(07-21-2017, 10:11 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(07-20-2017, 09:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(07-20-2017, 05:57 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: A brief comment on the original comment on how GPS makes you dumber.
There were earlier echoes of this. As the frontier vanished and more people moved to the cities, people thought we were loosing wilderness survival skills... which we were. One response was the Boy Scouts of America attempting to keep the old skills alive.
I have also thought the GI good with their hands. If it was broke, they could fix it. That seems to be fading as well.
I suspect that as technology and culture shift, the most useful skill sets shift as well. Overall, I would say the new internet and computer technology is putting a lot more information in the users hand, even if how to get the same information using dated hard copy methods becomes forgotten.
Note also that our objects are getting more complicated and intricate. If they are necessarily manufactured by a machine or robot, then we can hardly expect to repair those objects.
A Model-T Ford was so designed that the average person could repair it if it broke down. Contemporary cars? Could you replace or repair a catalytic converter? Or the car's air conditioner or radio? Obviously the car from a century ago had no radio, air conditioner, or catalytic converter.
Repairability and maintainability is an engineering discipline unto its self. However, it requires lots of diligence and creativity early in the design process. Often times, a designer resents input from experts in this field, because it forces the designer into certain constraints and may slightly increase the overall part count (especially interconnects and fasteners). Also on that score, enter also the bean counter. Still, having highly repairable and maintainable cars, consumer electronics, etc, is very possible. Were humanity to adopt a true Green philosophy, maintainability and repairability would be easily justified due to their reduction of total life cycle costs born currently by The Commons and the consumer. BTW, the same features of good maintainability and repairability also tend to make field upgrades far more viable, just saying.
Let's also remember -- the Model-T Ford broke down often. It would be terribly unsafe by modern standards. Lacking a fuel pump the car relied upon gravity to drive the fuel, so people often drove it in reverse up a hill so that they could get to the top of a hill. Ease of repair implies that it has much less to repair. Of course the Tin Lizzie is much too slow for modern highways, so it is no longer street-usable unless it has a modified (and thus non-genuine) engine.
But much that is truly modern is reliable enough. I have a ten-year-old flat-screen TV that has never needed a repair. The design was apparently really, really good. I suspect that obsolescence is more likely to cause me to give it up than a mechanical breakdown.
For real sustainability, technology can allow self-repair, as with computers. I expect self-repair to become a norm for robots and spacecraft.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.