On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 7:24 PM, delancey <[email protected]> wrote:
> > ... > > PS: I do wonder about the exponential arguments. It does seem some > patterns are exponential, and that does make things very weird, if not > downright frightening. But should we expect our exponential patterns > to flatten out? I don't expect them too, but will they? I didn't take the 'exponential' business as central to this presentation, but near-exponentiality certainly is core to the Singularitarian worldview. Even if 'progress' were exponential, our capacity to keep up with it is not, and never will be so long as we remain something we'd recognize as 'us'. Which, of course, is the core singularitarian point: IT won't be US anymore. But as I pointed out, on the way to the singularity we run into resource problems. Hence what Jamais Cascio has called an 'environmental singularity.' Don't discount the resource constraints: Things could move much faster if we had the resources to make them do so. They will slow down when our resource bottlenecks tighten. Of course, with so many more technically educated people being brought into the mix (what was it, 2.5 million a year between China and India?), we can expect one of the resource bottlenecks to get a little wider, and we can expect the same thing with regard to other bottlenecks. But until we get singularity beings to do the thinking for us, we're still just moving bottlenecks around. Toffler et al made two big mistakes: They underestimated our capacity for accommodation (a.k.a. 'putting up with shit'), and they underestimated our capacity for adaptation (a.k.a. technical deus ex machina). (It reminds me of the way that Marx & c. underestimated the capacity of capitalists to find new ways of moving capital around, except that the resources we're going to have a problem with aren't virtual, the way modern capital seems to be.) Those can be rolled up under the category of misunderestimating human imagination. And that's where the basic confidence of the SF'nal weltanschaung comes from, is that it's rooted in the idea that we can think our way out of any crisis based on the evidence that so far, we've managed to do just that. It's sloppy, un-scientific thinking, really: Because we've always managed to make it happen, we should assume we'll be able to make it happen again, without actually making an analysis to see whether it's likely that we will -- we have confidence, we have *faith*, that we'll be able to pull our asses out of the fire with regard to water, fuel, energy and air. It's really just substituting faith in human imagination for faith in providence. Certainly the former is a much wiser thing to have faith in -- but it's been responsible for a lot of crap so far, too. (After all, all those messes that human imagination got us out of -- most of them were ones that human imagination got us into. We now, for the first time in our history, have the capacity to very, very quickly create messes that we * cannot* get ourselves out of.) I always try to remember that denial requires imagination, too, after all. > Here I'm > reminded of when I was working on my MA in CS, the CS dept at IU had > this machine they were very proud of and kept cordoned off in a > refrigerated room: it was a terabyte memory server, and EMC machine. > We always said "terabyte" with awe. Last week I walked past a USB > ported terabyte drive the size of a paperback at BJs. I imagine soon > there'll be terabyte memory sticks. Then 10 terabyte memory sticks. > Then.... Well, come on, that's apples and oranges, right? I mean, 'memory server' -- that was RAM, right? RAM prices always lag WAAAYYYY behind hard disk space prices. I mean, a terabyte of RAM (as a flash drive) would set you back at *least*$2K these days.... And those memory sticks -- they better be at least Class 6 before I start plugging them into my cranium. I'm not going to sit around for 6 hours waiting to forget that 500GB case of heartburn I just had....* -- *Those of you who don't get this joke should take it as a sign that you have not quite yet been sucked into the void of technological consumerism.... > > -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
