WHY SHOULD WE TRUST NFTs? – PART 1
We understand that NFT is a very new technology and to be honest, at this moment in the world 99% of people are still skeptical. You may still be skeptical, but that’s okay! People were skeptical of every new technology when it first appeared and today we understand that the Internet is changing the world. It is groundbreaking. Now, billions of people are connected in ways never before possible thanks to the internet. But when they first connected in 1995, there was a hugely popular article called Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana and it was about how people back then were visionary. We are talking about the replacements for online newspapers. They will replace retail bookstores and brick-and-mortar stores. They will replace education, people will start working in telecommunications, and nothing will happen in 1995.
In 2021, we see that almost all of that has come true. Everyone works completely online. People just buy things online. People just learn online. People read newspapers online. All these industries have been revolutionized and transformed by the Internet. But in 1995, it was a crazy idea, and to be honest, it wasn’t just the Internet that people were skeptical about. That’s everything. Back in 1987, there was a famous article called STUDENTS FLEE FIELD AS COMPUTER “FAD FADES” about a passing computer fad that students became disillusioned with the prospect of making money with computers and left the computer science industry.
Although Microsoft and Apple were founded in the mid-1970s and there are still some of the biggest companies in the world today. If we go back further, there is an amazing article in 1984 about how calculators are inferior to the slide rule and how calculators beat humans. If you use a calculator, you will never learn how to use math. The slide rule outperforms the calculator because you don’t run out of batteries. There’s a famous quote by a professor that says I can do calculations on the rule slides faster than you enter the numbers into the calculator and when you finish typing the numbers, the calculator will run out of battery. It’s incompetent. People are always skeptical of new technologies.
Let’s give some more examples. You know the GUI, it’s a Graphical User Interface. That’s what all computers have these days, you can point and click. Before that, we used to have the command line. When GUI was invented, it seems better than having to type everything, and not seeing any pictures.
WHY SHOULD WE TRUST NFTs? – PART 2
Here’s a great article about how GUI has let people down. Assistant director of the writing program at the University of Delaware’s English department, Halio says that freshmen in the writing program who chose to enroll in a course using Macintosh computers produced far poorer compositions than students in the same course who chose IBM Personal Computer.
Her observations were based both on her own teaching experience in 1987 and on the comparison of the work done by students in 25 sections of the composition course in late 1988. The results showed that Macintosh users on average wrote shorter sentences and paragraphs may have significantly more spelling and punctuation mistakes and wrote at an eighth-grade level instead of the college level of their using IBM-using counterparts.
Further, the subjects the Macintosh students chose to write about were “fluffier” – fast food, dating, television – than the IBM topics, which included teenage pregnancy and nuclear war
The implication, Halio says, is that the Macintosh’s picture-oriented interface is somehow to blame. The same icons, mouse, font, and graphics that make the machine easy to use may well turn off the brain’s creative-writing abilities.
None of us are creative anymore, because using the computer is so easy, and that makes you skeptical of a new invention. For example, even airplanes are subject to this skepticism. Two months before the Wright brothers took off for the first time and powered the flight. There was an article in the New York Times that estimated that it would take humans 2 million years to achieve the ability to fly and all efforts to do so were futile. When the automobile was invented, a brain expert and a famous newspaper argued that traveling at such high speeds would choke your brain and drive you crazy. Even bicycles, which we now think of as a healthy way to get around, were considered crazy and unhealthy when they were invented. It is claimed that you will have a bicycle spine, and your face will also be wrinkled, just like with cars and airplanes.
All of this to say, when we’re faced with brand new technology, we feel cynical. We are still skeptical about everything. To be honest, I could be appalled. The first time I drove a car at 80 miles per hour. I would think this is unnatural. This is crazy. Maybe my brain will become tense. And finally, if we look at all those examples from the past, maybe the skepticism we’re seeing about NFTs isn’t so bad. It is quite reasonable. But remember, for now, NFT is like the Internet in 1995. People are saying crazy things like NFT will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the future. They may be worth more than the Mona Lisa. Maybe everything in the world will become NFT when we go into virtual reality and everyone lives in the metaverse. Those are all crazy concepts these days. But everything that was said about the Internet in 1995 was also a crazy concept back then, and all of that came true. So any skepticism you feel about the NFT is justifiable. You may be convinced of the NFT, you may be keeping an open mind.
