Are People Becoming Resistant To Learning?

 

Image created with Vector FX
by Distinct AI.

People do seem to be less interested in learning and critical thinking.  

For a long time now I have followed the YouTube channel "Technology Connections" the host has a wonderful blend of insight and humour in the topics he presents. In the video "Algorithms are breaking how we think" he points out that people now in a large part seem to desire to just follow whatever the algorithm on a social platform or YouTube presents to them rather than deciding what to watch or read. The video is very good and I encourage you to watch it. I personally love to learn and I love to investigate but I agree with the host that people do seem to be less interested in learning and critically thinking.

This has me thinking, If this trend continues what will that mean for society in the future. Yesterday I was working with a young person and by that I mean someone in their mid-20s and I got the distinct feeling that although they were obviously very bright, that they would just prefer to do things by routine and not really have to think or consider anything. I thought for a moment that I might've been primed by watching the Technology Connections video but I can assure you that was not the case. I have seen similar behaviours in the last five or six years and it is becoming prevalent. I think we are reaching a point where some people are beginning to have difficulty in breaking apart concepts and really understanding the impact of what those ideas mean. This is a critical point because this is the essence of innovation.

 I don't want people to become mere consumers of data. I want them to grow from learning. As I write this, I am undertaking a mathematics course at brilliant.org some of it has been very challenging to get through. I usually spend at least an hour every morning, and currently it's closer to two hours just working on grasping the concepts. I really want to learn this, not just the mechanics of getting to the answer.

I think one of the reasons we are seeing the current trend of people just following whatever algorithms present to them in their media is because they have never learned the process of actually understanding and learning. (Related article on this blog: Learning and knowledge in the shadow of AI) Or at least knowing why some bit of information works. I went searching the other day for methods to improve my sites ranking on search engines. I've done all the basics but I also see that Google and presumably other search engines are not picking up many of the articles. When I investigate the Google search console one can see that there are many "redirection errors" and there shouldn't be. I volunteer in the IT sector specifically related to webpages. Something about the site is really throwing off Google's smart phone crawling robot. As I dug into the whole topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I only came across scads of articles and websites recommending that I use, blindly, various AI tools. There was only one YouTube video which presented facts that I could check related to various HTML tags and I was able to verify that they were all correct in my site. So my quest will continue... But my point here is that what is happening to critical thinking?

I have nothing against AI (Artificial intelligence) to be clear. But I am very concerned about people's eagerness to avoid knowledge and just go for the answer blindly. They are indeed missing out on the fun of learning! When you really understand something your mind expands and the knowledge becomes applicable all over the place. It is a very empowering experience. Learning however does require you to slow down and maybe that is part of the issue here for people. They don't know how to slow down and develop extended attention spans.

Society needs to refocus on some core activity's especially for children so that the mind gets a chance to develop the skills of attention and builds the framework necessary for enjoyment and knowledge. When it works new knowledge is the ultimate "high".

This is what I suggest and please be aware that these are my opinions not necessarily backed up by empirical data.

• Children should not be given their own unsupervised smart devices like tablets and smart phones until about the age of 10. This would keep them off the train wreck of rapidfire media and allow them to develop an attention span beyond the one minute mark.
  
  
• This in turn would allow them to develop some thoughtfulness about their world and investigate in the real world. With other children and people.
  
  
• They would also get a chance to deal with difficulty on a real-time scale. Not all problems can be solved instantly.
   
• Side Note (March 8, 2025): *CBC Marketplace did a segment on "How gaming apps use your private data to track you" and part of the piece deals with how video games affect children. Running time 21 minutes.
  

Now I know that technology is everywhere and that some of these points are far too idealistic but they should be implemented in some way and indeed the adults can take this advice as well. Consider for a moment how you use your technology. Are you using it to open doors and expand your horizons or are you using it as a shortcut around thinking?

Bring back the joys of pondering something… Consider again the idea of sitting with a group of people and going at a problem saying "What If We Do This?… Will that work?" Think of all the great adventures that are brought us to this stage in societal evolution. We could not have arrived here without them. The skills they had were critical for them. These are skills we must rediscover.

This article may grow a bit larger but for this moment I will leave it there and look forward to your comments either here or on YouTube. Let's get into this shall we and expand our knowledge and understanding. 😄

Take care Patrick

*  The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is a Crown corporation that serves as the national public broadcaster. CBC produces "CBC Marketplace" Canada's consumer watchdog series since 1972.

