Will Future Consumer Tech Still Be Awkward?

have notes on. This isn't perceptive, this isn't the future of ants. Did we already do aunts? Oh no, oh no, I think I just copied my notes from last time. I don't worry, I'll catch up. I'll catch up. Okay,

you don't see that in sci Fi? As a little sub series we do within Forward Thinking, where we take something that you often see in science fiction and say, I don't know if that's what the future is really going to look like, or something you rarely see in science fiction, or at least don't see as much as we think you should, and say, well, why don't they

have more of that? Right? It's kind of like looking back at say, the nineteen fifties and reading the descriptions of what they thought the year two thousand was going to be like, and then thinking, boy, were they off, you know, and then thinking, wait a minute, are current visions of the future when depicted in science fiction films could be just as misguided, right, And sometimes that can be for really fun purposes, like the fact that explosions

are pretty or Jehovivic is pretty, Etcetera. Exploding in space makes a noise? Is that how you pronounce it Jehovavitch? Sure? Probably not? Oh no, no, let's keep it whatever it is, Mila Mia right now, Mila, I have no idea anyway, Let's continue. She'll him up again later in the episode.

In the asked, we've talked about stuff like how come when people speak English five d or a thousand years in the future, they sound just like people today, Because if you didn't have them sound like people today, people today wouldn't be able to understand your science fiction movie. Joe. That's an excellent point, Jonathan. Okay, well today we want to talk about consumer technology. So how many pieces of consumer technology do you have within reach? Don't ask me

that question. Joe, it's embarrassing. Well, it's probably a lot a lot of If you're listening to this podcast, I imagine you were listening to the podcast on a piece of consumer technology, unless it's just wafting through the air, or a friend listen to it, memorize all the parts and is now performing that podcast for you, In which case call us because that sounds fascinating. I want to meet your friend. Yeah, But I want to ask you

all a question. So, when you look into a science fiction movie or science fiction book, how is consumer technology like computers and how blitz handheld devices, phones, things like that, How does it seem in those pieces of media. Well, first, let's let's be specific. We're talking about kind of that idealistic version of the future, not the post apocalyptic Mad Max version right right now where everything's wrecked and burned. Sure, but there's no real consumer technology in Matt Max. I

mean consumer salvage. Yea, it's consumer salvage enough. In futures wherein there are giant corporations that are hypothetically selling these kinds of things, it's usually so sleek and so well, I mean whatever our current definition of the word sleek is, right, well, yeah, here, here's what I'd say. It's typically sleek, fast, responsive, immersive. It can anticipate what you want, it's easy to use. The characters are invariably very comfortable using it. Displays are

really gorgeous. Yes, it's like the technology becomes an extension of the characters. Right, There's there's never that moment where a character picks up that floating that floating display that doesn't appear to be made of anything, and they're about to zoom in on something and sudding, they get a blue screen of death that never happens. Right, That were you're getting at flash player has crashed. Yeah, right, do

you want to continue this application? Right? You just get a bunch of pop ups, like can you imagine Minority Report with just endless pop ups? Minority Report is a great one because it's a great example that people often refer to when they're they're talking about what movies have really good, probably very realistic, and interesting depictions of consumer technology in the future. Minority Report is one of the most often cited, and they actually did good research going

into that film. They they consulted with lots of people in the tech industry. Well, if you see the interface that Tom Cruise's character interacts with in Minority Report, where he's got his hands up in the air and the displays are all floating around and he can swipe stuff

off the screen. I mean, you can see the user interfaces and touch screen devices that obviously take inspiration from that same basic UI design, right, whether it was from Minority Report or the information that informed the writers and designers of Minority Report to make sure that it had that feel, it's very much a UI that we're familiar

with today. It may not mean that we've got displays bloating up everywhere, but that same sort of swiping to to get things off of a screen, or pinching or or moving your fingers apart to zoom in or zoom out, all of that kind of stuff is commonplace now. Yeah. Another good example would be Star Trek. Now to us today, if we watch old episodes of Star Trek, a lot of the technology might look extremely dated, but it's still within the universe depicting this kind of very fast, sleek,

very easy to use, comfortable. Uh, it's totally. It works all the time, unless there's a plot point in which it doesn't work, or if you're on the Holidack, in which it never works. Right, Right, there's there's a there's probably a seventy thirty chance that if you're on the holideck, something's about to go down and the holidack is going to try and kill you. Uh. The the interesting thing about Star Trek is that, again, like you were saying,

unless it's a plot point, the technology just works. And not only does it just work, but if you ever pay really close attention, it doesn't make any sense how how well it works. Because the actors, when they were not delivering a line, might be staring intently at a panel and then pushing buttons like a like a crazy person. Like they'll be like twenty or thirty button presses to do whatever task that that person is imagining they are

doing at that time. But then when you see a character actually have to do a task, often it will involve like a single button press. And then you pull up all of the works of Charles Dickens. Do you think, why does that panel have a Charles Dickens button? They went to the Charles Dickens annel. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, when you're Patrick Stewart, you gotta have the complete words of Charles. I mean, I'm sure he has all English literature defined to specific buttons, hot button keys

on the bridge of the enterprosem. He's got to print out a new copy every time he spills t exactly. It's just Charles Dickens. Yeah. You also put a note

about Wally. I thought that was a great example. Now obviously not the Junkyard of Earth, but this spaceship out in space, Ferry Apple inspired spaceship out there where where technology has reached the point where it's catering to every single need, so that humans are essentially subservient to the technology, not not in a a overlord kind of way, but in a like but not. They don't realize that they

have willingly given up that agency. I think. I think we're debating the plot of Wally, but seriously, those care moral of this podcast. If you don't realize it's tyranny, it's not, but it's they've they've given up their age and willing. They're not. They're not, and it was terrible for all of them at the end. Trichy is a word that you use when you realize how badly off

you are. They don't point like a benevolent dictator, Well, I want to transition to talking about why we think the future of technology might not necessarily look like that, where all pieces of consumer tech are very fast, sleek, sexy, and perfect, where a lot of the frustrations we have with technology today you might very well continue to see even in the future, far down the line of technological development.

