“Cool Ancestors”

Re-Engineering The Wheel

     I was talking about technology at the high school one day with some teenagers. I run a weekly program called 'Hungryminds' and we have fun figuring things out in math and science. I asked them what they thought was the first great technological breakthrough.

“The wheel,” said one student.

“Not a bad guess,” I replied,” That was a good one. What do you think they made it with?”

“Oh, may be some crude stone or metal cutting tools,” said another.

“So, isn’t the tool used to make the wheel the first great step?” I asked.

“Yes, but that would have been a primitive, crude cutting tool. They probably made it with very basic impure steel. All incredibly low-tech,” quipped one student.

“Do you think we have progressed and are getting better? Can each of us do better than our ancestors of, say, a thousand or ten thousand or even a hundred thousand years ago?” I asked.

“Oh! Sure. Just look at the wheel of today – a car tyre! No contest with the old ones. The shapes, the finish, the precision of the lines, the tolerances, the balances, the kind of composite materials – metals, plastic, rubber, paint and so cheap, affordable,” the kids were excited at what they could think of.

“Why just a wheel, look at anything today – a screwdriver, a pin, a hammer. Everything is of so much better quality, superior in every way. We are definitely better off and better in all aspects.”

“We are can each get more done in a day with our technology,” added another teenager passionately.

“I agree the products of today are better in many respects from the past. But I asked if we humans are better off in all respects of making products,” I clarified.

“We must be! Surely? If the products are better, we all can afford more, and all of us know and use better technology, isn’t it better?” there seemed to be a hesitation creeping in, even as the confident statements turned to questions tinged with a bit of doubt. They knew this kind of thing happened often in our sessions, when things seem obvious and upon thinking a bit, many convictions and passionate beliefs slowly crumble.

I smiled and encouraged more thoughts.

“How many primitive men did it take (or require) to make a whole wheel, you reckon?” I put it to the class.

“Well, mostly one, or two if he had a helper,” said one student.

“Right on! Good point,” I said,” And how many people or their knowledge and expertise do you need to fabricate a wheel, even if it is an exact replica of the old wheel?”

“You need a saw, a hammer or chisel, a sander, a work bench, and maybe one or two persons could do it,” another student said.

“But you need someone to make the saw, the metallurgist, the hammer, the chisel, their castings, finishing, the sander, the work bench. That would require heaps of persons!,” said a deep thinker, one of the quieter students.

“That’s it!!!” I was impressed and happy. That got a high-five and a chocolate from me. ”Exactly the kind of thinking I was looking for.”

     We were on the right track. We sat and chatted and suddenly the floodgates of observations opened. These kids saw what I hoped they would see.

     Once upon a time, not so long ago – say maybe just a 100 years ago in some parts of the world, and less in others, there lived in villages, towns and cities a blacksmith or carpenter who could make a wheel and a cart or a table or bench or a pan or a pen. Those old-fashioned wheels or tables or carts seemed crude in comparison to their modern counterparts.  Their finishes, tolerances of machining seem intolerable now. We look on in amusement at crude ‘stone age’ tools and implements. We look with a patronising air at the pans and pots of the ‘copper age’ or ‘bronze age’. Now, the often missed point about these wheels or table or pots and pans is that - usually, it was one single person who made everything about the wheel or table or pot or pan.  One single person had the knowledge and skill to fashion the product out of what nature had for us to use. The blacksmith or carpenter often made his own tools, got the ore, made the design, put in the labour. Even if he had apprentices, he had the ability to produce a whole usable product himself. This had been the case since the first man-made wheel from hundreds of thousands of years.

     Today’s wheel, pot or pan is infinitely superior in quality, finish, and tolerances of machining that were simply not achievable before. But there is a down side. It has gradually become a fact that no one individual today can produce an entire high quality or usable product by himself – except perhaps an organic farmer. Every little part or aspect of a product has become so technologically advanced that it requires the direct or indirect touch of many highly-skilled individuals, computers, machines.So much so that any little thing – even something that costs a cent or two to buy, requires the input of dozens if not hundreds of people.  Take the example of a wheel – sure it is more sophisticated, but it requires highly specialized expertise, knowledge and input from the designers  -mathematicians, computer programs, programmers, program testers, program managers, computer aided machining of the castings, specialized metallurgists for the alloys, artistic designers, chemical engineers for all the processes, chrome plating, tool designers, machines, rubber technologist, valve designers, painters, plastic technologists, manufacturers, each requiring its own specialized machines and their human expertise, transport, assembly, packaging… No one person can simply gather stuff from nature and make a usable wheel for any practical purpose anymore!

     No matter if we know more than what our ancestors knew, if we are more sophisticated, if we utilize the latest technology, knowledge and expertise to produce the best products ever made, we are individually more and more helpless, cannot even make a whole pin, a simple tool or a wheel just by ourselves. We need the efforts of dozens or hundreds of people to make a simple tool, a meal, a dress or even a drink. If the connections between any of them are broken, we will all flounder and become helpless. This is the price we have paid for technological advancement. We are all individually less capable of producing even the simplest complete thing to look after ourselves.

     Since these were young teenagers, I could tell them the joke about us becoming experts –“Knowing more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing” and getting a genuine laugh. I also noted that in the countryside where we live, there are still people who can do a whole lot of complete jobs by themselves. Australian farmers and country-folk are known for their resourcefulness and ‘improvising’. The ability to make something fully or solve a problem fully still persists in remote areas of the world, including Australia. It is highly valued and appreciated.

“What do you think of our ancestors now?” I asked.

“They were cool, even the ones as recent as fifty years ago,” said one student cheekily - he knew I was forty nine.

     I and the kids walked away from the class with a greater regard and respect for our ancestors, even the more recent ones, just fifty years old!!

Some Hungryminds

Some examples of great thinking by the students in Hungryminds last year:

I would like to make a special mention of the only some of the great examples of original thinking that the students came up with in Hungryminds this year. Each of these once was thought up by someone and they have patents to their names against the basic idea or an implementation of it that are worth billions in real economic value and used daily in the highest levels of technology. Our students came up with these approaches on their own with no technical background or knowledge, just pure thinking and a drive to have a go at a problem presented to them!

_ X  came up  with a way to potentially use a diode (that he read about independently to the problem presented) to configure a circuit diagram for a digital display driven by a keyboard made of switches.  This is actually one of the approaches used in real life.

_Upon  students pretending to be mobile phones connected to a ‘cell’ tower, the problem was how does the tower handle multiple simultaneous calls? Y suggested that each student (representing a mobile phone) take turns in speaking a word of their message, the tower would arrange them in order forward it to the next tower in order. This is in fact the concept of time division multiplexing which is used to avoid constant potential ‘collisions’ of two devices talking at the same time.

_Upon being presented with a problem of how it is possible to search for any keyword in a book of thousands of pages efficiently without having to read the book each and every time you need to make a search, Z came up the idea of  using with just enough processors as the number of words in the dictionary – this is the fundamental principle of indexing and is in fact used cleverly by search engines like Google, Bing etc.

_Problem was how do video games respond seamlessly and quickly to updating the screen image in a car race when the steering wheel is turned randomly and the images and objects shown are in high resolution and cannot be all stored in memory all the time? H  came up with the approach of the game generating and already preloading potential new images and just quickly displaying a track of images among many that are ready to go. This is in fact the approach used and I knew someone who actually holds the patent (along with the company) for this idea and its implementation!


Photos credit and Copyright  (c) Kannan Narayanamurthy 2012
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