Fixing It Yourself
Yesterday, I fixed the foam padding on my headset. The original padding broke and the replacement padding I ordered didn’t fit. For weeks, I had hard bare plastic against my ears and it could become uncomfortable after a few hours.
Finally, I was able to figure out if I used a hair elastic to tie down the larger foam, I could cut off the remaining foam and have something that looked almost-new. It worked! There was such a deep satisfaction in solving this petty little problem that I felt like MacGyver. I know where my headset with a little pride.
The same thing has happened a few times with other fix it jobs — replacing my taillight, removing a broken lightbulb. If I was less ashamed, I’d grunt like Tim The Toolman Taylor.
While we know live when most things are sealed up and not meant to be fixed and we see items as disposable, there’s a backlash against the environment impact of this approach. It might be that by the end of the decade, governments will mandate that consumer goods and even consumer electronic goods have at least a certain degree of repairability.
While most repair jobs will involve low tech items such as adhesive, metal, and plastic, what’s really enabling is watching other people make similar repairs on sites like iFixit or YouTube. However, more help could be on its way.
What if the current language and image generation tools are able to provide some unique ways to solve for repairs? What if I could take a picture of what was broken and the AI could give me a step-by-step breakdown of what I need to do to fix it? It would still give satisfaction to provide the reverse kinematics and actuation of the process (i.e. moving hands around and following the directions).
This is how we slowly become transcendent.
