Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-23 Thread Eric Scoles 
On 2009-02-22, [email protected]  wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:46:36 -0800 (PST) delancey 
> writes:
> >
> >
>
> >  And
> > folks like Vinge approach it with such a sense of inevitability that
> > they think 'ways it couldnot-happen' is a clever time-waster of a
> > parlor game.
>
>
> To be fair, Vernor Vinge himself has examined non-singularity future
> alternatives:
>
> http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/010247.html
> http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=memelist.html?m=1%23696
> http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0696.html?printable=1(print-friendly 
> version of the above)
>
> http://media.longnow.org/seminars/salt-020070215-vinge/salt-020070215-vinge-web.mp3(.mp3
>  audio of the above, plus questions and answers)
>

I hadn't seen the others, but I've listened to the Long Now presentation.
Vinge's a rational guy, a scientist, so of course he admits of the
possibility that there won't be one. But as I recall that particular talk,
he frames it by saying that this is basically a game to him, because he's
sure it's going to happen (though far less sure what it will mean).

At one level, the future is always a singularity, so in a sense I suppose
'the singularity will happen' ends up being a tautology (because the future
will happen).




-- 
eric scoles ([email protected])

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-22 Thread greenie31 

On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:46:36 -0800 (PST) delancey 
writes:
> 
> 
> > ==We should consider these facts when evaluating the singularity. 
> Will it be a spinning out of control, or will social factors 
> continue to improve?
> > This singularity -- is it blue?
> > I'm sorry, but 'the singularity' in non-ironic usage 
> simultaneously puzzles me and makes me laugh. It's got such 
> magic-think aspects to it, and yet it's all so bloody numeric. And 
> folks like Vinge approach it with such a sense of inevitability that 
> they think 'ways it couldnot-happen' is a clever time-waster of a 
> parlor game.


To be fair, Vernor Vinge himself has examined non-singularity future
alternatives:
http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/010247.html
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=memelist.html?m=1%23696 
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0696.html?printable=1
(print-friendly version of the above) 
http://media.longnow.org/seminars/salt-020070215-vinge/salt-020070215-vin
ge-web.mp3 (.mp3 audio of the above, plus questions and answers) 
   Frank

Check out my web page at: http://www.geocities.com/stardolphin2/link3.htm

"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or
present are certain to miss the future."
- John F. Kennedy

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-22 Thread delancey 


> ==We should consider these facts when evaluating the singularity. Will it be 
> a spinning out of control, or will social factors continue to improve?
> This singularity -- is it blue?
> I'm sorry, but 'the singularity' in non-ironic usage simultaneously puzzles 
> me and makes me laugh. It's got such magic-think aspects to it, and yet it's 
> all so bloody numeric. And folks like Vinge approach it with such a sense of 
> inevitability that they think 'ways it couldnot-happen' is a clever 
> time-waster of a parlor game.
> Sterling and others have pointed out repeatedly that: it's in the nature of 
> singularities that you don't know what they'll result in; that most of the 
> singularitarians are then going ahead and predicting anyway -- which is fine, 
> that's what futurists and SF folk do, but I smell a strong, deeply sexual 
> tang of technolust about it all that makes you wonder about their 
> objectivity; and that we have, in fact, been here before. (See my point 
> above.)

Sure, OK, I really just meant when speculating about futureshock.




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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-22 Thread Eric Scoles 







delancey wrote:

  
as fo people are becoming more civilized? I don't think so. Some are, some
are becoming less civilized. Tun on the news, local, national, or world news.

  
  
The news is nothing but anecdotes.  It focuses on the dramatic.
That's fine as a social service, but not as a source of representative
sampling.
  


It depends on what you're after. It can tell you what we fear.
Fear is pretty dangerous when you have the power to wipe out large
populations with relatively little effort.

The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski's standard admonishment to his
students always applies: Don't tell me what they say they do,
tell me what they do. But what they say they do, and how that
differs from reality, tells us important things about their mental
state while they're doing what they do. Helps us to understand why they
do, what they do. 


