The Warden says:

Dvorak,

You still need to get Jobs, Ellison, and Gates on your show. All at the same time. The fact you haven’t yet just shows the fact you have lost all your clout in SV! 😛

dusanmal says:

Rant on the phone usage/driving…

Dvorak and esteemed tech-savvy guests should educate themselves on existing research about phone usage and driving. It is scary to see even such prominent people completely unaware of known physical limits regarding this issue. What can we expect from the general public if these bards are so misinformed?

I’ll start from well known fact: all those “other” people who drive and talk on the phone at the same time are not in control of their cars and veer all around. They should be locked up. But “we” are able to do it and drive perfectly as we trained/have talent for it…

Proper medical research have found that all of us humans are simply not capable of doing both those processes at once without diminished capacity for each. You can train 24/7 ’till the day you die and you won’t be any better doing it.

Problem is in comprehension. Our brains have developed under evolutionary conditions where “remote conversation” have not existed. Hence, carrying each sane conversation/set of interactions with understanding and feedback requires “complete world” setup in our minds. Telecommunications allowed situation that never existed in our evolutionary path before: 2 (or more) sets of interactive, yet not physically co-existing “worlds”. Our brains HAVE NO OTHER WAY of dealing with it (hence no capacity to train for anything else, same as we can’t train to run on 4 legs) but to split brain capacity in 2 “worlds”. Unfortunately, we understand ourselves and environment through that same brain. Hence, although we now have only 1/2 of the brain power available for each of 2 “worlds” (ex. talking with understanding and interaction over the phone and driving) – it appears to us that the full brain power is used in each case. We always veer a bit while driving, just now our brain capacity for it is halved and we veer like drunken idiots. Though, to our understanding of the situation it looks like we are driving exactly like before – because we understand half as well. This insidious deception is what is causing my introductory paradox: it is always “those other people” who drive bad under phone-influence, but not “us”.

Don’t confuse this with listening to the radio, which is not intelligent conversation (and admit it,many times you have instinctively tuned off the radio content from your minds when driving conditions became complex) or conversation in person while driving (in which case brain instinctively knows that everything present is part of the same “world” and can distribute priorities). Problem lies in brains physical inability to do so when 2 “worlds” of understanding exist that do not share same reality.

So, training people to sanely drive and intelligently use cell phone at the same time is as possible as training average human to run on 4 legs (4 legs, not 2 legs and 2 arms or anything else).