make the trilobite out of aluminum. Mount a webcam on the back, and make it stream images. Program the device to patrol your apartment, store, or corporate location. When it locates someone, it emails you and you can see what it's seeing on the webcam. You can call the police and bust the thieves without ever leaving your cubicle, or vacation spot, or whatever.
Moving along, make one out of waterproof, floatation plastic, with a floating/swimming feature. Emergency services send out thousands of them to find flood survivors using infrared. Whenever they run into someone, they beam back a GPS coord set and some video. Or, better: some kid's lost in a forest. Thousands of trilobites scurry through the woods looking for heat signatures. Or, police use them to find fugitives.
Take this a little further. Make the little trilobite out of steel, and beef up the power and suspension. Mount a stronger antenna, and make it radio-controllable, so that it'll navigate through, say, a terrorist's cave until it "sees" somebody on infrared, and then hand over control to an operator. The operator drives it into the middle of the terrorists, and activates the modified claymore mine built into its armor. Boom.
Sure, it's a silly little vacuum cleaner NOW, but what can you do with the basic idea of the machine? Now that they've built it, what else can you do with it?
Most of the weird gadgets that are around today could be put to better uses. Research is research. It only takes imagination to bend it to a purpose...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Why am I bringing up Connections? Well, because Connections would trace the connections between various inventions that it would seem had no relation to each other. Many of the inventions the show would showcase as part of the chain would seem frivolous or irrelevent, but finally they would all link up to showcase the major invention of the show (which would be something like the automobile or the satellite dish).
Heh, lately most of the justifications for a space program are based on the idea that innovations that came from the space program led to improvements in medicine, construction or other fields. (Note: if you can't sell people on exploring a new frontier and helping humanity break its earthly bounds, explaining how we wouldn't have Tang is not going to sell them)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
The Automobile, when it was invented was a novelty at best. see its history laid out here: http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarsst eama.htm
It was difficult to get it onto the muddy( read dirt ) roads of the day. At best you would consider such things a diversionary hobby and certainly not practical for real travel. ... until Ford. Enough said about that article i guess. On the others hand there has been more then a few negative effects of cars along with the good ones. Maybe we should all simplify our lives and become Amish?
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
I think you're fucking paranoid. Dude, do you know how much TIME it will take to create a perfect world? The amount of human interaction it will require to get a "feel" for everything? Right now, with great tools, a game like Unreal Tournament takes 5 years to create. Can you imagine the time it will take to build a reliable, interesting, intuitive, varied life simulator? Can you imagine the expense?
Science Fiction's just fiction, kid. In the real world, we've got a free market economy, no clean cut force of good or evil, time that only moves forward, laws of cause and effect and the letter c. So don't let it bug you and worry about real things like the Patriot Act and Dumb and Dumber 2 instead.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
"This type of thing is typically said by people who are bored and poor "
Or buddhists/neo-buddhists (I use the neo for the people who follow buddhism but don't know it.) I knew this one buddhist (she was white, but that's besides the point) who's possessions were only what she needed to survive. So she didn't have a toaster, or a microwave, or a bread machine, or whatever. And she was happy with her life. So she wasn't just poor and bored. She actually made quite a bit of money (she was an elementary school teacher of mine) and gave it mostly away.