02 FEB 2024 by ideonexus
Abstractions Turned Obfuscations
There is an old saying in Silicon Valley, “There is the first 80% and the second 80%.†While it is really hard to create new technologies, it is also really hard to implement them for any measurable advantage. This has always been true: The steam engine didn’t matter until it was put into a ship and locomotive; the Wright brothers’ flight didn’t matter until it moved people; electricity needed to be delivered to the home; and telephony didn’t matter un...
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1 03 MAR 2014 by ideonexus
The Danger of Scientific Ignorance in a Science-Based Civ...
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when we're a
service and information economy; when nearly all the key
manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries;
when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few,
and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the
issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own
agendas or knowledgeably question those In authority; when,
clutching our crystals and r... 1 
notes
notesWe are more reliant on science than ever before, but we are also most disdainful of it.
20 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Death of Technocracy
What we are witnessing is the beginning of the final breakup of industrialism and, with it, the
collapse of technocratic planning. By technocratic planning, I do not mean only the
centralized national planning that has, until recently, characterized the USSR, but also the
less formal, more dispersed attempts at systematic change management that occur in all the
high technology nations, regardless of their political persuasion. Michael Harrington, the
socialist critic, arguing that we have rej... 1 notes
notesThis is not a dichotomy--there can be degrees of planning and emergence--but the problems with technocracy are true challenges.
08 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
Science VS Economics
The spirit and method of Science arc the direct antithesis of magic.
It is science which has produced the "Machine Shop".
It is magic that has produced "Finance".
In the machine shop. Science rules only in so far as machine processes go: there its control stops.
The social control of the Machine Shop lies with the Towosis of Finance.
Thus it is that our Towosis (like those Of Trobriand) control not only the work, the workmen, the work shop — "industrial society" is only the Great ...An interesting perspective. Science is the workhorse, economics is the charlatan exploiting it.
03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
A Positive Spin on Automation
Our labor world and all salaried workers, including school teachers
and college professors, are now, at least subconsciously if not
consciously, afraid that automation will take away their jobs. They
are afraid they won't be able to do what is called "earning a living,"
which is short for earning the right to live. This term implies that
normally we are supposed to die prematurely and that it is
abnormal to be able to earn a living. It is paradoxical that only the
abnormal or exceptional are ... 1 notes
notesBuckminster believes in automation because it will create more freetime and allow more adaptive behaviors in human beings, but he fails to take into account capitalist society where livings must be earned.
29 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
The Relationship of Industrial Society to Knowledge
Industrial Society is not merely one containing 'industry,' large-scale productive units capable of supplying man's material needs in a way which can eliminate poverty: it is also a society in which knowledge plays a part wholly different from that which it played in earlier social forms, and which indeed possesses a quite different type of knowledge. Modern science is inconceivable outside an industrial society: but modern industrial society is equally inconceivable without modern science. R... 1 notes
notesThe two are codependent, one cannot exist without the other; therefore, our entire modern world relies on science.
