Tag: Gordon Moore

Less is more

In reading Steve Jobs, a theme keeps emerge: less is more.

He cut out the fat and all its distraction.

(being a veggie, he stayed true to form).

His closet was full of the same long-sleeve stretch shirt that defined his personal brand.

His take on wealth and money was also consistent with his 60’s philosophy.

Steve could be nice when he chose to, but working for him must have been a nightmare.

His current replacement was quoted as saying “someone must take charge and fix the problem in China i.e. suppliers”. Half an hour later, he turned to see the man in charge still sitting there “why are you still here?”. That man drove to SF airport and bought a ticket flying East.

It’s true that our world is better and certainly more beautiful with technologists like Steve who also doubled as art lovers (I-pod).

If life consists of only 0’s and 1’s, we would all be automatons.

Lucky for us, we got both Bohr and Beethoven, Newton and Nicholas Cage.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Yet people keep acquiring, acquiring, acquiring.

And the longer I live, the more I see this isn’t going to end.

The pursuit of happiness has meant the pursuit of things (think of exercising equipment for home you saw on night TV).

All I can recall from a Hermeneutic class was “a priori “(we read into a text what we had already thought it would say).  We have consitently misinterpreted the meaning of happiness. In fact, advertisers have done this for us (driving a Cadillac is cool. Hence, to be cool, you must own a Cadillac).

Those text-book writers managed to make complex something very simple.

Urban gangs could say “yo man, m..f…is a racist”. That would say it all.

In the age of Wikipedia, if we want to go in-depth about a topic, just click it and scroll down. The spread of information will multiply even more quickly than Gordon Moore had anticipated (IBM has found a way to save space in transistors, call it magnetization, as opposed to polarization as traditionally used). Devices will get smaller with longer battery life (Acer’s thinnest laptop).

But convenience and comfort don’t equate to happiness. Life has gone on for centuries unassisted by today’s accessories. A tribe in India (island) is still functioning without modern amenities. (Tourists tried to bribe them to “pole dance” for YouTube , raising the issue of “human zoo”.)

The happy countries index often lists Costa Rica and other S American countries.

Yes, quality of life index listed Scandanavian countries such as Norway and Finland. They got the oil, but equally distributed unlike Lybia. But happiness doesn’t confine to just Costa Rica as opposed to Costa Mesa (where South Coast Plaza Mall is located). Perhaps Steve saw something while living in India (My Sweet Lord).

Perhaps we too should reexamine what are the core things that make us happy.

Beauty is found in wild lilies and the grandest scene recurs at every sunset.

Sometimes we missed those moments of happiness, only to recognize them after the fact. Would it be simpler to give happiness the initiative to seek us out. I bet you it work out better that way.

Forced leisure

MSNBC  interviews a blogger from Good magazine on automation nation.

The take away: automation is moving beyond manufacturing sector (e.g. Google test drove an unmanned vehicle in California, or Italian researchers tested a driver-less van, from Italy to China) to service sectors, such as health care .

Japan has been deep into robotic technology, a national policy to appease conservatives who were anti- immigration, and democrats who caters to its aging population.

Today, China has the fastest computer in the world.

Translation: it can develop faster elevators, bullet trains, assembly lines and bottling lines, weather forecasting, medical tech, bio tech, clean tech and up-the-value-chain services.

In short, all things that compute.

I cannot envision 1.3 Billion Chinese forced to travel and spend their leisure time away from factories and industrial parks

(take a nap in IKEA showroom, anyone?)

Unlike Japanese companies which have off shored their work force to counter balance their unfavorable currency (as of this edit, its Central Bank refuses to print more stimulus money, resulted in Asia’s stock plunge), Chinese companies have moved factories away from coastal cities as far as  Africa for cost-cutting.

Automation and offshoring  full impact will ease wage pressures and labor unrest e.g. Foxconn workers’ suicide.

It’s a Detroit way to fix Union challenge. First, they shifted manufacturing jobs South of the border, then, overseas. Then, service jobs were off shored as well. Now, even call centers in India’s major cities got further outsourced to secondary cities to shave off costs, with automation as first solution.

(I was just interrupted by a Spanish-speaking automated voice pitch from a retailer, probably urging me to rush to early Black Friday). First get someone else to do the job elsewhere. Then the machine. Then the customers.

Toffler was so prescient in observing trends such as pro-sumerism (the consumers contribute to the process of making the product e.g. stuff your own stuff animal, upload your Facebook data) and outsourcing. Kurzweil has been a thought leader in predicting that “Singularity is near“.

In the age of assembly line, Jobs the rebel, came up with the I brand (people buy the I phone cover to show individuality). Even I-robots invasion into our domestic lives. As Gordon Moore continues to see his “law” be self-fulfilling, Michael Moore will produce angrier documentaries i.e. about industrial changes and worker’s displacement.

Changes that are almost at the “speed of thought”. Bill Gates could think of the title, but his successor is left holding the bag. Knowing that change is coming is one thing, adequately preparing for it is quite another. These days, one cannot fight against the machine (winning at one chess game doesn’t guarantee much). The cat is out of the bag. Even if we took the Luddites approach, 21st  century lifestyles can’t accommodate collaboration Amish-style.  We left our farms for the factories just to end up with forced leisure. No wonder micro-trends like knitting, pawning, flannel shirts are back (knitting for boys?).

Back to frontier days, and the spirit of survival. In the Golden State, digging equipment and Levis are back. The Alpha male mentality. Off the grid.

The good thing is , blue jeans are still in. If you can still fit in those. If not, off to Wal-Mart, where jeans are cheap (thanks to logistic and automation). Have you noticed there is no one around to help you find your size? Workers have all turned shoppers of goods produced by 24/7 machines that don’t take break or demand health care.

Machines can’t afford to take time off. Neither can we, but it is increasingly forced upon us.

Amuse ourselves to the next level

Neil Postman didn’t see the rise of game online when he penned “Amuse ourselves to death”.

But he was on to something worth discussing: we are heading toward becoming a couch-potato nation

or in China, Internet-addict camp.

When Chinese kids get sent to these internet addict camps, we witness another unintended consequence of our high-tech living.

This puts Mr Watson in the early days of IBM to shame. He said the world market could use a few, but no more than a dozen machines.

Nobody could foresee the fall-below-the-line price of the chip, maybe except for Gordon Moore who predicted the doubling of chip speed every 18 months.

My kid watches her cartoon on Hulu. Asked why she didn’t want to watch it on TV. She said on broadband, she could watch it when she wanted it.

This kid even wants control, and not waits for a scheduled time by the network.

I will have to put a cooking alarm clock next to her desk just to limit her screen time.

Or let her “amuse herself to the next level”, the highest of which is at the Internet addict camp. Long way from Florida. And she will have to speak Chinese to

understand guard’s command. Maybe it’s not a bad idea, the unintended consequence of it all: internet addicts from the West get sent to Chinese internet-addict camps,

thus picking up a foreign language.

Neil Postman built his premise on the 4-hour average  (TV watching). Now it’s 5 hours, not counting the many hours online.

No wonder advertising appears in most unlikely places: pop up (download wait), stand-on (beer aisle), stare at while in a moving elevator or taxi cab.

We are living on New York minutes, even if we are  not physically there. Because New York is now more than a New Year countdown. It’s every day’s ticking, a state of mind. No more Crocodile Dundee coming to New York.

New York is now in Dundee’ Australian back waters. Hello, hello, hello…..

Luckily, we have a built-in alarm clock : it’s our bladder. Nature break. Machines will have to wait. Human will survive and be adaptive. Continuous re-invention.

To the next level of distraction and anesthesia.