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The Mechanized Future
Michael J. Ross and Dan Sisson write "In our increasingly mechanized world, we repeatedly hear promises that every new digital product, computerized service, or other form of technology, will make our lives easier — bestowing greater leisure, health, and happiness. Yet are any of those promises being fulfilled? Are we not instead becoming slaves to the very "conveniences" that we struggle to master? These weighty questions are addressed by Steve Talbott in his book Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines." Read below for the rest of Michael and Dan's review.
Devices of the Soul
author
Steve Talbott
pages
281
publisher
O'Reilly Media
rating
7
reviewer
Michael J. Ross and Dan Sisson
ISBN
0596526806
summary
A passionate warning against technology overtaking our lives
Published by O'Reilly Media in April 2007, under ISBNs 0596526806 and 978-0596526801, Devices of the Soul argues that we are now blindly accepting technology with little or no countervailing efforts or even awareness, and we are paying a terrible toll, both individually and as a society.
From the day a child of the 21st century begins his education, he is confronted with mind-numbing statistics, numbers, and facts via the computer — which he must accept. Perhaps even more important, he must master its "techniques" as the sine qua non tool to be successful in life. This is not a voyage of self-discovery; it is a demand by "the system" that the individual accept a way of viewing the world that invades, conquers, and ultimately controls his life. The child will learn most of what he knows with it, play with it, talk with it, and allow his thinking to be ruled by it — all because it is the magical machine that gives him access to the world's knowledge, e.g., the Internet.
By the time this child makes the transition from high school to college, he will be required to accept a curriculum that too often lacks meaning and content, that fails to allow him to satisfy his own curiosity about the challenges facing humanity, and is, moreover, expensive and will likely lead to indebtedness. There are few alternatives to this gauntlet, especially if one wishes to belong to the 'credentialed society', which determines modern man's measure of success.
Education is only the first stage in the numbing of our consciousness. What follows is built upon this edifice. Our acceptance of machines — ubiquitous in our everyday lives — provides our food, transportation, entertainment, information, and prestige — in sum, everything we need to function in modern society.
Talbott shows how the machines we use create a grand illusion, namely, that by having every technological gadget, we will save time and money, and be able to spend more time with our family and loved ones. However, that leisure time never materializes. The technology costs more, not less. Consequently, we find ourselves in a perpetual struggle to preserve a bare minimum of human emotions and instincts.
The next stage in the individual's life is integration into the mature world of the computerized economy, i.e., when he becomes a "stakeholder." He accepts a world that does away with human values and subordinates him to "market values." Furthermore, he is bound to lose his sense of privacy.
It follows that almost everyone willingly accepts that advancement in life and career increasingly requires having electronic conversations with machines — and eventually robots — that will never ask us what our personal assumptions and/or values are, and have no intentions of doing so. In short, our resistance to the machine fades. It is "far easier to assign the intelligence solely to the machine than to seek out those tortured pathways" to the human urges within us. Society itself, not just the individual, says Talbott, "is unsurprisingly assuming the character of our technology."
The outcome is grim: "Historically, there appears to be an element of tragedy in all this. We stumble along in ignorance and, by the time we realize the subtle ways our actions have caught up with us, the damage and loss are already irrevocable."
Technology expresses itself in numbers and computations divorced from human values. Efficiency is nearly the sole criterion by which modern corporations make decisions, and it is no accident that these two ideas, human values versus efficiency, are mutually exclusive. In objecting to the mess we humans have created, Talbott notes: "If you want human values, if you want qualitative distinctions, then your theoretical constructs must retain those values and distinctions every step of the way. The minute you allow them to collapse into number alone, you have no way to get back from there to the qualitative world."
Despite these tragic overtones, he argues that we can and must return to that qualitative world where we can realize our deepest human qualities. We can retain our humanity in connection to the natural world, despite using tools skillfully, as exemplified by the wily trickster Odysseus, as well as Tomo, a member of the Waorani Indians in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador who demonstrated phenomenal knowledge of his world.
His prescription for humanity's emergence from this present Dark Age also includes developing a strong sense of history. We must realize how other humans expressed their individuality, and realized their hopes and dreams. Despite the fact that Americans generally have little appreciation for or cognizance of history, there may come a time when reading history may be the only place to find models of human behavior that went against the technophilic grain.
Interspersed throughout his analysis, Talbott offers suggestions to arrest this headlong rush into a mechanized future. They tend to be general in nature, such as urging us to seek a sense of "place," and to engage in conversations with our fellow men (and even our machines) to remind them of our human needs. Echoing Edward Abbey, who attempted to alert us to the environmental disasters of the 1960's with books like The Monkey Wrench Gang, Talbott writes, "This may at times require us to throw a wrench into the machinery in order to serve the worthy human intentions behind it."
Despite Talbott's skills as a writer, the book, sadly, has some substantial flaws. Two of the most obvious are the overly long digressions into the stories of Jacques Lusseyran and Martha Beck, which admittedly are fascinating, but delay the presentation of more topical material. Furthermore, they suggest that Talbott is misidentifying the emotional power of those stories as proof of his arguments, and thus committing the common error of anecdotal evidence. Even worse, they border on romanticizing blindness and Down syndrome, respectively.
He also fails to address a major factor in our growing discontent with the Information Age: the nonstop ratcheting up of our expectations, driven largely by marketing on the seller side, and a lack of philosophic questioning on the consumer side.
A common pattern in the book is a deep criticism of any given aspect or consequence of technology, to the extent that Talbott appears to be arguing that we should do away with it completely. But he often then wraps up his analysis by briefly contradicting the earlier implication, and stating that he does not believe the phenomenon at issue should be eradicated. This schizophrenic reasoning mixes bold, blanket criticisms with assurances to the contrary. Yet one may argue that, with so much of current social discourse failing to question technology, its critics must never err with overly cautious warnings.
There are other problems in his analysis: He invests much hope in what he terms "conversation," "meaning," and "value" — not clearly specified, and yet spoken of highly. He fears machine intelligence (and perhaps rightly so), and doubts its viability, but fails to understand its potential for emergence. Even though a former computer programmer, he does not seem to understand the value of abstraction, and the possibility that it can be used beneficially, without being considered the only source of important knowledge. Lastly, it is odd that he does not cite the pioneering work of a well-known predecessor, Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society.