So one of the first things I think we should talk about is this concept in computing performance known as Pages law right and Pages law is kind of an

inverse of Moore's law. Moore's law being the idea that that the number of transistors that engineers can cram onto an integrated circuit is going to double at a steady rate, like every year and a half or so, right and by now we kind of suggest that that means the processing power itself doubles at that rate, because it may not be an actual doubling of the transistors every eighteen months these days, but engineers are finding better and better

ways to create architecture so that the processing power in effect doubles every eighteen months or so, the practical effect being that your computer hardware, your new computer hardware, is faster every eighteen months twice as twice as fast as the as the hardware that existed eighteen months previously. Yes, of course, the user experience is not determined solely by what the hardware can do, because the hardware has to run software. That's where they get you exactly. That is

where they get you. So at a Google Developer conference in San Francisco in two thousand nine, the Google executive Sergey Brin coined the term Pages law, which is sort of the inverse of Moore's law, and it's also been referred to as Worth's law. Worth with NYE. Worth. Actually the terminology their predates pages law, but pages law is essentially a synonym, and it was a popularization for it, and it was kind of a little bit of a

joke the way that it was presented at this conference. Yeah, but the idea is, every eighteen months software becomes twice as slow. So as your hardware becomes twice as fast, the software you run on it takes twice as long to run. I assume this was a dig at Larry Page, the co founder of Google. I'm sure it was, Yeah, some harmless jest. This law is obviously kind of a humorous it's it's not like a universal law. Right, we're not talking about the laws of thermodynamics, just like Moore's

law is not a universal law. Right. We had a whole other episode about a month or so ago, I believe, wherein we talked about some of the problems that Moore's law is currently running into with the development of or with the physical transistors as we know them. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Moore's law is not a law of physics. It's sort of a prediction that has turned out to

be very accurate so far, if even self fulfilling. Yeah, perhaps self fulfilling, right, because if you set out a sort of goal post for the industry, they might just work hard enough to go through it. You don't want to be an engineer working when you realize you cannot meet the goal of making a processor that's twice as powerful within eighteen months. And say I was there when

Moore's law ended, Probably don't want to be that. You want to be like, no, no, when I was when I was on I watched UM But but no. I think that we've all had this common experience of software bloat and and and this happens for a couple of reasons. Sure, feature creep is one thing so when when computers become more powerful, programmers want to take advantage of that power, and so they cram more and more features into a

piece of software. Features in air quotes because they might not even necessarily be things that you really want this program to do, but but sometimes they can be very helpful and or or pretty well and a lot of people, a lot of programmers may be working on software that they have these gray ideas for what the software can do. The problem is that the the hardware as it exists now, the state of the art hardware that your average consumer is going to have access to, would not be able

to support that kind of software. But software development takes a lot of time. Sometimes a cycle to develop a single program may take long enough so that by the time the software is done, there's actually hardware strong enough

to use it. Now to the end user, it just seems like the brand new computer is running whatever new version of the program you have at the same rate that your old computer was running the old version of the program, because in fact, the software was developed to take advantage of all that horse power, or that you might even need to buy a new computer in order to run the software that you really want like the number of times that I know when I used to

do some PC gaming, frequently things would come out that we're just a little bit better than what hardware I had, and so I had to swap out different bits if I wanted to play whatever it was, right, right, you might need to go out and get a new graphics card so that you can run that new version of A half Life three. Hey, did you guys hear about halfway three? Me? Neither, because they haven't announced it. That's sick ber Yeah, I guess. So I have a feeling.

I have a feeling. I'm not the first and I certainly won't be the last. But it's related to Pages law or Worth's law. As a there are a couple of other similar, kind of humorous concepts, and again these were kind of meant as tongue in cheek a way of explaining human behavior, and it doesn't necessarily relate just to electronics, but it can also relate to that. One of those is Parkinson's Law, which is created by C. Northcote Parkinson h that says that we're will expand so

as to fill the time available for its completion. So, in other words, you could have the exact same task and tell one person that you need to get this done in an hour, and tell another person that you have six hours to do this, and the amount of work that task is going to take will expand to fill that six hour period for that second person, whereas the first person will be able to complete in an hour. Um. This is just one of those things kind of explain

human behavior, not so much a universal law. Again, same sort of thing also can come true in the world of consumer electronics in a way, it's it's a little bit more of an abstract. There's also the Parkinson's law

of triviality, which can go into software design. The law of triviality states that if you ever get a group of people together to discuss an important uh idea important task, something along those lines, invariably that group of people will spend the most amount of time on the least important aspect of whatever that happens to be. Same sort of thing can happen with software blow, where you'll see people

