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To: LLCF who wrote (48975)	4/23/2004 6:47:03 PM
From: TheSlowLane	Respond to of 74559

9-pin adapter? I would have thought USB or Firewire!

To: LLCF who wrote (48975)	4/24/2004 4:21:50 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

DAK, I caught the tail end of the industrial revolution and while you might think that "good hard work" to do is a good thing, I deliberately sat on some sheet steel one lunch-time to eat my sandwiches and told myself never to forget the guys working there in the metal bashing and cutting factory and how life was/is for them. I have done lots of "good hard work" of various types. While some manual jobs have been enjoyable, there are some which are not enjoyable. People don't do more of them just for fun. You are right on the basic idea that we are bodies with brains and the balance has to be right. But industrial revolution "good hard work" wasn't all that great for everyone. People can still choose to do it if they wish. It doesn't pay much compared with geeking on a keyboard, but people are free to do manual "good hard work" if they wish. They choose not to because they like the better pay rate and what they can get. It's all choice. People are not mindless automatons [though I'm happy to argue the deterministic position that people don't have free will in the most fundamental sense]. I knew I'd be out of the steel cutting, welding and painting place and knew that most of those guys had no way out. You can think they had a good life, but I prefer mine having escaped. When cyberspace has replaced our brains, as the industrial revolution replaced our muscles, we'll be free at last with machines doing the leg work and brain work. We'll be at the apex of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Anyway, even now, people can use their bodies all they like. They don't have to sit on the couch gawking at tv while shoveling another kg of food down the hatch. Mad Magazine decades ago did a cartoon about the proliferation of cars and how Americans would evolve to have legs and arms as vestigial organs, being shaped like fat bowling pins. One look at what is sold in supermarkets in the USA [and here] is enough to explain a lot of things. If all the "food" things in a supermarket were mixed together in a big container, there would be a LOT of soft-drinks, sugar, white flour, fat and low-nutrient products, combined together with a lot of ethanol. But even that isn't an accurate description as some people are quite particular and buy the nutritious stuff and some buy the junk food. So some people are quite healthy and others are eating an appalling diet. The Matrix has got nothing to do with the process. Other than some DNA selection to give offspring high intelligence, there's not much that can be done to improve our limited wet chemistry brain power. Sure, we can have cochlear implants and retina scans to help data input, but we'll still just be people with 1 kg brains, albeit with a lot more smarts. Even with Einstein's brainpower, we'll still just be people with infinitesimal memory and speed of recall compared with Google, let alone what'll come along. Not to mention "thinking", reading, and so on. The industrial revolution was fueled by property rights, brainpower, population and civilized processes. Found resources were not the central issue. Maybe I'm a dreamer, but there really are CDMA networks around the world and there really is a Globalstar system spraying the joys of CDMA through you. There are quite a few things which I've dreamed and they became 3D reality. Ideas always precede reality. No ideas = nothing happens. You are welcome to spend your days grunting away in manual labour in Pol Pot's or Mao's agricultural great leaps forward. I'll take the cyberspace revolution, mod cons and freedom from the joys of survivalist "LOTS OF GOOD HARD WORK TO DO". Mqurice

To: LLCF who wrote (48975)	4/24/2004 10:03:37 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

<<< Mq is quite the dreamer, all wrapped up in his head with a strand of optic fiber sticking out the back ala "The Matrix"..... when we evolve to be able to fit in there, or at least develope a 9-pin adapter on the back of our skull's he'll be right. :)))) Until then we have hands and legs, and will get sicker and sicker and diseases never before heard of will flourish in people who don't use them. So simple that only the villiage idiot could have the realization.>>> Mq is sort of a quirky modern day Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, minus the Jesuit Theology. Pierre was an early 20th century philosopher, scientist (paleontolgy/evolution), Jesuit Priest, and mystic. His vision that through technology, we are all connected, and we can be thought of as a single entity - with tremendous intellectual potential. He died in 1955, but his thoughts were formulated well before computers became common place - way before Illiac (aka HAL) was imagined and put together (1952) at the University of Illinois. Some people think Piere's vision and the Internet converge. In some quirky way, Mq sounds optimistic and is probably a closet mystic. It is fairly easy, once it has been pointed out to us how human evolution works - how we got from there to here. But it is probably not that easy to see how we go from here to there in the future. You can't just extrapolate from the past. That would be like war colleges using weapons, strategies, and conditions from the last war to prepare for wars in the future - even as they might try to extrapolate how weapons may evolve. Similarly, when you predict the future, all you see is that we've used up all our natural resources, lowered our physical capbilities, and abandoned our tried and true ethics. Quite naturally, in your forecast of the future, you see nothing but doom and gloom - unless we do some of the things you know we will very unlikely do (conserve resources, work harder, etc). In all, I think Mq's vision (though quirky and at times appear to be cynical) is much more optimistic and far likelier to be.