Raging against the machine

[armaghniac]

I mind watching the film Wall.E with the kids where the humans are all on their individual touch screen tablets, driving around in motorised chairs getting fatter and fatter, not interacting with each-other in real life but through screens - that's where we could be headed...

You could be right Iceman, I've only every interacted with you through a screen, I didn't even call when I was in WA. 

[Owen Brannigan]

Bad enough that Armagh has had the bad news today of losing the Observer newspaper and ace reporter Joe McManus being laid off but today's bad news for the city continued with the word that the Observatory weather station is to be automated.

Manual weather measurements have been recorded daily on the site since 1795 but an automated system will soon be implemented.  Shane Kelly who has taken the 9-00am readings every day for 18 years is facing into the same fate as Joe McManus. He has no faith in the reliability of the proposed technology.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-39564125

Bit by bit the march of the computer is eating away at our traditions and the elements that have made up our lives through things like the Internet making our local papers no longer economically viable with falling advertising revenues and sales and now the skill and dedication of the technician building a metrological record is being superseded in the name of technological advance.

What will be next?

I had a Computer Science teacher many years ago with your name. ...He didn't object to computers. .....

Don't think he is objecting to computers now but probably just sad to see the application of computer technology superseding some elements of everyday life that were part of his past.  Even when you were in the classroom, no one could have imagined that computer based technologies would have become so pervasive in our lives, very much an example of unintended consequences.

Hope all is going well for you.

[seafoid]

https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Neil_Postman:_Five_Things_We_Need_to_Know_About_Technological_Change

[Owen Brannigan]

https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Neil_Postman:_Five_Things_We_Need_to_Know_About_Technological_Change

Very good!

[Milltown Row2]

https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Neil_Postman:_Five_Things_We_Need_to_Know_About_Technological_Change

Very good!

Would we much prefer no technology? Not being able to wiki things would reduce most of seafoids posts to about 10