This is one of the few areas where I grudgingly accept the old "you can't stop the march of progress" rationalization. Nonetheless, I think it is very disturbing that the technology everyone relies on for day-to-day existence is no longer accessible to the common man. It used to be that an illiterate could learn to overhaul an internal combustion engine. Today, even a routine adjustment is often beyond the capability of a competent engineer unless supported by on-line manuals, software, computers, internet connections, software licenses, etc. It is now cheaper to replace a perfectly good piece of equipment than to perform preventative maintenance on it. It is inevitable that this will inevitably lead to waste, and yes, loss of freedom: we are becoming dependent on support from vendors who are eager to sell us services which we at one time could rely on ourselves to perform.

I suppose this is all worth it if the performance, safety or cost of the technology can be substantially improved, but I still get a bad feeling about it. I get the impression market forces are more crucial now in developing new technology than technical requirements. Even many of the computer skills we all learned back in the paleolithic period, like writing code or designing software systems, are becoming increasingly irrelevant, or being taken over by narrow specialists who only have the vaguest idea of the real-world applications they are supporting. What's worse, specialists in many fields find that they are spending less and less time using the computer to solve problems and more and more time solving computer problems.

In my own profession, geography/cartography, my skills at map design and composition, imagery interpretation and enhancement, coordinate systems, statistical analysis of spatial relationships, map projections and so on are taking a second place to database maintenance, file formats, data management and learning interminable new user interfaces. Furthermore, the quality of the work is declining as less and less time is spent by professionals picking up job experience and more and more is devoted to perfecting IT skills. Science and engineering are being converted to bookeeping and data entry. Employers are more interested in making idle workstations productive than in exploiting human knowledge and experience. The trend is to prefer depth to breadth in new hires ("Do you have any experience with version 9.2?"). And of course, the finished product come off the plotters with a legitimacy and polish that handily obscures the fact that it is often just plain wrong. Work isn't fun anymore, and for me, at least, this was a tragedy in my life I never prepared myself for.

It's gotten to the point that really understanding a system or technology has taken a back seat to being familiar with the latest software or developing the intuition to quickly pick up a superficial working knowledge of some obscure sytem. No one seems to spend enough time doing anything to get really good at, and if you do, you are ridiculed as being a technological fossil, an "expert on our legacy software". You are obsolete as soon as the application is.

Remember when it might be years, even decades, between the time a spacecraft was designed and when it completed its mission? The long funding and development delays, coupled with long voyages into the deep solar system, meant many spacecraft arrived at their destinations with completely archaic software and hardware. In spite of this, the operators of these missions were able to perform heroic feats of remotely repairing malfunctions and finding workarounds, often in ways completely unanticipated by the mission planners. This can only happen when the technicans have a committment to the mission, not just the latest technology. It took years of experience to rescue some of these spacecraft, years in which their masters were not keeping up with the march of progress.

Perhaps we have reached the point where the technology is now developing faster than we can learn it. If that's the case, we're losing control of it.

Elisee the Luddite