really focus on things that ultimately may not matter. In fact, it may be something that just a tiny slice of the consumers ever even come to contact with. Those animations of Clippy are so smooth. That's wonderful, exactly the what I was thinking in my mind while I was saying that. Meanwhile, the rest of it's not right. I think Clippy is coming back. That's prediction I'm waiting for, Like Microsoft Bob

two thousand fifteen, that will be I'll be exciting. Okay, Well, anyway, It's true that things like Pages law or Worth's law or Parkinson's laws, these things are not hard and fast rules of reality, but they are observations that we laugh at because they seem to ring very true to us. Like this is a very accurate way of describing the state of technology today, and so it doesn't necessarily hold the future to technology will always follow the path of

software bloat. But I can see more reason to believe that it will than reason to believe that it won't, because it's been this way so far, and something would have to change for it to really overcome this. And it's being made by people, right, And these are observations ultimately about people, not about the technology. The technology itself

is completely separate from this. This is really about our behaviors as a species, right, right, that the users and the programmers of Yeah, the stuff I mean it's it's not likely to change now. Well, even if you get to a point where you say, what if we reach a future where machines are making our gadgets for us, like we're no longer making them ourselves, but a machine

is designing them. Well, someone made that machine, So you know, it may be that there might be several generations down that pathway where you get to a point where the things that are designed really are perfectly designed for a

human being to perfectly optimize what they're doing. Yeah. So that's so that's a completely natural, seamless integration in our lives to the point where we never have that awkward moment where you know, something just doesn't make sense to us, or we have that issue with whatever gadget we're trying

to make work. Yeah. So what I'm saying in this point of the conversation is that even though even if we don't posit, say the end of Moore's law or something like that, and we say that computers and devices continue to get more and more powerful, I still think in Minority Report, we should be seeing Tom Cruise getting frustrated with memory problems on his big swipy, sexy sleek screens and there should be things that crash and fail to load. Right, he should pull he should pull up

a window. Realized, dang it, I I was looking at Amazon earlier because I needed new shoes, and this is the Amazon thing. This is totally not that. That file about that that person who is up out to commit murder. Well, okay, but even even let's suppose that the technology is perfect, um, will all of us be comfortable with it? That is

a great point. That's sort of the compliment to the point we were just talking about, because yeah, you can look at one of the most easy to use, beautiful pieces of technology ever made, and some people will still have a lot of trouble figuring out how to use it. They're just not comfortable with the new tech. That's sort of a fundamental feature of human nature is that it's hard to adapt to new things. Are you Are you talking about old people? No, I am not talking. I'm

the oldest person in this room. I'm getting a little sensitive here. I'm not talking. No, it doesn't. In fact, though I don't know. Age maybe correlated with this issue. We may talk about that in a minute. But you can be anybody and have trouble adapting to interfaces that

you're not used to using. I think one thing that we should see more in science fiction is people being less at home with their consumer technology that I can't think of a film that's not satirical in nature where people are just really flustered and frustrated by not knowing how to work their different interfaces. Well, I think I think the reason for that ends up being dramatic rather than anything else. It's it's one of those things that

it would distract from the story. Therefore it's not a component. Whereas we would say, well, it's not really realistic. I mean, your average person would probably have, especially getting something new out of the box, brand new thing, would probably have one of those moments where you know, you toss the instructions away because you don't need those. But but but it would have been much more realistic, is all. I think we're saying to have Tom Cruse have just one

single moment where he went, what's that button? Well, you know, well, certainly, I mean, and the point of all the the storytelling may not be to go for realism. I understand that totally. I mean, it might be the same reason you don't see characters going to the bathroom and movies that it's just not interesting to the dramatic storyline. And and as we've talked about in uh several of these episodes before, I I accept that point of view, as I just

think it's worth pointing out. So let's talk about how people become acclimatized to new technology and how quickly they adopt it and become comfortable with it. Sure, and okay, part of it may in fact be generational. There there

has been some research get off my lawn. There's been some research out of the Pew Center, which does pretty good research about the Internet and technology, UM, indicating the tech is changing fast enough these days that it's actually speeding up generational differences and making smaller age demographics comfortable with smaller segments of tech. Uh and UM. There is an interesting paper kind of to this point by one doctor Larry D. Rosin, published in the National Psychologist in

two thousand four. It was called Understanding the Technological Generation Gap, and it pointed out the time frames of previous technological eras, which I thought was really interesting, like the agricultural era, which lasted for some three thousand years, or the industrial era, which lasted some three hundred or the digital age or information age, or whatever it is that you want to call it, which has been going on for for a mere fraction of that, like thirty to fifty years, but

has changed intrinsically the ways that most human people interact with the world. He generally suggests that we're all adapting more rapidly these days, but that as as generations grow up experiencing such rapid technological evolution, they're going to be able to adapt ever faster. What's interesting is that this also kind of uh plays into the idea of the singularity, this idea that we're having these ages of of of

technology and they are transitioning ever more rapidly. Now. Of course, in the concept of the singularity, you in our an age where change is the definition of that era. There's no consistency from one moment to the next. Whether that ever happens, well, we've done some episodes about it, so we don't need to go into it here. Uh and and other research kind of does disagree with with the concept that we're building towards sub kind of weird superhuman

