Worcestershire Journal - On simplicity and complexity
by Karl - November 25, 2008 10:22am
Whenever we got to talking about computers or the Internet, my father liked to remind me that, when he was a kid, radio didn’t exist. We got him a cell phone that he never used. One of his last purchases before he died a couple of years ago was an LCD TV. He bought it not for the improved picture quality, but because he could get the sound loud enough so that he could hear it without using up his hearing aid batteries.
He was a clever guy, Huck was. He built lots of interesting things from houses to boats to log splitters and stuff in between. The simplicity of the stuff that he build belies the amount of work and thought, what he called pondering, to make it simple.
Sometimes, necessity trumped subtlety. He needed to do some welding inside the camp. The welding machine was in the parking area by the boathouse and there was no easy way to bring it close enough so he could use the regular cables. He didn’t have (and didn’t want to buy) extra-long cables. So, he found some barbed wire from the old fence that marked the back boundary of the camp, hooked it up, and went to work. The barbed wire glowed red-hot, but he got the work done. Some 60 years later, you can still see the scorch marks on the window sill where the barbed wire came into the camp.
As clever as he was, however, he worked with things that he could see. The trend toward miniaturization, which began in the 50s with the advent of the transistor, made it difficult to know what was going on. Even though the magic of invisible radio waves was involved, you could see how an old radio worked by following the circuits and looking at the tubes. No longer. Wires disappeared into smaller and smaller chips and eventually reached the level of incomprehensibility.
In the 1970s, Ken Olsen, then CEO of Digital Equipment Corp., remarked that one of their latest systems was so complex that that no one person could understand the whole system. And, we’ve never turned back.
Before long, stuff became so complex that you reached that situation that Douglas Adams described, “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a non-working cat.”
Last summer, we needed some repairs on a cast-iron ladder. I brought the ladder to Paul at Queen Lake Auto Repair. Paul does lots of different stuff, mostly car repairs, but also some welding, the mode of the old shade tree mechanic. When I arrived, he was splitting firewood and didn’t mind taking a break. We got to talking about his work. He said that he spent as much time in front of his computer as he did with his head under the hood, tracking down repair manuals for newer cars to learning diagnostic codes for the cars’ computers. Another guy showed up and we spent the next while talking about printers and Google and wireless networks. There was too much for one person to learn and apply; you had to keep going back to the computer to look stuff up.
Our cars and gadgets do have a lot more features, cost proportionally much less than they used, and, in most cases, last longer. We sacrifice some independence when we rely on such complex gear and we get a lot in return. Most of the time.
Karl Hakkarainen is a writer who resides in Holden and Phillipston. In addition to holding a variety of technical and management positions in high tech, Karl has been a newspaper reporter, freelance writer, and short-order cook. He has maintained a personal blog, A Traveler From the World of Work, since 2004.