Nonetheless, the issues that Talbott raises are of critical importance — so much so that they make his lapses of logic that much more maddening. Because so much is at stake, our efforts at analyzing, understanding, and solving these problems, must be proportionally energetic and effective. Technophiles may dismiss his entire effort based upon the book's weaknesses, and consequently miss out on the valuable gist of his viewpoint. Similarly, impatient readers in our age of limited attention spans, might not make it through the aforesaid tangents, and likewise miss out.
The issues that he discusses should be raised more often and more loudly, with broader acceptance and expansion of the debate and its importance. Otherwise, we will continue our robotic march deeper into a future that is controlled more by soulless devices, and less by skeptical humans. If we fail completely to change course, we may be saddled with a life that is intolerable to the human spirit.
Devices of the Soul is an insightful, disturbing, imperfect, eloquent, and important contribution to what may ultimately become the most critical debate in the intensifying conflict between humans and our technological creations: Humans may survive, but will our humanity?
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, freelance writer, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter. Dan Sisson is an adjunct professor at Eastern Washington University, where he has taught technology courses for the past eight years; he is an authority on Thomas Jefferson, is author of The American Revolution of 1800, and is currently building and living in a replica of Monticello.
You can purchase Devices of the Soul from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
From the day a child of the 21st century begins his education, he is confronted with mind-numbing statistics, numbers, and facts via the computer — which he must accept. Perhaps even more important, he must master its "techniques" as the sine qua non tool to be successful in life. This is not a voyage of self-discovery; it is a demand by "the system" that the individual accept a way of viewing the world that invades, conquers, and ultimately controls his life. The child will learn most of what he knows with it, play with it, talk with it, and allow his thinking to be ruled by it — all because it is the magical machine that gives him access to the world's knowledge, e.g., the Internet.
By the time this child makes the transition from high school to college, he will be required to accept a curriculum that too often lacks meaning and content, that fails to allow him to satisfy his own curiosity about the challenges facing humanity, and is, moreover, expensive and will likely lead to indebtedness. There are few alternatives to this gauntlet, especially if one wishes to belong to the 'credentialed society', which determines modern man's measure of success.
Education is only the first stage in the numbing of our consciousness. What follows is built upon this edifice. Our acceptance of machines — ubiquitous in our everyday lives — provides our food, transportation, entertainment, information, and prestige — in sum, everything we need to function in modern society.
Talbott shows how the machines we use create a grand illusion, namely, that by having every technological gadget, we will save time and money, and be able to spend more time with our family and loved ones. However, that leisure time never materializes. The technology costs more, not less. Consequently, we find ourselves in a perpetual struggle to preserve a bare minimum of human emotions and instincts.
The next stage in the individual's life is integration into the mature world of the computerized economy, i.e., when he becomes a "stakeholder." He accepts a world that does away with human values and subordinates him to "market values." Furthermore, he is bound to lose his sense of privacy.
It follows that almost everyone willingly accepts that advancement in life and career increasingly requires having electronic conversations with machines — and eventually robots — that will never ask us what our personal assumptions and/or values are, and have no intentions of doing so. In short, our resistance to the machine fades. It is "far easier to assign the intelligence solely to the machine than to seek out those tortured pathways" to the human urges within us. Society itself, not just the individual, says Talbott, "is unsurprisingly assuming the character of our technology."
The outcome is grim: "Historically, there appears to be an element of tragedy in all this. We stumble along in ignorance and, by the time we realize the subtle ways our actions have caught up with us, the damage and loss are already irrevocable."
Technology expresses itself in numbers and computations divorced from human values. Efficiency is nearly the sole criterion by which modern corporations make decisions, and it is no accident that these two ideas, human values versus efficiency, are mutually exclusive. In objecting to the mess we humans have created, Talbott notes: "If you want human values, if you want qualitative distinctions, then your theoretical constructs must retain those values and distinctions every step of the way. The minute you allow them to collapse into number alone, you have no way to get back from there to the qualitative world."
Despite these tragic overtones, he argues that we can and must return to that qualitative world where we can realize our deepest human qualities. We can retain our humanity in connection to the natural world, despite using tools skillfully, as exemplified by the wily trickster Odysseus, as well as Tomo, a member of the Waorani Indians in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador who demonstrated phenomenal knowledge of his world.
His prescription for humanity's emergence from this present Dark Age also includes developing a strong sense of history. We must realize how other humans expressed their individuality, and realized their hopes and dreams. Despite the fact that Americans generally have little appreciation for or cognizance of history, there may come a time when reading history may be the only place to find models of human behavior that went against the technophilic grain.
Interspersed throughout his analysis, Talbott offers suggestions to arrest this headlong rush into a mechanized future. They tend to be general in nature, such as urging us to seek a sense of "place," and to engage in conversations with our fellow men (and even our machines) to remind them of our human needs. Echoing Edward Abbey, who attempted to alert us to the environmental disasters of the 1960's with books like The Monkey Wrench Gang, Talbott writes, "This may at times require us to throw a wrench into the machinery in order to serve the worthy human intentions behind it."
Despite Talbott's skills as a writer, the book, sadly, has some substantial flaws. Two of the most obvious are the overly long digressions into the stories of Jacques Lusseyran and Martha Beck, which admittedly are fascinating, but delay the presentation of more topical material. Furthermore, they suggest that Talbott is misidentifying the emotional power of those stories as proof of his arguments, and thus committing the common error of anecdotal evidence. Even worse, they border on romanticizing blindness and Down syndrome, respectively.
He also fails to address a major factor in our growing discontent with the Information Age: the nonstop ratcheting up of our expectations, driven largely by marketing on the seller side, and a lack of philosophic questioning on the consumer side.
A common pattern in the book is a deep criticism of any given aspect or consequence of technology, to the extent that Talbott appears to be arguing that we should do away with it completely. But he often then wraps up his analysis by briefly contradicting the earlier implication, and stating that he does not believe the phenomenon at issue should be eradicated. This schizophrenic reasoning mixes bold, blanket criticisms with assurances to the contrary. Yet one may argue that, with so much of current social discourse failing to question technology, its critics must never err with overly cautious warnings.
There are other problems in his analysis: He invests much hope in what he terms "conversation," "meaning," and "value" — not clearly specified, and yet spoken of highly. He fears machine intelligence (and perhaps rightly so), and doubts its viability, but fails to understand its potential for emergence. Even though a former computer programmer, he does not seem to understand the value of abstraction, and the possibility that it can be used beneficially, without being considered the only source of important knowledge. Lastly, it is odd that he does not cite the pioneering work of a well-known predecessor, Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society.