  
Interpersonal violence has smoothly declined for centuries (see
Pinker's nice discussion of this at TED:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html).
Slavery, sexism, homocidal homophobia, racism, state torture,
sanctioned genocide, the belief that all non-human organisms lack
moral value -- a million foul beliefs and practices that were normal
as little as a century or even 50 years ago are now socially
unacceptable.  Our government is now forced to wage war in secret
(e.g., Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador) or with huge disinformation
campaigns that limit the time the wars can be waged.  Examples like
these can be compounded indefinitely.  Though, perhaps, these trends
are largely but not solely in the developed world, such as Europe.
  


Actually, I suspect they get more dramatic when you look at the
details outside of Europe. Europe's been heading that way for a long
time. 

There is one exception, I think, though: Much of Africa remains
unstable (hard to argue that it's not less stable than before
colonialism). Aside from folks like Ben Ebenhack, nobody but the
Indians and the Chinese seem to give a crap about Africa in a lasting
or substantial way. That's true in SF, too -- who can you think of in
SF who writes on African topics? Gotta get ahead of the curve: Indian
and Chinese software development firms have been aggressively looking
for a fourth world to re-outsource to for at least eight years that I
know of (source: a former outsourcing chief at Sutherland) and keep
revisiting the idea of going to Kenya and Nigeria for talent; and I
give it a maximum of five years before the Nigerian film industry has a
breakout hit in the US. Chinese investors are rolling in there with fat
pockets and few scruples about how the money gets spent. 


  
(As a side note, this is the thing I find most perplexing about
conservativism.  Conservatives appear to share a belief that things
used to be better.  That's astonishing to me.  It's just false.  As
nuts as denying evolutionary theory.)
  


This isn't puzzling to me at all. The conservatives you speak of regard
many of the changes you cite as evidence of a decline in
civilization: Cats & dogs, living together in PC har-mo-nee. Hell,
I agree with you about most & maybe all of those as 'goods', but
many of the hottest-selling lines in SF right now have some pretty
strong racist, sexist and pro-violence (if not explicitly pro-torture)
aspects to them. Modern military SF is essentially fascist in
character, and there's a strong conservative aftertaste to 'new space
opera'. 

So anyway, as we "advance"*, we see backlash, we see instability, and
this has an effect on society. If you want a "'twas ever thus" on this,
you could find one by looking to the social changes going on around
many major technological revolutions. Yes, we cam through them all, and
now here we are. But: is where we are now someplace our ancestors would
have wanted to get to? 

To Dave's point: I agree that Toffler was looking at the social
aspects, but I still think he was technologically focused and that's
why he over-predicted the chaos and the change: We haven't changed as
much or suffered as much (psychologically) as he predicted, because he
under-estimated the power of inertia. So far. On this count, inertia is
a double-edge sword: It protects our sanity as it jeopardizes our
future.

==
*I was trained in anthropology, not philosophy, so I have some issues
with this concept of "advancement." To me, it's just choices we make
about what we want. To us, it's 'advancement', but to me, it's "mere"
evolution (and I define 'evolution' very, very broadly). "Advancement"
smacks of teleology. 
==


  
We should consider these facts when evaluating the singularity.  Will
it be a spinning out of control, or will social factors continue to
improve?
  


This singularity -- is it blue? 

I'm sorry, but 'the singularity' in non-ironic usage simultaneously
puzzles me and makes me laugh. It's got such magic-think aspects to it,
and yet it's all so bloody numeric. And folks like Vinge approach it
with such a sense

Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-22 Thread delancey 

No, no, no claim made one way or the other.  It was just a random
parenthetical association observed while responding.


