Friday, November 11, 2005 12:33 PM
The title refers to a great article on Wired. I feel this way exactly. If technology is so great, why do people work so much and feel that they get so little done? Everyone just gets more impatient as they get used to certain things being instant. Other things take way too long, are hard to learn, rarely work right, and require changing the way we do things to conform to the computer. We have such a long way to go for technology to get out of the way and let us live. It should augment what we do, make things faster and more accurate, and best of all: stay out of way. When we have to think about “using a computer“ to do something, it is probably already too invasive. Things need to just work, in the manner that we expect, the first time.
As for the other focus of the article, we don't always even need computers for everything. We need to get out more, walk, talk, get together, and live our lives. I know that I need to this more. It's too easy to get trapped by technology. You download that great new thing to make things easier, then you spend hours trying to make it work like you at the same time as “it” tries to mold you. Pretty soon, there's a whole class of software with no purpose except to augment other software. A computer is no longer a way to abstract tasks that we do -- rather we are caught up in the computer itself.
Anyway, enough rant for today. Catch the article at:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68742,00.html