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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (216770)	2/12/2013 1:54:37 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541622

That really is the same old argument which has been running for hundreds of years now and it has always been shown to be false. <That is because new forms of physical labor were needed---running the spinning machines etc. Now the machines are replacing the need to actually do the physical labor. 2 or 3 computer programers can monitor the robots. > If you believe that though, it's worse than you think. The physical labour was replaced in the industrial revolution. I used to do lots of physical work which has been replaced by machinery and a good thing too. The industrial revolution was a physical realm, replacing physical labour. The industrial revolution made our muscles obsolete. Now we have the Cyberspace revolution and extra-somatic thinking superseding wet chemistry thinking. It was years ago that Deep Blue sent Garry Kasparov walking off waving his arms in frustration, defeated. 40 years ago, chess was considered the height of intellectual prowess and it was claimed that computers couldn't beat people at chess. But it's worse than that. It's not just individual rinky dink little computers which are geting good at specialized tasks. They don't really think. They just run their programmes which so far are made by people. Thinking is the recognition of reality - the measurement of it [in our case by eyes, ears, texture, temperature, taste and smell], the genetic grinding of that reality, and an output which changes reality, which is then observed again and the newly created reality considered afresh and so the cycle continues. People have invented lots of measuring devices to help us recognize reality. So now we can measure magnetic and gravitational fields, invisible to eyes radiation, acceleration, altitude, speed and anything that exists, though the Higgs boson is somewhat elusive and neutrinos and dark matter are sneaky, so we don't have it all pinned down yet. There are now transducers by the billion. The internet of things is developing to monitor everything and report back to Cyberspace, where distributed intelligence considers that input data and in many instances takes action directly to change reality. That's thinking. We are "things" and are increasingly being monitored. It's a pretty sure bet that we'll be monitored nodes in the internet of things. "For your own safety of course" and "While we can do a drone strike at any time, we will of course be very judicious about who we strike and why". "Habeas corpus is a silly out of date English law". 1 kg of wet chemistry is demonstrably pathetic at thinking. Google alone can remember and recall in an instant stupendously vast realms of information. It doesn't forget and doesn't die of old age, or anything [though Gmail has been known to go down]. It's much more reliable to use Cyberspace to do our thinking for us than our own limited minds. Increasingly, we'll just follow the instructions of our personal devices, which will of course get their information from Cyberspace. So our Google autocar will turn left and take us around a back road and we'll be puzzled. But it will know that there's a traffic jam forming ahead and it's best to bail out now and take a different albeit slightly longer route. The car probably won't wake us to ask if that's okay. We need our sleep. It's a new paradigm for our brains, not our work force: <In other words it's a new paradigm for the work force. The only question is whether we decide to manage human obsolescence or not.> Ted Kaczynski decided to manage human obsolescence. So far, he and his fellow travelers are on the losing side. It's a rout. "We" are not going to manage much. China is trying to monitor people but paradoxically, they are really helping create human obsolescence. You are right that it's a new paradigm. Shift happens. Major paradigm shift happens. Chimps were superseded by New York. Chimps don't run New York. Evolved humans do. There will likely be some evolved humans necessary to help install fibre or something, where our chimpoid physical and cognitive powers are useful. But that doesn't mean chimps can't go on living as chimps in the African forest and humans can't go on living as humans. Cyberspace doesn't share the same ecological niche. Mqurice

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (216770)	2/12/2013 8:50:19 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541622

<<In other words it's a new paradigm for the work force. The only question is whether we decide to manage human obsolescence or not.>> And we do need to do that. But only the liberals seem to understand that concept (as something other than lazyness) and know how to do that. But the masses do not like liberals, so there is the conundrum. And there is also a huge irony here. IMO, the reason the low information RW voter does not like the liberals is exactly because the RW sort of knows the liberals know what needs to be done, but it would require them giving up many of their antiquated ideas 9and power and drams) and a certain contempt they feel about the elite educated liberal. I see it every day as I swim daily in a pond of conservatives. I know exactly what they think and feel.