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Exactly. As much as it’s peculiar and annoying to see everyone walking around looking at their phone, imagine if everyone was looking at a book. You’d think my, this is quite a literate society.
That happened to me once. Operator error. One of those instances in which a computer is obediently doing what it was ordered to do, but you don’t realize you told it to do that.
Downloading high-resolution topographic maps? So that’s why their so popular! (Just kidding)
I love newspapers. I really do. I love paper and print, and folding and glancing back to know where I was on a page, and flipping through to see how much more before the end of the paper, the story or the report. It takes a millisecond, but it helps me. And I hate a scrolling screen it’s like living in the present and not knowing history. It’s like never really realizing how much you’ve read in an article and then having to scroll back to look for a previous reference, and having to scroll down again and look for where you’ve left off.
And with different font sizes and self-adjusting formatting, you can never know exactly where to look on page number 47 or C12 for that thing you just were reminded of and wanted to check out again.
I use computers almost exclusively, but I really mostly hate them.
What I would like, and have been waiting for for decades, and what people had been working on in times past, was a foldable durable paper embedded with HD appearing-and-disappearing ink that is electrically activated, a paper that can be a single page newspaper that you can put in your breast pocket.
In those years before wi-fi I thought it might be that you could go up to a magazine or newspaper stall on the street on the way to work and for a quarter touch the corner-contact of the paper to a dispenser, which downloaded the whole newspaper to yours. And with thumb pressure to change pages and you could read front and back, over and over again until you’ve read the whole paper.
That was before the cell phone which is notoriously fragile and water-susceptible, and heavy and “butt-dials” and has so many touch buttons that I can’t talk to my sister without the constant beep of her ear touching the touch screen. AND tracks your every move, word, thought and smell. “He’s in the Deli, Mr. Brin!”
That paper, that I would invest in. If only to make the world a better place.
Well at least you don’t have it in a case on your belt…
When people tell me artificial intelligence is going to take over our lives, I just say, “Google Maps”.
I beg to differ. I know for a certain fact that they save their most malicious AI algorithms in secret, staying in a back room, smoking cigars, and drinking rum… dreaming up images of girls that are indistinguishable from the real thing… and making indecipherable puns and cackling while playing 3D Monopoly. Disgusting.