Is it PC to be anti-PC?
21 August 2009
Author : Paul Wolfe
"I’m sorry, but our computer is down so I’m not able to check that." It’s something we hear regularly, but why do we accept it?
There’s an old joke, apparently started by General Motors, about how our cars would be if they were manufactured by Microsoft. It muses over considerations that for no reason whatsoever your car would crash at least twice a day, the airbag system would say ‘Are you sure?’ before deploying, and you'd press the ‘start’ button to turn off the engine.
I recently went to my doctor’s surgery to collect a repeat prescription. Having arrived a matter of seconds after they opened, I was told I had to wait for the computers to start before the location of my prescription could be ascertained. I waited several minutes as the embarrassed receptionist explained, ‘It’s always like this.’ I read every poster in the uninhabited waiting room, and then the computer apparently informed her that my prescription was in a pile on her desk. A pile that was in alphabetical order. Low and behold, with the surname ‘Wolfe’, mine was at the bottom of the pile. How did we come to be so reliant on computers?
They are now such a big part of our lives and jobs revolve around them, but without them we’re essentially dumbfounded. It seems that computers have stopped people from thinking for themselves, and at the same time have become the easiest thing to blame for errors.
And how precious is our time that Google has to announce the speed at which it can return results? Put in ‘Electronics Manufacture & Test’ and it proudly declares that the results were found in 0.23 seconds. I don’t live my life at that sort of speed. Life should be more relaxed than that. On my journey to work each morning I encounter roadworks, cyclists, and traffic lights that each play their part in impeding my progress. But I don’t anxiously look at the clock and consider that the man crossing the road has delayed me by 6.73 seconds.
Our complete reliance on computers and unwavering faith in them means that in a production environment we appear to be so dependent on MES that we’ve lost the ability to think and apply common-sense logic.
Worryingly, I’ve noticed that our dependence is creating a society with a lack of personal interaction. My local supermarket has replaced a number of checkouts with four self-service versions. In an ironic application of ‘fuzzy logic’ there were four members of staff standing next to the new units to assist customers. Whatever happened to talking to someone?
Texting on mobile phones is growing at a tremendous rate, so do we actually talk to people now? It seems that modern hip young things are increasingly communicating in ‘text speak’ and if they’re growing-up in a time where there is no human contact in common day to day tasks, we’ll have a generation of non-thinking, un-communicating, computer-reliant technology junkies.
It seems that there is an overwhelming reliance on technology just because it’s there and we’re essentially flummoxed when there’s a failure and need to revert to doing things for ourselves. The Zenith Radio Corporation created the very first television remote control in 1950, and called it ‘Lazy Bone’. It could turn a television on and off, and change channels too, but it was not a wireless remote control as it was attached to the television by a cable. Now, with remote controllers for just about everything in a modern house, there really is no need to get up from the armchair.
So I’m fighting back, talking to cashiers, having conversations, thinking for myself, and doing it my way.
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