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Robots Without a Cause
WG55 writes "Have you noticed that more and more technology is more ingenious than useful? Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian writes in his article Robots without a cause that much technology produced today will change our lives little, if at all. He writes, 'Our response to being bored and rich is not to discard our possessions and live more simply, but to buy more stuff to reduce the space in which we might contemplate our shame.'"
I recently made a $60 investment in a tiller garden utensils and plants (onions, peppers, tomatoes, mellos, and corn) and planted them a new garden in my back yard.
Granted gardening is far from new technology, but a tiller that weighs no more than 20 pounds and can still cut through 8 inches of earth? That's a pretty good feat of technology. I really enjoy the fact that what used to take an entire weekend now only takes me 25 minutes.
While the technology may not have a huge impact on our lives it does bring about more time for leisure. Some of us spend 9 hours a day at work, come home and clean the house (because we couldn't before work), make dinner, and then notice we have maybe 2 hours tops of free time before we have to get to bed and do it all again the next day.
Technology has made it easier for us to be able to actually relax and release stress from us. To not have to worry about the lawn because you placed a chemical that causes it to grow stronger and less fast or to be able to not have to worry about the house because a new weatherproof paint won't fade peel or chip. It's these "simple" things that we may not notice, but we also don't notice the impact they have on us. It can take an entire weekend to plant a garden, take care of a lawn, or paint a house.
It's technology that makes it possible for us to have more time to enjoy life.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
It's about a cultural obsession with temporary diversion and amusement in novelty.
Shockingly, he supposes that lasting value in life might come from knowing oneself better, and that real sources of happiness are pusued with fewer contemplative distractions.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
And I believe that when Joseph Fourier presented his work to the academy of sciences showing that any function could be represented as an infinite sum of sine and cosine functions, the result was a big yawn from everyone.
Actually, Fourier's proof was extremely controversial at the time, and has arguably had a larger impact on the subsequent development of mathematics than anything else in the 19th century not invented by Gauss.
Consider a square wave. It's a discontinuous function that by Fourier's theorem can be represented as an infinite series of continuous functions -- and yet it's trivial to show that any sum of continuous functions must itself be continuous. So which is it -- continuous or discontinuous?
The problem in this specific instance results from a failure to distinguish between pointwise convergence (looks at local behavior -- whether two functions give the same answer at the same point) and functional convergence (loosely, that the functions behave the same over the entire range being considered). But the real problem was that there was enough slop in 19th century definitions and standards of proof that it was possible to "prove" a theorem true or false using equally valid arguments.
There were other problems cropping up at the same time, of course, but the problems of Fourier analysis were a major if not the major cause of the movement for rigor that redefined math in the 20th century.
Connecting all this to things the average Slashdotter will have heard of, the famous Hilbert program was a prominent part of the movement towards rigor -- a series of important questions that had to be answered if rigor were to be possible. Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem and the Turing machine were both answers to Hilbert problems.