generation like that. There was a critical review of the literature that was published in the British Journal of Education Technology in two thousand and eight called the digital natives bait, and it indicated that the differences aren't so much a generationally informed as they are socioeconomically informed, which, of course is is the money and social structure kind of sides

of this. And the others even went so far as to compare the the idea that digital natives, these people who have grown up with tech being intrinsically different, to a kind of moral panic, like like similar to the kind of thinking a couple of generations ago that Elvis was going to literally ruined civilization as we knew it with his wiggly pelvis. Did you know that pelvis rhymes with Elvis? I did. Greece made pretty pretty good use

of that fact, I recall. But I can definitely see what you're saying there about the the moral panic idea that people are very concerned about the digital native generation. Well, I mean partially because they're their own children and they don't understand what's going on with them. Yeah, Well, they see like, oh man, my kid knows how to use this technology that I don't know how to use, and

it makes me uncomfortable. Probably means it's bad. Well, it's also it's also interesting in that there have been plenty of studies that have shown that that kids growing up with this technology don't necessarily know how to use it,

at least not effectively. They may be able to access the things they want to access very very quickly, but when it comes to making any use of it beyond that that scope, the scope in which they have become accustomed, like social changing, yeah, well, or to get into angry birds or whatever, right exactly, whatever that might be, whether it's to to end up going on call of duty or to uh send out a message on whatever social network kids are actually on these days, I don't know

if they even do that anymore. Um, get off my lawn. But I mean, no matter what it is like, when it comes down to using this amazing tool for something along the lines of research, uh, they are not necessarily shown to be more gifted than people who were born before the Internet became you know, a household kind of of thing, at least in the United States at any rate. So Uh, for example, when I was in school, it was before the Internet was something that was accessible to me.

I mean, there were research institutions that were on our pannette and then the early Internet when I was a kid, but I didn't have access to it until I was in college. Uh So I ended up adapting to that. But it turns out that my research skills that I developed over time as I learned them, um, are not you know. It's not like the kids who were born in that era were suddenly on my same level just by nature of the fact that they were born when

it happened. They have to develop the skills too. So that's another thing just to keep in mind, is that even if we get into a future, another argument to support why consumer technology is never going to be this incredibly seamless experience, we still have to learn how to use it. Until we get to a point where the

technology is learning how to react to us. Then they're still going to be a learning curve, which means they're still going to be times when you do have that frustrating moment where you're trying to make the replicator actually make your earl gray t well. A lot, a lot can go into those learning curves. It's not just an issue of a particular humans capacity to pick up a thing and understand it. It's it's also a societal and

an infrastructural problem. And and I have a rather lengthy, but I think worthwhile example to talk to you guys about about telephones. Okay, Um, it took a long time for them to become truly pervasive within our culture, you know. Okay, so these days we dial phone numbers using a numerical keypad or a digital represented representation of one more likely. But those keypads only debuted in the nineteen sixties. Before that, it was all rotary phones, which seemed hopelessly outdated these days.

But we're new as of the nineteen twenties, whereupon phone companies had to hold public demonstrations for an entire decade to explain how these things worked, because before then, operators had handled all of the dialing. You would you would pick up the phone, talk to an operator and say, hey, connect me to this thing, and they would figure out how to do it. You never had to dial a phone previous to the actually like in those old TV shows where they just pick up the phone and say, hey,

give me you know ethel yeah, right exactly. But but even even when those non dial phones debuted back in the eighteen seventies, it took like forty years where the tech caught on enough that companies could stop publishing really basic telephone instruction manuals. At one from CIRCA recommended that you and I quote speak directly into the mouthpiece, keeping mustache out of the opening. I think that's still a valuable piece of information. It is for most of us.

Know that it was written specifically for Teddy Roosevelt. Okay, um, And let's let's look at this in a more quantitative light, because I know that all of that probably sounds a little bit circumstantial. So so, in terms of phone adoption by the general populace, in eighteen seventy seven, Belt Telephone Company had seven and seventy telephones in existence. By eighteen ninety nine, twenty years later, they had a million telephones. That's that's one percent of the population of the United

States with telephones. By nine thirty years later, they had twenty million phones. That's sixteen percent of the population. And Okay, some people had telephones other than Bell, but being that they were the biggest players in the phone industry kind of by far. It's an alright, rough idea, right, pretty much a monopoly. Yeah, by it was sent of the population. Then once we hit the digital age, things sped up

kind of considerably. A Cellular phones debuted commercially in the early nineteen eighties, and these days, uh, couple decades later, of the of United States adults have a cell phone alone, not even counting other types of telephone. So the adoption of cell phones was much more rapid than the adoption of phones in general, very much more rapid. In fact, according to a report put out by the United Nations, in six billion of the world's seven billion people have

access to a mobile phone right now. Um, and you know, you could argue that since people were already familiar with phones in general, it was a really easy switch, or that it's an infrastructure issue, not a person an adoption issue. Well, quick, quick, just sort of uh tangential question related to this, did you guys adopt cell phones relatively quickly? Did you hold out for a long time? Well, I was, I was

a kid in the eighties, so it's a slightly different question. Um, but but but I I had one when I first went to college. I never had a real phone in college, a landline. I had a mobile phone. I specifically remember having a conversation on my college campus with friends who had just recently got a cell phone, which at that time, you know, early cell phones were pretty much that was

