The Perfection Of Technology

With all of the new technology around nowadays, such as electric cars, self driving cars, drones and AI, let's remember my concept of the Perfection of Technology. I have noticed something about technology that brings about a concept that we could call "perfection".

What I notice about technology is that when an element of technology, such as a car, radio, computer or, phone, is first introduced it is necessary to know how it works in order for the average user to use it. As the technology develops, with improvements made to it, it becomes less and less necessary for the average user to know how it works in order to use it. What I mean by perfection is not being "perfect", in the strict sense of the word, but having reached the point where there is no need to understand at all how it works in order for the average user to use it.

This concept of perfection is useful because it tells us how much room for improvement any element of technology has left. If it is necessary to know how it works for the average user to use it then it still has room for improvement. When it has reached perfection then the average user will have no need at all to understand how it works.

An example of something that has reached perfection is the calendar. We know that the calendar is based on the rotation of the earth as it revolves around the sun. But it is not necessary to understand this in order to use the calendar.

Mathematics is a realm that has reached perfection. What I mean by that is we must completely understand something in order to describe it with mathematics. But science is not a realm that has reached perfection because there are unsolved mysteries in science and we can express in words, rather than numbers, what we do not yet completely understand.

Perfection just means having no more room for improvement. It shows up in how much we need to understand something in order to use it. If it has reached perfection then there is no reason for the average user to understand it at all.

If anyone remembers the early days of personal computers, the C, colon, backslash days of DOS, you can see what I mean. This was known as the C Prompt, C:\. The user typed in a command after the C Prompt.

The user had to remember that the main hard drive of the computer was the C: Drive because that made it third in line in the boot sequence. The A: Drive was reserved for a floppy disk drive. The reason for this is that, if the computer failed to boot in the usual way from the C: Drive, it could be booted by inserting emergency boot floppy disks into the A: Drive which had the necessary boot sequence. The B: Drive was reserved for another insertible disk drive. If there was a secondary hard drive it was the D: Drive.

Fortunately those days are long gone and users today need to know none of this to use a computer, or especially a phone. But we can see that computers and related devices have not yet reached perfection because it is still helpful to know how the device works for the average user.

All improvements to technology go in the direction of making it less necessary to know how it works. I cannot think of a technological improvement that has made it more necessary to understand how it works, unless something has been added to it.

If it is helpful for the average user to know how it works then an element of technology has not yet reached perfection. Software and especially AI are major steps towards perfection.

High-level computer languages that are compiled make it much less necessary for a programmer to understand how the processor works but still do not bring the computer close to perfection.

What about radios? It used to be necessary to string a piece of wire as an antenna. That was because longer wavelengths were used in the early days. The shorter wavelengths that came into use later use much shorter antennas but can only be used in a line of sight. Shorter wavelengths can carry much more information, and thus higher quality.

The development of solid state electronics, based on chips instead of vacuum tubes, were a step forward so now the user doesn't have to remember how the radio requires tubes for detection and amplification because tubes have to be replaced periodically but transistors last the life of the radio.

In the early days of telephone a caller had to dial the operator and tell her who they wanted to be connected to. The operator had a pile of cables, each of which had a connector at each end. The operator would plug one end into the caller's connection and the other into the connection of the recipient of the call. At the end of the call the recipient would call the operator again and request removal of the cable. The user clearly had to know all about how the phone and it's system worked.

I will leave it up to you to decide how much room for improvement phones have left, keeping in mind that today's phones are computers as well as phones.

Cars are somewhat different from the above technical elements in that they are moving. With mechanical parts in motion that naturally makes auto parts susceptible to wear, and requiring replacement. This makes it much more necessary to understand how a car works, relative to the elements of technology referenced above.

To use a standard transmission it is necessary to understand how the transmission operates but automatic transmissions have eliminated this need. It is not absolutely necessary to know at all how a car works in order to drive it, other than the basic controls like ignition, steering and brakes. But, since cars are inevitably subject to the wear that comes with moving parts, a vital part of being a user is continuous monitoring for signs of malfunction or breakdown.

While it is not really necessary for a driver to understand how each part of the car works, but it is helpful and it is necessary to understand how the different parts of the car work together. This means that cars today are nowhere near perfection, despite how far they have come, and still have a lot of room for improvement left.