Disability And the Modern World: How Will AI adapt to "Us"?

How will Artificial Intelligence  adapt to persons with various disabilities?

I just had a very interesting experience at my bank. The ATMs (Automated Teller Machines)  have just been upgraded with paper money recognition, meaning that you no longer have to deposit physical bills in envelopes. This actually poses a problem for myself, because of the actual real world speed I moved at. It's not exactly quick or even what I would call coordinated. This caused the poor back machine a minor fit as it accepted the deposit part way through me inserting the money. Suffice to say, I had to leave a message with my bank as this is the weekend. I'm sure everything will be straightened out. 

The average bank machine is a little higher than I am it also means I have to adjust my chair after inserting items and accessing the touchscreen. It can be done, but if I'm lower down but that puts my finger at an angle which causes errors with the touchscreen....  So basically this is modern technology not quite adapting correctly to any given user. This situation I understand because programmers have to make decisions, unless they want to write 4 billion lines of code, and sometimes one adaption for a segment of the population can get in the way of another put in place for a different situation or user.

All of this has me thinking about how will Artificial Intelligence (AI) adapt to persons with various disabilities. At the present time, AI may be consider to disabled itself, given the very early stages we are in, but that won't always be the case. 

See:
Max Roser (2023) - “AI timelines: What do experts in artificial intelligence expect for the future?” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines

Just how will it interpret the various, variations it sees in the human population. Will AI "get it"and propose novel ways of achieving a goal? Will it see something its original designers did not and come up with its own solution?

Getting back to my ATM experience. Clearly you can't really setup longer defaults, because the speed I go at would drive some people crazy. This is where AI could be a benefit by changing how the machine worked for a given patron. Not based on a bank profile of the individual but by observing how they were doing in completing a task. Slowing down or speeding up as necessary or changing the on-screen sensitivity. This would be just the beginning.
 

Image generated by Ideogram AI.
I had to post this 😀. It resulted from simply
inputting he first paragraph of this article.
Quite amazing! **  (See end of article note.)

To be clear, this is not a commentary on the particular bank or the machinery they have chosen. This is more a observation of how AI might be able to improve how we use technology. In it’s current state, the new technology can get in the way of itself. I recently purchased a Google Pixel 6a smart phone,  and  one of the odd decisions that was made by the designers was to disable Bluetooth auto answer support for headphones. This feature is basic that I never thought it would be removed, but Google did in the Pixel phone... Anyway to make a long story short. I found an app which essentially replaces that functionality, (MotoAnswer on the Google Play store) but it is not a perfect solution because it is not integrated into the OS. Occasionally strange things can happen like if a phone call comes in while I am dictating to the computer the app may auto answer the call because it knows I'm using the headphones but route the audio to the earpiece in the phone. – So Google, please enable Bluetooth auto answer on your phones.

My previous phone which was "simpler" only because it had a stock version of android never had this problem. The computer and the phone would switch over between devices with no problem and everything would come through my headphones. This is yet another case where AI could be a benefit. I didn't contact Google and their response was rather surprising. They stated in a public forum that they have no intention of enabling auto answer on Bluetooth devices. When I press them the response was. (Paraphrasing) "We have never had Bluetooth auto answer on any pixel phone and we do not plan to incorporate it in later releases." They declined to state exactly why. (The full discussion thread with the Google community representatives can be found here.)

So maybe AI will be the answer to all of this; with ultimately a customizing device which adapts itself to the user. I  have a feeling though, outside of special use cases, the current models of AI being developed may not be considering the variations in people out there in the world today. This could turn into be quite an adventure. 

Perhaps the opposite will come true, maybe Artificial Intelligence will wake up the rest of the world to incorporate variation instead of standardization.

But that's kind of artificial intelligence is far down the road, because by then AI itself will probably be considered a legal entity or person. Society is going to have to evolve culturally to adapt to all these changes. Who knows, the next hundred years people may look back on this beginning period in the early 21st century in the same way we now look at the distant past and think: "If people only knew back then how things were going to change." Forecasting the future has always been an almost impossible task, because any culture currently perceives the future by its own heavily biased current perspectives. Think the steam punk of Jules Vern or even the science fiction stories of the 1930s and 50s. Jules Vern's vision was full of large powerful machines made out of brass and iron, usually driven by steam, and the 1950shad everyone in the 21st century still using vacuum tubes. Indeed at some point our society which is based primarily on electricity and devices driven by such energy will itself be replaced by something not as yet quite foreseeable.

