Back Down To Earth
Martin Christie, Digital Imaging Lead – Colourfast Group
Regular readers may have spotted that I am not a huge fan of Elon Musk, or at least some of his more ambitious schemes and pronouncements. The rocket man may have his head in the stars, but whether he always has his feet on the ground is another matter. The vision of mankind colonising other planets is certainly exciting but the reality may depend rather more on our sustainable use of the resources on the one we already have. The history of colonisation, after all, does not have too many positive lessons. But then his CV would tend to suggest Musk is not an avid student of the past.
After all, he may be wealthy enough not to need to work, but for us mortals the concept that we won’t have to because intelligent machines will do everything for us, is more than fanciful, it’s positively insane. I am old enough to have lived and worked in a world without computers, and yes, life was actually possible without their help. Many tasks were more difficult and time consuming, for sure, but as a result you had to think things through, consider consequences and predict results - all very human qualities that have enabled us as a species to progress from simply banging rocks together to make fire.
There was a time when I thought I would be able to retire without having to deal with anything more digital than a calculator and a watch, but that time is gone along with all the leisure time I was promised that would be a direct benefit of the electronic revolution. So having shared working practice with both the old and the new order I think I am in a pretty good position to comment rather than those who have only experienced the latter.
As both a photographer and printer, digital is obviously a massive aid, and can do things that were never possible before. But to go from that to believing that you can sit back and rest in a comfy chair while it does everything for you is one massive leap into a very dark space. Artificial Intelligence is just that, something created by human intervention, and it's worth remembering that the adjective is also used to describe something fake. And while perceptive humans may spot a fake, AI will not because to its brain the reproduction is just as real as we are.
Without going into a philosophical discussion on reality, there is a very good reason for me reflecting on these points in this column which may become clearer if you haven’t dozed off already.
We started the New Year with a move, if you read last month’s truncated column - a very disruptive process for any business. But on top of that the last few months have seen some staff changes, and the challenge of not only finding suitable candidates, but bringing what skills they have up to speed with practice in the print on demand workspace. As you will know, experienced staff are hard to find as the job requires a combination of skills more complicated than general retail. The challenge of dealing with general customers over the counter, on the phone, or by email exchange, is one thing. Combine that with the software knowledge of handling digital files, and the hardware complexities of modern printers and you have a task on your hands.
It’s the dilemma of the digital age that so often people who are good with computers are not very good with people, and vice versa. It may be an over simplification, but there is definitely something different in the interaction between people and machines. On balance it’s probably better to find people who are good with people as at least you are likely to keep your customers.
Teaching people with only a basic understanding of computers is a lot easier than teaching those with no empathy with even more complex and unpredictable humans. But it is a challenge nevertheless, partly because most people interact with computers in one form or another now on a daily basis, and rely on them being accurate in giving them the information they want. So much so that they don’t even question it. It is real. Or at least it is till they discover it isn’t - which may take some time, and take even long to resolve.
In our business we don’t have that time, people are impatient, deadlines are ever tighter, and the customer assumes that what he has given you is ready to print and correct in numbers and quantity. Our default mode has to be suspicion. Don’t trust what you see without checking it, and even if you know it’s a regular customer, they may have made a mistake typing a hasty email - something that is very easy to do on a tiny phone pad rather than a proper full sized keyboard where you can look at the letters and not be egged on by predictive text. Putting a 0 after an A instead of a 4 for example, makes a rather large difference in size, as does adding a few to a number to make up a quantity.
People rarely check carefully what they have written before sending, and even if they have used spell check, it won’t correct a proper word, even if the sentence doesn’t make sense. Now AI may get better at understanding meaning and context, but will it really decide whether you want to order a thousand sheets rather than a hundred, or will it just block you because you’ve only ever had ten before. A polite human intervention would be more appropriate to resolve the question.
Apart from obvious mistakes, there are the hidden ones deep inside the digital codes that are part of electronic transfer of images and information. We all know Word documents don’t translate exactly as they appear to the sender when they are received on another computer, but that’s a very basic error. At the heart of it is the assumption on the part of the user that what they see in front of them is real, and not in fact a sequence of binary equations that only makes sense to a compatible computer.
This has become more critical as the direct result of using AI to produce more user friendly apps so that the average person could instantly do things that otherwise would have required an expert. Unfortunately this also means that it may require the skill of an expert to untangle the resulting digital jumble to be usable. Though it’s no longer popular culture in what Adobe proudly hailed ‘Creative Democracy’ recently, it is important to understand the process that gets to a result, rather than just leap to it, even if it is more convenient and time saving. It may not be significant for the majority of items shared purely in visual terms on social media and blogs for example, but to print we need to expand that illusion into something real.
Adobe has been caught very much in the middle of this dilemma, as one of the original leading developers of design software, they have had to react to the marketplace and compete with products to match some of the quick fix options available to the general public. There are some very good ones out there, as well as the more obvious gimmicks. The problem for the professional user is having the capability to tackle any possible task, not just the easy ones.
And while I always stress that other programmes are available, it’s hard not to compare them with the industry standard which has such a comprehensive selection of options for the experienced user.
I often compare it to a tool kit - the simple kind you may have in the boot of the car, or a kitchen drawer. It’s perfectly fine for most simple tasks. But as a tradesman you want to be sure you have every type of tool you might need for your trade on a call out and not just be tackling a job with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Of course you still need to know how to use all the various tools properly, and most importantly know which one to reach for when you see the task in front of you. Experience is obviously very valuable, but equally even to a novice plumber, a bust pipe should be pretty obvious. The problem with digital files is that any issue may be well below the surface.
Once upon a time it was sufficient to advise a customer to save a file, as a PDF or a Jpeg, and that would be fine because generally those customers had some understanding of what they were doing, or the programmes they were using were more basic in what they actually did. Now, with so many alternative apps, and many ways of saving many different types of files it...
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