There comes a time in every man's life when technology advances beyond what he grew up with to such an extent that the only way he can envisage anything being able to function in the frightening age which is his children's future is to imagine it all being held together by an over-class of nerds; deathly-pale protectors of all we hold dear, locking themselves in deadly combat with machines that only they know how to defeat, like The Terminator with bad skin.
My dad experienced this Nerd Singularity when I was about eight years old, back at what was probably the dawn of the computer age. He had been a roofer, and saw no place in his son's future for anyone who's only skill was physical labour. By 2010, all construction and repair work would be undertaken by machines, programmed and controlled by the aforementioned and all-powerful nerds. Buttons pressed in a control room would send a swarm of Star Trek-esque nanobots to swarm around what was once a raw pile of materials, turning it into a house, or a shed, or a car. Those salt-of-the-earth builders that would have once sat around drinking you out of house and home while one or two of them occasionally move a hammer from one side of the room to the other would be obsolete, or worse, turned into some sort of Soylent Green-esque paste to feed these slightly ominous building machines of the future.
So I reached for computers with great gusto - I learned everything I could, and perfected more techniques for illicitly viewing pixellated tits than I could possibly count. I spent a good portion of my early adolesence fixing mice and setting up web browsers for people for whom the computer age began some time the previous week. I was a whizz, a technological ace. I knew everything, and I had more porn than any other fourteen-year-old boy could possibly imagine. I was going to be part of this wonderful digital over-class, I was going to be rich and powerful, and spend my days lying under satin sheets with an array of beautiful women, reaching out from under the cashmere blankets to tap out the odd command on a backlit green keyboard.
But then it never happened. And that's a good thing, because once my forays into technology took me away from anything I could use to make easy money off of gullible teenagers, I was completely and utterly stumped. Programming eluded me, hard as I tried, presumably because as horribly socially inept as I am, I can actually sustain a conversation with a woman. Counter-Strike was a phenomenal amount of fun until it got taken over by 15-year-old boys with £50 mice and phenomenally stunted social skills. That was years ago, and I was starting to lose my grip on things then. Now, there are things coming out that frighten me. Roombas, for example, those little robot hoovers that drive themselves around and tidy the place up while you're away. They're terrifying. Even people just a few years younger than me probably think they're fantastic, that they'll never have to know the slap-faced tedium of the housework of their ancestors. I find the things horrifying, and can't get past the fact that one day, the little bastard is going to go all Skynet on us and trip me down the stairs. I, too, am fast approaching the Nerd Singularity, though I expect when I do finally cross over it will be so I can get my children to work out how to stop the video of the future flashing zeros forevermore.
A word of warning, however, before I finally slip across the threshold and find myself enveloped by the bafflement with this generation's technology that always embraces us in the end; don't go into it as a career. If you or your children are currently at the age where education starts to become more about choice than assemblies and P.E, don't think about choosing the path to being the latest genius whizz with all the latest technology. The sort of people that fall into this sort of job will do it naturally, and nothing you could possibly learn at school will prepare you for the sort of massive advancements that seem to come along every ten years or so, and by the time you finish your schooling in becoming the tip-top tech wizard you dreamed about a decade ago, you and your knowledge will be entirely obsolete, replaced by a new generation of whirring, bleeping technological abominations which given half a chance will kill you off for bio-fuel.
Try writing for people instead. The million robot monkeys haven't arrived yet.
Goodnight
My dad experienced this Nerd Singularity when I was about eight years old, back at what was probably the dawn of the computer age. He had been a roofer, and saw no place in his son's future for anyone who's only skill was physical labour. By 2010, all construction and repair work would be undertaken by machines, programmed and controlled by the aforementioned and all-powerful nerds. Buttons pressed in a control room would send a swarm of Star Trek-esque nanobots to swarm around what was once a raw pile of materials, turning it into a house, or a shed, or a car. Those salt-of-the-earth builders that would have once sat around drinking you out of house and home while one or two of them occasionally move a hammer from one side of the room to the other would be obsolete, or worse, turned into some sort of Soylent Green-esque paste to feed these slightly ominous building machines of the future.
So I reached for computers with great gusto - I learned everything I could, and perfected more techniques for illicitly viewing pixellated tits than I could possibly count. I spent a good portion of my early adolesence fixing mice and setting up web browsers for people for whom the computer age began some time the previous week. I was a whizz, a technological ace. I knew everything, and I had more porn than any other fourteen-year-old boy could possibly imagine. I was going to be part of this wonderful digital over-class, I was going to be rich and powerful, and spend my days lying under satin sheets with an array of beautiful women, reaching out from under the cashmere blankets to tap out the odd command on a backlit green keyboard.
But then it never happened. And that's a good thing, because once my forays into technology took me away from anything I could use to make easy money off of gullible teenagers, I was completely and utterly stumped. Programming eluded me, hard as I tried, presumably because as horribly socially inept as I am, I can actually sustain a conversation with a woman. Counter-Strike was a phenomenal amount of fun until it got taken over by 15-year-old boys with £50 mice and phenomenally stunted social skills. That was years ago, and I was starting to lose my grip on things then. Now, there are things coming out that frighten me. Roombas, for example, those little robot hoovers that drive themselves around and tidy the place up while you're away. They're terrifying. Even people just a few years younger than me probably think they're fantastic, that they'll never have to know the slap-faced tedium of the housework of their ancestors. I find the things horrifying, and can't get past the fact that one day, the little bastard is going to go all Skynet on us and trip me down the stairs. I, too, am fast approaching the Nerd Singularity, though I expect when I do finally cross over it will be so I can get my children to work out how to stop the video of the future flashing zeros forevermore.
A word of warning, however, before I finally slip across the threshold and find myself enveloped by the bafflement with this generation's technology that always embraces us in the end; don't go into it as a career. If you or your children are currently at the age where education starts to become more about choice than assemblies and P.E, don't think about choosing the path to being the latest genius whizz with all the latest technology. The sort of people that fall into this sort of job will do it naturally, and nothing you could possibly learn at school will prepare you for the sort of massive advancements that seem to come along every ten years or so, and by the time you finish your schooling in becoming the tip-top tech wizard you dreamed about a decade ago, you and your knowledge will be entirely obsolete, replaced by a new generation of whirring, bleeping technological abominations which given half a chance will kill you off for bio-fuel.
Try writing for people instead. The million robot monkeys haven't arrived yet.
Goodnight
No comments:
Post a Comment