I know I shouldn’t do it but I guess I’ll never learn. Today, I was scanning the internet news headlines
and I came across this: Nike Unveils Its First Self-Lacing Sneaker. It was bad enough when they introduced the
pump so you could tighten your shoes’ fit, but now they are putting sensors and
adjustment mechanisms in the shoe to ensure the proper of fit. And soon, they will release a shoe that makes
the adjustment by itself.
Now I am no luddite.
I embrace useful technological advances with good humor (notice I wrote,
“useful” ‘cause let’s face it, some technology is just there for the bragging
rights). But it seems to me that we are on the path to
a skill-set free existence. Soon, no one
will have to do anything, it will all be done for us. One of my toughest childhood challenges was
learning to lace and tie my shoes. When
I mastered that, I had booked a huge win in the self-confidence column of life’s
register. And it was no easy feat. I remember, my dad announced, “This is the
day you learn to tie your shoes!” I have
to admit that I was wearing my little red cowboy boots daily not to make a
fashion statement, but because it was required we take off our shoes for kindergarten
nap time… and the teacher forbade my little girl-friends from tying my shoes
for me (you may remember Donna and Rose Marie from a previous post).
I was seated in the family folding chair (why we had one
folding chair was a mystery I never solved, even to the day I sold the damn
thing at my parents’ estate sale) facing a blank wall, no TV, until I
successfully followed the rabbit through the hole three times. But by the end of those tortuous hours (well
it seemed like hours to me) I was equipped with a skill that precluded my wearing
penny loafers… ever!
And speaking of the family folding chair, it was deeply
involved in my training reference: getting cracker crumbs on my Sunday suit
while dining at the Chief’s Club (NCO Club to non-sailors); talking while in
church; overfilling the bathroom sink while reenacting the Battle of Okinawa
with my fleet of toy ships; letting the dog and/or cat into the house (spaying/neutering
was not so widely practiced in the days of my youth; if you don’t understand
you’ve never owned a tom cat).
But back to the point of waning skill sets. We have so little to do concerning our day-to-day
existence that is not done for us automatically by a machine or for a fee by
some entrepreneur that we are dumfounded when something doesn’t perform as per
our expectations and we are forced to buy a replacement rather than fix it, or
worse yet, do without!
Mastery of problem solving skills, even simple ones like
tying one’s shoes, are essential to our continued existence as a biological
entity. Yet more and more of our skills
are being eroded because it’s all done for us.
See how many of the questions you regarding simple tasks you can answer:
- How do you make a shovel more effective (if you are stumped by the term “shovel”, just quit now)?
- What is the proper gap for your sparkplugs (if you don’t know where your sparkplugs are, meet your new robot overlords)?
- Does water boil at a higher or lower temperature at higher elevations, and what effect does that have on cooking times (or you could just eat trail mix, right)?
- Do you know how to change a flat tire (do you even know where your spare is, or if you have one)?
- If your car gets stuck in the mud, should you add air or decrease air in your tires (if you don’t know, why did you leave the pavement in the first place)?
If you desperately need the answer to any of these
questions, call the people at Nike who invented the self-lacing shoe.
No comments:
Post a Comment