On Feb 22, 12:43 pm, David Ennocenti 
wrote:
> Are you calling me a conservative?
> Dave E.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 10:16 AM, delancey  wrote:
>
> > > as fo people are becoming more civilized? I don't think so. Some are,
> > some
> > > are becoming less civilized. Tun on the news, local, national, or world
> > news.
>
> > The news is nothing but anecdotes.  It focuses on the dramatic.
> > That's fine as a social service, but not as a source of representative
> > sampling.
>
> > Interpersonal violence has smoothly declined for centuries (see
> > Pinker's nice discussion of this at TED:
>
> >http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_viole...
> > ).
> > Slavery, sexism, homocidal homophobia, racism, state torture,
> > sanctioned genocide, the belief that all non-human organisms lack
> > moral value -- a million foul beliefs and practices that were normal
> > as little as a century or even 50 years ago are now socially
> > unacceptable.  Our government is now forced to wage war in secret
> > (e.g., Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador) or with huge disinformation
> > campaigns that limit the time the wars can be waged.  Examples like
> > these can be compounded indefinitely.  Though, perhaps, these trends
> > are largely but not solely in the developed world, such as Europe.
>
> > (As a side note, this is the thing I find most perplexing about
> > conservativism.  Conservatives appear to share a belief that things
> > used to be better.  That's astonishing to me.  It's just false.  As
> > nuts as denying evolutionary theory.)
>
> > We should consider these facts when evaluating the singularity.  Will
> > it be a spinning out of control, or will social factors continue to
> > improve?
>
> > cd
>
> --
> David Ennocenti
> 9 West Crest Drive
> Rochester, NY 14606
> 585-426-2348
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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-22 Thread David Ennocenti 
Are you calling me a conservative?
Dave E.

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 10:16 AM, delancey  wrote:

>
> > as fo people are becoming more civilized? I don't think so. Some are,
> some
> > are becoming less civilized. Tun on the news, local, national, or world
> news.
>
> The news is nothing but anecdotes.  It focuses on the dramatic.
> That's fine as a social service, but not as a source of representative
> sampling.
>
> Interpersonal violence has smoothly declined for centuries (see
> Pinker's nice discussion of this at TED:
>
> http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
> ).
> Slavery, sexism, homocidal homophobia, racism, state torture,
> sanctioned genocide, the belief that all non-human organisms lack
> moral value -- a million foul beliefs and practices that were normal
> as little as a century or even 50 years ago are now socially
> unacceptable.  Our government is now forced to wage war in secret
> (e.g., Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador) or with huge disinformation
> campaigns that limit the time the wars can be waged.  Examples like
> these can be compounded indefinitely.  Though, perhaps, these trends
> are largely but not solely in the developed world, such as Europe.
>
> (As a side note, this is the thing I find most perplexing about
> conservativism.  Conservatives appear to share a belief that things
> used to be better.  That's astonishing to me.  It's just false.  As
> nuts as denying evolutionary theory.)
>
> We should consider these facts when evaluating the singularity.  Will
> it be a spinning out of control, or will social factors continue to
> improve?
>
> cd
>
> >
>


-- 
David Ennocenti
9 West Crest Drive
Rochester, NY 14606
585-426-2348

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-22 Thread delancey 

> as fo people are becoming more civilized? I don't think so. Some are, some
> are becoming less civilized. Tun on the news, local, national, or world news.

The news is nothing but anecdotes.  It focuses on the dramatic.
That's fine as a social service, but not as a source of representative
sampling.

Interpersonal violence has smoothly declined for centuries (see
Pinker's nice discussion of this at TED:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html).
Slavery, sexism, homocidal homophobia, racism, state torture,
sanctioned genocide, the belief that all non-human organisms lack
moral value -- a million foul beliefs and practices that were normal
as little as a century or even 50 years ago are now socially
unacceptable.  Our government is now forced to wage war in secret
(e.g., Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador) or with huge disinformation
campaigns that limit the time the wars can be waged.  Examples like
these can be compounded indefinitely.  Though, perhaps, these trends
are largely but not solely in the developed world, such as Europe.

(As a side note, this is the thing I find most perplexing about
conservativism.  Conservatives appear to share a belief that things
used to be better.  That's astonishing to me.  It's just false.  As
nuts as denying evolutionary theory.)

We should consider these facts when evaluating the singularity.  Will
it be a spinning out of control, or will social factors continue to
improve?

cd

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-21 Thread David Ennocenti 
Toffler's view wasn't tech, it was the social changes resulting from tech.
as fo people are becoming more civilized? I don't think so. Some are, some
are becoming less civilized. Tun on the news, local, national, or world
news.

