Phil Henshaw wrote:
I feel that I am an anachronism, though I am probably not alone on this list. In reviewing the list of "obsolete skills" I find that I hold over half of them and actually practice half of those.Does it just accelerate indefinitely, like the singularity guys propose?? Or does it reach some point of stabilization as a process, and a relative completion of the process of exploding rates of change? For example: I still adjust the timing, gap the plugs and points, and clean the carbuerator on my 1949 ford truck. I cut my own firewood (often with handsaw and axe rather than chainsaw and logsplitter). I cook my meals on a wood cookstove which is my only heat other than the sun. I have built my own structures of mud and straw. I make my own charcoal and use it to forge my own iron and steel implements. I grow (some of) my own food. I have not owned a television for 20 years. I still own an operable manual typewriter. I was born just before Sputnik went up. I watched men walk on the moon. I've seen every square meter (literally) of the earth mapped from orbit. I've seen the surface of Mars via telepresence. I've watched global climate change go from a rough concept to a conspiracy theory to a widely accepted theory to an almost-directly experienced phenomena. The sunburn I got in NZ after 10 minutes on the beach at Sea Level helped to make the Ozone hole more real to me, for example. I have also personally experienced the accelerated advance of knowledge and technology. I have worked on some of the most advanced big physics, new biology, and advanced computing projects in the world. I was already a veteran user of the internet (NSFnet, ArpaNet, UUNet, etc.) when it was opened up to the world. I read Drexler's seminal nanotechnology-coining "Engines of Creation" while it was still only his master's thesis. I attended Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" (first given the year I was born!) and "Reversible Computing" lectures. The list goes on. I am not unlike most of you on this list in this extreme contrast of experiences. Some here are at least a few years older than me, and many are much more well connected/embedded in the science and technology realm. Some here were born before the Manhattan Project. Many of you may even be mildly bionic (replaced hip or knee, pacemaker, etc.) and many of you will become moreso, possibly unto immortality. <Singularian Rant> We are perhaps at a unique cusp in time. I believe (but do not so much approve of) Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity up to the question of what it means to be *human*. If some of us do succeed in living forever, which almost requires replacing all of our meat, one piece at a time (like the Tin Man of Oz) or all at once (Kurzweil's upload), will we be the same person? Will we even be the same "species"? Would we even recognize ourselves? What is intelligence/cognition/self without embodiment?</Singularian Rant> |
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