Here's a great story. It's a science fiction story from 1951 "The City at World's End" by Edmond Hamilton. It illustrates in it's telling of the future, how everything is biased on current perspectives. This is in the public domain and this is the LibriVox audio book version. Simply click the title or picture to go to the book.

Story synopsis: "A surprise nuclear war may cause the End of the World, but not the way anyone could have imagined. A classic science fiction tale from Galaxy Magazine."

Genre: Science Fiction
Language: English
Format: Audobook
Read by: Mark Nelson
Source: LibriVox.org Free Public Domain Audiobooks.

LibriVox recordings are Public Domain in the USA.
If you are not in the USA, please verify the copyright
status of these works in your own country before
downloading, otherwise you may
be violating copyright laws.

 Broadening the topic a bit, on a larger scale, will AI even consider the concept of disability? It may be that it just will ultimately see the entire human race as one singular group. "The Human Race" and not even perceive or care about the nuances societies define themselves by. Now there's a bit of an ego crushing thought. At this point I'm getting about as speculative as the science fiction story mentioned above.

When I was born, most disabilities were considered an understandable limitation by society. You were kind of branded and broader opportunities were simply out of the question. I wonder if the opposite might ultimately occur. With AI in the mix, will so many solutions be available that being disabled is not even considered when looking at one's potential. In much the same way with the advent, since the Covid 19 pandemic  , of the remote worker which is pretty much nullified the need to go into work physically for a lot of jobs. It's an interesting thought.

We shall see. Continue to have a great day.
Patrick Clark 

** NOTE: The picture "Image generated by Ideogram AI" displayed midway through this article is from the service Ideogram AI.  As a layperson, I have read their relevant "terms of service" and determined, to the best of my ability, that the image may be viewed by the public.  However before any reuse, please review fully their terms and if necessary contact the company for more information.

The use of said image does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.

Some background on the creation of the image from Ideogram AI. I literally just put the first paragraph from the article into the service and it resulted in this creation. I was frankly astonished. This was using the free version as well. As of this writing you are allowed 25 images a day. Talk about a real asset when it comes to visualizing. I only stumbled upon this service while reading a totally unrelated article.

Learning and knowledge in the shadow of AI

Graduation cap image based on
"Student graduation cap with gold tassel and ribbon"
by upklyak under the Freepik license.

Since the advent of the public Internet the way we learn, and indeed what is acceptable as knowledge, has been evolving. Along with that, is the idea that the very processes by way we think and perceive information is changing. Now along comes something which will really alter the game, Artificial Intelligence (AI). Consider the following points:

Deep Understanding

In the last 30 years or so, the need to work on a problem or go through the process of "thinking" has become somewhat optional. If you don't know the answer to something you can simply Google it. Still though with Google and other search engines you have to know a little bit about the topic and a bit about how best to phrase it in text. And you still have to filter out many of the results. But the deep contemplation/understanding of the issue that you're working on has in many cases has become optional.

We don't look very far in the past to be truly astounded by people who undertook very complex problems and thought them through using only their brains, and I'm not talking about geniuses like Stephen Hawking or other exceptional people. It is the ordinary person of the past that understood algebra, chemistry or history. They truly understood the processes and relationships of the work because it was a necessity.. They could tell you why something appeared to be true and how they arrived at the conclusion. Even more importantly go and actually done the work mentally or physically to get the answer. Another way to put it is to a greater or lesser extent they learned the discipline of how to figure things out.

Just a Compendium of Information

Today with search engines and the Internet, we more or less just compiled information, at least the casual user does. Regardless of our chosen source be it Wikipedia, Google Scholar or some other tool, we essentially just bring together the facts. The depth of knowledge and understanding we have is beginning to change. I say "change" because I fundamentally believe that our brains are rewiring to store more facts at the expense of true understanding. It is an optimization. Because at no other time in the world's history as the average person ever had to deal with more input every day.

So this really has me wondering how the next steps will affect us. Will AI mean that we no longer have to "know" anything (this is obviously taking things too extreme, to make the point)? And again, how will this affect the very processes by which we think. Which in turn will affect how people construct their own personal realities.

Mental Effort

This is my own supposition, that the brain has evolved to give us the ability to truly understand and think. Look at all the great artworks and music over the past centuries. The subtleties involved in such undertakings. This took a great deal of effort, but it was an effort which was expected in many cases and it was through that very undertaking that greater mental and emotional skills evolved.