Nonetheless, the issues that Talbott raises are of critical importance — so much so that they make his lapses of logic that much more maddening. Because so much is at stake, our efforts at analyzing, understanding, and solving these problems, must be proportionally energetic and effective. Technophiles may dismiss his entire effort based upon the book's weaknesses, and consequently miss out on the valuable gist of his viewpoint. Similarly, impatient readers in our age of limited attention spans, might not make it through the aforesaid tangents, and likewise miss out.
The issues that he discusses should be raised more often and more loudly, with broader acceptance and expansion of the debate and its importance. Otherwise, we will continue our robotic march deeper into a future that is controlled more by soulless devices, and less by skeptical humans. If we fail completely to change course, we may be saddled with a life that is intolerable to the human spirit.
Devices of the Soul is an insightful, disturbing, imperfect, eloquent, and important contribution to what may ultimately become the most critical debate in the intensifying conflict between humans and our technological creations: Humans may survive, but will our humanity?
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, freelance writer, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter. Dan Sisson is an adjunct professor at Eastern Washington University, where he has taught technology courses for the past eight years; he is an authority on Thomas Jefferson, is author of The American Revolution of 1800, and is currently building and living in a replica of Monticello.
You can purchase Devices of the Soul from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I think it would break it down to two possibilities: upper class those who can fix the robots or create new models, lower class those who cannot.
... is 42.
Does anyone else find it ironic it that he most likely wrote this on a word processor or type writer, rather than the good old fashioned 'un-mechanised' way 'by hand' that he appears to be purporting as the correct method.
Even before mass computerization the fact is that our lives are still being run according to the Industrial Revolution model. Our schooling and sleep patterns have been molded to fit into a model which is no longer being used. Or so I've heard.
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
By the time this child makes the transition from high school to college, he will be required to accept a curriculum that too often lacks meaning and content, that fails to allow him to satisfy his own curiosity about the challenges facing humanity, and is, moreover, expensive and will likely lead to indebtedness. Nothing new here. This is how it was prior to the net. The next stage in the individual's life is integration into the mature world of the computerized economy, i.e., when he becomes a "stakeholder." He accepts a world that does away with human values and subordinates him to "market values." Furthermore, he is bound to lose his sense of privacy...
Efficiency is nearly the sole criterion by which modern corporations make decisions, and it is no accident that these two ideas, human values versus efficiency, are mutually exclusive. This is a false distiction. Modern corporations - with the exception of those that we have foolishly allowed to become monopolies - have to be efficient at pleasing the customer. We customers still have our 'human values', and corporations will cater to those values or go broke.
There is nothing new here, really. There has always been a tension between those who learned a new technology and those who were late learning it. Whether it is the wheel, or the inclined plane, or whatever the latest tech is, the question is who is master.
Mother's Day
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Give war a chance.
Thanks a lot.
Prezidentially yours,
W
All of this technology is suppose to make our lives easier. It used to be all one had to do was go out and hunt for some food a couple ours a day (if even that). Nowadays, we work 8+ hours a day just to make ends meet.
It is my theory that new technology will not make life easier, but instead will increase our demands. It's the same way computer games will always be limited by hardware. Whenever we increase the hardware of a computer, we add more to the game to increase the demand for better hardware. It becomes (has always been) a vicious cycle.
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
Someone watched The Matrix too many times lol. Most americans don't even want other people (immigrants) doing jobs for them, let alone robots. If someone makes a robot that oversteps bounds that people are comfortable with, people will go nutso and make the government halt the robot technology in its tracks. Plus, is it ever really going to be good enough? I for one HATE those self checkouts and voice recognition call answering systems like Microsoft's. I don't think people would be comfortable with androids taking their order at McDonalds or checking them out at WalMart either. I'm still gonna go build some EMP granades right now though lol.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
People were getting their arms pulled off and chewed up in industrial production lines and if they were lucky they might live into their 60's.
I much prefer my options today. And that is what our mechanized future promises. More options.
Those options will not guarantee hapiness, but will offer more people more choices that might lead to hapiness.
The fact is that these devices are only part of the wider picture, of creating mass democracy into a democracy of domesticated consumers. people dont buy things any long because they NEED them, but rather because they want them, and often they want only because theyre deemed disireable by society, or because they see purchasing goods as a way of self expression.
6 5191428174
there is a very good explination of the social engineering tactics used by world leaders utilizing Freudian theories of the psyche that was broadcasted by the bbc, which is entitled, the century of the self.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-26376353
My Grandpa was a factory worker.
My Father was a factory worker.
I am a network engineer.
...you wouldn't post things like this the day after I watch all three Matrix movies back to back to back...
Just another damn luddite. "Oh noes, teh machines are eating our SOULS! We should hearken back to the ways of the indians, for surely they were one with teh nature."
Just once I want someone to really take into account what it would mean for society to actually do the stuff they think it should do. Let's drop out of the rat race, lets stop burdening our children with science and math, and just teach them art and the kind of philosophy that has no practical applications.
So what happens? Lets say our technology doesn't decline, but just stays absolutely steady: All the crap we've been trying to outrun for years will catch right up. Global warming? Yup. Anti-biotic resistant bacteria? Yup. Shortage of clean water? Yup. Shortage of resources? Yup. To stay where we are, we have to push through some of this crap...It's a real race to see whether we can beat it before it beats us.
Alternative? Drop our tech back a couple hundred years, go agrarian. We've only picked up, eh, around 5 billion people since then...Better for the world if they starve, right? At least they won't have to be soulless users of math.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't feel soulless. Life's a grind, sure, but tell me that hasn't always been the case. Regardless of whether or not I kill a deer today, I'm still going to have dinner; that's a hell of a lot more than most of my ancestors could say. My kid may die of something but it's a hell of a lot less likely than it was even 50 years ago. I travel as far back and forth to work as a strong hiker could do in a day, and it doesn't even take me an hour.
Sure, this isn't the best of times (we hope), but it's not the worst either. We're still solving problems. Air quality sucks, but it doesn't suck half as bad as it did 50 years ago. Computers are still ramping up at a rate that is practically obscene when viewed from an objective distance. Think about the tech 50 years ago; most of us have calculators that crush that...And the tech is still in it's infancy. We're still seeking something better for ourselves, the growth of our minds and our societies and the glory of our species.
Or we could just give up. Go back to being hunter gatherers...If that's even possible.