the realm of the executive, right. There weren't very many people other than executives who had them in the early days. Truck drivers maybe as well, or like nerds like Fox Molder. Yeah, yeah, actually he is a real person. Actually actually had a college professor who was so enamored with X files he would bring a fake giant plastic cell phone and have conversations with with a scully on the phone to give class announcements. What's that Scully? You want to remind me

that Martin Luther King Junior day is is Monday? Al Right, guys, no, class Monday. That was really well, uh, he was awesome. It was my medieval lip profess. But anyway, No, I remember distinctly having the conversation at that time saying I'm not going to get one of those, because I can't imagine ever being in a situation where someone needs to get ahold of me so badly that I have to have the phone on my person. That's what answering machines

are for. This was in the realm of answering machines. Y'all, we're not talking about digital voice recordings. So UM, yeah, of course. Now I've got a smartphone and uh and and I it would be really hard to separate me from it. So how much message time could your wax cylinder record? Uh? It's you know, it depends. Uh. If the person was not terribly loquacious, I could get maybe two messages out of one. But mom, it was like it was like a roll and a half, which was

unfortunate if someone was not there and actually switched them out. Um, at any rate. So that's also true. I would be really curious to see what the smartphone numbers are as well. I bet smartphone adoption is even faster than cell phone was, right, you would be so. Regarding people's level of comfort with existing and cutting edge technology, it may be that both development and adoption are not just speedy recently, but continuously

speeding up. It's getting faster still. Uh. In a two thousand twelve article for The m I T Tech Review, Michael D. Gusta noted that recent technologies like smartphones and tablets might be spreading faster than any technology in human history, though he explicitly notes that it's difficult to compare all historical technological trends as well as global data about adoption rates. Nevertheless, it seems a really distinct probability that these things are true.

So older technology like grid electricity and landline telephones, which you talked about taking along time to reach saturation, might have taken longer to reach maturity because they required infrastructure development. Cell phones and smartphones required less, especially on the part of the consumer, and tablets required even less than that. So with smartphones, for the years throughout the two thousands, the technology dawdled sort of at fairly low adoption rates.

You had some Blackberries and stuff like that. It was really when Apple released the iPhone in two thousand seven that the smartphone market really took off. So apparently it's sold one point twelve million in its first quarter. Uh and and that was despite having a high price to goose to notes, but it increased its market share very quickly, and so at the time this article was written in May two thousand twelve, he noted that fifty of all US mobile phone users, which was of the US population,

now had smartphones. And just a little update as of j Neuarteen, I looked it up Pew Internet reports that fifty eight percent of American adults had a smartphone. That is really really fast maturity for a new technology. Now, there were some even faster developments in the tablet world. There was some sort of early trip ups early tablets that didn't really go anywhere. Again, it was Apple that made the difference. When Apple launched the iPad in April

two thousand ten, it was relatively huge. Within a year and a half, tablets could be found in eleven percent of American households, and within two years, thirteen percent of US consumers owned a tablet. To Gusto noted that that adoption rate was faster than any other technology he could compare it to. UH. And that was again in May two thousand twelve. What are the more recent numbers. This is astounding again from the Pew Internet Project fact sheet.

As of January, forty two percent of American adults owned a tablet. That's in four years, less than four years UH. That's insane compared to these other technologies that took decades to reach that level of maturity and then eventual saturation in the American markets. And it suggests that we're incorporating more and more newer and newer technology into our lives

faster and faster. But it's funny that I feel like there are two different ways you could interpret this relative to our question about people's level of comfort with technology. Does that mean that we're incorporating more and more technology into our lives before we're ready for it, so we're going to be even more and more confused and discombobulated

by our devices in the future. Or does it mean something is changing in society where we are getting used to new technology faster than we used to, that our level of comfort with our devices is adapting to become more agreeable basically that we just get used to it, or that we're more eager to do it and therefore put in more of an effort to learn more quickly. I think, uh yeah, I think that's a big part

of it, Lauren. I think that things like the um iPad have really set a precedent where it's it's increased the interest in consumer technology beyond what it used to be because it was something that was designed very well. First and foremost, it's a really good design. Secondly, it was marketed really well, so you had an amazing marketing push an amazing design um and the accommodation meant that

it had a really positive reception in the public. Like, you know, if you had told me ten years ago that there would be people who would take time off of their jobs, like whether officially or not, in order to watch an industry event that Apple is holding, I would have thought you were crazy. But that's what happens there, to camp out outside of an Apple store for for a new product release, right That would also I would

have told you you were crazy. I would have told my wife she was crazy when she did that way I've had too um. But but no, that's the that's the world we live in now. And I think part of that is that this this expectation now means that we're eager for that next thing that's going to be like the iPad tablet that will UH kind of give us that same sort of sense of of wonder of what technology can do. And I think there's a lot writing on wearables right now as being the next big

UH form factor for that. And it may be that once someone has got the killer implementation of that, that we see the levels of adoption that are similar to what we're seeing in these other examples. Yeah, so I think this example might be an interesting thing that actually runs counter to our thesis that people's relationship to technology and the future should look more awkward. Maybe it shouldn't.

