The Idea: FlannCo Technological Innovations

Tired of doing more for your computer than it does for you?
Ever wish you could trust it to keep your information safe and orderly?
Wonder when all those dreams of computers that understand you and respond to your commands will come true?

Well, stop daydreaming, bub. Now is the time. The revolution is at hand.
It’s time we stopped spending hours learning how to work with these machines. It’s time for them to start working for us, rather than the other way.

     For the first time in the history of the world, Mankind has created a machine capable of reason, of logic, and of thought (loosely). These machines can be added to and improved upon far easier than any prior mechanical invention. Most of the time, changes can occur without physical modification, at least without bothering humans to perform the modifications. All people need to do is tell these machines what they want them to do and they handle the underlying details.

     That's their magic: that learning, that scalability that automates low-level processes in favor of presenting high-level, nearly intelligent, interfaces for their human operators. They have come from requiring relays, switches and cables to be manually set to needing cryptic numerical information on punch cards. Then they didn't need the punch cards. Then we taught them to respond to more versatile assembly code that could work on more than one machine and was more humanly understandable. Then we taught them increasingly complex languages to do increasingly complex tasks and present themselves at our service more readily. Now we have graphical user interfaces, pointing devices, voice input, communication between computers over distances long or short, files that can be accessed from anywhere, even a little annoying helper paperclip animation that taps on your screen when it knows you're lost.

     Yet despite progress in storage space and processor speed that doubles every other year, the languages and interfaces we use to tell the machines what we want to do remain somewhat out of date. We have more computing power than our programs can keep up with and most of the time it's idle. Still, we run into delays and snags and lost information and system crashes. The concepts of information theory are well explored and decades old, yet we have thousands of disparate data formats. Important documents are lost, left behind with the last upgrade or left indecipherable by a new program that doesn’t recognize the old proprietary format. There are promising advances in open source technologies, platform independent languages, universal formats, and widespread standards but they are often under-employed or used improperly, resulting in more confusion.

     If they are only increasing the complexity and confusion of our already busy lifestyles, who needs them? Throw them away! Return to the card catalogues, indices, and filing cabinets. But there’s so much information, too much for the old ways to handle. If only there was a way to keep track of it all without resorting to clumsy, counter-intuitive digital abstractions; if these so-called “smart” machines would be responsible enough not to lose our information but to keep it safe, secure, with regular back-ups; if they were approachable and accessible, rather than being great and fearsome as Oz; if they were understandable without a college degree in computer science –- then! Then. Only then might they live up to their hype.

     So, again I say it’s time we stopped spending hours learning how to work with these machines. I say it’s time for them to start working for us, rather than the other way.

(From tamethem.blogspot.com 1/22/2004)