Steve Jobs, Mr. User Friendly…
I never met the man, although I can say he was very much a part of my life—for most of my life as a scientist, at least. He was the consummate snake-oil salesman, giving most people what they needed and convincing them they needed it whether they knew they needed it or not. While that need was often a fix to satisfy an addiction to new technology—in other words, a perceived need, as a child needs new toys—there is no doubt that he was a genius in bringing to market many user-friendly devices that have changed how the world uses computers.
Most people are users of computer technology. iPods, iPads, and iPhones have made it easier for them, no doubt about it. All those nifty little apps also make life easier for many people, as long as there is one to do what you need it to do—or, as long as you don’t need to go beyond the programming restrictions of the app. Apple technology and the technology of competitors who try to keep pace with Apple technology are slowly converting the population of the world into technological savages—more and more users mean more and more customers, and most don’t give a damn about how the gizmo works. The addiction to new gizmos is driving a lot of research and innovation in the world right now.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If we take the view that information is power, the easier it is to get information to people, the better off the world will be. This is why fascist states like China Inc try to control information. This is why the Arab Spring took off. Right now people are using social networks to organize protests all over the country against Wall Street. Although they aren’t quite clear about what they’re protesting, I hope the protests are about the growing chasm between rich and poor and the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the super rich. That’s more than a protest against Wall Street—it’s a cry for survival.
The irony is that those same gizmos that people love—gizmos that make a few super rich—might be responsible for the downfall of the super rich and a more equitable distribution of wealth in this world. I’m not sure Steve Jobs intended this. Unlike Bill Gates, he didn’t seem to have much of a social conscience. Since I didn’t know the man, he might have been quite the philanthropist in a more private way. If I malign him, my excuse is that he wasn’t public about it, like Gates and Buffett, for example. Publicly, Steve Jobs was obsessed with sexy new technological toys and said so on numerous occasions, especially when he returned to a floundering Apple Computer for the second time. He put out products that pleased both his sense of aesthetics and his desire for new technological gizmos. He became rich because his products also pleased many others.
I once taught a course on the use of computers in education as part of an outreach program a colleague and I designed for Colombian high school teachers. (The course notes were written up and became a text, La Revolucion Informatica en la Educacion. This book, written by Bernardo Gomez and yours truly, was probably the first of its kind in Colombia if not the rest of South America. Like many computer books, it became a dinosaur within a year, although some of the ideas in it have never reached many of our American schools—a sad state of affairs.) We used an engineering lab filled with Apple II computers. These had some sharp graphics for the time but were so numerically crippled that they were hardly appropriate even to calculate students’ grades.
At that time, real programming was done in FORTRAN, although PASCAL was trying to make in-roads, partly because it was the language Apple wrote its OS in for many years. Ironically, FORTRAN is still the language of choice in scientific programming. There are two reasons for this: (1) There are lines and lines of legacy code, tried and true, that exist in FORTRAN; and (2) FORTRAN has kept pace with newer languages, stealing many positive features. Yes, I know, there are whole generations of scientists and engineers, churned out by the world’s universities, who believe that C++, Java, and other low-level languages are the cat’s meow. Much scientific and engineering program development now happens with MatLab, a high-level language that owes more to BASIC than it cares to admit (it is an interpreted language), but it often calls FORTRAN subroutines because they’re out there, debugged, compiled, and ready. (In particular, many of MatLab’s special functions were taken from open source scientific software packages like LINPAC.)
In that course that Bernardo and I gave, circa 1982 (since the book has a 1984 copyright), I already began to see the bifurcation that would hold true among computer users. Those Colombian high school teachers were smart enough to realize that the computer would be a useful tool—most of them were not interested in anything beyond that. That is a user mentality. There is nothing wrong with being just a user. Programming is an arcane art form that very few people practice anymore. Most people don’t stop and wonder about either the hardware or the software, the black art of putting devices together and programming them so they all handshake and do what you want them to do. Engineers and scientists often do, as part of their work.
I suppose that in most aspects that’s an acceptable result. Glitzy interfaces and clever apps have done wonders for people that were originally technophobic. In that sense, Steve Jobs was a therapeutic psychologist for millions. He made their lives more interesting, entertaining, and informed. He opened a technological Pandora’s box for the world—whether what came out of his magical box is good for humanity or not, time will tell. I do know he will be missed.
Mozart was a musical genius whose life was all too short. No one knows what wonderful music he could have produced if he had lived for another thirty years. Jobs was a gizmo genius, a man that turned the human-computer interface into an art form, a user-friendly tool, for music, movies, communications, and all sorts of media, a liberating tool for everyone to use. Again, who knows what wonderful devices he would have conjured up with even another twenty years. R.I.P., Steve. If there is a heaven, I’m sure you’re wiring it for wi-fi right now.
And so it goes…
