Editor’s note: Besides following tech developments, our author is a musical composer (Juilliard-trained). He has provided a musical composition for you to listen to while reading this column. This piece is called “Sidestepping”.
We are all problem solvers, and we spend a lot of our lives solving the problems that come to us. But we don’t all approach problems from the same perspective. The way physicists view a problem is different from how an engineer does, but the way an artist or a writer views a problem is even more different still. This is because we all have very different mental models from one another.
To some extent, we are all empirical, meaning we do experiments and see what the results are. In general, solving a problem does require some experimenting.
But the larger issue is: wouldn’t it be better to avoid problems than to solve them? Especially tech problems if you’re not a tech person. All of us have become, to some extent, our own tech support personnel, mostly because the technology we use every day is a moving target.
Some people got really good at making their fax machines work. But nobody has a fax machine anymore—or almost nobody. And when they do, it’s generally an indication that they haven’t yet joined the 21st century because fax machines are decades old.
Some of us have also become very adept at dealing with our printers, which you would think are straightforward to use. But not necessarily, because they are mostly wireless now, and that brings up networking.
By the way, did you know that most college students never had a printer and don’t use hard copies at all? They haven’t for more than 20 years.
And then, what about our computers, which have this pesky habit of requiring updates? Often these are major updates, because a new operating system needs to be installed. When this happens, sometimes the apps you’ve been using stop working because they too need to be updated. But not all companies stay in business, and not all companies are able to perform updates.
This is not only true for our computers, but also for our phones—and even our cars. Since we all know that this is a problem we’re going to encounter many times, are there steps we can take to avoid having to solve these problems?
In general, I try to avoid updates for at least some period of time to make sure that they really work. Often, updates have problems, and the companies that create these software and hardware systems are relying on their customers to help them debug these issues. I don’t want to do that work for them, so I may even wait a year or two to upgrade an operating system until everyone has made sure that it works and that the apps I use have been updated so I don’t have to spend time solving these problems.
In this way, I solve the problem by avoiding the problem.
Another huge problem that can’t be avoided—though many people somehow do manage to sidestep—is the loss of data. Eventually, at some point, you will have systems that crash and lose your information. If you’ve been using these systems for years like I have, you save often when you’re working, back up frequently, and store backups in more than one place. It is inevitable that some system of yours will crash, and that you will lose your information. If you do not have a backup system—or perhaps more than one backup system—it’s going to take you a lot of time to sort through these problems. Sometimes, the data is not even recoverable. People lose important information all the time.
Then there’s the issue that many of us have multiple systems. How do you keep them in sync? Can you remember which system you used to perform a certain task?
If you’ve been using technology for any period of time, you eventually come to realize that all three of these things are inevitable: updates will occur, data loss will happen, and systems not being in sync will occur.
Are there steps you can take to avoid all three of these?
And what about contracts or legal agreements, which frequently exist to avoid problems? Many high-net-worth individuals create prenuptial agreements, just as corporations create contracts with clauses to deal with what will happen if there’s a problem. People anticipate problems in order to sidestep them. And many of us, in fact, all of us, have plenty of blind spots because the world is changing rapidly.
Is there anything you can do about this? If you don’t happen to have a friend or relative who is very technologically or legally literate, well, of course, there is. You can ask an AI what it thinks about it. If you know that a problem is likely to come up, you can ask an AI what you might be able to do to avoid it. I am dead serious. It may give you terrible advice, but the advice you get may be no more terrible than the advice your friends or relatives give you.
In all of these cases, you still have to weigh and measure the responses in terms of their usefulness and validity. But now all of us have someone we can ask about inevitable problems—like, “My system is going to crash, so what kind of backups would make the most sense?” It will probably ask you what kind of systems you have in order to give a better response. I mean, you do realize that the geniuses at the Apple Genius Bar are basically minimum-wage employees, right?
Just because your 11-year-old nephew has been messing around with computers doesn’t mean he can solve your problem, but it does mean that he can help you think about it because he’ll know something you don’t know. But you also know things he doesn’t know. The same is true for artificial intelligence. It knows some things you don’t know, and you know something it doesn’t. But you can use it to avoid problems. Because, after all, even if you are a very good problem solver, isn’t the best solution to recognize that you are surely going to have problems? Wouldn’t avoiding problems be more elegant than solving them, and wouldn’t that also take a lot less time? Just something to think about.