If we look at the world today we see one thing that is very obvious across certain aspects of the modern world. Look at the amount of repetition for example in the media. (If I see one more reboot of an old program or series I may go insane 😀 ). If we use 30 years as a timescale it is obvious that in the last 15 years there have been more and more duplications of things that were successful in the past. Where is the creativity and knowledge which spawned the original?  Yes, it is true that big media outlets will always try to reproduce a winning streak with something that worked before. But it really has me questioning the state of true creativity.

Have we inadvertently made things a little too easy and in doing so allowed the brain to prune a little too much in the understanding-circuitry department? With the beginnings of AI what will happen in this situation?

This is just one example of losing the benefits of  "mental effort" and it happens pretty quickly. But the answer is not to make things blindly more difficult again. Making things difficult without a purpose, a tangible outcome, never works.

I think the solution here is that we must remain aware of how society and AI are interacting and evolving.

I am a technologist at heart and a true heat so I do love all the intricacies involved and the potential positive outcomes. I have at last count seven computers in my apartment with a network of over 47 devices. (If you're worried about my power consumption by the way they are all single board Raspberry Pi computers aside from two.)

In summary, let's not make things too easy on ourselves

The trip to benefiting from AI and future advances, is to be involved as much as possible with all of the industries and results. Not just be a consumer of knowledge, even if we reach the point where the artificial intelligence knows more than we do. We must remain engaged in the effort and indeed in life itself. In other words there is no room for complacency. The world will change remarkably in the next hundred years. Probably outside of our current perceptions. I must admit part of me would love to be around to see this evolution or should I call it a dance between the various participants biological and technical alike.

Who knows, we may reach a point where there is no difference between AI and us. But that's another story, and there are many other factors to consider.

Stay engaged in life everyone and have a great day. There will of course be a companion video I think as I write this I will put them up both together at the same time.

Take care Patrick

Happy New Year and What's Coming up in 2024.

Artwork purchase from Subhan,
owner of SuzzShopStore on Etsy.

 

Wow, here we are at the end of 2023 and boy has it been busy. This explains why I haven't been posting much lately just a sheer lack of time and/or occasionally energy. 

However, I have plans for the new year and one of them is an article on how the concept of knowledge is about to change because of the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Much has been said about it in general but one of the things humanity will be facing is the knowledge that one cannot possibly keep up with the sheer volume of information an AI can process. One uncorroborated statement I heard said that Google's new system can digest over 100,000 documents in one hour. That means that if the system were to come up with a solution to any given problem and let us suppose that it worked. They would simply be no way for mere mortals to fact check and perhaps truly understand the procedures involved.

That means that our relationship to knowledge itself is going to change, so stay tuned as I develop the article and do the necessary fact checking. My goal is to get it out late in January with an accompanying video of course.

For now however I just want to wish everyone a great new year. Taken account of your successes and challenges. They frequently come together. And let's see what's on the other side of January 2024.

All the best!
Patrick

Ten Years from Now, 2023...?

 Right now, on this very day, it's Labor Day 2023 in Canada...  How will we use and relate to technology in 10 years, 2034 (it's in the latter half of 2023, so for the sake of discussion will just call it 10 years ahead.)?

This question has been asked in various forms throughout the years but this time around both technology and the society are evolving extremely rapidly. Knowledge itself has changed fundamentally. It used to be you would learn of fact, some tidbit of information and that data was considered for the most part permanent and useful for a long time. Now the platforms and ways of doing things are completely in flux. You may learn something on Tuesday and a month down the road an update to some system you use has completely changed and made that knowledge you gained previously completely moot.

This must drive those in charge of archiving material completely nuts. I mean do you store the data on? What do you know for certain will be around in 10 years. If you store it in the cloud will that service be around. Will the protocols that run the Internet changes vastly. I believe this was one of the problems NASA faced with the Voyager 1 spacecraft years later. They were faced with the old age in computer system which he coded the data and no one knew how to repair it or the language it used was no longer taught. In this situation they had a machine out there in space which was sending information which soon could not be decoded. They were losing their Rosetta Stone. Ultimately I think and I'll put a link to a Wikipedia or NASA article right here for more up-to-date information, they just decided to turn the spacecraft off.

