Quote:
Originally Posted by tanksoldier
...but none of that is unique to you or uses software or hardware not readily available commercially.
Elon Musk and his crew are being innovative, the rest of us are riding coat tails.
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No, but we are using the little device, complete with easily available commercial applications, to do a myriad of things that were
much more difficult to do at TL8 (1980-1999).
Without any trouble, I can wander countries I don't know the first thing about, navigating by the little device, which not only has any map I want, but will talk me through the route. I can book rooms in hotels I didn't know existed until the little gizmo found them, even in little Czech towns where I don't know the language and wouldn't even know how to
begin to look for anything without the aid of the little miracle device.
The device tells me more about anything I see than most tour guides know. I get up to date information about traffic and road repairs. It finds walking routes and I can pick restaurants when I get hungry, booking a table if it tells me that this is likely to be necessary. In picking a place to eat, I can usually get reviews from several hundred people, though if I'm
really off the beaten track, sometimes only a dozen or so.
When I find that I've run out of money, I can use the device to arrange for a bank loan, i.e. a higher overdraft, which I can use about 5-15 minutes later. Moving money from a savings account to a card, credit or debit, takes minutes. Obviously, I never need to visit a physical bank any more, unless it's for something very complicated to do with my law firm.
The device doesn't require me to carry a camera, which is good, because I'm not the kind who'd have packed a spare device, but now I have one that fits in my jacket pocket without me reallly noticing it's there. It plays all the music I've ever heard, of course.
I
can, in a pinch, do my work anywhere. I
have actually written briefs, signed them electronically and arranged to have an employee show up in court to file them formally in front of the judge, all the while I was on vacation several countries away and wouldn't even have known about the need for this without a miracle gizmo.*
Even if I really need better word processing software and/or a proper keyboard, all I need to do is tell the gizmo to find a place with access to computers and then I can log on to a remote server with all of my files from work and home.
All in all, without a miracle gizmo (when on the road) or a computer (when in the office), my work would take an order of magnitude more time for each case. In the dark ages of 1980-1999, it pretty much did, because people used to have to look for precedents by hand, through books,
without automatic search functions. Do you have
any idea how laborious the process of looking for a legal precedent is without an automatic program that looks up every relevant case for you is?
Without any hyperbole, after the year 2000, the technology that has come into regular use, commercially available to normal people, has altered pretty much every aspect of how I learn things, how I do things professionally, and even how I conduct myself on vacation or as part of my hobbies.
RPG research that would be unthinkable, because it would be so much work, before the Internet, is now a trivial Google search and a little refining of search terms, not to mention that I can do it while waiting for the police to call me and a client on for an interrogation, instead of just writing that time off as lost.
My game session notes, instead of being haphazardly scribbled in coloured notebooks, to be searched with patience and a vague idea of the timeline of the campaign in mind, are now automatically searchable with the aid of Windows. So, for that matter, are my GURPS books, but that is thanks to Adobe Acrobat.
When even your
Hobby skills are performed in a fundamentally different way, with some aspects of them being more than an order of magnitude easier, it becomes really hard to argue against the difference being something that ought to be modelled by a TL shift in GURPS terms.
*In fact, I heard several stories today about how a key decision-maker in a company being out of contact or going on vacation could paralyze everything in the dark days of 1980-1999. No more. Without a seriously eccentric or irresponsible executive and/or someone actually being in a coma, it's pretty much impossible to imagine a situation where you can't contact someone within a few hours.