Tech

Oh, wow…I’ve got the keys to ChicagoBoyz. Can I get it started…ran rough for a minute, but now it seems to be turning over nicely. What to write about…perhaps a rant in the classic style.

DEAR CELL PHONE FANATICS

What exactly is it that you’re talking about that is so overwhelmingly important? It must be very important indeed..

*More important than the lane change you’re doing at 70 mph
*More important than the attractive person sitting across from you at the restaurant
*More important than showing common courtesy to the clerk in the checkout line

The thing is…you talk so loud, it’s hard to avoid overhearing your conversations..and they usually don’t sound all that important. It’s not usually about getting that corporate acquisition done, or even about picking up little Jimmy at school to take him to the dentist. An awful lot of it seems to be …talking for the sake of talking.

When the telegraph was first introduced, a journalist remarked:

“This extraordinary discovery leaves…no elsewhere…it is all here.”

If wired communications reduced the sense of elsewhere, does the abuse of wireless communications reduce the sense of the here and now?

A lot of people seem to think so. A good part of this perception, as far as I can tell, comes from a misunderstanding of the way society would look after the skycar came into general use.

When people recoil in horror at the thought of cheap flying cars, they seem to envision a city much like the ones we live in with those idiots they share the road with trying to navigate our accustomed traffic density in three dimensions. They imagine millions of the things flying over a few dozen square miles of city, with cars falling out of the sky through accident or mechanical failure and inevitably crashing into a building or residence far too often for anyone’s comfort.

All of which fails to address one fundamental question: why do cities exist in the first place?

They exist because they drastically lower the cost, in time and money, for people to trade and socialize, and thereby drastically increase the number of people they can feasibly choose from to trade and socialize with. This leads to more competition as well as larger markets for enterprises of every kind; the latter allows products, services, jobs, and enterprises to exist that couldn’t show a profit if they were limited to serving smaller markets.

For all of these purposes, the flying car serves not as a means of traveling within a city, but as a substitute for the city itself! Instead of shortening the distance between people and enterprises by crowding them into a city, the skycar shortens the travel time while allowing the people themselves to live hundreds of miles away from their jobs, their friends, and their favorite shops. A few dozen houses may be clumped together in a single clearing, or a single house may stand on its own, but in either case small neighborhoods and single office buildings/strip malls/large stores will be surrounded by miles of wilderness, and people will spend most of their time endangering nothing but trees or grass if they happen to suffer mechanical failure, and enjoying plenty of space between themselves and the nearest fellow traveler.

How do we get there from here? Simple – allow ordinary people to operate skycars/aircraft/etc. anywhere except over cities. Even better, let anyone operate an aircraft anywhere if they get sufficient liability insurance – and the insurance companies will profit by setting appropriate rates and conditions. Either way, people flying their own vehicles will tend to avoid population centers, enterprises wishing to sell to or employ such people will start locating away from population centers, and as sales volume and penetration increases and prices go down, the countryside will become more desirable and large population centers less desirable as places to live, work, or operate a business.

And the end result will be better and safer than what we have now. Against a dispersed population, most terrorist attacks, even with nuclear weapons, would yield disappointing results (a notable exception being contagious diseases). While natural disasters are not as much of a threat for us as they once were, there are potential disasters that could still exact large loss of life in today’s concentrated population centers – a direct hit on New Orleans by a hurricane being one example – that would be drastically mitigated by lower population concentrations and faster evacuation capability. Profit opportunities will open up in the development of vehicles that are easy to control safely, opportunities that don’t exist today because no one who isn’t trained to use today’s not-so-user-friendly controls is permitted to fly a craft with any controls.

And when you get right down to it, it’s a travesty that, more than a hundred years after the Wright Brothers’ pioneering flight, practically all of us are still driving glorified Model T’s and seem to accept without a second thought that our children and even our grandchildren will do so as well. What happened to us?

A WSJ (subscription only) column explains the issue WRT to telephones, but the point applies to all media that transmit information at the pace of speech:

. . . Given a choice, who uses the phone anymore? Talking — whether on a cellphone, a landline, or some VOIP-y instant-messenger doodad — can be time-consuming and ponderous, and costs money. E-mail is a cold and barren medium, but it’s efficient, and we don’t have to wait for the bozo on the other end to hang up — we just hit escape. Anyway, we can read much faster than we can listen — all that spam in your inbox is annoying, but just imagine if it were voicemail.

Not only can we read much faster than we can listen, but with text we can easily read ahead or reread what we’ve already read. Simple and efficient.

Text is for communication, speech is social. While speech is useful for communication, text tends to displace it in uses where efficient communication is more important than sociability. For example, text messaging and text email access are popular cellphone features but email-to-voice translation never took off.

The use of text to transmit information will continue to increase as productivity increases continue to make everyone’s time worth more. The model for the future is not video blogging or video phones but specialist blogs and RSS feeds, and other text-based information filters on the margins of the network. Voice and video will remain the province of calls to your mom, business meetings, some news reports and a narrow range of other applications, where the social information conveyed by speech or the visual information conveyed by video is valuable enough to outweigh the speed advantage of pure text.

Sanford Lakoff’s “Higher Education Needs Guardians of Learning” is nostalgic but acknowledges technology helps us become better writers (as well as freeing us from spending our lives on others’ words). Sure, ink wells and the Palmer method were aesthetically pleasing. (Not that all that penmanship was lovely – ask anyone who has struggled through manuscripts by Thoreau or Faulkner.) The advances are greater than he implies, since the future he describes in his penultimate sentence is here: “Then will come virtual courses, with no need for personal attendance in classrooms.” Nor are the readers of this blog likely to embrace his conclusion: “No wonder Socrates thought that, in a utopia, we would need guardians to set the rules and control change.” Our passion is for the beautifully turned phrase and the precise wording that captures an idea; this is the essence – we respect that whether it is on papyrus or paper or typed or word processed or blogged. We learn from and admire the understanding of the human condition whether it is in Sophocles or Lileks. The traditional genres may win out – but I don’t think we know that yet. Right now, blogs are defining it as we go. We know what we do now is transitory; but, in that future, will it all be? It won’t be guardians but experience and time that will mold this medium–as well as the art of teaching.