Dave Ennocenti

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 8:31 AM, delancey  wrote:

>
> > Well, come on, that's apples and oranges, right? I mean, 'memory server'
> --
> > that was RAM, right? RAM prices always lag WAAA behind hard disk
> space
> > prices.
>
> Nah, it was an EMC blade server.  Though in all fairness it was a full
> RAID array of some kind or other, I believe.
>
> RE: Toffler.  I would add that the Toffler view is too tech focused.
> There are also social changes other than reactions to technology.
> Many people are getting more civilized.  I can't think of a political
> theorist other than Chomsky who recognizes this fact.
>
> cd
>
> >
>


-- 
David Ennocenti
9 West Crest Drive
Rochester, NY 14606
585-426-2348

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-21 Thread David Ennocenti 
I think Eric said it well with this:

Finally (for the moment): as I got to about the three-minute mark, the
thought came into my head that "future shock" was real, but it's not what we
imagined it would be: The shock is essentially a form of denial.

That's why I believe Toffler was right and I think we are denying it.

Dave Ennocenti

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Eric Scoles  wrote:

>
> Several thoughts spring to mind:
>
> I think this might have been inspired in part by an old Seinfeld bit: "It
> must be hard to be a guy in China. Even if you're a one in a million kind of
> guy, there's a thousand other guys just like you."
>
> I'd had something over 30 jobs by the time I was 38. I never realized that
> made me cutting-edge. (Bleeding edge, maybe...)
>
> All this new information comes at a time when we have dwindling resources
> to actually do anything with it, and in at least two key ways:
> Financial/material, in that more people and more resource-usage and a
> struggline ecology means more cost; and in what for lack of a better term
> I'll call creative bandwidth, as we struggle with assimilating the new
> information. There's an excellent chance that we know, right now, what we
> need to in order to [pick one: find a source of limitless energy; cure AIDS;
> cure cancer; feed all the world's hungry, forever; travel tot he stars in
> a heartbeat; make up your own...], but we don't have the
> wherewithal to process the information to find the answer, and might not
> have the physical or fiscal resources to implement these wondrous fixes.
> Singularity Beings could do all that for us, of course -- assuming they
> cared, and that we could communicate to them what we needed.
>
> Finally (for the moment): as I got to about the three-minute mark, the
> thought came into my head that "future shock" was real, but it's not what we
> imagined it would be: The shock is essentially a form of denial. Because we
> blot all this out in order to continue with our lives, we cling to the ways
> we've done things in the illusion they'll carry forward and even hark back
> to imagined past-ways, instead of dealing with the rate at which things
> change. And in so doing, we insure that some things stay close enough to the
> same that we can continue with our lives.
>
>
>
> On 2009-02-20, [email protected]  wrote:
>>
>> The statistics in this short clip are amazing -- although some of the
>> predictive ones sound a bit iffy.  Do look at this.
>> Nancy
>>
>>
>> --
>> From: [email protected]
>> To: [email protected]
>> Sent: 2/20/2009 12:17:24 A.M. Eastern Standard Time
>> Subj: Fwd: Did You Know?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> SONY PLAYED THIS VIDEO AT THEIR EXECUTIVE CONFERENCE THIS YEAR.
>>
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *
>> *
>> =
>>
>>
>> --
>> You can't always choose whom you love, but you can choose how to find
>> them. *Start with AOL 
>> Personals.
>> *
>>
>>
>> >>
>>


-- 
David Ennocenti
9 West Crest Drive
Rochester, NY 14606
585-426-2348

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-21 Thread delancey 

> Well, come on, that's apples and oranges, right? I mean, 'memory server' --
> that was RAM, right? RAM prices always lag WAAA behind hard disk space
> prices.

Nah, it was an EMC blade server.  Though in all fairness it was a full
RAID array of some kind or other, I believe.

RE: Toffler.  I would add that the Toffler view is too tech focused.
There are also social changes other than reactions to technology.
Many people are getting more civilized.  I can't think of a political
theorist other than Chomsky who recognizes this fact.

cd

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-21 Thread Eric Scoles 
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 7:24 PM, delancey  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 WAAA 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])

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-20 Thread greenie31 

On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:24:52 -0800 (PST) delancey 
writes:
 
> 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
 
 
   Funny you should ask...
 
http://thefutureofthings.com/news/6259/sdxc-memory-card-format-to-offer-2
tb-of-storage.html
 
 
   And strangely enough, I happen to be currently reading Charles Stross'
'Accelerando,' which is relevant to much of this.
 