I mean, maybe future technology trends will be sort of dominated by this Apple like approach, where it says, look, user experiences first. Things need to be very comfortable and easy to use in your hand, especially before we move on one more quick point, especially being that the technology of marketing kind of tier point Jonathan is also stepping up pretty quickly, and that we are able to know

about new technologies and able to troubleshoot them more easily. Hypothetically, if if, if the Internet is working at the time than than anyone was before, you know, you know, like people don't have to hear about a new Apple product by going out to a fair in their town and having someone stand up and present something to them about it. And they don't have to read a paper instruction manual. It's all very much at their fingertips. As broken bowns

rheumatitis syphilitis. I have heard that in two thousand and fifteen, all Apple marketing will be delivered by Carnival barkers. So I'm just saying I would really like that. That would be awesome. But no, more to your point, Joe about the the the assertion that perhaps in the future we've got these pieces of technology that integrates so easily. And that's why I don't I think that adopting technology quickly might be a trend, that does not necessarily mean that

that technology is going to give us this seamless experience. Uh. And so I mean, I think there be even people who would easily argue that the iPad and iPhone are not completely free of of issues that are frustrating. Oh no, I I have had issues with Apple products before. I mean, if they I would say, I've had fewer issues with Apple products than with the non Apple products that I

know and love and am supplied with by my workplace. Well, like, for example, the iPhone four is the one I liked to to cite because that was the one that had a little tiny gap on the lower left side that represented where the antenna was. And there were some people who reported that they were having reception issues with their phones.

They were getting really terrible reception even when they would have another phone on that same provider, and it would have great reception, and there were multiple reasons that we're guessed about for this. Apple eventually came out and said you're holding it wrong, saying that if you were holding the phone in such a way that your hand obscured this little section of the phone. Basically, everyone holds their phone. Certainly anyone who's left handed would hold it where the

left side is against their palm as opposed to their fingers. Um, so left handers, we just hold everything wrong. I am a left hander everything. I know this me and ten percent of the population, which realizes a rough number. But yes, yeah, no, it's just me. Okay, that's fair, get off my line. So the but yeah, this is this is one of those things where again this was a user problem with

an Apple product. So I imagine that we're going to see this happen in the future where uh, you know the issues that you can't as a designer necessarily anticipate all the use cases for the thing that you are making. Right, Like, if my job is to make the next amazing piece of technology that's going to be your you know, techno arm bracer that gives you the redoubts of everything, you need to know that day and you could just stare at your forearm and you've got all the information you need.

I'm doing it based upon what I think is going to be the universal experience. But I can't really know what the universal experience is going to be. It's gonna be filtered through my own preferences, um, even if I'm getting notes from other people. So it's very possible I could come up with a product that for a lot of people just doesn't work. I could have a real

problem with that piece of technologies, certainly would. But he is what he is, So I mean that's just that's you have that as as a poster right there in the development team, because if you designed for Popye, you'd have a very limited customer base. Yeah, but at any rate, Okay, the general usability and adaptability of consumer products. It's kind of another factor that we wanted to talk about here, oh, in that most movies never portray technology as being annoying. Yeah.

Well again, some satirical ones do, but you're straightforward sci fi action drama kind of that thing. Right, If it's horror movies, then the technology is always going to to crap out the moment when you need it most, Right, that's that's the trope in in horror movies. The trope and science fiction is the technology works until you need

it to not work. Right, So in a in a world like Minority Report, the technology is just this amazing, integrated thing that's part of your life, just as any other element of your life would be considered like a defining thing you would you would not be able to imagine that world without that technology there, though, it is funny how we've got technology very deeply integrated into our lives.

Are our phones and our computers and stuff like that, and these pieces of technology still do extremely annoying things. It is deeply, very much a part of my life that I use my phone all the time. My phone has all kinds of terribly annoying habits well. And there are a lot of issues at play here, right, I mean, it's not just that a single device might do something annoying. It's that we don't have Like in the Star Trek universe, you get the feeling that everything is made by the

same person, the same person. There's one guy who's making everything. That's everybody's used, the phasers, the replicators, everything is integrated, whereas in reality you've got all these different companies making different form factors with different user interfaces for stuff that's supposed to do the same thing, right, right, Yeah, Tom Cruise never like goes over to a friend's house and goes like, wait, wait, I'm trying to swipe the thing

and it's not swiping. Yeah. Oh, it's because the Swipe Tech patented that particular user interface, and so this one, because it's not a swipe Tech display, you can't swipe. You have to blink three times. You know that that. That's the thing is that when you're able to patent a process, which you can do with the United States, then you can apply that to your technology and then

limit what other companies can do. So they either have to license that from you or they have to figure out a different way around it, which means there's no universality to a user interface or form factor. You've got a lot of fractured landscape going on, is what I'm trying to set, like right, and and for them were like like your your Star Trek communicator works with all of the computers and start because it just does right.