I know which road I'd choose.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I can do my laundry the old way, by washing them manually on a washing board, and then hanging them to dry on the clothlines. Using my washing machine and dryer makes that process go 10x faster. There are examples of this everywhere. Yet we're still working full time and still have the same amount of leisure time as people did in the past (roughly). Why? Cause we want more. We want bigger houses and better cars. And we're competing with each other. Some $500k house in LA is an artificially high price, considering the real costs of building the house. Its high because everyone wants it and anyone buying it knows they can sell it for more later.
There's a bunch of book authors ending up with a review here and they're all writing about the same thing:
"Are things the way they seem, or how about my incredible spin on everything with catastrophic consequences?"
And they always turn out wrong.
we're slaves in a differnet way... more like wage slaves in trying to buy all this stuff.
Also, mind-slaves, in that once we own all this stuff it causes us to behave in more sheep-like conformant ways.
As happened with labor with the wondrous invention of Eli Whitney's cotton gin, technological advancements almost always lead to a future with fewer jobs. Another fact is that global population continues to rise. So we have more people, and fewer jobs to go around thanks to increases in productivity from better software & hardware design, streamlined assembly production lines, and even fruit pickers are facing competition from robotic picking machines in California.
I live close to a large beautiful park. In recent years I have noticed a large percentage of people in the park talking on cellphones. I was amazed. I go to the park to get away from such stuff. You are truly a technological slave if you can't even get away for a few minutes of R&R without being bothered.
As to the consumerism run rampant in our society, there IS a lot of inane and mindless chatter in the media we can partake of daily. A simple solution to that problem, and I believe that most thinking people will figure this out, is simply to turn it off. You don't have to listen to the endless barrage of encouragement to consume, and you don't have to teach your children to become mindless young consumers, either. If someone else wants to raise their families differently that's really none of your concern either. Maybe they're happier that way.
As to Robots in the future, if we create another form of intelligence in the future we should not treat it as there to serve us. I think that part of what makes us uneasy about the idea is the implicit view that robots will be our slaves. If it is self aware then we should allow it to have its own goals, hopes and dreams. We should not enslave them any more than we enslave our own children. Hopefully they'll have a similar view...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Through human history, 99.9% of people had to work from sunup to sundown to even have a chance at survival.
'Go out and hunt some food a couple of hours a day'.... you go try that and see how it works out for you. Remember all it takes is no food for a day or two and you're dead....
I'll take my current 8 hour day where I spend good chunks of it on slashdot and fark, then go play with my son....
Actually, this is an old, old problem.
The ancient Greeks observed that if happiness is the result of having all of your wants satisfied, the surest path to happiness is to discipline your wants.
Philosophy is a pasttime of the wealthy. Technological and social progress have created a society where almost everybody is, compared to the helots of ancient times, wealthy. Quite ordinary people now find themselves dealing with detritus produced by a life of unexamined wealth and consumption.
So, this is not a problem of technology per se; it is only that mass produced technology is one of the most abundant and affordable luxuries of our soceity. The medieval sin of gula or "gluttony" is not simply about gross overeating, it is about compulsive and unreasoning consumption of every kind, which happens to be the cornerstone of our consumer economy. The only reason we think of this in terms of food only is that food is the one overindulgence available to the rich of every society and technological level. Note that food gluttony does not imply massive consumption, it can also be characteristic of excessive delicacy or daintiness. This fits technological gluttony particularly well.
So, it is probably incorrect to call this an "intensifying" conflict. It is more of a "broadening" conflict: broadened to include more classes of peoples and desires than before.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"The stuff you own ends up owning you." -Tyler Durden
"Look, nobody takes this more seriously than me. That condo was my life okay? I loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was me!" -Narrator
Charming man. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one. -Arthur Dent
The introduction sounds a little too black and white, as if technology was either a blessing OR a curse. What about the idea that some advancements have improved lives while others have made things more difficult? I'm sure the author weighs pros and cons in a way that provides this more realistic perspective though..
Wow...for a minute, there, I thought this was the triumphant return to slashdot of Jon Katz!
It's kinda too bad it's not; the resulting flamewar would have been hilarious.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Mr. Talbott had ignored one of the most dangerous and dehumanizing technologies yet, the "book".
This soulless and inert device transforms the living, thinking word of Man to meaningless scratches on parchment or vellum. It leads inevitably to disrespect of knowledge and the withering of memory.
While priests and philosophers may find an occasional use for these "books", their use by the common citizen will enslave them to a technology and destroy the human spirit.
My Great-Granfather was a lumberjack My Grandfather was a machinist My Father was a plumber I am a DBA
Well ok, there is no formal fallacy like this...though some lines of reasoning which are both false and popular get labeled "fallacy" anyway. Like, for example, the "gambler's fallacy."
When we compare unpleasant aspects of modern life to pleasant aspects of an idealized historical life, we find the latter preferable to the former. However, this comparison is always made after specific key variables are eliminated (the pleasant aspects of modern life, and the unpleasand aspects of historical life).
I'd say this game is rigged.
It begins...
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Try Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society and Its Future (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_ and_Its_Future), popularly known as The Unabomber Manifesto. In it he outlines the same slavery to technological advancement in a far less muggy way. Although I have no issue with multiple similar texts spanning the same topic, the fact that he doesn't reference (as far as the summary goes) Kaczynski's seminal contribution makes me somewhat wary of this author's breadth and credibility.
"Devices of the Soul argues that we are now blindly accepting technology with little or no countervailing efforts or even awareness, and we are paying a terrible toll, both individually and as a society. "
Correct me if I am overly cynical, but how terrible can a toll be if it is experienced blindly and without awareness?
Tell me when you've got a terrible toll that is experienced daily and that makes families cry.
Despite the fact that Americans generally have little appreciation for or cognizance of history,
Your bias is showing.
Hypothesis one (original theory): This gives us mroe time to spend with family
Hypothesis two (their reply): Despite this time saved, we seem to have it sucked away. It must be that the devices are EVIL. SATAN SPAWN EVIL. Cue Manical laughter now.
Hypothesis three (reasonable, intelligent, but not panicy enough to get a book):
About 50-100 years ago, we settled down to a reasonable ratio of time spent with family vs. work. Any thing that saves us time will NOT increase the time we spend with one or the other. Instead we will keep the same ratio of time spent working vs time spent with our family. Work is not evil, it is a GOOD thing. We either enjoy it, or we enjoy what it lets us earn. We like more money more than the time with our family, becaue we can use the money to have higher quality time (or we just don't like our family.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This topic was handled with much more insight and analysis 30 years ago when James Burke created Connections and later co-wrote The Axemaker's Gift .
