tymshft

Does technology breed stupidity?

Of course the answer is “yes,” but I’m going to look at the question from an extremely limited sense – does technology provide us with new ways to share stupidity with others?

Steven Hodson has written a post entitled The Rise And Glorification Of Stupid In Our Social Media World. Hodson goes through great pains to clarify that stupidity is nothing new – but he has found something that he asserts is new.

[T]here is a difference between what great actors like Charlie Chaplin or even Red Skelton did as entertainment and what we see propagating through the web today.

This is the new generation of stupid as being made famous by the likes of the Jackass bunch [whose] whole intent is just to get other people to do stupid things. Not to do anything else, not to provide any life context, just perform the stupid act….

From my perspective, I was sure that this was untrue, and that other generations made themselves famous by doing stupid things for no good reason. So I thought about it, and realized that stupidity goes back at least as far as 1989. That happens to be the year that America’s Funniest Home Videos first appeared. If you haven’t seen this TV show, it consists of clips of people unintentionally or intentionally doing stupid things, accompanied by comments from the host(s) and laughter from the audience. Back in 1989, before YouTube existed, this is how we watched stupid stuff.

But as I continued to research this, I discovered something. America’s Funniest Home Videos was itself based upon something that originated in a Japanese show, Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV. The show was not exclusively dedicated to funny videos – this formed only a part of the show. However, it’s interesting to see WHY the funny video segment was introduced, according to Wikipedia:

[The show] is notable for having a segment featuring funny home videos sent in by viewers, as the home camcorder became more popular in Japan, which Ken and Kato would comment on.

That’s when it struck me – whenever we get a new technology, we try to do something stupid with it.

We obtain access to a technology like Facebook, and millions of us (myself included) use the technology to play games that consist of constant mouse clicking.

We obtain access to a technology like YouTube, and we create and watch videos of people doing really stupid stuff.

Japanese people obtain access to the camcorder, and do they use it to film beautiful vignettes of the Japanese countryside, or instructional videos in the (then) dominance of Japanese industry? No, they use it to film regular people doing stupid stuff.

Take television itself. Some people thought that television could serve as a university of the home, providing access to the wide world around us. But what do we remember from the first decade of television? Lucille Ball being wacky at a conveyor belt, Jackie Gleason exploding, and Milton Berle wearing a dress. And those were the GOOD shows.

But let’s look at an older technology – newspapers. Publishers of newspapers were often threatened with imprisonment or worse, with the 1733 trial of John Peter Zenger marking an important turning point in freedom of the press. And when the press obtained this freedom, what was the result? The Election of 1800, which makes the Election of 2012 look like a lovefest.

I think if we continue to look back, we’ll find that the inventor of the wheel probably used it to drive off a cliff.

Self-assembling structure theory, then and now

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, programmer Bill Kline created a ProBlocks DOS simulation program. At the time, he explained the concept of ProBlocks:

Imagine a time when the structures that people want to build can simply assemble themselves! Using a number of identical cubes or Programmable Blocks (ProBlocks) with electromagnets in their 6 faces and simple electronics inside, structures can be built block by block by themselves. Starting with just one seed block, other blocks will be attracted to the faces of that seed block that have their magnets turned on. These other blocks will attract other blocks and so on, until the entire structure is built.

The outer part of a space station can self-assemble from a large bag of ProBlocks floating in space. An underwater dwelling can self-assemble from a bag of ProBlocks on the ocean floor. The average person could use ProBlocks around the house. Instead of having many specialized items that are only used for certain occasions, a set of ProBlocks floating in a liquid medium can be called upon to self-assemble into whatever is needed at the moment. The user could self-assemble a chair, table, desk, stairs, partition, bed frame, or counter when it is needed, then dissolve it back into ProBlocks when it is no longer needed.

It’s taken twenty years, but we’ve finally gotten to the point – well, actually we HAVEN’T gottten to the point yet. Research is still being conducted, such as this research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

The team from MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory have developed a testable algorithm that uses interlinking smart systems – in this case, “smart pebbles.” These are cubes one centimeter across that contain four magnets and a basic processor, which map out the shape of objects they surround and communicate it to each other.

Once the shape of the object has been identified, the position of the smart cubes is remembered and used to replicate more copies of the original.

When self-assembling objects are finally available, it will be a blessing from me, since the phrase “some assembly required” often causes me to utter words that cannot be printed in a family-friendly blog such as this one.