An Argument Against Complexity
There’s currently a chip shortage as our addiction to silicon and all the computational power it affords us is embedded within the systems that we depend on.
What used to be going into the “computer room” has turned into partially self-driving vehicles that entertain as you travel, watches that can tell you how hard you’re working out (or how close you are to a heart attack), and smart speakers that you can talk to about almost anything. Even beyond the cutting edge, it’s increasingly hard to find devices that you don’t immediately need to scramble to find your wifi network name and password to finish the initial setup. After all, it’s not like you changed the password since you got your router like you were supposed to, right?
Centuries ago, many societally-important complex machines were primarily well-made and novel physical objects. You could look at them from many angles, and show others through the primary senses what made them a useful thing. This would apply to mechanical inventions as the purpose of a coiled spring, gearing, or even steam-powered installations could be illustrated fairly indisputably to anyone, whether or not they were an inventor themselves. You didn’t have to know the equation for conservation of energy to see with your own eyes the work a coiled spring could do, or understand the phase transformations of water to believe that steam was hot and rises.
Arguably, all of the obvious inventions have been made since then, which has allowed each of us to specialize more and more as our systems become layered labyrinths that rely on the knowledge and practice of niche experts. This is a useful way of indirectly cooperating with each other - a lifetime is not long enough to fully understand the things we need to know to function in the modern world.
The other side of this coin is that reliance on others requires trust. Trust that others have put in the effort to understand their niche and practice it responsibly.
There are broader trends contributing to alienation between us (especially in politics), but specialization has caused us all to tread on divergent paths that are making it much harder to relate to those outside of our own bubbles. It becomes especially problematic when many fields are conducted in ways that are almost entirely different languages, whether it is via lengthy medical terminology, advanced mathematics, or the latest programming language. Losing trust in each other is a natural symptom of our specialization as we struggle to understand even the most basic fundamentals of other disciplines.
What I’m advocating for is not a step back in time, but a step forward to what matters. Instead of making autonomous electric vehicles to solve the problems of transportation and the environment, let’s find ways of building neighborhoods that allow us to simply walk to our destinations. Instead of quantifying our physical state with sensors and machine learning, let’s find ways to make healthy food and lifestyles accessible to everyone. And instead of building AI virtual assistants that can participate in more conversations and metaverses that use endless amounts of data to create caricatures of ourselves that can fly, let’s actually talk to one another.
Unfortunately, I have no solution to passwords and I hear they are supposed to be very complex.
Nicholas Menon