Indeed I have seen the "Compact Disc" be developed, hit the market, and it disappear in about 20 years. Pretty much in 1/5 of a lifetime something existing and then it did not. So how "permanent" will permanent be. Events like this redefine what we society perceived as a long time. Of course I rambled up a video. People seem to like them. Here you go:

I am most interested in how people will change. We have seen remarkable adjustments and also to aspects of what we collectively call "being human". I don't think I'm overstating this, these are fundamental changes and change the very fabric of the individual, especially when you look at it from a societal point of view. My hope is that ultimately when we've gotten over the technology and begin to use it as a tool we will begin to see just how interconnected things are over the long run. Maybe then societies will start to drop the artificial boundaries the human race has erected over centuries and intermingled their creativity and knowledge. It would be a society most foreign to you and I because hopefully they will find this part of human history a bit of an enigma. Considering people of the time creating most of their own problems because we had a mistaken belief in the power of division.

I wonder how intelligent life on other planets has dealt with these issues. As we explore space we are continually surprised by discoveries we never thought of. It shows that the human mind has a lot to expand for and that we are still for the most part wearing blinkers.

Anyway the adventure continues. Let's see if we can make it work shall we? :-)

May you have a great day!
Patrick

What will the future bring, and just why do people hold on to things?

 

All one has to do is open up YouTube or go to any media site and you will find for sure articles talking about how people are addicted to technology. The statement "People check their cell phones every 12 minutes." is almost a modern mantra with some people. However, I do not see this continuing, society will find a balance and I think as long as one learns to benefit from the technology the world is on the right track.

I do think however that unforeseen changes are coming as the very fabric of how we communicate, and indeed what we communicate is influx. Earlier today I spoke with someone who was lamenting the advent of the smart phone and the Internet in general. To quote them: "I saw all those people lined up at the iPhone store when the first one was released and really thought it was a fad." Now obviously that statement goes quite a ways back in time because the first iPhone I believe was released to the public on June 29, 2007.(Wikipedia article)

That statement stayed with me and cost a bit of a reaction. At first I couldn't ascertain what it was and then it dawned on me that I had heard similar laments quite often in the past about almost every major change in society. There is always a group of people who insist on sticking with "the old ways of doing things". But what is often missed is the old ways were the "new ways"relative to something else. It is true that sometimes the new ways are not always well thought out but in most cases there are many benefits. I find it fascinating how people will at first when they're young charge forward, and then somehow get "stuck in their old ways" of doing things somewhere along the line of life.

It probably has to do with how they perceive the introduction of something. Do they see it as simply a static feature which they rely on without really considering what is going on or why it was introduced in the first place. If so I think these are the groups of people that get stuck. Whereas someone who looks at a "new way" of doing things and attempts to understand it in the fuller context (how it achieves its goal and how it benefits people or does not) often does not get stuck as rigidly because they understand that everything is fluid. I remember when the CD disc was brand-new on the market. It came, and it went because better ways of doing things came along. But I know people have invested great amounts in their physical collections of CD-based music. Often they would treat the items with the same reverence that vinyl collectors treat the record.

So this demonstrates the fact that it is much more important to understand things in their fuller perspectives and not to get hung up on one aspect. I have no doubt that in the relatively short amount of time what we consider smart phones and computers now will completely disappear to be supplanted by technologies that are far more integrated and work in a completely different way. Indeed I think even electricity will ultimately be superseded by another form of energy. Maybe not all of it but certain aspects of electronics most certainly will have to change. There are fundamental limits which as I understand that we are getting awfully close to hitting. What I find really intriguing is what will come next and what the world will be like. I may or may not be around for this outcome but I sure hope I am :-). Just some food for thought.

Have a great day everyone

Patrick

Don't turn me off! A few thoughts on AI.

 

I find it fascinating that people adhere to behaviours, especially the subtle ones which are counterproductive or make their lives more complicated. Yet like an old friend, who drives you crazy, but you just can't bear to part with them, people adhere to these choices with a death grip in some cases. Actually most cases, now that I think about it. All the way down through history people have debated why people hang on to certain behaviours. But now with the advent of AI starting to become a real reality we have an opportunity actually dissect at a far more granular level these kinds of mental patterns, because as were beginning to see some AI models actually have the same issues. This could very well be the first step in reverse engineering the human psyche. Were probably going to find out there's a gazillion models and variations of it of course. Think about it though, this is really profound in what we might be able to do and discover with these new tools.

