At 03:09 09/03/2013, MG wrote:
Or, and this is the fundamental flaw of the Ted-oids is it both--utopia
for some and dystopia for the rest.
(KH) Yes, indeed. From the very earliest significant innovation (striking
a spark from flint), some people would have benefited, others would have
become inadequate. (A savanna tribe with portable fire would have been able
to push a predator away from its kill and thus, over time, been in better
physical condition than a fire-less neighbouring tribe which, in times of
severe drought, would not have survived. In later millennia, the tribe that
invented the sprung spear [atlatl] was able to kill large grazing animals
whereas tribes with simple thrusting spears could get nowhere near their
prey. In many later millennia still, starting in early agricultural
'civilizations', successive episodes of human exploitation have occurred at
different times at various levels of savagery -- large-scale human
sacrifices, slave labour, feudal populations, conscripted armies, factory
workers and, latterly, increasing numbers of people whose jobs are
presently being robotized.
Keith
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell
Sent: Saturday, March 09, 2013 2:37 AM
To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Subject: [Futurework] Are We Standing at the End of Times or Before an
Intoxicating Dawn?
From:
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Kurtz
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2013 8:45 PM
Subject: [Ottawadissenters] Are We Standing at the End of Times or Before
an Intoxicating Dawn?
<http://www.nytimes.com/>
The New York Times
March 8, 2013
Are We Standing at the End of Times or Before an Intoxicating Dawn?
By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/anand_giridharadas/index.html>ANAND
GIRIDHARADAS
LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA This foolish, callous world of ours is en route
to hell. Or this is the best the world has ever been.
One of the stranger features of our time is the jousting and mingling of
these two rhetorics. You hear them so often that you can forget how
extreme and contradictory they are.
Europe and the United States as we know them and, ergo, civilization
itself are toast. The ecosystem is falling apart. Your texting children
will grow up illiterate. Chinas sky will soon be rotating among 50 shades
of black. The middle class? Finished.
Oh, but: We live in glorious new times in which an illiterate,
malnourished African child can text-message her way to democracy; upload
her version of the Harlem Shake to YouTube on that smartphone she
hopefully owns and become a viral star; and perhaps even avail of that 3-D
printer in her refugee camp and finally make those toys her parents never
could buy her.
Each of these rhetorics must be taken with a truckload of salt. But it is
true that this is simultaneously a time of real fecundity and real
withering, of astonishing innovation and unbelievable breakdown, of great
gains that so often fail to make ordinary lives less grinding and bleak.
To spend a few days ricocheting between these rhetorics, attend the annual
TED conference it stands for technology, entertainment and design
which this year served up a heady stew of claims that the world either is
going to the dogs or is awesome squared.
It began, aptly enough, with a debate between two men about whether human
progress was over or perhaps just getting started. The scary thing was,
both made a compelling case.
Robert J. Gordon, an economist, depressed everyone with a progress is
over sermon. His bottom line: The kinds of things we innovate and
celebrate today, like apps and thinner phones, cannot compete with
previous generations of innovations for their capacity to improve human
living: the discovery of electric lights, for instance, or of
refrigeration, elevators, cars and washing machines. Thus, genuine
progress is leveling off and, with it, growth.
Erik Brynjolfsson quickly marched onstage to inform us that Mr. Gordon was
all wrong. The next wave of inventions will make the last waves seem
childish. Its a new dawn in which we can measure almost anything, in
which ideas can be shared for free, in which people around the world can
self-organize and solve problems without the help of big institutions.
Progress!
If you came suspecting that this technology thing was ruining the world,
there was much fodder for you. A technologist named Danny Hillis warned
that the very smart Internet was never designed to power very dumb things
like your light bulbs and your thermostats and that using it for more
and more such things exposes us all to the risk of catastrophic system
meltdowns. Others argued that technology was privileging headwork over
other labor and would leave all but the most brilliant behind. That the
new corporate-built, technology-greased cities we are creating will lack
soul. That were all going to be badly hacked unless we wake up. That
technology once seemed poised to take us all on regular moon trips, and
instead all we got was Facebook.
And then, just as you were about to get sad, you would hear that 3-D
printing is going to revolutionize the revolution, turning all of us into
makers. That blind people can now get shoes installed with GPS and a
haptic feedback system, so that their shoes can navigate them. That there
is a new way to create
<http://topics.nytimes.com/your-money/credit/credit-scores/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>credit
scores for the worlds millions of unbanked people. That robots, rather
than displacing workers, will soon work alongside them, turning humans
into robot trainers. That paper posters can somehow be turned into
electronic touch screens. That someone has figured out how to make cheap,
Ikea-like kits for the assembly of whole houses. That were at the outset
of a new
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/solar-energy/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>solar
energy boom. That underground fission will make solar seem like amateur hour.
Sometimes, the utopians at TED grow so removed from the doom crowd that
they propose solutions to problems that arent really problems, like how
the Internet is presently confined to human beings.
We should not restrict this network to one species, Vinton G. Cerf, one
of the pioneers of the Internet, said in introducing a new initiative
the Interspecies Internet.
And so it went. An age of technological unemployment awaits, but Bono
informed us extreme poverty could soon be behind us. The music business
as we know it could end, but so could global health pandemics. Corrupt
money is strangling U.S. politics, but never fear: We can bypass the U.S.
government, raise virtuous money and incent states to make reforms with
private, rather than public, cash.
What makes this time of ours so peculiar is that both of these visions
contain truth. Its hard to think of a comparable period in history in
which the rhetoric of end times so effortlessly danced with the rhetoric
of an intoxicating dawn. So which will it be?
Join an online conversation at <http://anand.ly>http://anand.ly and follow
on <http://www.twitter.com/anandwrites>Twitter.com/anandwrites
[]
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