Learning to be Human...

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It's quite amazing how much machine assistance we take for granted these days. I've been grazing YouTube this evening, and have found a few instances that warrant contrast and comparison. Rick Beato, on his ever-excellent channel talks about Martha Argerich - the virtuoso Argentine pianist still touring as she approaches eighty: still playing from memory the most difficult concerti written for the piano - and admits that one of the reasons he got out of music production was the invasion of tech into the creative process, where an artist can simply get the producer/engineer to massage and tweak every last iota of a (non-contiguous) performance into some notion of 'perfect'.

Elsewhere, I watched a young YouTuber attempting to drive a factory re-imagining of the Aston Martin DB4 GT: racing clutch, dog-box, no power-steering, cammy race engine, etc., etc... As she rightly said, modern supercars are actually easy to drive: this thing would involve a steep and long learning curve to master. Another motoring YouTuber - again, someone who obviously makes a decent living out of whittering on about the exotic machinery he has the privilege to drive on a regular basis. This time it was another Aston: a one-off, four-million quid job, with a manual gearbox, clutch and racing brakes - again a triumph of someone not really having the basic skills to handle something real and (relatively) un-computer-assisted.

Virtually every fast fighter jet extant is impossible for a human being to fly unassisted, as they are just aerodynamically unstable and require the mediation of vast amounts of computing power to translate the pilot's input into something resembling not-crashing. All of this stuff is vastly impressive and indicative of mankind's all-consuming inventive genius, but in reality we still need to teach people to double-declutch a non-synchromesh gearbox as a matter of principle: life isn't simple and neither should we be led to believe it is.

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