I have been involved with the cult of technology for thirty-five years. There are more than a few people, my parents and family included, who view me as their shaman or witch-doctor. Through years of intense study and practice, I know the secret chants and finger-strikes to enable computers to perform their magic.

It's belittling to many adults I know that they need someone like me, or someone a fifth or sixth their age, to enable them to work their computer. My mom tells the story of buying her first Mac more than twenty years ago. Yes, I enabled the purchase, but here was a computer she felt she could actually run use. Last year she purchased her second Mac and her feeling of being able to work on accomplish tasks with her iMac is still there.

When I look at it though, I'm still the shaman. I installed her printer drivers and desktop wallpaper.

My kids also have an iMac. On the other hand, my kids have become more creative with this computer than they ever were on the previous family Windows box. Under Windows, they ran the programs they needed to and did little else. Enter the iMac and my 6-year-old is making movies and my 8-year-old emails Grandpa photos and stories. Something different has inspired them to explore and create.

From a technologist's point of view, the iPad is tiny and limiting. "Only 64GB of storage on the largest one? I've got a 500GB hard drive in my MacBook Pro!" Yet, I know my mom and kids typically use less than 30GB of data each. My oldest daughter has perhaps 12GB of music on her iPod. In today's world of gargantuan storage potential, most of us computer users run around with most of our terabytes rather empty.

We're all seeing the future of computing: a truly abstracted platform that doesn't require the technological elite just runs. Most of the nay-sayers are seeing the end of their religion and power over the tech-have-nots. As one of the technological elite, I'm looking forward to doing what I need to do, not just working to make what I'm trying to do work. This point alone is one of the reasons I left the Windows camp and use a Mac. Just like the automatic transmission abstracted us from shifting gears, computers like the iPad will distance the technology and help keep it out of our way.

It's about time we all get down to the real work at hand. That's the stuff in our job description. There is no reason for us to be a nation of geeks so we can just send and read a few email messages or browse the internet. We don't need to all be technologists or system administrators just to write a report or create a spreadsheet.

If you read my previous posts on making something look easy and small subtleties making big differences, you'll have a grasp on the complexities of simplicity. Computing with iPad-centric technology will finally allow people who are too stupid to breathe the rest of us to utilize technology closer to its potential. Perhaps now, they'll finally stop asking me how to find that lost file and let me get back to what I want to do.