10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus

 Being Against Technological Progress if Futile

Ron complaining that antibiotics put too many grave diggers out of work. The transfer of labor from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization. It is inseparable from centuries of rising living standards and improvements in human rights. What a luxury to sit in a climate-controlled room with access to the sum of hu¬ man knowledge on a device in your pocket and lament how we don't work with our hands anymore! There are still plenty of places in the world where p...
Folksonomies: automation
Folksonomies: automation
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30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus

 Information Fertilizes Moral Growth

...a flow of information can fertilize moral growth. Scholars who have puzzled over the trajectory of material progress in different parts of the world, such as the economist Thomas Sowell in his Culture trilogy and the physiologist Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, have concluded that the key to material success is being situated in a large catchment area of innovations.306 No one is smart enough to invent anything in isolation that anyone else would want to use. Successful innovators...
Folksonomies: information morality
Folksonomies: information morality
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05 OCT 2014 by ideonexus

 Relativity in Space Warfare

"Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn't cope with it; that they wouldn't have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffler coined the term future shock to describe this situation." The commodore could get pretty academic. "We're caught up in a physical situation that resembles this scholarly concept. The result has...
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Having to travel at speeds of light means facing a future version of the enemy and that you are attacking them from the past.

12 APR 2012 by ideonexus

 Intelligent Life May Have Appeared in the Universe Billio...

[W]e might expect intelligent life and technological communities to have emerged in the universe billions of years ago. Given that human society is only a few thousand years old, and that human technological society is mere centuries old, the nature of a community with millions or even billions of years of technological and social progress cannot even be imagined. ... What would we make of a billion-year-old technological community?
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Considering the age of the universe. The technological progress of such extraterrestrials would make them godlike.

04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Keynes Predicts Unemployment from Automation

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.
Folksonomies: employment automation
Folksonomies: employment automation
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He predicts technological progress will outrun the pace for which we can find new uses for labor in 1930.

01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Dyson Spheres

The mathematician Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study, offers a scheme in which the planet Jupiter is broken down piece by piece, transported to the distance of the Earth from the Sun, and reconstructed into a spherical shell – a swarm of individual fragments revolving about the Sun. The advantage of Dyson's proposal is that all of the sunlight now wasted by not falling upon an inhabited planet could then be gainfully employed; and a population greatly in excess of that which...
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A hypothetical sphere surrounding a star, harnessing all of its power.

01 JUL 2011 by ideonexus

 The Impact of Scientific Ignorance on Society

As a society, we walk a tightrope between limbo and extinction. We’re on a threshold of survival, in a society threatened as never before to find the way, with less and less margin for error. The decades ahead to the year 2000 and beyond, as were the decades just past, can be either interrogative, presumptuous, or insane. And we have to create our own flight plan, because this Earth didn’t come with one telling us how to get to the future safely. The winds of change are blowing across th...
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Anticipating the future is the lesson of the past, and the modern world is increasingly disenchanted with the technological progress that makes life possible.