While this is the best thread I've read on Slashdot lately, and there is a lot of truth in what the authors say, I'm not sure I can blame technology as much as the values by which we live. Since when did jobs become more important than families? Tolerating all behaviors more important than supporting healthy behaviors?
Our society is a chicken with its head cut off. We probably have another hundred years before the collapse, but our values have become disconnected from reality and from that all our problems come. Did technology create the mess? No, but much as a word processor sure beats a typewriter, it is a more effective method of realizing our future. Whether that future is decline or progress is up to us.
Another way to put this is, did technology create slavery (the greatest evil of our time) or was it the idea that owning other people was a morally acceptable way to live?
Wow. This horse was being beaten in the century before last. It's DEAD, Jim. It's a self-centered viewpoint that thinks that NOW is somehow "the edge" beyond which the world will plummet into unspeakable horrors. Yes, it's exciting, it's controversial, and it's not true.
I'd much rather be living in the NOW than when that horse's hide was just beginning to blister as it was passed by that new-fangled auto-mobile.
But here's a fun activity... Read through that book report again, but substitute "religion" for "technology". It won't fit in every usage, but where it does and doesn't work is quite enlightening.
My grandfather was a plumber
/. demographic)
My father was a builder/carpenter
I am a physicist
(this game is a little biased though due to the
Repetitive manual labour reduces in value to the cost of the capital and the electricity. With AI, so does the value of thought.
We've already see what would happen. It's happened already with outsourcing. In Bangladesh for example, labour is worth a few cents per hour. The cost of the goods produced using that labour also deflates massively. Everything becomes much cheaper, the value of any money you do earn goes much further.
Of course, brands will still try to get you to spend $300 on $3 worth of shoes and $10,000 on $250 worth of car.
We're assuming plentiful energy here, change that and the robots don't look so attractive.
Deleted
The fact that we have the time and energy to post articles on the internet griping about how inconvenient our gadgets can sometimes be is proof that ours lives are much easier. Whether they are more fulfilling has little to do with this. However, it is hard to have a fulfilling life if you're working 100 hours a week at backbreaking labor to simply get enough food to keep you from starving.
The economy just ups a gear and the jobs change. People do something else instead.
Deleted
Like all things in life, these are just primitive, degenerate forms of bending.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The very people who have the biggest problem with consumption are debtors, who are, by definition, not wealthy. Aside from their own abilities, their net worth is often zero or negative.
The issue with this is that many people are apparently not taught financial prudence, moderation or frugality by anyone, and then, the economy fails to acutely punish their manic spending as harshly as it would have in the past (death, prison, slavery, etc). Instead, we must all bear the burden of the massive consumer debt. Tragedy of the commons, you know. It is this, not directly technology, which allows people to be as gluttonous as they are.
we believe in human progress
we create the servants we need
we develop new ways of living
we develop new ways of living
we search for power sources
we need energy to survive
we build on fragile ground
we build on fragile ground
we feel safe in unstable houses
we fear the world outside
we've become strangers at home
we've become strangers at home
we went too far, we can't turn back
we built too high, we can't get down
we are the slaves of our servants
in the shadow of our ambitions
More specifically, some of his short stories with Tichy (or was it Pirx? I can't keep the two apart) and the two constructors. In his mind, having every need met by robots would lead to a population of fundamentally content beings, but whose activities are exactly zero.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
*yawn*
Another sad attempt to scare us all with the techno-boogyman. It was much more fun when he sounded like HAL, not not an iPod. Now it's just so *old*
Maury
The errors described in the review are so numerous it is hard to know where to begin. Here are a few:
From the review: However, that leisure time never materializes.
Not so! Leisure time has increased! By 6-8 hours per week for men and 4-8 hours for women!
Hell, I am old-duffer compare to most here. Remember what bill paying was like 10 years ago? Having to write checks, fill out addresses on envelopes and stamp them, make sure they get mailed on time, etc. etc. It could take hours, and I hated it. Now, I do everything on line in much less time.
Or, how about writing papers in school in the old days using a type writer! Aagh! Don't get me started on that one -- which brings us to more bullsh*t...
From the review: . . .he is confronted with mind-numbing statistics, numbers, and facts via the computer -- which he must accept. Perhaps even more important, he must master its "techniques" as the sine qua non tool to be successful in life.
What a load of crap! The internet has everything! False statistics and incorrect facts from every possible point of view. "He" does not have to accept everything, and will in fact learn much better discernment tools much earlier in life. And as for "techniques"! Gosh, maybe we should go back to the days before we could read and write so we would not have to be bothered with using pens and the alphabet and other such bother some techniques. Or perhaps we can jettison our computers for the good old days of slide rules and typewriters and mimeograph machines and telegraphs. Its not like there were techniques in the old days now were there? I am reminded of this: Monk's help desk.
I have no time to continue, but this man is a Luddite. History? Here, I am a blast from the past for a lot of you youngin's (whipper snappers the lot of you!) and here I get to speak to you. I couldn't do that in the past. I find nothing credible from the book in this review. I thank the reviewer, but I also think he is too charitable.
You mean "inconsistent", not "schizophrenic". You've committed one of Paul Brians' "Common Errors in English":t ml
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/schizophrenic.h
By your logic, there are less jobs now than there were in 1793, which would indicate that there are more than 5.5 billion people on this planet who have no jobs, assuming everyone who was alive in 1793 had a job.
Damn you Eli Whitney! Damn yooooooouuuu!
What really happened is, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, creating a huge surplus of cotton, reviving the slave industry so they could grow more cotton, kickstarting modern spinning and weaving factories, which produced more clothes, which went to more stores, etc.
At every step in the process, extra jobs were created, and not just a few, but thousands and thousands. People flocked to the factories to work, and why? Because it paid a hell of a lot better than subsistence farming. Sure, a lot of the new jobs sucked, and you know what? We replaced 'em with machines, and those machines created new jobs.
And yea, robotic fruit pickers. You ever picked fruit? It sucks. You bust your ass in the hot sun, toting huge baskets of fruit around, and you gotta hustle because the stuff starts rotting instantly. Hot, sweaty, miserable work. My heart doesn't bleed for people not having to do that anymore! I used to cut tobacco when I was a kid and it was still a popular cash crop; that is about the most miserable thing I've ever done in my whole life. Do I give a damn that people don't grow as much tobacco as they used to? Hell no!
