Jay, going troppo is the natural state of humans. We are simply not designed for mass-producing cast iron wheels and machining them day in day out, as in the industrial revolution, or sitting in a cubicle all day with a phone, computer and intray, having driven along a freeway in a traffic jam, as in the cyberspace revolution.
If somebody wanted to keep a large primate, say a chimp, in a little cubicle all day, with nothing to do except look at pixels and paper, interrupted with random stress-inducing demands when the bell rings on the phone, there would be hell to pay in the ethics committee meeting.
I think you misunderstood my position on troppo bush-babies, while reading the lines rather than between them, because I write an eclectic mix of jest, irony, satire, mimimcry, nonsense, fantasy, serious analysis and confusion, blended with ignorance, knowledge, guesswork, pondering and hope.
Tradermike, saying the industrial revolution makes the cyberspace revolution look like a toaster [if I am reading him correctly] has got it completely wrong. <... Contrast the technological changes today with those of the 1880's, 1920's, or the 1940's and you'll see that this notion is one of the biggest jokes foisted on the American public. It is used to justify insane stock valuations and the reckless Federal Reserve policies that Greenspan has carried out over the past decade. The industrial revolution makes the computer look like a toaster. We weren't in a "new economy" that suspended the rules of economics and we aren't in one now. Debt still matters. Capital investment still matters. You can't create an economic boom with record levels of consumer and corporate debt and a hyperinflation of the money supply - computers or not computers. Internet or no internet.....
Put the 1990's "productivity miracle" in perspective with the history of the American economy and it is just a small blip....>
He inadvertently put his finger right on what it's all about. But got it wrong. The industrial revolution freed people from muscular effort - machines are good at mechanical action, especially now that robots have got some programmable and even self-correcting abilities. The computer [which is a simplistic way of looking at cyberspace] is freeing our brains! Without having to use our muscles and without having to use our brains, we have nothing left to do but go troppo. No more cubicle, no more lathe. Just serving drinks to each other, giving massage, dancing, playing music for each other, discovering new mechanisms in the Calabi Yau superstring quantum loops, going swimming, fishing, and otherwise living the life of Riley.
The industrial revolution was quite literally the toaster. A useful electromechanical device. The computers combined are cyberspace. To think that replacing our brains [by doing an infinitely better job and a negligible cost] is less of a big deal than an industrial revolution toaster is totally failing to understand the consequences of what people are creating.
Brain workers used to use books of logarithms and slide rules. I am geriatric enough to remember being excited to get a slide rule - it made calculations so simple. Not only that, I had a circular slide rule! How swanky was that. I could move poundals, slugs, feet, inches, pounds, shillings, pence, gallons, pecks, bushells and acres around like nobody's business!!
I bought my first calculator in London in 1974 and it was a Unitrex something, which had sin, cos, cubics etc - a reasonable scientific calculator, which cost me a months salary. In 1973, a guy I worked with got the job of reviewing various calculators to see which was the best buy. It was an actual project, which took a week or so. Now of course, calculators are spread all over our house, and cost near-zero. This cybercomputer, 80211-linked, ADSL powered, sitting on my lap able to communicate with anywhere and get any information is unimaginably amazing viewed from only a couple of decades ago. To think of it as a toaster is so off-track I can't think of something funny to say about it.
graviton.com and many other companies are going to link sensors into cyberspace using wireless links. They are building a brain. It isn't a human brain replica. Humans, despite a peculiar self-absorption, are not the centre of the universe and our needs include the need for a supernatural being to get everything under control, which will then discover that that need parallels It's own. [Note the correct apostrophe there]. The cyberspace revolution is the zygote of that entity.
Now, alongside that significant development, are 6 billion people, who are at present essential for propelling the whole show. The more the merrier because each person adds value [other than the barbarians - relatively few of them; I only saw one yesterday] and because the tools with which they add value have a marginal cost near zero [a cloned Windows XP, CDMA ASIC, and fibre is near-zero cost per pixel] they can easily add value.
Adding value is easier and easier. The cost of adding that value is nearer and nearer zero. With more people in the profitable circle of life and money, we have a virtual circle of huge proportions compared with 50 years ago and 100 years ago.
I remember reading a letter to my grandmother's mother who left Cornimont in Alsace, France with her three daughters and husband during the Prussian invasion of 1870 [or thereabouts] and subsequent siege of Paris which they survived. It described the process of the late 19th century industrial revolution in the area, with people moving to the towns and industry.
The industrial revolution surrounded me during my early life and adulthood. I saw it burgeoning into full bloom in the 1970s in Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere. The oil crises were effectively the end of the story [not really the end, but the dramatic price increases in oil marked a psychological watershed]. At that industrial revolution zenith, the computer, communications, cyberspace revolution, which had been bubbling away in the background; literally the dark rooms in the basement of engineering school in Auckland and similar places around the world, with people punching cards in Fortran IV, booking time to run their programmes on computers which seemed impressive then, costing millions, huge roomsfull of hardware, but which are a pathetic joke compared with what I have sitting on my lap right now.
This revolution is barely started.
I know there is a url somewhere [to save DJ reading this repetitive redundancy] but I have no idea where it is. Anyway, everyone else repeats their "Uncle Al is a toaster. The end of the world is nigh!" comments day in, day out, so I think I can too. So far, I seem to be most right. The world is getting better, not worse. The great financial collapse of 2001 did NOT happen. It was postponed to 2002 but 20.02. 20.02.2002 was The Cusp when the little global dip seemed to turn around and the Nikkei and Hang Seng are now over 11,000 and the Dow is not far behind. They are back in the expansionary era. There was no black hole.
We are beyond the event horizon with no limit to where we can go. We have escaped the black hole of biological destiny where DNA feeds on DNA, red in tooth and claw, with random mutations and 99.99999% death filtering out the successful mutations, determining the future of our lives.
The cyberspace revolution is more than a toaster. It's enabling total freedom. Well, there are the small glitches about steel trade, Osama, head-hacking and fuel supplies. But other than that, [and a few currency glitches, banking ratios and bankruptcies], things are hunky dory.
It looks like another great day, so, going troppo, which is our human destiny,
Mqurice
PS: DJ, did you get to here?
Once upon a time, long, long ago, I was sitting on some sheet steel, eating my sandwiches by myself, looking into the factory where I had been machining faces on cast-iron wheels, and boring an axle hole, pondering the meaning of life, work and happiness. I knew I wouldn't be long there and knew that most of the guys there would always be there, or somewhere similar. I made a pact with myself to never forget what it was like to work there for them. That was the industrial revolution in action.
I subsequently worked in cubicles, offices and on the 23rd floor [or thereabouts] of corporate HQ [BP Oil in London].
I have also had a lot of other jobs. The natural state of humans is definitely troppo, but we want the mod cons too. Our drives are limbic, epub.org.br and those don't fit easily into the industrial factory or office cubicle. |