 
   Frank
 
 
Check out my web page at: http://www.geocities.com/stardolphin2/link3.htm
 
"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or
present are certain to miss the future."
- John F. Kennedy

Find the apartment of your dreams by clicking here now!
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTHF7xA2lB2mnE1hqykHjSMh9vriclZMcSdQE4U4oxoX49ltIBpTAs/
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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-20 Thread greenie31 


On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:24:52 -0800 (PST) delancey 
writes:
 
> 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
 
 
   Funny you should ask...
 
http://thefutureofthings.com/news/6259/sdxc-memory-card-format-to-offer-2
tb-of-storage.html
 

   And strangely enough, I happen to be currently reading Charles Stross'
'Accelerando,' which is relevant to much of this.
 
 
   Frank
 
 
Check out my web page at: http://www.geocities.com/stardolphin2/link3.htm
 
"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or
present are certain to miss the future."
- John F. Kennedy

Meet your Communications needs. Get serious about Tech.
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTL3sVwT7ckmR3TXcLmlcrSDyvTHp9MmdsInMWr1eeJmjzXStzQj5s/

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-20 Thread greenie31 


On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:24:52 -0800 (PST) delancey 
writes:

> 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


   Funny you should ask...

http://thefutureofthings.com/news/6259/sdxc-memory-card-format-to-offer-2
tb-of-storage.html



   Frank


Check out my web page at: http://www.geocities.com/stardolphin2/link3.htm

"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or
present are certain to miss the future."
- John F. Kennedy

Meet your communications needs. Get serious about tech.
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTEmfNAK5fbnW1i4fpXRWH5kdeoiuSjfEJd7E54d48MUteolIV9pYP/

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-20 Thread delancey 

I watched the whole thing, and didn't have a baby, and didn't download
a song.  How can that be?

cd

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?  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
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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-20 Thread delancey 

I watched the whole thing, and didn't have a baby, and didn't download
a song.  How can that be?

cd

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?  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
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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-20 Thread Eric Scoles 
Hmm. I'm left wondering what your point is.

So, are you arguing that there's no *import* to those 'specific statistics'?
Or just that 'change is all that's constant'?

Are you saying that the rate of change is actually not any different than it
ever was?

Are you arguing that we do not face challenges the world did not face when
you were young?

Or are you simply arguing that nobody but Harpers should bother with this
kind of stuff?



On 2009-02-20, SteveC  wrote:
>
>
> I'm afraid I'm not terribly impressed. While some of the specific
> statistics are new, the overall theme could have been compiled into a
> similar video - with contemporaneously astounding numbers - at any
> point in my adult lifetime. Or earlier. Any reading of history will
> show that people thought about change in these exact terms with the
> adoption of television, or the automobile, or the telephone, or
> electricity, or the railroad. Changes that are popularly accepted can
> percolate through society at a much faster rate, but other changes are
> still much slower. How long will it take for hybrid or electric cars
> to reach 50 million? Or the Kindle? Or solar roofing panels? If you
> are 1 in a million in the U.S. there are 300 people like you. That was
> true in the USSR before it was true here and look how that turned out.
>
> The entire foundation of modern science fiction lies in the
> omnipresent feeling of rapid and exponential change that was present
> in American society in the first half of the 20th century. Campbell
> and his boys would have been impossible without it. That's maybe why
> this feels so old to me. Didn't I see this at the 1939 World's Fair?
>
> Change always seems overwhelmingly fast to all people in all modern
> cultures. That is the one constant in the world.
>
> If you want original fun astounding statistics I recommend the
> Harper's Index, published monthly in Harper's Magazine.
> http://www.harpers.org/subjects/HarpersIndex
>
> >
>


-- 
eric scoles ([email protected])

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-20 Thread SteveC 

I'm afraid I'm not terribly impressed. While some of the specific
statistics are new, the overall theme could have been compiled into a
similar video - with contemporaneously astounding numbers - at any
point in my adult lifetime. Or earlier. Any reading of history will
show that people thought about change in these exact terms with the
adoption of television, or the automobile, or the telephone, or
electricity, or the railroad. Changes that are popularly accepted can
percolate through society at a much faster rate, but other changes are
still much slower. How long will it take for hybrid or electric cars
to reach 50 million? Or the Kindle? Or solar roofing panels? If you
are 1 in a million in the U.S. there are 300 people like you. That was
true in the USSR before it was true here and look how that turned out.

