Tech Giveth, And Tech Taketh Away
I’m at the age where a lot of the technology we now take for granted was mostly in its infancy, although a lot of it still had a long way to go to reach puberty, never mind maturity. This makes me, and people of a similar age, the lucky ones! Seriously! Because although we’re a long way past puberty, and some people may even have reached some degree of maturity, we’ve pretty much grown up alongside the information highway and we don’t find technology as intimidating as people born twenty years earlier, and we can still remember, mostly, how things used to be before we became quite so dependent on a little piece of tech in our pockets.
For starters, we knew what books were and how to research in places like libraries. We took little for granted because we were able to think for ourselves. Many of us were even lucky enough to be taught how to think in schools and universities. We didn’t have to worry about groupthink because the little angry voices on social media hadn’t been given their megaphones. We were even brought up to respect our elders, parents and bosses — even on occasion our politicians — although that was already becoming somewhat harder.
We could choose how and when to buy into the new technologies that were springing up all around. We didn’t need mobile phones or 52-inch high-resolution TV screens because landlines worked perfectly well, and heck, even in 1982, we still only had three TV channels in the UK and none of the shows being made were filmed or recorded in particularly high resolution. Besides, you could see the latest blockbuster films at the cinema on mind-blowingly large screens, blasting sound out at ear-bursting volumes and still have enough money for a fish and chip supper, all for less than a Great British Pound.
My first computer was a BBC Model B 32K machine, which I built into a powerhouse with an additional 6502 processor, another Z80 processor and twin floppy disk drives. It was a beast on which I learned to develop software using Pascal (in a ROM). There’s probably more computing power in an Apple Air Tag these days, but I was a coding genius, and I lived in a world where there weren’t many people like me who could help me. So, I had to figure out stuff for myself.
I’m writing this in an apartment in Prague, which I’ve rigged up so that I can control many things with my voice and most other things with my watch. As technology has expanded exponentially, so has my ability to embrace and make it work for me. Am I worried about AI? Am I heck! I’m far more frightened by the actual intelligence (or lack thereof) of the many people who visit this city every year.
But even I get spooked by the technology companies from time to time. Take this morning for example. I received an email from Hive, a UK smart home system developed by British Gas and launched in 2012. I was an early adopter when it was mostly a system to remotely control the central heating, and have been using it ever since, and encouraged my fiancee to adopt it in her home. Over the years it has grown in features and accessories and for most of its lifetime has performed perfectly well. There are occasional frustrations but that’s an inevitability with tech, especially as the airwaves become more and more congested and dozens of gadgets all crying out to be connected.
This morning’s email was alarming. Hive have had a tendency to pull features and even whole accessory groups out of the system from time to time. Their excellent security cameras are destined to be chopped in 2025, leaving us with perfectly functional cameras which will turn into paperweights at the click of a switch. This time the Internet based monitoring sytem was on the hit list, meaning that the Hive app would be the only way to access a Hive home system as from June 2024. I went into panic. The web dashboard is the only way I can monitor both my own home in the UK, and keep an eye on my partners home. And since you can’t add more than one instance of an App on an iPhone this meant I’d potentially be locked out of one or other system.
I was unaware this functionality had been around in the Hive app for a while. I mean, you don’t tend to go looking for new functionality in an app which you are using to perform a specific task and it’s working perfectly well. So I started whinging on a Hive Facebook page…(not something I do very often I hasten to add. I try to keep my contributions as helpful as possible rather than complain!). Luckily for me and others who may have been thinking along the same lines, there are good people on Facebook as well as utter morons, and I was pointed in the right direction. I thanked the gentleman profusely and called my fiancee, and within minutes, we each had access to each other’s home control systems from the Hive app.
So, you see, Tech does sometimes taketh away, but very often (not always) it’s only an illusion and what’s apparently been taken away, is actually still hiding in plain sight. It just needs to be discovered. And, I doubt I’d ever have found the solution to that problem in a library!
I am a semi-retired, independent management consultant specialising in organisational change management and better working methods. I’m from the UK but based in Prague in the Czech Republic. I mainly write about developing better ways of working, about working in the Apple ecosystem and about my adopted home in Prague, but I’m relatively new to Medium (so please be gentle with me!).