All the way down
We talked last time about the Pi40, a thing we call a mechanical keyboard. And why not! It’s got 40 keys! Sure, it’s got a million-transistor reprogrammable computer but hush up now. If we start describing everything with more than a million transistors as a computer then people will start to think they’re surrounded by the things. Such a general awareness would make The Birds look like a RomCom.
I think this is the main reason to not discourage the various conspiranoias about Big AI Overlords In The Cloud. If we let Uncle Terrence focus on that then he’s much less likely to realize that the coup already happened and it’s much closer to home. Never let him see you upgrade the firmware in his CPAP machine.
If we take a deep breath ourselves and dream about what a computer is, we might fall through the mattress into a fractal spiral where computers are disposable machines that you have to remember to take to e-waste, then up to computers as mechanical marvels with limitless potential, then back down to computer as a tedious semi-skilled profession. Recurse further and we’re scrapping half-finished piles of brass shaft and pinion and dumping the legacies of their crackpot builders on the top of the heap. And then marvel again, semi-skilled scribe, junk, until you crash into the maximum stack size of the dream and land on a broken abacus.
Waking, we remember for a moment that in each whirl of the dream, there’s a part where computers seem promising and also where we’re not quite sure exactly what they’re for. The adults were discussing it but you couldn’t make out just what they were saying. Was it artillery? Was it navigation? Chess? Yes, twice it was chess. I remember the part where I had to navigate the chess board and calculate a firing solution for the ballistic knight and tabulate the payroll taxes for pawn promotion. You were there too.
Often the computer advanced a square too far when new and was captured, en passant, by some other name. Mechanical computers are only computers, and only scary, when we don’t know what they’re for. Give them another name and they can be safely ignored until something goes wrong. I’m in the air now en route to Dallas and the autopilot is operating smoothly. If the pilot came on just now and drawled “we’ve reached our cruising altitude and the autopilot is going to give us a smooth ride on to Dallas where the temperature is a comfortable 72 degrees”, nobody would notice. If he instead said that the ‘autopilot computer‘ was going to give a smooth ride, I bet you might get a few white knuckles clutching the armrest.
In a panic situation, which armrest does the middle seat passenger grab?
Fortunately, none of us here using our iPads and the WiFi have to worry about computers. As we descend, the laptop computers are all stowed completely under the seats in front of us.
This post pairs well with “Long Way Down“ / Goo Goo Dolls / 1995 — their under-appreciated ode to computers.