....about Technology. About growing old....
In movies, on television, and in books, robots are stalking the land, scanning for human victims. The technology we depend on is going awry. Our civilization is going up in flames.
As we consider the umpteenth round of cutting-edge cellphone upgrades, we feel a creeping unease settle over our shoulders. Dread drips from every new device that dances into our lives: newer, shinier, faster. This time in white.
At some point, you probably stopped to wonder where all the pay phones had gone. You've been heard to say, "May I speak to a human, please?" Perhaps you've even contemplated the deeper questions, like just what in the hell does Twitter do?
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/i...0609154433.jpgViktor Koen
We think we're afraid of the technology. But we're really afraid of getting old.
I turned 33 this year, plenty old enough to have grown weary of being bombarded by the new. For my part, I channeled my fear and worry into a novel called "Robopocalypse." The book is about, well… by the fourth or fifth syllable of the title, you should start to get the gist of the plot.
"Robopocalypse" joins a proud tradition of techno-apocalyptic tales, stretching from high-flying Icarus, to Frankenstein's monster, and to many a giant radioactive creature who has crashed the streets of Tokyo. And then, of course, there's the Terminator.
The fear of the never-ending onslaught of gizmos and gadgets is nothing new. The radio, the telephone, Facebook—each of these inventions changed the world. Each of them scared the heck out of an older generation. And each of them was invented by people who were in their 20s.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't create Facebook for people with kids and mortgages. Technology is created by the young, for the young. The young revel in new gadgets with small, deft thumbs. They beg for them in acronym-laden speeches because OMG, you need this stuff to be cool IRL. Then they use them to take lewd pictures of themselves, even though this is obviously a very bad idea. They are the fearless ones.
Why are the young able to thrive, tossing away instruction manuals and digging in with reckless abandon?
Thankfully, Jean Piaget, one of the first developmental psychologists, figured out part of this puzzle years ago.
Piaget observed his own infants rapidly gaining simple skill sets related to manipulating objects in their environment. Skills like grabbing a Cheerio and stuffing it toward their mouth holes. These skills are the starting point for exploring a diverse and ever-changing world. Piaget called them schema.
And a schema is designed to evolve. When exposed to some novel object, infants don't start over from scratch. They choose an existing schema and enact it. With a rather limited repertoire, you can expect infants to exercise the "grab and gum" schema quite often as they explore the world. (This is why you don't allow unsupervised babies near cat food.) This process of applying an existing schema to a new object is what Piaget called assimilation.
For adults, assimilation is a perfectly natural response to new technology. And as a result, we often get it completely wrong. This is probably why I once caught my grandfather speaking into a computer mouse as if it were a ham-radio mic. I'm not above it. A few years ago I bought an old-fashioned manual typewriter to write love letters to my then-girlfriend (now-wife—thanks, 1950s technology!). But every time I sat down to use that old Olivetti, I got the oddest feeling. Something was weird. Amiss.
Finally, I realized what the problem was: I wanted to flip its (nonexistent) on switch.
It turns out that my schema regarding keyboards was formed in the 1980s. Every device from a Speak & Spell to an Apple IIe required a plug or batteries. How silly of me, I thought. And yet… the urge to turn on my typewriter didn't go away. I understood what it felt like to simply not get a technology.
Young people don't feel this way. When Piaget's infant finds an object that doesn't fit into an existing schema, he or she will accommodate a schema to fit the new object. "Grab and gum" turns to "grab and flail wildly." It's this process of assimilating things we know and accommodating to things we don't that constitutes what Piaget called adaptation—and what the rest of us call learning. Everybody has the necessary equipment for adapting.
Young people adapt quickly to the most absurd things. Consider the social network Foursquare, in which people not only willingly broadcast their location to the world but earn goofy virtual badges for doing so. My first impulse was to ignore Foursquare—for the rest of my life, if I have to.
And that's the problem. As we get older, the process of adaptation slows way down. Unfortunately, we depend on alternating waves of assimilation and accommodation to adapt to a constantly changing world. For Piaget, this balance between what's in the mind and what's in the environment is called equilibrium.
It's pretty obvious when equilibrium breaks down. For example, my grandmother has phone numbers taped to her cellphone. Having grown up with the Rolodex (a collection of numbers stored next to the phone), she doesn't quite grasp the concept of putting the numbers in the phone.
Why are we so nostalgic about the technology we grew up with? Old people say things like: "This new technology is stupid. I liked (new, digital) technology X better when it was called (old, analog) technology Y. Why, back in my day…." Which leads inexorably to, "I just don't get it."
Case in point: At a recent sci-fi conference, a woman told me about taking her Volkswagen bus deep into the Oregon forest. When the bus broke down, she and her husband were able to fix it with a coat hanger and a piece of wood. Her point was that nowadays you'd need a laptop computer.
But guess what? They don't make old-school Volkswagen buses anymore. And all the muddy sticks in the world aren't going to fix your Nissan Leaf.
Of course it's possible for old folks to adapt to new technological advances. People do it all the time. It only takes a grim determination to force yourself consciously to interact with each new wave of technology, no matter how insipid it seems. Only through grueling, hard work can you hope to understand or belong to the new world that is constantly (and rudely) emerging.
"So what?" you might ask. Those young people can keep their precious Internets.
I'm not saying you have to keep up. But at the moment you choose to stop growing, your world will begin to shrink. You'll be able to communicate with fewer people, especially the young. You will only see reruns. You will not understand how to pay for things. The outside world will become a frightening and unpredictable place.
As they say, the only constant is change.
Each new generation builds on the work of the previous one, gaining new perspective. New verbs are introduced. We Google strange and dangerous places. We tweet mindlessly to the cosmos. We Facebook our own grandmothers.
I, for one, don't want to be left behind.
My plan is to look for the signs that I'm starting to calcify. There will be a moment when I say to myself, "A 20-year-old billionaire has made up a nonsense word and I'm supposed to memorize it? Phooey."
When those kinds of thoughts scrabble into my aging brain as I hold some magical new device in my vein-laced hands, I will bite down and swallow my confusion and anger. I will power through it, try to figure it out, and I'll even try to enjoy it.
I will do my best to keep faith that with each passing day, technology still makes sense. It didn't used to be simpler. It wasn't better before. It's not useless.
I'm just getting old, dammit.
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...#ixzz1PiEEeSi3
