On Lawn Mower Technology

Andrew
3 min readMar 28, 2023

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and the subtleties of what we can’t see

man pushes lawn mower into the future.

Today I found the ability to get work done, with any real clip, absurd. Productivity, much less action, became overwhelmingly muted by the reality of needing to purchase a lawn mower.

So instead, I bought a lawn mower. A push kind.

If you’re picturing one of those black and red saucers that have the pull chord, attributed to many shoulder surgeries, with a 140cc gasoline Briggs and Stratton engine, you’d be wrong.

It’s a Kobalt, baby. And it’s electric.

Meanwhile, I’m two chapters into Kevin Kelly’s bone shaker of a book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. It’s been disturbing my head (in mostly good ways) and inspiring even more interest in our intersection and parallel with all-being technology.

The first ‘force’, Becoming, lays out the notion that technology is a first source of the reality that “everything, without exception, requires additional order to maintain itself.

In good detail, Kelly peers into the machine of constant technological evolution to show us that we evolve with it as “perpetual newbies,” having to first learn the new tech and then constantly relearn it as it undergoes its own fission, transformation, and rebirth.

This reality begets visions of utopia (evolutionary technology selects for the relegation, or even elimination, of work resulting in perpetual bliss) and dystopia (evolutionary technology cannibalizes us and AI takes the game of thrones).

Kelly presents, in contrast, what he calls “Protopia.” This is the “state of becoming, rather than a destination.” It’s a process that makes things incrementally better. Something we loathe as we have evolved to the absolute now.

But, he states, there’s a problem with this protopia/becoming: never-ending change blinds us to incremental change. We expect to go from zero to generative AI all of a sudden.

Meanwhile, we underappreciate the language models like ChatGPT, Bard, and Microft’s Co-Pilot. Google Translate is missed as ‘normal’ and Video Assistant Referee (VAR) has disarmed most soccer fans.

Forest for the trees.

So what’s this got to do with Kobalt’s Gen4 40-volt Max 20-in Push Cordless 6 Ah lawn mower? Excellent question.

The last time I mowed a yard was with the kind I described above: Pull chord, engine starts, gasoline flows through lines, fires pistons, guy drinks Mountain Dew when finished.

Having now bought an electric lawn mower that I need no gas can, no engine choke, engine filter, oil, spark plug, and no pull (shoulder)-chord start, my mind just leaped forward from 2014 — 2023.

Without examination, it assumes that zero innovation happened in that gap and that, what do you know, Kobalt electrified the lawn mower in time for me to arrive at Lowes and pick it up.

How many other smooth and gradual progressions has my lack of a protopian worldview missed over the last 9 years?

Too many to know.

Wherever I think I am, I am ten-fold behind the curve that’s ahead.

Quick, hide from my brain that there are already automated Roomba-like lawnmowers.

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Andrew
Andrew

Written by Andrew

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