Technology for Technologies Sake

  I've always been in love with gadgets, the more technologically advanced the more I am in love. As a kid I used to take radios apart and steal the speakers and make speaker boxes that were across the room from the actual radio trying in some way I guess to simulate stereo. One day in early 90's as a friend and I were Junkin (actually this is digging through trash cans) I found an old TI-994A made in 1981 and sold by Texas Instruments for $525. All I knew about it was it had a place for cartridges to plug in so I thought maybe I could find some and play some video games.

  

 Well I took it home and plugged it in and it came up to a cursor on the screen. I had no idea what to do...I would type things in and hit enter and every once in a while instead of an error it acted like it took what I typed...although it didn't do anything. Soon I was searching used book stores, flea markets, Goodwill, and garage sales for Basic programming books, I don't know how I knew but I just knew that this computer was using Basic. I found some...and after trial and error, mainly because TI's basic was different from any other Basic by just some small syntax differences. I actually typed a program in and ran it....unfortunately there was no way to save this, so once I typed it, ran it and watched it, the program was gone. I was  totally consumed by this machine and spent all my free time sitting in front of it learning new things, I even programmed a horse racing game by myself.

  

  Soon though I found an actual Computer at Goodwill, again it was a TI Business computer, this one had floppy drives and a monitor and external keyboard. I was in heaven, within a few weeks I had found a color monitor for it...almost unheard of even with newer computers. I had found an old users group that had a bulletin board, for people who don't know what that was, you used your 1200 baud modem and dialed up to another computer that was running Bulletin Board software...there you could chat with people or send email to them on that system...or download games and programs. I downloaded everything I could find that would run on that old 8088 TI computer. Soon I found a whole stash of computer programs and programming languages for it. It was not long after this I realized that I had a knack for computers, so off I went to technical school to learn programming. 

  I graduated and got a job at a crop insurance company programming in C++.  I couldn't ask for anything better, I was making pretty good money, and in my spare time I had garage full of old PC's and parts that I was refurbing and selling to people. Soon I was offered a job in DFW and took off following my passion. 

  Now it's been 25 years since all this started and I sit in a restaurant and watch a family eating dinner every one of them with their nose in their smart phones. I drive home and have to avoid the people driving down the road with their nose buried in their smartphones. I drive down my street and see no kids outside playing, I suppose they are all sitting in their rooms with their nose in their smartphones. I watch the news and they have one newscaster that does nothing but relays what is on Twitter about them. New cars are being produced now that have all these things embedded into their dashboard so you can have the smart phone experience in your car. All this while it seems that we don't talk to each other any longer, and actually communicate, when is the last time you wrote a letter? When is that last time you got one? I cut the cord and no longer have a home phone, and later this year I'm cutting the cord on the cable to my TV....because I can get everything I want from my internet connected device hooked up to my TV. 

While all this is going on in full public view...and I'm not the only one complaining about it. Computer Scientists at Google are working full speed ahead on Artificial Intelligence. Sounds great when they talk about it, they want a computer like the one on the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise, one that you can say Computer I'd like to have Chicken and Waffles for dinner...and of course the computer knows exactly what you are talking about and delivers you to the closest Chicken and Waffle diner. The problem is that they expect computers to exceed human intelligence in just a few years, computers will be programming other computers and robots with AI will be building computers....all of these devices smarter that humans. I've actually had discussions with some of the people involved with this, they don't even know about Asimov's rules for robots.  If you don't here they are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

 I watch as people communicate less with each other, yet think they are connected more. I have over 700 friends on Facebook and several hundred followers on Twitter, I doubt any of them will come to my funeral, or even notice when I die. Granted some I know in real life and will care, but the majority will never notice that they don't see my posts in their feed any longer. We are living in a world that has become more disconnected from personal interaction and more connected with anything cyber. As we as humans seem more divided among each other over issues that we used to be able to talk about. Have our digital lives done this to us? As I watch the family in the restaurant, only speaking to each other long enough to tell the waitress what they want to eat and drink, I ponder how will the kids learn about morals, ethics, religion, their own families history? Meanwhile I have in the back of my mind of buying a couple hundred acres of land in the middle of nowhere and moving there when I retire and throwing all my electronic connected devices away...living a simple life without all this distraction.