Baby Steps

From Adding Machines to Sex Robots

It's the little things. They add up. I've been studying electronics as a hobby, learning what I can from YouTube videos, books, and mistakes. I've wanted to understand computers and the like. I've even built a couple. You open up a computer, see all the pieces, and then you ask, "Where is the magic? Which piece is the piece that turns electricity into thinking?"

After a few years pursuing this hobby, I can still say that I don't know much, but I do know there is no such magic piece. It's not there. You've got resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, inductors, and chips made from combinations of these on the micro scale, but there is not a bit of magic in any of them.

Working with these electronic parts is like plumbing, but instead of piping water around, you are piping electricity around.

And, given all the things a computer can do, this is hard to understand. We are now at a point where a computer can tell me what I want to buy; it can get me where I want to go; it can help me communicate with hundreds of people all over the world virtually instantaneously. And it got to this point from a machine that could only awkwardly do arithmetic less than a hundred years ago.

How did we get here?

Well, it happened little by little.

While I don't know much, I have found out that the folks who design computers know how to sweep complication under a rug. They draw their diagrams in such a way as to show you only what they want to talk about. Anyone who has tried to read one of these diagrams will agree that that's hard enough to do, but the engineers communicate in such a way as to keep you focused on what specific thing they are trying to tell you.

It's sort of like saying that Romeo and Juliet is about a boy and a girl. They get out one piece of information first; they make sure you've got a grip on that; and they make sure you understand it before they show you the dead bodies.

So we started with adding machines and have ramped ourselves up, one step at a time, piling complication upon complication until we got where we are.

And where is that?

I was reading my phone last week and saw that in Japan they've developed a robot that looks just like a woman. (Well, at least close enough to evoke the word "creepy.") Beyond looking like a woman, it acts like a woman in certain ways. Anyway, while we need not come out and say it, those who understand how the world works know what this robot is going to be used for.

Japan has been out in front on robotic design. It has robotic factories. And on the human front, it has an inverted population pyramid. What I mean by that is that the country has more old people than young people because of a low birthrate. I may be going out on a limb here, but it doesn't seem too unreasonable to suggest that they have so many robots because they don't have enough people in the labor force.

And given the propensities of fallen human nature and the fact that dealing with a robotic human is easier in so many ways than dealing with a flesh-and-blood one, I don't think that this robot trend is going to help the inverted pyramid any.

Just a guess.

Big changes very often come very slowly and incrementally over time. While there were a few visionaries back in the day who saw what far-reaching changes could eventually happen with the computer, they were mostly those wild-eyed science fiction writers.

I can't say what's going to happen in another 25 or 50 years because I am not crazy enough to foresee such things—please, someone agree—but we all need to be careful because we got to where we are today by taking innumerable baby steps.