| | | I may have misunderstood your motive for
saying that, but my point is simple and remains the same. You've reached into your prodigious and admittedly impressive brain and pulled out the innocently revealing instruction we were given ages ago, the last few lines of which say:
He stuck in his thumb,
Pulled out a plum,
And said "what a great boy am I"!
Consider that the older references (e.g., 1850) say "great boy" while the newer American references say "good boy". That a group of someones decided that patting oneself on the back (as we do, say, with Qualcomm or fast airplanes) is equivalent to being "good" is instructive in itself. It's the same sort of "good" a defense secretary might say of an efficient missile on its way to destroy 10000 innocent beings. Observe how we have "normalized" horrendous things.
I've been doing binary numbers for a long while. And with some of the smartest people, much smarter than me :) . I understand advances and how they (can) happen, and even (sometimes) why they happen, but in all that time I have been unable to see with clarity where they lead other than to other, similar, advances. This is not good or bad; it is how events occur.
The motivation is always something like "greater good, for the benefit of humanity, for national security", and the more crucial motivation of profit is taken as a normal. We have normalized so much horrid behavior in the name of advances for greatness or, even worse, good.
Will grand-scale mistakes and disasters occur? For certain they will. This is not new. It happened with Chernobyl, with Japan, with the famine in Ukraine and even almost occurred with the little Dutch boy whose little finger in the dyke saved everything, as did Noah's (supposed) boat. It happened with the dinosaurs too. And it will happen with us. It has as much to do with VVV as with Daffy Duck, though Daffy at least brings a smile to our faces in the worst of times. :)
I do not know where all these fantastic things you revere are taking us. Where some of them have already taken us is decidedly bad and not good.
The thing is this. We wobble about as if we know what we are doing. Greedy algorithms and optimal algorithms are different things. Because optimal algorithms don't come easily, people (even computer scientists) use greedy algorithms when faced with a task for which they don't know the best solution. But while mathematicians know they are working in non-optimal terrain, most people (MBAs, politicians, war-mongers, CEOs) have no clue. As a result, what seems to be "great" or "good" right now has longer term consequences we simply have no handle on. Facebook and Google are good examples. It's as if you marry a gorgeous woman because she is gorgeous, because everybody wants gorgeous, and later you find that gorgeous is not gorgeous. So a better strategy was required.
But then again, what do I know? You can travel with gorgeous in a fast Qualcomm airplane with all kinds of plums and spread the VVV doctrine. :) I have faith in the Universe: good eventually, eventually is squeezed out of a thing, no matter how evil the thing. I do not know why it is this way. |
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