Because I'm dissatisfied with the drafts for one reason or another, and I don't have the motivation to finish, I don't post much of what I write. Instead of finishing articles, I start messing with my writing environment. I move among up to five writing apps and three devices. So, I'm doing an experiment. I'm going to be less fussy about my text and post in the most frictionless manner possible. Hey World was created so the owners of 37signals software (a Web app company) could post from the email platform they created. It's email; it has no editing amenities. My articles will be shorter and more of my immediate rather than longterm interest. And include more tieposes. Don't subscribe out of politeness.
I wrote this a couple of years ago, but it's still relevant.
I am reminded of a passage in Tocqueville where he noticed that America seemed to be on a trajectory that would have it erecting “an immense tutelary power” that wants only what is best for us, and is keen to “save us the trouble of living.”
I wrote this a couple of years ago, but it's still relevant.
I am reminded of a passage in Tocqueville where he noticed that America seemed to be on a trajectory that would have it erecting “an immense tutelary power” that wants only what is best for us, and is keen to “save us the trouble of living.”
—John Naughton
In my childhood home of Los Angeles, when TV antennas still dotted rooftops, we had the most TV channels in the nation: three national networks and four local channels.
The local channels couldn't finance their own shows, so they filled the airwaves with old movies. This was the media era of bloodless violence and post-World War II American dominance. In those movies, John Wayne won world wars and defeated American Indians. James Arness put down villains with quick draws, Errol Flynn wielded pirate swords, and armor-clad Robert Wagner fought with a knight's flat-edged sword. Those were the days.
In the fifties in the San Fernando Valley, new housing tracts sprung like backyard weeds, and on weekends, I'd walk through the framed but yet-to-be walled homes to liberate discarded wood scrapes from which I assembled weapons inspired by the above shows. A favorite was a rubber-band gun, because it shot real (but harmless) "bullets." I'd saw ten inches off a two-by-four and hammer a small nail into a spring-enabled clothes pin. As I further searched through the not-yet houses, I was rewarded with additional fantasy tools hiding in plain sight such as wood trim to create swords. If I were lucky, I'd find a scattering of nickel-sized punch outs from electrical boxes—perfect for pirate gold. If I were unlucky, I'd bring home the unwanted souvenir of a nail that punched through my shoe and punctured my heel. In those days, kids were expected to get injuries, so my only consequence was a trip to the doctor for a tetanus shot.
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In the Netflix era, there are more streaming services than the bygone TV antenna era had individual channels, and the popular services have an avalanche of shows. A writer (whose name I don't recall) suggested that this oversupply of manufactured fantasy puts a damper on the development of children's imaginations. In the pre-streaming era, just one of those movies or network TV shows could sustain a young child’s fantasy play, as it did mine, for years. But, today, why role play from memories of an old show when dozens of new shows are a click away?
Faux
I backed off when I realized I was invading singer Alicia Keyes personal space. She was on stage performing, and I was nearly draping her from the front. Weirdly, she didn't notice and continued to sing. It felt like a dream, but I was actually in a crowded Apple store. My head was strapped into Apple's new virtual-reality helmet, the Apple Vision Pro, and I was near the end of the demo.
The make-believe closeness with Keyes was the finale of the demonstration. The wild animals that passed mere feet from me before I ducked into the safety of the nightclub were intimidating, but the encounter with Keyes felt worse. Better to be mauled than commit a faux pas.
While Apple touts the Vision Pro as a viable productivity device (which currently only works as such in conjunction with a Mac), hardly anyone who's tried one views it as anything but an entertainment device. At $3500, it's a really expensive entertainment device, a really expensive entertainment device that can be used by only one person at a time. This doesn't mean that future versions won't be far cheaper and may evolve to a productivity device, but despite engineers' passions and management's prognostications, devices find their users. Apple thought the iPad would replace the Mac and that the Apple Watch would compete with smart phones, but the iPad is used mostly to consume video and the watch has become primarily a health aid.
Apple is trying to save us the trouble of living
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, promoted the motto, a "bicycle for the mind," that is, a technology that augments an inborn human capability, as the guiding concept for Apple products, and Jobs favored commercials for Apple that emphasized their products as tools for creativity. If he believed that, he was fooling himself. His favorite term of derision was "bozos," which meant those who weren't the best of the best. The Apple commercial, Here's for the crazy ones, didn't feature you and me making something with an Apple product, it featured (voiced by Jobs himself) the likes of Picasso, Einstein, Gandhi, and Earhart who, by the way managed their creativity and excellence without an Apple product. But apparently, you can't sell a billion devices if you restrict your sales to "the crazy ones." In contrast to the "bicycle for the mind" motto, most of Apple's products since the 1980s have been designed as an easy chair for the mind, designed for entertainment not for creativity.
As everyone knows (or should know), ignore what people say, watch what they do. Since Steve Jobs retirement from Apple and subsequent passing, Apple's marketing has implied that Apple product buyers are the "crazy ones," in this case, they mean to flatter their users as the creative ones, who in another of their former ad campaigns, "think different."
It's wax-on, wax-off all the way down
One of the most iconic scenes in movies is from the original Karate Kid movie. Mr. Miyagi begins his instruction with his teen student, Daniel, by having Daniel perform repetitive tasks such as painting a fence with up and down and side-to-side strokes. After days of this seemingly irrelevant task, Daniel objects. Miyagi demonstrates that the painting motions were the same as karate blocks and have become installed in Daniel's muscle memory. It is, of course, not muscle memory, it's nervous system memory earned from learning by doing, which now goes by a fancier term in modern cognitive science, embodied cognition.
Our mind map (what we call reality) is assembled from experiences, experiences of movement that we interpret to ourselves using language. Medical students, interns, and residents engage in patient rounds that make meaning from anatomy and chemistry books. Cooks prepare food to make recipes come alive. Even when just reading, your mind is moving— interacting with words based on experiences.
We've got so impressed with improvements in displays and computer graphics, in shows as well as on computer screens, that we don't appreciate how far away they are from creating a more than superficial cognitive experience. No matter what Apple claims, the Vision Pro isn't a virtual or augmented reality device, it's a fancy 3D screen you wear as a helmet. If there's a virtual reality device in our future, its future is on the same timeline as the ubiquitous, go-anywhere self-driving car, the timeline of "in the future."
I believe the Vision Pro is already being used in flight and surgery simulations to teach. That specialized use case sounds about right. To that, I hope and expect an eventual replacement for graduated lenses in eyeglasses, where the whole lens changes instantly to your directed object distance. I can't be the only one who hates walking down steps because graduated lenses moves the perceived distance when you glance downward.
Notes
- Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, and the founder of the first U.S. cognitive science department (at Harvard), Jerome Bruner, laid down the modern foundation of learning by doing.
- Apple's Vision Pro is both a virtual reality device—the device dominates your senses—and an augmented reality device—your senses are enhanced. I didn't understand augmented reality until someone pointed out that eyeglasses and hearing aids augment reality.
- You see in the news that self-driving cars are happening, but they're traveling on only limited, well-defined roads. Self-driving is to human driving as a small school district in a homogenous community is to the United Nations.