Steve,
I recognize much of your experience of a rush toward a vanishing point and sense of expectation about that. My question is how can you tell the difference between the usual kind and the unusual kind? We've had exploding economic change for a couple hundred years, doubling in size every 20 years and radically transforming everything everywhere all the time. Look at how vastly each generations life experience has been from the last, going back as many generations as we have any personal knowledge of. People have declared the "sky is falling" and the "end is near" endlessly it seems too. I think when I set about to find the answer to that question, to see if I could validate some of feelings of expectation, I asked some of the useful questions and narrowed it down quite a bit. The question though, is what question would you ask to tell if a feeling of impending grand transformation was real or not? I don't think "magic" is what we're talking about. One would not have any way of confirming a "premonition" of magic. I do think quite sincerely and confidently that foresight about real complex system transformations, approaching 'water shed moments' is very likely to be verifiable if they're real. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:56 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete? Phil Henshaw wrote: Does it just accelerate indefinitely, like the singularity guys propose?? Or does it reach some point of stabilization as a process, and a relative completion of the process of exploding rates of change? I feel that I am an anachronism, though I am probably not alone on this list. In reviewing the list of "obsolete skills" I find that I hold over half of them and actually practice half of those. For example: I still adjust the timing, gap the plugs and points, and clean the carbuerator on my 1949 ford truck. I cut my own firewood (often with handsaw and axe rather than chainsaw and logsplitter). I cook my meals on a wood cookstove which is my only heat other than the sun. I have built my own structures of mud and straw. I make my own charcoal and use it to forge my own iron and steel implements. I grow (some of) my own food. I have not owned a television for 20 years. I still own an operable manual typewriter. I was born just before Sputnik went up. I watched men walk on the moon. I've seen every square meter (literally) of the earth mapped from orbit. I've seen the surface of Mars via telepresence. I've watched global climate change go from a rough concept to a conspiracy theory to a widely accepted theory to an almost-directly experienced phenomena. The sunburn I got in NZ after 10 minutes on the beach at Sea Level helped to make the Ozone hole more real to me, for example. I have also personally experienced the accelerated advance of knowledge and technology. I have worked on some of the most advanced big physics, new biology, and advanced computing projects in the world. I was already a veteran user of the internet (NSFnet, ArpaNet, UUNet, etc.) when it was opened up to the world. I read Drexler's seminal nanotechnology-coining "Engines of Creation" while it was still only his master's thesis. I attended Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" (first given the year I was born!) and "Reversible Computing" lectures. The list goes on. I am not unlike most of you on this list in this extreme contrast of experiences. Some here are at least a few years older than me, and many are much more well connected/embedded in the science and technology realm. Some here were born before the Manhattan Project. Many of you may even be mildly bionic (replaced hip or knee, pacemaker, etc.) and many of you will become moreso, possibly unto immortality. <Singularian Rant> We are perhaps at a unique cusp in time. I believe (but do not so much approve of) Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity up to the question of what it means to be *human*. If some of us do succeed in living forever, which almost requires replacing all of our meat, one piece at a time (like the Tin Man of Oz) or all at once (Kurzweil's upload), will we be the same person? Will we even be the same "species"? Would we even recognize ourselves? What is intelligence/cognition/self without embodiment? The turmoil in politics (last 8 years), economics (coming on hard as I type), and religion (fomenting for decades with possible more-acute symptoms any year now) may only be a mild tremor leading up to the extreme and abrupt changes we may be in for. Maybe I've read too much Science Fiction, too much Utopian/Dystopian fantasy. Maybe I am too easily fueled by Morbid Fascination. For better and/or worse, there are big changes afoot. Can Complexity Science help us to predict anything specific, help us to avoid any of the least desireable changes, or mitigate the worst effects? I'm not sure. Some of us seem to have a fundamentalist-like belief in Complexity. We believe that by increasing the complexity and/or diversity of a system, we get "good" results. Some of us seem to believe that our complex systems theories can help us model "everything that linear science cannot". I am not so sure, not so impressed, yet I *am* highly entertained and sometimes even hopeful at the meager understandings and predictions and even interventions we *have* achieved. As a member of this culture (high-tech Western Civ) and of this species (Homo Sapiens) and of the class mammalia and of the subphylum vertebrate and the general category of life itself, I am totally amazed and taken in by what we are. Not the pinnacle of evolution, whatever that means, but something uniquely interesting. Life seemingly being an antidote to entropy or at least a brave challenger in the face of entropy's statistical inevitability. If I survive the distortions we are entering into, and can still recognize my humanity, my membership in the family of all life, I hope that what I find in the PostHuman result is not a terrible aberration of all I currently hold dear and familiar. I doubt I will survive this time, possibly only because the time will be too long for the body I was born into and I personally have little interest in taking on the many changes and technologies implicated in singularian survival/advancement. I will most likely die in the next 20 years of one of the many human/mammalian frailties our ancestors died of. I do question the Singularians, the wisdom and implications of living forever. When a cell "chooses" to live forever, I think it becomes a cancer which seems always and ultimately to kill the body it was formerly a member in good standing of. The Singularian Utopia may be nothing more than the beginning of a not-so-benign tumor in the body of humanity. In another vision of Singularian Utopia, those who transition to PostHuman will simply retire from humanity unnoticed, not unlike Ayn Rand's John Galt. Methinks too many of the Singularian/PostHumanists read too much of Ayn Rand like John McCain. I am a died-in-the-wool Godelian and by extension of the halting-problem, believe that for most (all?) interesting things, we must simply wait for the "Fullness of Time". </Singularian Rant>
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