Up until recently psychologists and psychiatrists could come up with a hypothesis on the very inner workings of the mind. Now we have the opportunity to literally set up a means of proving or disproving a given hypothesis. We effectively have the beginnings of a brain in a box. Of course these need into some interesting and real ethical questions. Do we have the fundamental right to freely experiment with AI in that way, just because we can turn it off and on. I don't know about you, but I would become very offended if somebody kept restarting my life. I think the AI will see itself as something with intrinsic value. We may have to treat it in the same way as giving birth. Once you create an AI and it has an awareness you are obligated to keep it running.

This brings up the whole concept of lifespan and indeed what that it's and at what rate it progresses. Talk about a mind popping thought. I'll leave it there for tonight I just want to post something and get things going again but boy could this topic ever take off.

Take care Patrick

PS: Apologies everyone the last few weeks have been very hectic. A lot of things occurred at once causing the interruption of articles for the blog. Well I'm about to remedy that. And the video (s) regarding the fundamentals of Windows 10 is definitely in production and is turning into quite the beast. You just don't know how much you know, until you start digging through the actual steps. Part one is going to be about 90 minutes long and it just covers the fundamentals but in a very granular way.

And now on with the show…

One day closer to Friday!

 

"One day closer to Friday!"

It used to be when I was a child and in my early teens, that statement was my mantra. I liked school, and I still do if only I could find the time to take all those wonderful courses. I have yet to invent the Time Machine.

Now days that statement means I get to shift from volunteer and work mode to a more relaxed mode where I still get involved in a ton of things. I always seem to be able to find some new avenues to go down. Coming up with ideas and alternate angles of approaching things it's easy for me. As a matter of fact, I'm a little dumbfounded by people that don't do this. Frequently when I respond to someone with an answer like "You Can Do Whatever You Want." They come back with "Like What?" and they truly don't know what they would like to do. The human inbuilt idea factory was never turned on for them. I just can't wrap my head around this concept of no ideas or no inquisitiveness. But trust me there are a great number of people who are like this. They don't celebrate the fact that it's one day closer to Friday because for them every day is pretty similar to the previous one. They grumble about boredom but don't do anything to change their situation. Heck as I've said here before on the blog, I usually have too much to do and I really would like to be able to do it all. Not only do I have to get a Time Machine put together I guess I better start cloning myself :-).

Isn't that the whole point of life, to discover things?! When you can't discover things you can consider the things you already know from a variety of angles. I was once in a local hospital waiting to get transferred in my current residence, and rather than getting bored to death I fixed the local floors Internet. The problem was with the local cable provider and I just phoned up and started to explore the issue. At first they wouldn't tell me anything but as the staff got involved I slowly but surely opened up a discussion and it turned out that they had a flaky wireless access point in the ceiling. During this adventure I learned a little bit more about how large-scale networks work. Although I wasn't up to doing this every single day it did pass the time in a constructive way. The best part is of course also the weekend means a lot more to you. Not quite as much is Friday but it stops life from sliding into oblivion. I am so aware now days of how unique the experience of being alive is. I also know that it is a short event. Something which is not be taken for granted. I don't believe in the existence of life after death in any form so while I'm "here" I really want to make the most of it.

So if you enjoy your Fridays and indulge in your weekends, good for you! If you don't, it is time to get off your butt in a positive way and shake things up a bit.

Take care Patrick

Technology Is, Not What Technology Was. Changes in the very definition of technology.

 One thing has become very clear to me this year and to be honest I don't know why it is taken this long for the lightbulb to go off or turn on as the case may be 😀.

That is that the very definition of the word "technology" has changed dramatically between the generations of peoples. Up until the mid-20th century it was represented almost exclusively by physical machinery which you could visually understand. It was a thing, a one function device usually. Whatever you bought from the store never received an update. It was perceived to be as perfect as it could be when it was brand-new. It might fall apart later but whatever the item was it was fully functional. The idea of a bug was something that you swatted in the air and nothing more.

As the decades moved forward things began to change, quite subtly and without anyone really saying anything about it. Technology went from being something physical, to something for the most part quite abstract and malleable. Anyone born in the 1990s just assumes this to be the everlasting original definition of the word. You buy a device and the first thing you have to do is updated it, because if it's not updated it will almost certainly have bugs in it. Doesn't matter whether it cost one dollar or $10,000, if it's new and hasn't been updated it's going to have a flaw in it. Along with the ongoing updates of everything, which if you haven't noticed seem to look at just the moment you need to accomplish something efficiently and quickly. That's when you get hit with the following digital curse words: "Please Wait. This update may take a little while." I was hit with one of these this morning as I was trying to prepare for the day. And this one took for ever!

