Humans & Machines

Having some things on my mind in the middle of the night, I tried watching a movie, but it didn't have enough distractive power to take my mind off of things, so it seemed like a good time to finally go over some text I wrote a couple of months ago... edit it and post it.  (Note: The photos were taken within about a month of when the text was written, but are random.)

(20221027) Riding on a train yesterday, as I listened to the robot voice (recording) overly-loudly broadcasting the exact same computer program generated message I've been listening to over-and-over-and-over the past (how many?) years, I thought back to how much nicer it was when a human being was making the announcements - a fellow human being making the same journey as the passengers.  And while the driver of the train is operating a push-pull control for accelerating and braking, there's a computer between their actions and power or brakes applied.  That element is less clearly defined than the robot vs. human announcements, but it was another element of a fellow human being on the journey down the rails.  Now, even though there's a human at the front of the train at the controls, there isn't really a sense - as there used to be - of a person running the train.

(20221027)  Shibuya at 6:15 a.m.  Small crowds of young people clearly on their way home after being up all night.  Either young people now are fairly radically different from the young people I walked among a few decades ago and/or I've changed to the extent that young people appear more different than they actually are.  So?  ........  Nothing.  Just that observation.  I used to feel like I was within my generation while in Shibuya, now I sometimes feel like I've entered a strange foreign country when there.

(20221027)  It would be nice to go back in time and give myself a 2022 laptop and 2022 camera to record the eighties with.  I actually did a fair amount of writing back then, but it was handwritten... so it would all need to be transcribed first to do anything with it.  Also, I would have written a whole lot more if I'd had a laptop computer back then.  At least I had the foresight to learn to type back when I thought I would only really be using that skill with typewriters.  It amazes me how many people are six-finger typists.  Percentage-wise, it doesn't seem all that many people have actually learned how to touch-type.

(20221227)  Reading my text from October 27th, it reminds me - once again - how important it is to record things in words at least now and then.

- Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/

Hoping for things not to get worse...

   I used to think - when people said how they wished they lived in a different era - that every era has its good and bad aspects... but recently it's beginning to seep in that whereas the thought before was "how to make things better", now it's beginning to be "how not to let things get worse"....  Which is pretty profoundly depressing, when you think about it.

   That said, I must say I do appreciate the computer tools we have now.  It was so much more trouble to write before.

   Shorter and shorter days... the morning begins under a starry sky - more the night before than morning.  And then as the commute progresses, the light of the sun begins to color the eastern sky.

   I noticed a couple of (probably) tourists looking at a station map this morning - with a woman touching the stations on a line one by one while the man she was with looked on.  Not sure what she was doing, but as it was a Japanese only map, it occurred to me that she was counting off the stations to somewhere?  I briefly considered stopping and asking if they wanted any help, but even before the Internet foreign tourists were generally vastly happier to get lost than to be helped by another outsider.  That used to seem odd, or perverse, or something to me, but it makes sense - you don't go off to exotic lands just to talk to people like you left at home.

- Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/