Quit making robots like that! All of these things should be made from lego!

nicholasjh1, the next commenter, who I suppose represents the oh-so-rational voice of geekdom, immediately steps in, with footnotes, and sets her straight–but somehow manages to miss the whole point of her comment.

She may very well know what memristors do. She wants to know why the author of the article assumed she already knew.

There is something naggingly disturbing about this explosion of Clarkeian, magical technology. The tech is now outside of the effective control of its users–and its creators. The people who work with it every day don’t really understand it, much of these devices operate at the quantum level, so the engineers and even the scientists who use and assemble them don’t understand the principles behind their operation. They just assemble and plug in modular components that might as well be magical objects, or get lost in the endless complexities of programming and interfacing them, because those who do understand the science behind them are so super-specialized that they don’t really know how their inventions work together or what they will be used for. We rely more and more on the economic and industrial infrastructure that generates and maintains all this tech, an administrative creature that has its own agenda and motivation, to make the decisions on which technology is going to be discarded and which will be introduced, which will be indispensable and which will be replaced–all for reasons that do not concern us or our needs.

This isn’t just Larry Luddite talking. We cannot afford to lose control of our machines. We used to be able to fix our own cars, or build a crystal radio, or assemble a locomotive from the crated parts without a manual (the first one shipped to the USA from England was put together by a Yankee mechanic who had never seen one before). Today, the folks who exploit all this new tech often don’t know the difference between a Volt and an Amp.

The Roman Empire fell when the administrative infrastructure fell apart. The economic, trade, transportation, communication, governmental, security, systems gradually seized up. But in the most remote villages on the frontier people still knew how to grow food, forge metal, weave cloth, breed livestock, work leather, break horses, in short, they could still manage the technology. They could build a house, or a ship, or a wagon, from scratch. They did not lapse back to barbarism, to a Paleolithic existence, because they depended too much on the skill of others far away.

We are already slaves of our machines, and our machine-administered systems; not in some hokey SF way where the AI robots have us working for them and tell us what to do, but in the sense that we spend most of time, effort and talent trying to find ways to utilize and improve our machines. Unless we are managers or executives, most of us go to work and spend our time keeping some machine (or a machine-like bureaucratic organization) functioning smoothly and efficiently. We service our tools, they no longer serve their masters.

Come to think of it, I can’t come up with a better description of slavery than that.