Whereas if you know, we've talked about this with the Internet of things, if you wanted to have that integrated experience. Right now, with like all the kitchen appliances that can talk to each other, you have to get them all from the same vendor, or you need a industry wide

kitchen protocol. Right. So that's one of the reasons why technology is frustrating is because we don't have a universal standard that each form factor has to adhere to, and we don't really want to have that because then you're stuck with whatever has been produced. Right, you don't have any choice in the matter, Whereas with choice, you've got competition, which at least in theory, means the consumer gets the benefit because the consumer can pick between whichever form factors

and user interfaces appeals to that person the most. So there's a trade off here, Right, you have the great advantage of choice, but the disadvantage of the fact that the thing you have may not work the way the thing someone else has, and when you try to get the two to interact, it may not be a smooth experience, unlike the world of the sci fi where everything works

together all the time until some catastrophe happens. There's also, I think a thing that bears mentioning, which is the gap between the expectations of what technology can do and what it actually does, which we've experienced many times in our lives throughout the years. Um, I don't know if you necessarily expect to see this so much in sci fi, because that would sort of would have to cover sort of in the marketing and the media approach to something

and then you see how it falls flat. You wouldn't necessarily expect to see that in every story. But it is a very funny feature of consumer tech that I feel like you don't see in sci fi all that Often the virtual reality problem, right, the idea, the idea that you've heard about this technology for long enough, and by the time you're able to actually experience that firsthand, you realize that the reality and the hype don't measure up. So virtual reality in the Nines is the perfect example.

I remember the first time I ever got to put on one of those helmets and m and play that Pterodactyl game, and like I was thinking, like, well, it's really cool that I can look around and my motions in the real world are being translated into the virtual world. But but I just vomited five times. Mostly I'm just nauseating the latency was certainly an issue in those early days.

What was interesting was that you could definitely get the feeling of a virtual presence, like you could feel like when you walk over toward an edge in the game, that you were near a physical edge even though you were just standing on the ground. That was interesting, but the actual sophistication was lacking, and so there was this big gap between what we expected and what what what

was delivered at the time. I played a virtual reality game at a festival one time in the nineties, and I remember, I think, you know, when I was a kid, like every movie I went to see in the theater was the best movie I've ever seen, and I had I was very easily satisfied, I guess. But I do remember after this experience having this feeling like someone wasn't

write about that well. And of course there are other examples like the one I wrote down here was a series and voice controls in general, the idea of having this this voice activated personal assistant, the kind of backlash after it came out where people were like, this serie thing is kind of dumb. Yeah, Like at first people were thinking this is really cool, and they were having a lot of fun with the stuff that kind of the Easter eggs that were hidden with was mostly fun

to get cheeky with. Yeah, it was. It was a diversion more than an actual useful sory. Where can I do something illegal? Right? Where where can I hide a body? That kind of thing. Um. And then also I had the windows Surface tablet, which was really being pushed as the next like a really viable competitor to Apple's iPad. Uh, And there were a lot of people who were legitimately hoping that this would happen because competition, again is a

good thing. Competition pushes companies to keep innovating and to improve their products. So even if you never planned on getting a windows surface tablet, you might have hoped that it was a really good tablet because that would mean Apple would have to come back and for the iPad seventeen it would have to be truly amazing that kind of thing, and that they would continuously push each other.

But the general reception of the windows Surface tablet was that they just didn't quite It just didn't have the magic that needed to have to really be a competitor or the iPad. So again another expectation versus reality. Problem. Cool. Well, I think we should round this up end by giving a salute to a few sci fi visions that really do capture the awkwardness of consumer technology in a very perceptive and funny way. Sure, as we've said throughout, I think a lot of the sci fi that does this

best is satirical. I've been trying to think of a serious sci fi movie that or book or whatever that does this, and I haven't thought of one yet, though I'm sure they exist. But but we've got several satirical ones here, one which I don't know which of you noted, but I think it's a great one. Brazil, right, and Brazil that I wrote that one down, But Brazil really also goes back into that Parkinson's law as well, because it's all it's not just about kind of a weird

science fiction big brother state world, which it is. It's a big brother state world that's not efficient at all. It's it's rampant with bureaucracy. Right. We should say it's a Terry Gilliam film, Yes, Terry Gilliam film, and it uh, you know, it brings that Terry Gilliam sensibility. There's a lot of absurdity and and things are just useless and

pointless and don't make any sense, but they wield power. Right. Yeah, it's if it's a rule, you have to follow it, that sort of thing, like the rule doesn't have to make sense, but the rule has to be followed. And there's a possibility that no one knows why that rule is in place at all. Right, that rule may have outlived its usefulness, but because it's a rule, it's going to be there. So that describes the government and the bureaucracy in the movie. But the technology is an extension

of that same principle. There's all this technology that doesn't appear to have any real purpose the work. Yeah, hilarious machines that are these giant machines with these tiny little screens on and uh, it looks like a kind of a retro version of the future too. There's like there's a lot of of old fashioned typewriters that are worked into it. You know. It's it's a mixture of old tech and high tech sensibilities and also a level of

the grotesque. There's quite a bit of the grotesque, like the facelift device that is pretty memorable in a couple of scenes, but um, you know, this is the sort of stuff that you look at it and it's it's definitely pointing out the the the kind of absurdities of technology that we often encounter. Another one is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yep I wrote that one down to this one also has a lot like this is a universe that you can totally imagine existing, right It's it's

an absurd, comedic universe created by Douglas Adams. And in this world there's plenty of technology that works sometimes despite itself. So for example, there's a device that Arthur Dent, who

is formerly a resident of England. Uh contemporary, I mean like like nineteen eighties to two thousands England, depending on when exactly, Yeah, which version you're watching sum so if you're if you're consuming the original version, yeah, nineteen eighties, early nineteen eighties era England, he was a resident there and England spoiler alert in the in the story doesn't exist anymore because the Earth was blown up, but Arthur

