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 pe...Folksonomies: automation
Folksonomies: automation
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notes30 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
1 notes
notes05 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... 1 notes
notesHaving 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? Folksonomies: extraterrestrials alien life
Folksonomies: extraterrestrials alien life
1 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
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 n...Folksonomies: extraterrestrials solar power
Folksonomies: extraterrestrials solar power
1 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 this l... 1 notes
notesAnticipating the future is the lesson of the past, and the modern world is increasingly disenchanted with the technological progress that makes life possible.
