Why the Terminal
In this post I detail why simplicity with computer applications must be an ideal to be held - computers are immensely complicated machines, and are crucial for many aspects of modern society to run, and so software must be kept to a minimum to retain functionality.
Scenario 1: Catastrophic Infrastructure Failure
You can do anything with a computer. But the usecases that I specifically want to be preserved, in the event that humans can no longer manufacture computers or lose that knowledge, is instantaneous person to person communication and document retrieval.
Bar some strange discovery like mechanisms behind inter-brain telepathy or intra-brain telepathy (how is it that different regions of the brain are able to communicate with eachother instantaneously, and know what is going on in the other region, without sending a nervous signal over there? paper), there are only two ways to do this.
- Wired - sling a cable from you to your buddy. The United States already has networks of underground cables laid out, maintained by companies like AT&T. In the event of catastrophic infrastructure collapse, these networks could no longer be maintained or functional. So, on the local level, such as a town, network engineers will have to be present to set up a network with everybody there in alignment. These networks can scale all the way down, to your small band of friends or interpersonal from your house to your buddy's house. This is more reliable then wireless because it is not really prone to signal jamming.
- Wireless - Carrying over radio signals. Currently LORA technology is being developed by a few US companies such as Wave RF, and, at functionality, a small device that fits in the palm of your hand will be able to broadcast an internet radio signal over five miles. These devices can also function as repeaters to push a signal to an endpoint further than the range of one, if they are all in a same network. At a larger scale, radio towers can also broadcast signals, but these require maintenance and upkeep, more power, and are vulnerable to sabotage. LORA technology is vulnerable to being jammed by loud radio noise over the same frequencies, whereas radio towers are much less vulnerable to that. A radio tower could be used to jam LORA frequencies - the devices can only operate over a certain frequency range. But regardless a LORA jammer would require a sustained power source, and would really only work in a set range unless it was being carried around on a truck or something like that. Also worth investigating is HAM radio.
Maintaining communications is most easy on an interpersonal 1-1 level, so a cable being slung over, or two connected LORA devices, is easiest. Tradeoff of reliability (cable) vs. mobility (LORA).
Once communication paths have been established, medium must be decided. Instantaneous communication can be done over radio and wires can be used for SMS, phone calls, and even telegrams, but document transfer cannot be done in any of these mediums easily at all and can really only be done using internet protocols. So ideally the current functionality of the internet must be preserved for these reasons and in these manners.
Considerations:
- Since there are many servers that host "the internet", that are all connected together, downing of some of these servers and the unavailability of large parts of the internet, or the inability to connect to a server that is physically a long way away, would be near certain if there is large widespread power grid failure.
- So, the perpetual availability of important documents must be maintained (and ideally copied many times, cached, and widely distributed), as well as the ability to quickly produce and share new documents and information.
- HTTP relies on a client-server model which would not hold well in a catastrophic infrastructure failure scenario, so the widespread distribution of devices with P2P-protocols (like libp2p or BitTorrent) would have to happen. Setting up an apache server on something like a raspberry pi and assigning it an address on a network would be a triviality compared to other challenges faced in this scenario, but the time required for setup may not be worth it to everyone, or be available to connecting to people out of network.
- At time of writing I am unsure how robust the ICANN RSAAC system is, but, since it is the first step of gateway to connect to most links (when a computer requests a link to a domain whose ip address it does not have cached, notably when it is its first time connecting to a domain, the ISP first sends a request to a DNS cache to return the ip address, after which it requests the resource from that ip address), it could be a notable point of failure.
- Widespread re-adoption of the ICR (Internet Chat Rooms) protocol would be ideal for instantaneous communications, with terminal clients like irssi, WeeChat, or telnet.
- Continued usage of email protocols including IMAP, SMTP, and POP3 would be sustained, along with their terminal clients such as mutt, dove, and pine.
- Browsing: viewing HTML documents can be done through already popular terminal-based browsers such as lynx.
Computers as machines must be sought to be as simple as possible to maintain interpersonal communications and document sharing. This would mean keeping it at the terminal - striking a perfect balance between human usability and comprehension, and ease of manufacturing.
Scenario 2: What if the Singularity Happens and the World Changes in Unexpected Ways?
I haven't read much Yudkowski. Probably for the best. But if the singularity happens no one knows what is going to happen, anyways. If AI becomes more and more part of our daily lives, familiarity with how computers work, as they actually work, from the ground up, and having terminal literacy will be crucial for humans to have an "even footing" with AI. That is about all I will say on the subject at risk of saying something horrendously stupid.
3. Historical Reasons
The first graphical interfaces for computers didn't come about until the 1980s. Until then, computers were accessed through terminals, and today's modern systems are build on top of terminals. Since operating systems are very complex, it makes no sense to tear away what is already working. Computers are merely I/O devices!
I believe terminal literacy should be a fundamental skill. Computers are immensely complicated devices that are extremely important to society so familiarity with them should be instilled in everybody. I want to encourage people to develop familiarity with the terminal and I personally believe terminal literacy should be taught in public school computer classes before Microsoft Office. And, at the very least, I want there to be a basic competency standard for publishing to this website. That is why I have designed publishing to this website to only be accessible through the terminal.