Jacob, As somebody pointed out, you ignored my irrefutable comments. The industrialization of the world didn't get going in most countries until well into the 20th century and you will still not find much sign of it where a billion people live [who remain rural, poverty-stricken survivors]. Okay, there were some steel axes or something in the 17th century [and they used some to decapitate a lot of French aristocrats], but even in 1900, people would write letters to their rural, agricultural cousins in New Zealand about the industrial revolution attracting people rapidly to the towns [and cities].
Anyway, the timing is interesting, but irrelevant. The point was the progress and the increasing rate of it and the qualitative change of it and the quantitative change too!
Life is NOT made up of a reversion to the mean. Life specifically DOES include 'progress'. The evolutionary process is progress in any normal sense of the word. Now we have overlaid on DNA progress, an intellectual progress. Now we are taking it to another level.
'Reversion to the mean' specifically breaches the Chaos Theory, fractalizing impetus and all that stuff. Randomness writ large! What humans are doing is defying the reversion to the mean. They have been successful in self-selecting themselves with the help of mutation away from the Monkey Model, to what you see in the mirror!
You are a Believer in Doom. You are the type who thinks the world stopped in the 15th century and we should all be Amish. You are the type who thought [in the 1980s] that the huge debt would cause The Great Depression of 1991. [I'm just saying 'you are' to show you how it's rude to presume what somebody is...which isn't really the point here - the point is It]
The New Paradigm will NOT be a laminar flow into Nirvana. $ill Gates and Microsoft have adopted as their new slogan to replace "A computer on every desk and in every home", "Major Paradigm Shift Happens".
People should NOT think that there will not be major mayhem. Of course all sorts of paradigm shift will happen and much of it will be ugly and death-dealing for a lot of people [think AIDS in Africa as one macabre example]. Think tsunamis from meteorites. See my next post for some other not necessarily fun paradigm shift.
But the big stuff won't go away - there really IS fibre stringing the world. There really ARE blisteringly fast processors linking together by the billion. There really ARE 5 billion of us living in the modern world compared with 1 billion in the rural world of 1900 or the 500 million of 1800 [or however many were around then]. There are a multitude of real, major changes and improvements NOW in place around the world. The hordes of people wasting time on Y2K are now gainfully employed in something constructive. Every day there is a vast flooding multitude of developments being reported. So many that even in one narrow field such as CDMA, nobody can hope to keep up.
These are progress reports. CDMA really IS better than GSM which really WAS better than analogue which was better than walking to a phone which was better than riding a horse to warn that the British were coming, which was better than running after a pig to kill it with a knife to get dinner!
Mqurice [My immense ignorance of history won't change what The New Paradigm and It are going to do to the world.] |
