I, through something that I can only assume was a clerical error, 3 years ago, was named
to be a National Geographic Explorer.
For the month of August, this year, I found myself on a expedition, and we were in this
very small tent in the Sandy Islands in the middle of Botswana's Okavango Delta
and by the light of a headlamp, besieged by these tiny bugs, we would solder sensor equipment
and visualize data and upload this stuff and the efforts of this big conservation effort
that we were working on.
Late at night, we would often hear the song of hyenas, and that meant that about 10 minutes
from then, the hyenas would be in our camp, and they would basically take anything they
could get.
We would go outside and move all of the food into our tent with us and leave only anything
that was locked in a tight container and then for the next hour, we would listen to them
rummaging around, and hopefully, that we hadn't forgotten anything.
In the morning, though, if we were up before sunset, we would hear the alarm call of baboons,
and they too would come into our camp, and baboons were much trickier because not only
did you have to hide all of the things, you had to hide all of the tools that they might
use to get into the things.
Tools are dangerous and also powerful, and it's interesting to me that when we think
about tools, I think we mostly think about this.
This is my hammer.
It's a nice hammer.
Tools have become much more complicated.
These vastly complex things that we use in our everyday world like this amazing machine
that travels along train tracks, tears up the old train track, replaces it with new
train track, recycles the old gravel bed into a new gravel bed that we can only really conceive
of the complexity of this thing.
One of the things I want to talk about in our tool-making group is this axis of tools
between the hammer and the giant track-laying machine and where we're facilitating tools
to be built because, I think in software, we tend to focus mostly on the giant track-laying
machine side of things and not so much towards hammers.
I specifically want to talk in our group about, "What does it mean to create medium-sized
tools?"
I've been a tool-maker for a really long time.
I think it started with this.
This is HyperCard.
I don't know if people remember HyperCard.
It was installed in all the original Macs, and it was a tool for making tools.
Interesting to me that out of the few pieces of software that were shipped with the original
Mac, 1 of them was specifically made for people to make tools, something which I'm not sure
that ships on computers these days ... People would use it to make tools of all scales.
This is a statistics tracker for a basketball team, high school basketball teams, so you
could track statistics.
This is one of my favorite things.
It's called "200 points of light," and it's a functioning operating system built in hypercard,
which I think is much more sophisticated than most of the operating systems that we use
these days and offers all kinds of interesting visualization capabilities.
I think this raises to me is the second question I want to talk about is, "What does it mean
to create bespoke tools rather than relying on tools that we can find off the shelf?"
How can we make tools that are specific to a task, so I think all of us are working on
complex problems, and often, complex problems need to have tools that are geared directly
towards them.
The last question I want to talk about is related to the baboons.
Baboons are tool-makers and tool-users, not like the tool-making baboon in the troop.
You don't go to the tool-maker.
Every baboon in the troop is a tool-maker, and yet I think what we've done with technology
is we've created an incredible amount of barriers to tool-making.
We've in some ways dehumanized ourselves.
One of the defining characteristics of being a human is that we can make and use tools.
Yet, I think, we're raising a society which mostly cannot do at least one of those things,
make tools.
In some cases, can't even use them ... How can we remove barriers to tool-making, institutional
barriers, cultural barriers to make sure that not just the elite are able to make tools?
The technologically elite but everybody is able to use tools ...
I hope everybody in the tool-making section is going to come with all kinds of questions
of their own.
We're going to have a long and lunch-filled dialogue around these things, and if you're
not in that section, and you want to talk about this stuff, get in touch.