Impactful Progress?
As I impatiently waited for Epistle to finish downloading — the MarkDown interpretive Android application that would allow me to seamlessly create content on my phone to upload to my blog while preserving the beautiful .md formatting — I was struck by a fascinating thought: we’re finally making some serious progress.
I used to chuckle at the projections of “where we’ll be 20 years from now” because there seemed to be a persistent human desire to believe that leaps in “functional innovation” will take place in our lifetime. We can point to unmatched electronic and digital advancement but I would argue that the life of an adult in 2012 isn’t all that different than one in 1992 — save for some altered modes of communication and information gathering our lives are largely the same as they were 20 years ago.
Sure we have the ability to program our coffee pot to brew the second we wake up (if we actually wake up when we’re supposed to or don’t accidentally unplug it), record the (likely meaningless) TV shows most important to us, and have a “face to face” conversation with someone on our mobile phones. But this is a far cry from the futuristic, Jetson lifestyle that cartoonists and screenwriters envisioned back in the 80’s — flying though the air in propulsive shoes and cars that careened us towards automated machines that would complete tasks not worthy of human’s “invaluable” time.
My realization today was that open source, i.e. free, tools were providing me the ability to do something that was actually making my life much, much easier, and it was a tool that most of the population could use. Furthermore, the technology easily extends to web content of any kind, unlike our programmable coffee pot that is destined to lie in isolation and fail to communicate with other machinery that logically complete similar tasks.
The past 10 years have been an accumulation of complexity, frustration, and anguish (for me) around the alleged “productivity increases” availed by technological advances of human civilization. Every technological advancement brought a smoother, sexier hour glass, or rotating beach ball, or whatever the en vogue graphical depiction was that attempted to placate the burning inclination to throw my gadget into a brick wall. And yet, here I am truly (and surprisingly) benefitting from a fairly simple set of steps that will permit me to post a blog entry online with content entirely written on my phone!
Of course I had to link my Dropbox account and find out that Scriptogram worked seamlessly with Markdown and a couple other granular details. But this was not programming, which has been my usual “attack strategy” over the past couple years — the process is a fairly basic use of straightforward tools that end up accomplishing a pretty sophisticated task, we’re really making progress!
….Or maybe I’m just falling into my own trap of getting really excited about the possibility of a quantum leap in technology during my lifetime.