Nov 21 2008
The Road to Complexity
From the days of traveling by burro or horse, we certainly have come a long way. Thanks to technological advances and engineering wonders, our lives are easier, safer, and more comfortable.
Yesterday I had a brief conversation with an electrician doing work at my house. I’m a curious kind of guy and tend to ask a lot of questions. One of the things I learned was that because the work he was doing entailed going up into our attic space, any problems he encountered there — any wiring below current code regulations — was his responsibility to remedy. So he couldn’t do just the work he had been hired for, he also had to fix inadequate work by electricians before him. And there were some things he did have to fix. He told me that had he not, the inspector would have spotted them and the job wouldn’t have passed.
I guess this makes some sense, for many an electrician might be tempted to say, “Well that wasn’t my work.” If a specialist in a field discovers something genuinely dangerous, it is a good idea that he be required to do something about it.
Another thing I learned from the electrician doing the essential work he does (try to think of any activity today that doesn’t involve electricity, including the mere laundering of the clothes worn and the heating/cooling of the space used) is that the Florida state code book is 700 pages long, and with each edition gets longer.
I wonder. In 50 years from now, will electricians in Florida have a book (disk, thumb drive, chip . . . ) that contains a file of information that contains twice the amount of specifications and requirements? My guess is “yes.” Technological development is cumulative. With few exceptions, such as t-shirts and basic kitchen utensils, I can think of very few things that in my short lifetime that haven’t changed in material and/or design.
Have any things in our lives become less complex through the years? Okay, maybe the potato peeler is a bit of trilobite, remaining relatively unchanged. And of course we can ask ourselves whether, with all this human technological progress, can we really say our “road” has led us to a place substantially different than before.
My answer would be “yes and no.”
In general, human beings today are more healthy, better educated, and better entertained than any generation before. And yet we still spend our days eating, drinking, working, loving, and, eventually, dying.
While yesterday’s pioneer sailed across great bodies of water, today’s jets halfway across the globe or far into space. While the vehicles and destinations are indeed different, when it comes down to it, how different is what both gropus have done and now do?
Is the life of a person who reads text on an LCD screen substantially different than the life of a person who read text on a page by lamp light?
