The Apple Watch rekindled fond memories of an old episode of speaking truth to digital power.
It happened in a bar. Twenty or thirty people were milling about cheerfully in anticipation of an evening of free drink and merriment. They had been informed a few days earlier that the final release candidate of the software they'd been working on for almost a year was the real deal, the golden master was done and on its way to the factory.
The Director stood at the bar talking to the barkeep, giving him the company credit card number and looking up some information on his PDA, his personal digital assistant. A handful of engineers noticed the PDA and started hemming and hawing as their boss tapped the small keyboard with a stylus.
He savored the admiration of the small audience until he overheard a voice from behind his left shoulder ask why would anyone want to use a knitting needle to operate a device? He turned his head far enough to see the irreverent team member and was visibly relieved when he noticed it was not one of his folks, just a contractor who would be gone when the project wrap up was finished by the end of the week.
Since those days, the stylus has become a fixture of everyday life, the knitting needle joke has been told a few times too often, and even the modified oh, you can't even do knitting with a stylus has turned a bit stale.
The underlying issue has not gone away, though.
Pinching, squeezing and tapping doesn't solve the fundamental problem of nature's inability to equip at least half of humans with adequately small, dainty fingers.
Adapting the old custom of Chinese foot binding to the hands of 21st Century tech users has not even been proposed.* It remains a mystery why not. People are willing to forgo real food in favor of the horrendously named liquid concoction Soylent, they put RFID chips on their extremities to magically turn lights on and off, and they do all sorts of crazy things.
Voice commands are the answer, say some, without realizing that, strictly speaking, a command may or may not be an answer.
Granted, talking to your watch is not necessarily more or less crazy than talking to your cat, but we build the watch, so we have options. Unlike with cats.
Should we wait until evolution catches up and finally gives us Human 4.0 as those who persist reap the benefits of this technology, eventually producing offspring with slightly better fingers, who will in turn outperform their sausage-fingered cousins and produce even better fingers?
But what happens to those unfortunate contemporaries who cannot evolve cute spider leg fingers because their livelihood selects for strong digits?
We should not exaggerate the problem because even traditional technologies often favor the little-handed, as the author discovered recently when replacing an old porch light.
Had you been within a 50 foot range, you would have heard this: Who the fuck managed to wire this up, there is less than half an inch of wire sticking out of the wall?
So, after capping the wires, a solar light was installed instead.
Oh, you changed the light.
Yep.
You did is without even disturbing the spider who's using it to attract bugs.
C'mon, you think I'd do that on purpose?
I think, you would be exactly the kind of person to do this on purpose.
So, folks, what is the world's take on adopting Chinese foot binding to fingers so we can finally uses those gadgets as their inventors intended?
* Just hoping this statement is correct, because who really knows what's going on in the Chinese (!) factories where they assemble our electronics from tiny components.
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