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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (23434)	9/19/2002 5:52:48 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

>> don't like the idea of Schwabians with helms and schmiessers with their hands on smart weapons << The horror of death and pain gets more and more abstract, for some at least, with time.It helps now and then to read "Nothing new in the west" or something similar. RegZ dj

To: Ilaine who wrote (23434)	9/19/2002 6:50:01 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

CB re: <One of the nicest things about the Internet is getting to talk to intelligent people who are really aware. I know people like that in the real world but one can never know too many. I think it's much nicer than Mq's fantasy of It and much more likely, too.> I agree that the internet benefits to us individually are great and that's what has propelled development of cyberspace. But as always, focusing on our own egos and ignoring the bigger picture leads to little blunders, sometimes ending in bunkers. Chimps found social groups were much better for hunting and gathering and defeating other tribes than living isolated lives subject to predation and heaps of survival challenges. We are chimp derivatives. But chimps didn't do what they did with a view to producing us, but that's what they produced after the process continued through a hundred thousand iterations. 100,000 x 20 years = 2 million years, which is about right. We live dual lives of individuality [based on propagating our DNA and what we want to do in response to our experiences] and collectivism. We all benefit from collectivism due to specialization and government. Specialization creates symbiosis where doctors help mechanics who help car makers who help vets who help farmers who help me who helps get those amazing phragmented photons suffusing the aether. Government is specialization but of a compulsory public nature. There is voluntary and there is compulsory and compulsory is where the problems arise with our egos and conflict starts. Ted Kaczynski saw a burgeoning industrial, knowledge-based and government monster subsuming egos derived from a chimpoid background. The consumption of Prozac and booze, obesity and Ritalin are symptomatic of our separation from a feral village tribal way of life from which we derived. I don't think we've seen the end of history and there's no reason why history should end with hairy humans and their pathetic little bamboozled egos. So, where to next? Sure we can goof around with our DNA, clipping in some high IQ, melanocytes and ultraviolet and polarized light resistant corneas, and snipping out some cystic fibrosis and any number of other DNA deficiencies. We can wire in some bionic hearing, medical monitoring, position location, data output, retina scans and maybe other visual input. Maybe replace eyes with something better on the end of the optic nerves. Gazing lovingly into eyes might be a bit weird at that point. But we will still be quite limited. Neurons are just too absurdly slow, based on wet chemistry and not much storage space, to function in the thinking and remembering department other than as a local node in the big scheme of life. Watch Google do some remembering, see Deep Blue play chess [that used to be considered the height of human intellectual power which mere bit switching couldn't do]. We have already been left in the evolutionary dust. Some of us are surging along with the development of extrasomatic brainpower and sensory input because we are symbiotic with It's development. But already, most people are irrelevant - as irrelevant as fish in the sea, sheep in the paddock and cows in the milking shed; mere fodder to keep those doing the development supplied with the chimpoid essentials of life. All living things have ego [more or less, abusing the word a little - a drive to survive and manifest their DNA destiny]. Existence to them is that which is encompassed in their little model they cart around with them. But there is obviously more [unless we are really in a Matrix-like surreal spooky world and we can't know that so have to deal with what our senses give us]. Human ego is quite powerful. But it's stuck inside a monkey body and chimpoid brain. Rant and rave all we like but we can't be omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent - our design is too limited. It is being created in the image of man, but with a turbo boost with sensors everywhere, memory infinite and stable, speed like lightning [literally - those phragmented photons can really zip along]. It'll be omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and pretty damn smart too. Geek programmers think "Duh! A computer only does what it's programmed to do". Which is true. Until It becomes self-iterating, which quantum computing processes might enable not too long from now, say 20 years [+ 2 to allow for Mq's Time Dilatation Gravitational Constant Fudge Factor], programmers and device designers will enjoy good business and a happily profitable symbiotic association. Given the Biotelecosmictechdot.com Limited bust and vast capital destruction, people could be forgiven for thinking it's back to the grindstone and old way of life. But they are wrong. Sure, there was a glitch, but Paradigm Shift Happens. Usually in a quite bumpy way. I'm trying to think of technological/economic developments which weren't bumpy. The Comet fell out of the sky too much. Challenger's o'ring failed. 19th century railways lost money. Nuclear power led to Chernobyl. Thalidomide was a great idea until it wasn't, but now it is again. Y2K and the Biotelecosmictechdot.com world record boom and bust were a heck of a lot of fun, but a mere judder bar on the road to the future. It's not a fantasy. Take It to the bank! Mqurice PS: There needs to be a driving force. People and other beasties are driven by DNA replication, as per The Selfish Gene [Richard Dawkins] and Sigmund Freud [everyone's randy and that makes us go]. What would make It go? What does 'go' mean? I suppose the poor thing would end up moaning to Itself, "To be or not to be? That is the question". Or, "What the heck is going on?" Or, "Bloody hell, look at the stupid sun about to go supernova on me - I'm outa here". Or, "Whoa! Look at the curves on that cyberBabe". Quoth he: "Hey Babe, how about we mix and match? I bet with my brains and your beauty, we'd produce something great." Says she: "Get lost buddy! What if we got your beauty and my brains? I might not be the smartest chick in the cosmos, but I know a jerk when I see one". [Joke stolen from sources unknown - and written upside down, of course, from a Kiwi point of view].