Technological breakdown

You might even have been using technology without knowing about it. Because, believe it or not, using your phone or driving your car would be impossible without at least some technology. And did you know that even your watch uses technology? Just take the back off and there it is – lots of technology packed in there, really small. This might be counter-intuitive to many of you, but it’s actually technology that’s moving the fingers around the dial. So without it, we simply wouldn’t be able to tell the time – at least with the modern watches that have tech in them, rather than the old ones that worked by winding them up; but few people alive can remember those now.

Other devices that have been replaced by technology include typewriters, stationary phones, steam organs, video recorders and vinyl discs. All have been made redundant, crushed into quaint obsolescence by the relentless march of technology. Even the word ‘disc’ has been replaced by ‘disk’ under this technological onslaught. I’ve lost count of the embarrassing situations when I’ve asked for the latest floppy disk in a shop only for the millennial behind the cash desk to snigger at the old-timer in front of him mispronouncing the word as “disc”. Another problem we can often encounter with technology is that we could start chatting with someone online, strike up a friendship, swap photos, make marriage proposals… only to realise at some point that we’d been chatting with an AI, virtual reality ‘chatbot’ all along. There are too many tragic examples to mention here of those who have fallen into this trap and, despite discovering that they had been the victim of a hoax, nonetheless felt obliged to go through with the wedding.

Many pitfalls of this kind lie in wait for the increasingly bewildered, tech-unsavvy older generations that you and I belong to. I say “you” because for sure a millennial wouldn’t be seen dead reading anything as old-fashioned as a magazine. They may accidentally see the online version, but wouldn’t be able to read it anyway because it contains no ‘textspeakish’ (the syntax-free, monosyllabic language they communicate in). It would look like hieroglyphs to them and be entirely undecipherable. Scarily, some of them may already – while slouching back on beanbags sucking iced lattés out of plastic cups – be working on the tech needed to translate this column into textspeakish... and probably also on a journo ‘bot’ that would write this column for real estate ‘bots’ to read in-between developing their virtual buildings for other bots to live and work in. This terrifying vision of the future is, I’m afraid, inevitable – so we’d better start getting used to it.

You might think that technology is as old as the hills. And you’d be wrong. This misconception has only arisen due to the word ‘technology’ itself, which derives from the Greek teknos, meaning ‘technical stuff’, plus logos, meaning ‘to log on’. However, the ancient Greeks never actually used that word and their method of logging on involved carving passwords onto real wooden logs. Although modern computers today use basically the same logging on method, the crucial difference is that they use technology to do so. The carving is done at a microscopic level deep inside your computer, by super intelligent nanobots that use minuscule lasers to burn your password onto unimaginably small wooden logs, which then float around the computer’s circuit.

On the other side of the bit-coin (a new kind of invisible money and the preferred payment method of those people who keep emailing me to tell me they’ve been filming me using my computer – I don’t even have a webcam, but thought it best to keep paying them anyway), technology has given us many wonderful and ingenious things: the microwave, the mobile phone, Brexit and President Trump, to name but a few. But it’s not all good stuff that it has given us.

In spite – or maybe because – of its unstoppable success, there has been an inevitable backlash against technology. The ‘anti-techer’ movement has emerged, dedicated to the overthrow of technology and a return to a simpler, tech-free time, when the only entertainment was watching black-and-white TV or listening to music at the roller-disco on your walkman. This campaign to eradicate all technology had a slow start, but was eventually able to flourish thanks to chat forums, mobile apps and online petitions. I’ll certainly be adding my name to one of these the next time I log on. And so should you – if you don’t want robot-you to be reading an article by robot-me this time next year.

This is Nathan North’s final Endpiece column. Starting from next month the regular columnist will be Hackdroid 3000