on-many-things-blog

[on-many-things-blog]

... On TIME and mobile computing

A fancy way of saying browsing the web, social media, taking pictures and selfies (a word I hate by the way), ordering food, taxi (a word increasingly replaced by Uber and Lyft), taking care of finances, chatting with friends/family/strangers, dating and on goes the list.

Most of these used to be routine errands and tasks that made up day to day living until about a decade ago, since one had to physically go to a location where the said task or errand could be completed. So, when the folks in Silicon Valley (and maybe other places as well) carelessly say “We are making the world a better place”, there is perhaps some truth to it. They are certainly making life easier and easier with the launch of every piece of tech, be it a new phone or app (any hardware or software for that matter). It is convenient to communicate with people in far away places; it is saving time by taking commuting out of the equation in a lot of circumstances and there are a ton of ways to express one’s self and connect with others like never before. 

The underlying goal here, at least in my opinion, seems to be the fact that one can accomplish all the routine work and then some, with enormous ease and comfort while saving money and time. For example, during the recent Google I/O 2017 event (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654432/google-io-2017-keynote-highlights-news-announcements-recap), they talked extensively about the integration of machine learning and AI to make photo sharing and editing super easy; how the AI is helping people look for jobs and saving companies time and money etc.  I see it, I get it, fine.

However, the word “computing” in my mind, stands for number crunching or running very powerful devices and process in an industry/lab setting for the purposes of design, R&D, manufacturing, finance or education. For example crunching numbers to fold for protein molecules; resolving drag coefficient or running the Monte Carlo math model for a financial analysis, in my mind, would be “computing.” Now I am not saying that people should be doing this on their phones or anything (although devoting their computing resource during off times to such a cause would be spectacular, like PlayStation 3 back in the day - http://folding.stanford.edu/faqs/technical/high-performance/folding-sony-playstation-3-ps3/). I do think however, with the exception of truly busy souls, that all the ease, comfort and time savings are only giving the fingers of “ordinary” people a good workout and straining their eyes to the nth degree.

Sure, someone whose job is to process lot of images and share it across departments for various reasons will benefit greatly with such new features introduced by google but for someone who just uploads 2000 selfies to social media (not that there is anything wrong with it), the new AI feature in photo sharing is probably useless because now that a bot did their job for them, they are likely to use the “saved time” on making more selfies… Still think the world is becoming a better place?

Again, these are just my thoughts. Feel free to share yours.

Also sorry for the horrible grammar and spelling!