There is this notion in my head that a computer should be part of that “Jetson Future” where we get to seriously contemplate what economics looks like when there isn’t any actual labor to perform, beyond the creation of machines which create machines to do work for us. I know that prospect scares people, and invokes various dystopian images ranging from fat and stupid humans, to the machine apocalypse, but that isn’t what this is about.
This is about the idea that computers – and by this i mean machines with a semblance of logical order, moving over time towards the limit of intelligence, that do as they are told – don’t make my life better. When I say “better” I suppose I’m actually talking about removing from my concern things which I’d rather not deal with because they are ephemera or redundant or annoying (but not those things I’d rather not deal with because they are difficult or scary or otherwise “character building”). Technology is fundamentally about human beings not needing external help to cope with the environment because they build and employ tools that provide that external assistance in the form of “self-help”. It is about not needing the gods or the fates or the furies to intervene on our behalf while we go about conquering the world.
Technology is not about being held beholden to a mechanism which neither does as it is expected nor shelters one from the whims of the universe or the oppression of the mundane. This is just asinine, and yet I find myself drawn further and further into this circumstance when looking objectively at the way I personally use technology. And it pisses me off.
I really don’t want to deal with substantial percentages of things that my time is occupied with, and I’m willing to pay reasonable amounts of money to let technology do it for me, but I can’t find someone to take my money in exchange for solving my problems. Now, granted, these may be hard problems which only apply to small esoteric segments of the overall population, but that acknowledgement doesn’t keep me from being pissed off about it. Here is an example:
I have a house with a few acres and want to have a surveillance system to keep tabs on it, record anything suspicious, alert me when the FedEx and UPS guys come down the driveway (because they like to leave my deliveries by the garage instead of take them to the front porch), and maybe catch some interesting wildlife. To do this I need some cameras, a network to connect them, power for the cameras, a DVR, and a system to recognize when something should be recorded and when it shouldn’t be recorded. Not to terribly difficult, and for most of the market, the out-of-the-box systems that can be had for about two-grand are probably sufficient. But, I don’t want to pull power to every place I want to put a camera, and in some of these locations, I don’t even want to pull a network cable. I also don’t want to have a video network that is isolated from a sensor network that tracks things like how much fuel oil is in my tank or how hot the boiler room is or whether or not it is raining, and how much.
All of a sudden, my requirements aren’t satisfied by the out of the box, proprietary system at all. Now I need cameras that can operate either with Power over Ethernet or on batteries and solar panels; now I need cameras and sensors that can be part of a WiFi mesh but use Zigbee as a command network; now I need event management systems with comprehensive logging and rule-based triggers; now I need a DVR that is coordinated with a running log and a video standard that can have metadata added into the stream programatically yet still be compressible and broadcastable; and now I need a command node that is network-aware and can talk to me even if I’m on the other side of the country. Now I need things which only exist in the world of hackery, and the time to do the tinkering and hacking necessary to get it all working. And that pisses me off.
I can probably offer a dozen examples like that – things where I want just a little bit more than what the market will provide for me, usually because I understand what I want, understand the technological possibilities, and want to combine two or more “business verticals” to create added value.
What actually pisses me off about all this isn’t that I have high standards or want bleeding edge or niche products. It is that there are so many people out there getting rich producing mediocre shit and, more importantly, paying people to make it that could otherwise be paid to make great, awesome, kickass products that I’d be happy to buy.
When I figure out how to become rich enough to pay the rent and change the world, I’ll let you know. Until then, consider me pissed off about the talent embargoed by the likes of Apple and Microsoft and Google who are more interested in milking the 20th Century marketplace dry than creating a “Jetson Future”.