“The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work”.
It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.
Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.
If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.”
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He’s got some good points, but this clunker really stood out for me:
Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something?
Houses. Large appliances. Travel arrangements. Books. Bicycles. Guns. Shoes. Suits. Cosmetics. Glasses. Wine. There’s not really a shortage of situations where grown adults need (or think they need) help from other adults when making purchasing decisions. That’s why we have salespeople, isn’t it?
Actually, in many if those cases I and many others have bought things without the aid of others. Card, wine, appliances, bicycles all come to mind. In some cases, like a house, there are legal issues that need expertise, but there aren’t many of those.
Well, yeah. And plenty of people buy computers without the aid of others. My dad, for example, called me when he needed a new computer, to see if there was anything I recommended. And then he went to Fry’s and picked out something completely different, on his own. My uncle has bought his own computers for years, and has never been employed in a technical field. But he’s a ham radio operator, so he might be an outlier. But my aunt is a poet and English professor, and buys a new Mac every six years or so, on her own.
It was just a weird thing for the author to have said. There are plenty of situations other than computers where grown adults depend on others to help them buy things, and there are plenty of non-technical adults who buy computers without hand-holding from someone else.
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