Knowledge Essay

Everyday that you walk around....you are forced into a situation where you have to retain a fair amount of knowledge....not only to survive, but to conduct most all of the little taskings in your life.

If you take a 1936 car....there's about fifteen general things that you needed really know about the car, and maybe eight total controls that mattered on the car (brakes, accelerator, lights, key, horn, fuel display, speedometer, heat control, and window 'roller'). 

If you take a 2018 car....after you've read the ninety-page manual....you will reach the conclusion that there's about three-hundred significant things about the car that you need to know and remember.  The sixteen different warning symbols on the dash?  Well....yeah, you need to remember what exactly they mean.  The forty-odd controls now at your disposal?  Their significance matters.  Every year that passes.....they add another two or three characteristics that add dynamics onto the way you operate the car.

GPS devices?  There's probably a hundred features now that matter (you could program it to tell you where all the Sonic-burger 'joints' are located as you pass through town after town).  You could use your GPS capability on the smart-phone to tell you about gas prices along the sixty-mile route to work and where you ought to stop to fuel up and save 4-cents per gallon.

Your refrigerator? You might have the newest model with forty features connected to some massive memory device. 

Your heating system in the house?  In my house, the system (from 2007) has seven control items, and I can arrange it to drop the temperature after 10 PM by fifteen degrees, and 'wake-up' at 5 AM to heat the house back to normal.  Some folks have AC units which work in the opposite fashion.

ATM machines used to be dirt-simple, with only four options (besides dispensing money).  Even their functionality has increased.

The problem is that you now need expertise there to answer very technical questions.  In 1975, if you'd stopped at some hardware store for a home-project....'Dandy Dave' would have been able to answer every single question and you would have left in eight minutes with the right items.  Today...'Dandy Dave' is gone, and you have his nephew 'Leon'.....who barely got out of high school, and he only knows of four types of hammers, while there are officially 23 models and types of hammers in the 'real world'.  'Leon' is worthless but he's all you got.

The burger kid at McDonalds?  In the 1975, that kid knew the entire grill operation and any problems could be resolved in three minutes.  Today, the kid has to call some technician out to repair the grill....mostly because it's too complicated for the real world.  Same way for the coffee maker, the soda apparatus, and the fryer.

We each now walk around with 40,000 index cards of information that we have to remember....to survive and operate all the gadgets in our life.  Will this actually double in the next twenty years?  It's possible.