From: micah glasser (micahglasser@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Apr 19 2006 - 08:27:38 MDT
As I see it the PC and the Internet , which are obviously not two distinct
things, are nothing more than the current state of the evolution of
technologically mediated human language and logic. This technology is only
one more technology, yet it is also a greater technology that has been made
possible by the technology that came before it through a process of memetic
natural selection (AKA science). Do we say that this technology is greater
than the invention of writing or the steam engine? Although the Internet (to
include the entire global telecommunications infrastructure) would not be
possible without all of the world-changing technologies that came before it,
it is still the greatest technology. It is the exponential rise in power of
machines that mediate human language that facilitate the exponential rise in
power of all other technologies. In this sense all technologies prior to the
Internet were nothing more than faint adumbration of the Globalizing
technologies of the present which now promise to advance at speeds that have
never before even been imagined. And that is why the Internet is a "big
deal". Those who are engaged in linear thinking need to awake from their
dogmatic slumber. The Internet portends AGI and technological singularity
which raises questions that make people very uncomfortable. So anyone
selling a book that assuages that basic fear and tries to explain away the
current state of technology as just like any other era of technology is, in
my opinion, doing a disservice.
On 4/19/06, Ricardo Barreira <rbarreira@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > What he said is that the Internet and the PC aren't any more important
> > than many other earlier developments, and that's true. Corporations,
> > secure locks, printing, ships that can sail upwind, banks, newspapers,
> > rifles, democracy, rights, coal, romanticism, economic theory, the
> > Enlightenment, Newton's laws, interchangeable parts, public schools,
> > eyeglasses, public libraries, steam power, an end to slavery, the
> > tractor and the automatic reaper, street lights, evolution, vaccines,
> > electricity, explosives, sanitation, police, tanks, machine guns,
> > antibiotics, airplanes, the assembly line, marketing, recorded music,
> > radio, quantum mechanics, insurance, income tax, social security,
> > phones, nuclear weapons, televisions, cars, indoor plumbing, air
> > conditioning, elimination of smallpox, environmentalism, civil rights,
> > rockety, globalization - which one of these has been less important
> > than the internet or the PC?
>
> So if he puts the matter that way, what is his point after all? What
> is his definition of importance and how important is his assertion?
> Irony intended...
>
>
-- I swear upon the alter of God, eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man. - Thomas Jefferson
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