Last Updated: Sunday November 12 2000
So I'm out with Michael, Kelly, and Jo watching Red Planet with Carrie-Anne Moss and Val Kilmer, and am realizing how silly the public really is.
You know how it is: you see previews for movies, and then make these little mental lists of which ones you would like to see, and which ones you think you would not like to see. Then you go see them. For some reason, I've seen a lot of movies about space travel lately, and am beginning to come up with generalizations about them.
People are more interested in seeing a good action thriller than a hard sci-fi movie. Now that there's this mainstream interest in science fiction prompted by the soap operafication of certain tv shows, I see a lot of movies trying to decide whether they're a science fiction movie or some kind of horror thriller.
I picture my mom trying to understand something like 2001: A Space Odyssey, or concepts like inertia, and realize that, although she's a pretty bright lady, reality can be kind of hard to understand sometimes. There's been this quote from John von Neumann running through my head lately: "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." It's true! Think about it: even simple things like skydiving involve details like air pressure and compensating for the earth's rotation (well, just a tad). Things like the speed of light barrier, so it takes 20 minutes to talk to Mars. Things like shooting a rocket into outer space toss out all sorts of assumptions about the acceleration of objects and other constants which we are taught in high school. People stick by those assumptions, and think you're lying to them when you violate them. I suppose that's why the directors of these movies dumb them down so that the audience doesn't get that feeling that you're lying to them. A bright person might say that they would be better people by thinking through what they're presented, but they may or they may not. I guess they're in the business of making movies for entertainment, and the thinking should be done elsewhere.
It still doesn't help me, though. I can't help my brain from going off and saying things like, "Gee, if *I* were putting together the mission plan for these people, crap like that robot going crazy and killing them all wouldn't happen, since NOBODY IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD WRITE THE CODE TO DO THAT" and so forth.
Yeah, that's one of the things that's been bugging me. Software. They show you all this cool eye candy where the actors and actresses are talking to the computer, and the computers do all this cool stuff, and I'm just banging my head against the wall. I've read a Compaq report that had the fallout from an experiment they tried: they gave all the people in an office voice-activated boxes to do their work on. After the people got used to the idea, the noise level quickly went above any sane threshold, and the experiment had to be cancelled. Voice just isn't a good interface medium in a public area.
Besides, does anyone realize how incredibly complicated it is to do that?! The systems have to have these looney sized databases containing all sorts of random crap (f=ma. e=mc^2. Still doesn't mean you can push a rope) that people accumulate over the first 20 or so years of their lifetimes. There's a lot of people who are learning about thinking machines because of having to fix their computers so they can get on AOL, but they still don't get even those fundamental things.
It makes me sad to think that after all this time and all this taxpayer money on technology education programs, the general public is still that ignorant.
People say to me, "well Jason, you have to understand that a lot of these people were born just after WWII," but they are adapting just like everyone else is. Even hick farmers in Podunk, Nebraska are connected to the Net, and *using* it.
Admittedly, it is better than it was, say, 5 years ago, at the release of Windows '95. A lot better. Maybe it isn't so bad after all. I mean, we've transitioned to a more network-friendly culture in just that short period of time, so maybe great gains will be made in the next five years. Maybe.