The entire foundation of modern science fiction lies in the
omnipresent feeling of rapid and exponential change that was present
in American society in the first half of the 20th century. Campbell
and his boys would have been impossible without it. That's maybe why
this feels so old to me. Didn't I see this at the 1939 World's Fair?

Change always seems overwhelmingly fast to all people in all modern
cultures. That is the one constant in the world.

If you want original fun astounding statistics I recommend the
Harper's Index, published monthly in Harper's Magazine.
http://www.harpers.org/subjects/HarpersIndex
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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-20 Thread David Ennocenti 
I think Toffler warned us about this with Future Shock in 1970. People were
skeptical about his predictions then.  I think it means we should invest in
Prozac! Some of these stats are good, some, I think indicate bad things.

Very interesting video. I think it's one I'll pass on to others.

Dave

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 7:14 AM,  wrote:

>  The statistics in this short clip are amazing -- although some of the
> predictive ones sound a bit iffy.  Do look at this.
> Nancy
>
>
>  --
> From: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> Sent: 2/20/2009 12:17:24 A.M. Eastern Standard Time
> Subj: Fwd: Did You Know?
>
>
>
>
>
>   SONY PLAYED THIS VIDEO AT THEIR EXECUTIVE CONFERENCE THIS YEAR.
>
>
>  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
>
>
>
>
>
>  *
> *
> =
>
>
> --
> You can't always choose whom you love, but you can choose how to find them.
> *Start with AOL 
> Personals.
> *
>
> >
>


-- 
David Ennocenti
9 West Crest Drive
Rochester, NY 14606
585-426-2348

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Re: Did You Know?

2009-02-20 Thread Eric Scoles 
Several thoughts spring to mind:

I think this might have been inspired in part by an old Seinfeld bit: "It
must be hard to be a guy in China. Even if you're a one in a million kind of
guy, there's a thousand other guys just like you."

I'd had something over 30 jobs by the time I was 38. I never realized that
made me cutting-edge. (Bleeding edge, maybe...)

All this new information comes at a time when we have dwindling resources to
actually do anything with it, and in at least two key ways:
Financial/material, in that more people and more resource-usage and a
struggline ecology means more cost; and in what for lack of a better term
I'll call creative bandwidth, as we struggle with assimilating the new
information. There's an excellent chance that we know, right now, what we
need to in order to [pick one: find a source of limitless energy; cure AIDS;
cure cancer; feed all the world's hungry, forever; travel tot he stars in
a heartbeat; make up your own...], but we don't have the
wherewithal to process the information to find the answer, and might not
have the physical or fiscal resources to implement these wondrous fixes.
Singularity Beings could do all that for us, of course -- assuming they
cared, and that we could communicate to them what we needed.

Finally (for the moment): as I got to about the three-minute mark, the
thought came into my head that "future shock" was real, but it's not what we
imagined it would be: The shock is essentially a form of denial. Because we
blot all this out in order to continue with our lives, we cling to the ways
we've done things in the illusion they'll carry forward and even hark back
to imagined past-ways, instead of dealing with the rate at which things
change. And in so doing, we insure that some things stay close enough to the
same that we can continue with our lives.



On 2009-02-20, [email protected]  wrote:
>
> The statistics in this short clip are amazing -- although some of the
> predictive ones sound a bit iffy.  Do look at this.
> Nancy
>
>
> --
> From: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> Sent: 2/20/2009 12:17:24 A.M. Eastern Standard Time
> Subj: Fwd: Did You Know?
>
>
>
>
>
> SONY PLAYED THIS VIDEO AT THEIR EXECUTIVE CONFERENCE THIS YEAR.
>
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
>
>
>
>
>
> *
> *
> =
>
>
> --
> You can't always choose whom you love, but you can choose how to find them.
> *Start with AOL 
> Personals.
> *
>
> >
>


-- 
eric scoles ([email protected])

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