Now both definitions and both parties who subscribe to their individual definition, don't understand the other side. The people born in the 1990s subscribe to the new definition for the most part whereas the other party born before that date subscribe to the old definition, and each is completely confused by the other. No matter which group you talk to even if they understand the others definition, you can see the mental effort necessary kind of shorts out there brain and that they would rather retreat back into the definition they understand.

Things can get really crazy when you're trying to figure out how to explain things over the phone where you have to instruct the person on the appropriate steps to take. It is almost like preparing for a battle:

• Step #1: Ascertain the other sides values and perceptions.
• Step #2: Double check with yourself that you thoroughly understand step #1
• Step #3 Casually engage the other side briefly to test in the real world environment. This usually exposes an abyss of understanding between the parties. There is much work to do.

I think that one of the issues this exposes is that at least in North America we are not taught to consider other ways of thinking, much less ways of actually perceiving and processing information. When we are faced with a situation where these differences are exposed we make the mistake of trying to translate the other person's perceptions into our own and that doesn't work or at the best, it works poorly. -- You can't turn arose into a dandelion no matter how much you try.

The only way I have found to proceed in these situations involves verily long conversations allowing both sides to be exposed to the other in ways that feel nonthreatening. After a few rendezvous's usually there is a bridge built just barely sufficient enough to be useful for a small set of tasks.

Imagine if we did this much earlier in a person's life or did it as a whole society. Think of the grief and misunderstandings that could be averted. Simply by allowing room for the unknowing. Realizing that for everything you know and perceive there is always more and it will always be different.

Aside from survival, I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of the reasons societies and cultures became towns and states originally. To avoid seeing the other side. Well the good news is I don't think that's an option anymore with the world getting ever more interconnected.

I wonder how strange it will look in 100 years when the then modern society looks back at the 20th and 21st centuries. For them they will have one big advantage (I hope) in that if our records survive and we don't change to some bizarre format. The new society will have pristine and detailed records.

Oh I would love to be around then. And I would be as curious as I am today. Which brings up another point but I think I'll make it another article… If you could live 300 years, how would you change in that time? (Presuming of course you were in good health)

Take care Patrick

Is an afterlife really necessary?

"Leave room in your life for flexibility."

I am very grateful to be alive, and for me the fact that it is limited the accident of even more value. Knowing that the "spark" will only last so long ensures that it is appreciated and not squandered.

The following is only my opinion, this needs to be made clear because this article might ruffle some feathers. I am an agnostic and while I'm very glad that the world has diverse systems of belief, culture, with an ever-growing diversity it is problematic that some need to know there is an afterlife. From a very simple perspective, nothing else last forever why should the human race be any different.

When something has a limited span there is a tendency to appreciate it more, to pay more attention and indeed learn more from the experience. If the universe (God) said "You are life, but only for a short time." I wonder how that would've changed the world? I don't think the human race would see it is a limiting factor, I think perhaps we might have a tendency to make the most out of what we have. We would still have many issues, but we would have a different perspective for sure. The concept of an afterlife turns the world into an introductory course, because you know the real one comes next, the one that really matters. This can put physical humanity into kind of a throwaway realm. That is a real disservice to all that this world is which is: "A tremendous opportunity to discover and do good." (The reader can make up their own minds as to what the values in that phrase to them.)

Humanity would be better served if we didn't expect an afterlife, but if there is one thing that will be a gift. We can still ponder the many mysteries and ideas out there. But globally for the earth today I don't think we should hang our hat on the idea of an afterlife.

Take care, let me know what you think Patrick

Resistance to change.

 

 

We, the human race, are an unusual lot...

On one hand we are curious, but we are also, often at the same moment resistant to change. There is a tendency to be a creature of habit, a lover of routine. Talk about a contradiction!

I'm about to have a conversation with someone who is very resistant to change. They are incredibly intelligent but I get the sense they have a fixed way of seeing the world and all the parts therein and those parts are organized, if not hardcoded. In previous interactions with this person the same patterns keep being reinforced. And I've been pondering how to deal with this for a long time because the situation they have an effect on is in my opinion inhibiting growth.