happens on the third page. Arthur. Arthur is obsessed with getting a nice cup of tea because he's a real he's British, he's British. He's extremely British, and so a cup of tea is sort of his way of dealing with the world. Ending like he's got some stressed to to deal with. Uh, And he encounters a device that, in the words of Douglas Adams, is something along the lines that's able to produce something that is almost, but not quite entirely unlike tea. So it's almost the opposite

of whatever t is, but not quite. It's just on the side of tea enough for it to be identifiable as being almost completely wrong. That the automatic doors in this universe before they will let you into or out of themselves, need to talk to you for a while about their feelings about open They thank you for for for for walking through them every single time. This is a specifically on that feature. It's on the Heart of Gold, the Heart of Gold spaceship. Yeah. No. And then you've

got Marvin, Marvin the paranoid android. I mean, is this what we really want when we say we want general artificial intelligence? Do we want to be able to really simulate the human mind to program manic depression into a into a robo. Actually, I guess it's not even mannic depression is just depressions. He has the size brain, the size of the planet, and he's standing on a car park for a thousand years. Um, yeah, it's It's another one of those examples where the technology is another element

of absurdity on top of an already absurd story. But it really does point out that in this version, in this world, this universe that Arthur Dent goes through, the things we've talked about with consumer tech and the pitfalls associated with it, at least in this particular book, are universal. They're not not limited to the human experience. And then because everyone's ridiculous. Sure, I guess, I guess Another example of that would be the Fifth Element. Yeah, I wrote

this one down. Um, I filled up this one. I was as I was thinking about it, I was trying to think of of science fiction movies where the technology, at some point or another just is giving people problems. And the Fifth Element has a couple of moments like that. Particularly, Uh, there's a moment where Bruce Willis's character there's a knock at the door, doorbell rings, and he goes to answer at the door and there's a would be robber at

the door who's holding a gun. Pointing at Bruce Willis's character and the he's really twitchy robber guy, and Bruce Willis's character just very casually reaches over and says, you've got the safety on and turns the safety off for the robber who just kind of just like uh, and then and then he Bruce Willis pulls his own gun on the robber is like, why don't you just hand

that over here, and gets like okay. But it's one of those moments where like, like the technology is not you know, you could you would imagine then the future world, everything that is designed to do something is supposed to do it really really well, even weapons, even weapons, and even weapons, especially weapons in some cases, especially in the world of the Fifth Element, which is pretty violent. UM. But yeah, the technology and the Fifth Element ranges from

really useful to unreliable. So it's seems pretty realistic. And also the vision of the future, and that is not the pristine, glorious, glimmering future that you've see in a lot of other, like you know, far thinking science fiction films. Yeah, though that one, I would also say, though I wouldn't strictly call it a satire, it is UM does have strong humorous undercurrent. Say it's a comedy adventure with an emphasis on the comedy. Yeah, you can't. You can't have

the characters in that movie and not comedic comedy. Uh no, we straight future RuPaul is certainly a thing that happens.

Uh no. And and it's that one in particular I find pretty interesting because it's again a very cobbled together version of the future that incorporates a lot of historical technology and historical looking technology, and different characters from different characters from different social strata have access to different types of technology, and there's a little bit of a discussion

about the economics of all of that. There's a lot of different cultures represented, including alien cultures as it turns out, which is really interesting that you you see this kind of mishmash world and there is still like a social structure. Like you were saying, it kind of falls in that the lower in the world you are, the lower floor you live on. Essentially, it's it's kind of a kind of a direct correlative there. So what do you all think, I mean, have we been too hard to do? Maybe?

Uh maybe these movies have some good reasons for making all the future technology the consumer technology looks sleek, sexy, fast, easy to use, perfect Or should they make an effort maybe to show more of the foibles of the consumer electronics. I think, uh, I think if it's not distracting, um, then it's perfectly fine to throw in a couple of little moments, if that's not even the point of the movie.

Like even let's say you've got a plot of a movie where technology is part of the setting, but it's not the focal focal point, so it's not like the technology has risen up against the humans. But I think it's still fine to have. Like, even if it's just a background thing where you see someone who's clearly struggling with something, I think that could be a moment where you think, oh, yeah, I guess in the future, will will still be human? Yeah yeah, it's a humanizing moment,

And I think it it can. It's a great potential for levity, which I I personally enjoy very much, even in very very action, blow stuff up all those serious things kind of movies, and especially in those. Really I think it's a terrific little salt to to the dish. I kind of negatively in terms of what's actually going to happen in the future, and this is kind of

a cynical outlook. I suspect that that this is going to be a social strata economic kind of issue, wherein the upper classes are going to have perhaps the more sleek, more wonderful technology, and that there might be more of a divide unfortunately between the halves and have nots in this sort of discussion. Yeah, when you talk about is technology some extent, it is very much like that today. And so I guess the question is will it get better?

I mean, uh maybe maybe, I hope. We definitely want that future, right, we want the future where people have uh more affordable access to that kind of thing. If we ever hit the Star Trek future, then money doesn't matter anymore and everybody has access to everything, which would be nice. Also jumpsuits also, never forget the jumpsuits. Yeah, so, um,

I guess they're wraps up this discussion. If you guys have any suggestions for things we never see in science fiction that you want us to cover, maybe you think, hey, you know what we never see anymore? Ruby Rod? Can we see more Ruby Rod and science fiction? Let us know. Send us a message on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. Our handle is fw Thinking, and you don't have to limit it to just that. It could be any topic

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