In psychology, we talk about resilience - the ability to bounce back
after experiencing adversity. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that
resilience is what makes the difference in many cases between the
successful and unsuccessful. Resilience, or something akin to it,
enables some of us to see opportunities during periods of change and
to take advantage of those opportunities. The lack of resilience is
what causes some of us to see those periods of change as adversity.
So, the question becomes who can adapt to changing circumstances the
fastest/most successfully. Those will be the ones who come out on top
in the long run.
IMHO.
Barry
On Mar 9, 2013, at 10:42 AM, Keith Hudson wrote:
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: [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?
March 8, 2013
Are We Standing at the End of Times or Before an Intoxicating Dawn?
By 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. China’s 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. It’s 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 we’re 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 credit scores for the
world’s 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 we’re
at the outset of a new 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 aren’t 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. It’s 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 and follow on
Twitter.com/anandwrites
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