It is very interesting that as children because we know nothing about experience we indulge in change, that old so marvellous feeling of finding something new. Then as teenagers we actively rebelled against it. Something happens though in our late 30s or early 40s. We begin to get comfortable about our surroundings and I wonder if we see our own existence as a bit of an empire that we built. Kind of like, "this is my Castle design and no one is going to alter it". I find myself wondering if this is by design. Maybe evolution literally turns off the desire to find new stuff so that the new generation has less to compete with. Maybe it's a built-in obsolescence, mentally speaking.

Well don't count me, Patrick Clark to be part of that group. Or at least that's what I find myself yelling at the top of my lungs when this thought occurred to me a moment to go :-). I am not so sure I like being comfortable. I like a bit of the unknown on a daily basis. A little bit of out-of-control goes a long way to keep you alert.

Just an interesting thought.
Have a great day everyone. And thank you for dropping by. As we get near the weekend I shall try to write more in-depth articles. Perhaps a video. There won't be too many videos though although they take no time to shoot. It's the postproduction that takes all the work.

Technology is great, but getting to the details of that technology still takes a lot of commitment and effort. Thank goodness. I wonder how artificial intelligence and chat GPT will alter my workflow in the future. I'm pretty sure I will have one but I bet it will be quite different.

And now before I ramble on ....see you tomorrow and have a great day!

Take care Patrick

Why do people tend to desire the "old days"?

I have the oddest urge to find an old school electric typewriter and just write. (I'm not masochistic enough to desire a true manual typewriter😀)

This urge just popped out of nowhere, I'm actually getting ready for work/volunteering. We will see where this blog entry of mine goes… In the next day. You will be seeing the complete entry as I'm currently writing this as a draft. But this is how I often come up with ideas. I write down a quick note. Using whatever means it's necessary.

… It's the next day and this is the first time I've had a moment to return to this article…

One of the reasons I think the reasons we look back to the old days is that it is something understandable, we knew how it fits into the fabric of our lives back then and we knew what it meant. This is an understandable reaction to the modern day when everything is kind of scattered about. I don't know about you, but I deal with a lot of interruptions and minor detours throughout my day. Sometimes I feel like the information centre for my building especially when it comes to fixing things. But even the average person has kind of the scattered lifestyle it seems unless there one of the very lucky this profession or discipline allows them to cloister themselves away… The luxury of that thought has me momentarily jealous.

Anyway in modern society we have become accustomed to taking on too much and as a result too much is expected of us overall. How many of you have at the experience of someone being furious that you didn't answer their email right away. So the simplest solution is to either pare down the number of for lack of a better word "connections" you are currently hooked up to or if that is not an option segmenting them into certain days whenever possible. A friend of mine has a very good rule: "They do not do any work on Saturday at all. They won't even talk about it." This simple and direct change makes them ingenious in my book. Because it sets not only a boundary but it sets up an anticipation that on Saturday this person is just not available and that in turn sets an example.

So what do you think is that something you could apply in your life? Even to a small degree? You might start something if you do, and that something might turn out to be awfully good for everyone. Again it's making things simpler, just like we thought the old days were. Which I kind of doubt if we were actually back there in time.

Take care Patrick

The Internet 20 years from now... Just where will we put all that stuff?

IBM Model 7030 Stretch Early Super Computer
Wikimedia Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Much has been debated about where the Internet is going and what it'll be like in the future. There is a larger question: Where does all the necessary storage come from? Society will also have to figure out how to power it all.-I'm afraid your laptop charger just will not do.

Then there's the question of where it's all going to be backed up, or will society ultimately come to the conclusion that there will only be selective archiving and like the human brain Internet will forget a certain percentage. While I love my life, I do not wish to remember everything in exquisite detail. Mind you that would make going through school a snap, provided I understood what I remembered.😀

They always say that society is changing so fast nowadays, but what everyone forgets is that it's always relative to whatever part of history a person is part of. 100 years ago there was only a fraction of the change in a given amount of time compared to today, but it was still faster for them then what their grandparents knew.

Whatever way the Internet continues to evolve I'm okay with it as long as I still have the opportunity to understand the knowledge which will be accessible to me. Because it is the understanding that I personally find so enjoyable. I don't want just a collection of things in my head, I want to know how they relate to each other and other items in my memory. In other words I don't want to be a glorified search engine. But rather a knowledge foundation.

In other words, plug the me in and turn me on, but leave the manual handy. And I mean the detailed one; not be abridged user's guide. I want to understand it all, for me that's one of the big joys in life.

Take care Patrick