I’d like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to a wonderful piece of technology: the DVR. Now, I’m not saying it’s the greatest invention of all-time. But it’s at least in the top five, up there with baseball, the wheel, television and enchiladas.
I recently got done watching the epic Federer-Roddick Wimbledon final, and I love the fact that my DVR recorded it for me simply because I told it to record all tennis matches two weeks ago.
You might argue that DVRs are simply VCRs with a monthly fee. I used to think that way. But if I was recording Federer-Roddick — which was played between the hours of 8 a.m. and 1 p.m., when I was asleep — with a VCR, I would’ve screwed it up somehow. I would’ve done one of the following:
1, set the timer to stop before the match was over; 2, set the speed to standard play rather than extended play, so the tape would run out; 3, forgot to rewind the tape, so it would run out; 4, forgot to turn the VCR’s power off to trigger the timer; 5, set the channel to ESPN rather than NBC; 6, set the time for 8 p.m. rather than 8 a.m.; or 7, forgot to put a tape in.
And I’m an experienced VCRer. I have almost every episode of several long-running TV shows on tape (I never watch them, because I have them on DVD, but that’s beside the point). I say “almost every episode” because inevitably I messed up the taping of an episode here or there.
DVRs are superior to VCRs because they minimize the human element by giving the bulk of the task to a computer.
Granted, humans are superior to computers in some ways. For example, at my workplace, the computers are coddled in a temperature-controlled room, whereas the room the humans work in is warmer than our preferred temperature. This is because management knows that humans are more flexible than computers (and also cheaper to replace). I could have a bad day at work and bounce back the next day. But if my computer crashes a few times, it will probably keep crashing until a human IT person intervenes.
I know when we watch the “Terminator” films — and most of James Cameron’s oeuvre, for that matter — we’re supposed to take them as a warning to not let computers get too powerful. But I’m pro-computer. It’s totally worth the risk of computers becoming self-aware and triggering mutually assured nuclear destruction if we get things like DVRs out of it.
And what people often forget is that a good Terminator saves the day in almost every installment of the “Terminator” franchise except the first movie — computers can be rehabilitated a lot quicker than humans can.
Furthermore, why should we assume that computers desire to wipe out humanity? We are giving human traits to computers when we make such a prediction, and as I’ve already established, computers are different from us. Despite the endless popular-fiction propaganda, computers might not desire to rule the world at all.
The next time I hear someone swearing at their computer, I’m going to remember the great time I had watching Federer-Roddick on my DVR, and I’m going to stand up for my non-sentient (so far) friends.