People who romanticize fruit picking, and cotton picking, and god, cotton combing like had to be done before the cotton gin, have no fricking clue what they're talking about. Go do that stuff for a year as your sole source of income, and then you can come talk about how wonderful it is.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I couldn't let this one go...
... a fictional character ...
> we can and must return to that qualitative world where
> we can realize our deepest human qualities.
Ohhhh kayyyy....
> as exemplified by the wily trickster Odysseus
> His prescription for humanity's emergence from this
> present Dark Age also includes developing a strong
> sense of history.
JFC! Is he kidding?
I have a strong sense of history, I spend most of my free time reading and writing about it. Here's a quick lesson in history for you:
Five hundred years ago YOU would live in a one-room dirt floor shack. You would have almost no money, only a handful of tools, and little or nothing in the way of personal belongings. You would eat perhaps 25 varieties of food in your entire lifetime, and those would take you a significant portion of the day to prepare. You would work from before sunup to just before sundown, although there were periods of the year where there was little work to do, but due to the lack of artificial light, it wasn't like you were missing much anyway. For entertainment, you did nothing, although there was church on Sundays (which is why anyone went), and for distraction you had the periodic interludes where gangs of some warlord's men would come by, rape you wife and stick something pointy in your stomach. If you were lucky you might make it to 60, but you'd spend a significant portion of the time sick, and in many cases, pain. I'm not talking "I wish I had a new iPod pain", I'm talking "please someone chop off this leg" pain.
> We must realize how other humans expressed their individuality,
> and realized their hopes and dreams.
I can answer that too: you didn't have those.
For the first time in recorded history we, as a race, believe that things can actually change. There's only been one period in recent history where people had the same sort of upward mobility as we enjoy today: during the black plague when everyone was dying.
We live better than kings did. Never forget that.
Maury
The materialization of the benefits from the machines may be "a grand illusion" to the author, but certainly not to me.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
Of course it's a good idea to think about technology and how it changes our lives (and it's not all good, obviously). But a lot of the stuff I read in the review is hardly related to technology itself. It seems to be a lot of unrelated, unsubstantiated claims and a lot of fuzzy hippy talk. That's too bad, because there exist authors that have substantiated these claims much better.
Let's just have a look at a few of the statements:
Please explain to me, exactly how does "mastering the techniques of using a computer" equal "being forced to accept a [particular] way of viewing the world"?
So you're saying, the educational system (in your country) apparently sucks. What does this have to do with technology?
Wait, so now we're suddenly discussing the state of the educational system in particular countries (which, apparently, do not have [good] government-subsidized colleges)? What does this have to do with technology, again?
Including, might I add, our survival (of the current amount of people sustained by earth, anyway). Fine with me if you strive for an earth which will have, in time, only 1 billion people living on it (just pulling this number out of my ass, but without technology earth can sustain only a fraction of the 6+ billion that are currently alive), but please be aware of the consequences of having no technology at all. The point is of course, using any 'tools' can be considered technology, so where do you draw the line? Some nuance would really help here. It's impossible to say "so technology is bad, lets just not use it altogether".
This has nothing to do with technology, but with a world-view where everything is measured by its value (economical or otherwise). Just because we have models to do so, does not mean it is what *I* consider the thing that makes my live valueable, is it? Nor is this necessarily connected to technology. It could be, but please substantiate this claim.
Why?
Anyway this is where I stopped reading, you can go on like this for the rest of the review basically. If the book is anything like the review suggests, I won't bother reading it.
Ahhh. Jacques Ellul, the anarchist. Günther Anders also comes to mind. I think you'd be much better of reading one of their books instead of the one that's reviewed here.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Philosophy is a pasttime of the wealthy. Technological and social progress have created a society where almost everybody is, compared to the helots of ancient times, wealthy. Quite ordinary people now find themselves dealing with detritus produced by a life of unexamined wealth and consumption.
Actually most philosophy before the 21st century was done by people who took vows of poverty and sat in caves or monasteries and thought about these problems. Wikipedia is down right now or I'd link you to eastern and western philosophers.
The whole concept of Buddhism is that suffering comes from wanting things... Not the lack of them. So basically they had plenty of time to think about things because they either took donations of food or grew their own gardens. Not because they had wealthy patrons or slaves to sustain them. They simply stopped playing the universal rat race and accepted poverty. Same thing happened in European Monasteries but with Christian overtone (St Thomas Aquinas?)
Now when we get into modern times did we get non-religious philosophy like Voltaire (well he wasn't modern but might as well have been), Kafka, Nietzsche, and everyone else who took different views on materialism etc.
Simply saying having more luxuries now is the key reason for these philosophies is not true, but rather stems from the human fear of change.
Personally, I think that there nothing philosophical about what the author is saying other that it matches a luddite world view that fears having too much time on their hands and change to their personal life.
In that respect people have been saying these since the automated looms replaced workers in the 1800's.
Personally, I think technology can be used both ways... To repress humanity and to expand it. However, we haven't had many Buddhist monks contemplate this since it is a rather recent thing, but from what I have gathered... Transhumanist and Buddhist ideals aren't that far away from each other.
They both seek to desire to rise about their limitations of being human.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I think in many situations, where human incompetence abounds, people would welcome automated replacements. I would love to go to McDonalds, enter my order on a keypad, swipe my debit card and have my full tray pop out a slot in a minute or two. No forgotten sauce, no other screwups. Same with the wal-mart checkout. Give RFID a couple of years and watch the self checkout lanes (which are a problem of design, but also the customers), as well as the regular checkout lanes dissapear. Load up your cart, walk out the door, everything in your cart is totaled up and deducted from your debit card. Retailers would love it, it would save them millions in cashier pay.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Perhaps the economy doesn't punish them because the economy is based upon the consumption provided by debt? Do we not use the Consumer Spending Index as a large market factor? Isn't most of our economy based on people having disposable income? What would happen if people did not use debt to prop up the economy?
So true. I turned off cable TV a few years back and have never missed it. We watch videos and dvd's and that's plenty. I won't say that there's not still some clever programming out there because I'm sure there is, but the other things in my life that have taken their place are infinitely more nourishing, and I know longer waste my time and energy (attention) 'surfing' the sh*t for something of interest. There is enough audio-visual 'interest' on Netflix alone to feed that bug for many lifetimes.
Nutshell: I have lost (in large part if not completely) my fear of silence.
The Fear of Silence is what plagues most of the people I know who are 'hyper-connected' and going nowhere fast. Lots of flash, sizzle and 'choices', almost none of them meaningful or nourishing, but rather chaotic and vampyiric, sucking up our time and attention in almost every area, physical and otherwise, of our lives.
