Darragh McManus
Sorry, Apple...but I’m too old for a brave new world
THIS week Apple did its annual launch of new products, and all the attendant features we’ve come to know and hate were there.
The boss-man addressing an adoring crowd, like the world’s dweebiest rock-star.
A range of products breathlessly pitched as if this was Moses coming down from the mountain.
Indistinguishable brand names involving lots of I’s and X’s.
That geeky watch they’re still trying to make cool. Nerds worldwide licking their lips at the prospect of spending over a grand on a phone.
And one other hardy annual: the Apple launch inevitably leaves me cold.
It’s just stuff, isn’t it?
In fairness to Apple, though, I’m not the target market for their latest bit of kit. What I am is a dinosaur – who couldn’t be more out of step with these technological times if I was an actual dinosaur.
A new book by mathematician Hannah Fry, ‘Hello World’, explores algorithms. These now control our lives at an ever-increasing rate and ever-deeper level, in such subtle and clever ways we often don’t realise it’s happening.
Fry examines their use (and abuse) across several areas of life: elections, crime and punishment, culture, medicine, transport. In essence, humans are ceding more power to machines all the time.
Part of me wishes I could travel back in time and uninvent the smartphone, the internet, the silicon chip
There’s some fairly scary stuff here – Cambridge Analytica, invasion of privacy, algorithms deciding prison sentences. But what was really scary was the thought I had while reading – to quote Danny Glover in ‘Lethal Weapon’, “I’m too old for this s***.”
I’m too old for all the incomprehensible technology which surrounds us: a real-life proof of Arthur C Clarke’s immortal maxim about any tech, suitably advanced, being indistinguishable from magic.
I’m too old for social media altering our collective and individual minds, for these uncountable machines which control everything.
For the pace of change. The newness of everything. The inexorable laws by which each new thing then becomes obsolete, replaced by something even newer.
Part of me hates and dreads this brave new world.
Part of me wishes I could travel back in time and uninvent the smartphone, the internet, the silicon chip.
It’s not just some Luddite “subconscious resistance to change” thing. I honestly feel my brain is no longer capable of adjusting to these new paradigms. They’re too big for me to process. Everyone reaches a point after which brain plasticity no longer functions as it used to. For me, that point was reached sometime in my late 30s.
This means I have no problem, psychologically or neurologically, engaging with such items as telephones, cars, DVD players, personal stereos, computers: stuff that existed when I was young enough to ‘get’ it.
But I don’t have a smartphone, and the main reason is that I can’t figure out how to work them.
I look like a chimpanzee, forever wrongly jabbing instead of swiping, in futile attempts to send a text or open the picture gallery.
I’ve never used Bluetooth.
Fry subtitles her book ‘How to be Human in the Age of the Machine’.
And I know, in some ways, there’s no choice: as the world keeps reminding me, “you can’t ignore change, you have to engage with this new technology”.
But maybe I’m incapable of it. Even if I wanted to make nice with the algorithms (I don’t), I simply can’t.