Are we becoming a 'cargo cult'?

The 2007 holiday gift-buying season again brought a major step-up in the sophistication and complexity of consumer goods. The technology embedded in these products is nothing short of astounding. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote in "Profiles of The Future": "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

But there's a worrisome aspect to all this magic in a box. The very complexity of the technology makes it less necessary that users understand it. For example, today's cars are much more reliable and easier to drive than earlier cars (Choke? What choke?), but they are also much more difficult to fix, unless you are trained and have specialized equipment and documentation. The good news, in theory, is that you no longer need to understand how the car works to keep it running; the bad news is that you couldn't do much even if you wanted to.

This reminds me of a "cargo cult," a term originating with a story of Pacific Ocean islanders in WWII who built dummy replicas of radios, antennas and microphones, then called for the planes to land with their cargo, just as they saw military forces do. Physicist Richard Feynman referred to this in his insightful 1974 Caltech commencement address (www.cs.umbc.edu/www/graduate/ feynman-cargo.shtml).

When I think about the trajectory of all this technology, I wonder: Will we increasingly become a society of largely ignorant consumers who happily use what is given to us but leave the design, development, debug and manufacturing to an ever-smaller group? Looking a decade or two out, will there be only a dozen experts who know how to design a decent power supply? Will these groups become like the alchemists of old, and be called upon because they are the only ones with the understanding of how things actually work?

We've come to a point where rap stars get accolades for "designing" cell phones, which really means they are prettying up the case, not the innards. How many people can actually design the phone, or the parts inside of it, and produce it?

Donald A. MacKenzie, professor of sociology at the University of Edin- burgh (Scotland), wrote in "Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change" that there is both "explicit knowledge," which is published and spread, and the very vital "implicit knowledge," which skilled practitioners know and bring to their work, but which is not recorded or even recognized by them.

With the combination of increasing internal product complexity and decreasing end-user understanding, are we reaching a point where the implicit knowledge may get lost, or be known to a smaller and smaller circle? Are we becoming something of a cargo cult ourselves?