Technology is quickly reaching a point where the 'cost of access' is more than the monthly bill. With the first wave of true nanotechnology about to crest, terms like 'computer virus' will take on much more dangerous and invasive connotations, and 'privacy' will utterly and completely be a relic of the past. We will be able to Google each other's private lives (and privates ; ) with near-realtime accuracy.
On the plus side, it will be egalitarian. The hammer with which you can 'smite' (humiliate/swindle/blackmail) me can as easily be used against you.
Interesting times ahead. Relax, keep your chin up and focus on what's important to you. And take the 'vampire' analogy to heart. We are responsible for the consequences of whom and what we invite into our homes/lives.
**>>BELCH
ps -- in the interest of full disclosure, the author is yours truly. But it comes reccommended with blurbs from, among others, Ray Kurzweil, Eric Raymond, and Vernor Vinge.
"From the day a child of the 21st century begins his education, he is confronted with mind-numbing statistics, numbers, and facts via the computer -- which he must accept. Perhaps even more important, he must master its 'techniques' as the sine qua non tool to be successful in life."
So what's really different if one makes it
"From the day a child of the 9th century BC begins his education, he is confronted with mind-numbing statistics, numbers, and facts via writing -- which he must accept. Perhaps even more important, he must master its "techniques" as the sine qua non tool to be successful in life."
I think Plato kvetched about the same thing... and somehow culture survived. As it will survive the computer, at least until the Singularity comes along.
I have not read this book. However, the summary as presented here suggests that it is rubbish. I measure convenience and life improvement in basic criterion such as number of hours I work per week, can I work from anywhere or do I have to work from a central office, is the technology easy to use, does the technology allow me to do useful things that I otherwise could not do but would want to do anyways. Any relevant critique of technology would be based on these kinds of consideration. The problem with Talbott and others like him is that they do not base their critiques on these consideration. Rather they chant philosophical mumble-jumble that is completely meaningless to real-world people trying to do real-world things. One of the benefits of the internet is that I can run a business from home and stay in contact with sales reps, customers, and suppliers located in Asia and Europe at low cost from the convenience of my home or office. Wireless allows me to sit at the poolside in the nice hotel and do my work just as easily as if I was in a central office. My opinion? The internet has definitely improved the ease and convinience of my life. More significantly, it has allowed me to start a trading company much more easily that I would be able to elsewise. What idiots don't get is that technology is just a tool, nothing less and nothing more. Tools are used to accomplish things. The more tools you have, the more you can accomplish. What Talbott and others are really questioning is the right of individuals to accomplish whatever they seek to accomplish and to have access to the tools (Stewart Brand meaning of the phrase "access to tools") to do it. This is not just stupidity, it is condesending and evil.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Certainly technological advances have made life in the industrialized world generally better.
The real question we have to ask is can we really adequately handle ourselves in a world where technology continues to progress this fast?
We very nearly destroyed ourselves once already by creating a technology the ramifications of we were not ready mentally or nationally to cope with (a|h-bomb, cold war, aside: the first h-bomb was tested before scientists were able to determine if it would or would not ignite the atmosphere). When will it happen again? Will we succeed in destroying ourselves next time?
What can we do to ensure a more thorough understanding and preparedness of present and future innovations? Not for the scientists, but for the public and the politicians?
I refuse to get a cellphone and an iPod. Is that enough?
~= scwizard =~
Perhaps I was not being specific enough. I think I should've said, "Debt, willfully accumulated by persons attempting to live beyond their means, which will never realistically be paid off." For example, people who have long since graduated with advanced degrees and are still paying off pizzas they ate in their freshman year, or who go into a store with a one hundred dollar budget and end up spending five hundred.
Speaking as a layperson, I cannot fathom how such people are having anything but a negative effect on the economy as a whole.
You obviously are not an economist. :)
Well, the pizza they bought as a freshman required the employment of several people (pizza maker, delivery person, etc). If the pizza was delivered the purchase of the pizza required the use of an automobile, gas, oil, etc. The delivery of the pizza also supported the auto maintenance industry, etc. The making of the pizza supported the dairy industry for the cheese, agriculture for the ingredients making the sauce and dough and possibly the meat industry for meats on the pizza. Do you now see how our country's economy is highly dependent on the amount of things that people buy? Even if they cannot afford the items that they buy everything will collapse if people stop spending, however most people can't really afford to spend the amount that business wants, therefore we are dependent on credit.
Yes. I have noticed that as well. I can sit in silence for hours. Many people I know become visibly uncomfortable in such an environment. I have been accused of being angry at someone for not responding to every little thing that comes out of their mouth. If I don't say something, people will feel the need to to fill the silence. One of these days I'm going to have to ask them what they're afraid of...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The "AGE of RECREATION via the Emancipation of Humanity from the Machinery of Economy via the ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY."
This website contains all the details:
http://teaminfinity.com/MagnaCarta.html
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
In our economy, we accept it as a bad thing when people are put out of their jobs. We also accept it as a good thing when machines take over our jobs. This is not seen as a contradiction because we think we'll just find jobs that are more creative and less tedious. Can we not see the glaringly obvious alternative? Embrace more leisure! The economic system needs to be modified to account for the fact that we're producing more than we can safely consume. Let's not tweak our consumption psychologically (through advertisement/entertainment) to match our overproduction.
In a certain banana republic, the colonizers introduced tractors which were supposed to double the harvest. Guess what the indigenous workers did? They all took half the day off. Kudos to their common sense.
What's the prize?
No, not that kind of wealth. Debtors (especially students and recent grads) may have a negative net worth, but they still have most of the luxuries of modern living -- often a small but reliable income, housing, heat and air conditioning, cheap food, computer access, e-mail accounts, cell phones, etc. Debt is really what makes that possible: without debt to support you, if you run out of resources, you starve.
The economy doesn't particularly have emotions or values (part of what the book seems to be about). Banks support the culture of debt, and overall, they profit from it, incidentally crushing some imprudent consumers in the process. Some societies make this economic issue into a moral one as well, and that's where death/prison/slavery come in. But here, technology has made widespread debt possible by making credit as readily available as it is today. Without credit cards (for example), you'd have to bargain with an individual each time you borrowed money, and it'd be difficult for a lender to set up a safe situation with interest, monthly billing, and almost entirely automated accounting.
As the grandparent insightfully described, modern life -- even with debt -- is full of luxuries where 500 years ago the equivalent comfort would have only been available to a small number of aristocrats. If you're reading Slashdot, you're probably not a starving subsistence farmer. If you're railing against the mechanization of modern life, especially without having taken the time to read and cite Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," then it's clear you've reached such a level of comfort in your life that you can contemplate actually giving up some of these modern luxuries in exchange for a closer look at an unnameable Quality threading through humanity.
Most philosophy? Let's set aside the pre-Socratics. Socrates' level of wealth is largely unknown. Plato had many distinguished relatives and can be surmised to come from an upper-class background. Aristotle was an aristocrat. Among the Stoics were Roman senators and emperors. Descartes, Locke, Hume, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche (as well as almost all of their contemporaries) were all born into the upper class (which was a prerequisite to go to university and study philosophy, as opposed to working in the coal mines or farming or whatever). The philosophers of the 19th and 20th century were primarily university professors, which has become at least a middle-class living, if not better at certain points. So who does that leave? A few of the Stoics and Epicureans, and many of the Medievals? And most of their work is (to put it bluntly) vague advice about how to live your life, completely-made-up (and yet very dramatic) cosmology, and bad proofs for the existence of God. Whereas the philosophy done primarily by people who DIDN'T live in caves and monestaries included: the foundations of modern science, almost all of logic, the entire tradition of analytic philosophy, almost all political philosophy...
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
They fear Existential Void
Now me, personally. I love the silence. Out of necessity at my workplace we don't listen to music or have TVs going or anything, and initially not being able to listen to music drove me bonkers. Now it's kinda weird if I have music going at work, so go fig.
On the other hand, I love being highly connected, tho I also have no problem turning it off at will. So take from that what you will.
Hate to break this to you, but technology met the basic needs of all living people with the invention of the iron plow. We've been able to feed, cloth and shelter the whole planet since basically Rome.
We just think we have better things to do. So when the universal assembler/replicator finally shows up, don't look to hard for Paradise to descend on Earth. We've been putting jackposts under it for a while now...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Since this book is so weak, I'm going to try a useful explanation of the dangers of technology.
Namely, that the German Jews didn't have guns. And the French didn't have tanks. And Belgium didn't have the Maginot line.
In other words, technology is the enabler of facism. Throughout the 1950's, the Russian people viewed Stalin as a hero, even as he slaughtered millions. Why? Because radio and newspapers told them so.
It's only when technology filters down to the lower levels of society that the dangers of misuse are tempered by equal-access. Any new technology is inherently proto-facist, especially weapons and media, i.e. the internet.
Who first got rich on the internet? Large corporations who already had data centers and programming staff. Next in line is the government, who finally figured out how to build large data centers.
Notice any cross-continental wars going on right now? Coincidence?
I'm not going to compare you to this man any more than I just did. I went without television for most of my time in the military, and I didn't miss it. That said, I also missed out on a lot of what was going on in the world, and while I could get that insight from a newspaper, I now appreciate being able to see and hear what happened for myself, and the ability to get differing viewpoints with the press of a button. Just like the internet, it can be difficult to appreciate the undertones of what's being said, especially when people are being quoted. So I keep my cable for CNN (more specifically CNNi) and MSNBC, and the occasional times I put Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network on for the kids instead of the 5 millionth viewing of Nemo (although the abundant commercials frequently and quickly make me regret those occasions).
Yes, it's possible to obtain, and even watch, news online, but there's something to be said for sitting in something other than an office chair. That, and my bandwidth is typically saturated by other functions anyway.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I've seen the future and it's http://www.fuckingmachines.com/
For people who are interested in the (western) philosophies surrounding technology, there is an entire Master program dedicated to this stuff @ the University of Twente (Netherlands).
website
Hate to be an advertiser but it's new, unknown and I think a lot of beta bachelors would be interested.
Yes, certainly, if measured as number of person-hours spent engaged in philosophical inquiry. This was, and is, the monastic tradition, and worldwide it did and does greatly outnumber the activities of the privileged, and published, few.
You counter with some interesting examples of overt philosophical inquiry which produced events of historical significance. These were certainly influential and important for society at large, but that being so does not address the previous -- and eminently valid -- comment that philosophy is not a pastime of the wealthy.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Part of the problem here is we can't tell the review writer and his point of view from the book author.
A second problem is, the reviewer didn't address Who is this book addressed to? This reviewer appears to be caught up in the book, and the review is largely a retelling of what the book asserts.
A third problem is the review doesn't match the quality usually associated with the publsher: O'Reilly. O'Reilly books are generally in the Stewart Brand "access to tools" cultural-philosophical penumbra. This year incidentially is the 35th anniversary of the 1972 Whole Earth Catalog.
The reviewer hasn't distinguished "What is the question?". Is the book about computers, education, culture, philosophy, existential anxiety or the emptiness of the unexamined life?
I have been recently thinking back to the Energy Crisis of 1972 and 1979 and asking "What have we learned?" "What did we change about our society as a result of those crises?" "What myths have we wrapped ourselves in as a society in the last 28 years?". The choice of questions drastically conditions the audience and assertions.
The whole paradigm of "Battling for SELF" is a fallacy, it's logically flawed. Who's battling for that self... who wins, who loses? To whom or what are you loosing yourself? How can you lose yourself to something outside yourself, without having given yourself away in the first place? If you are at battle with yourself, then you have already lost.
Technology is a tool. You don't lose yourself to a hammer, unless perhaps you foolishly split your own cranium with it. Even then it's not the hammer to which you were lost, but your own foolishness or carelessness. The problem never was the tool. It's always been the tool user. The distinction between the one who builds with the hammer and another who bludgeons with it. The hammer is never the issue, and the inherent problems surrounding the tool have always been and continue to be deeply human. That's been the case since paleolythic times and our lot, whether the tool is a flint knife or a thermonuclear device.
The difficulties facing us are the problems created by amplification. Our tools amplify our strength, our speed, our intelligence. However that amplification is indescriminate. The gun doesn't care if it's used to feed a village or slaughter that village. The act of amplification without the wisdom of foresight to manage the products of that amplification are the issues we now face. Our primate brains are driven by emotions, and among the strongest is survival. The want to control, the drive to horde, the impulse to dominate, these are all ways that our primate forebearers survived. These very same impulses amplified bring us to the brink of our own undoing. When men take the want of control, the desire to horde and own, the impulse to dominate to their insane technologically amplified limits, the world we have today isn't just understandable, it's unavoidable. Look at corporate business, look at our governments, look at our churches, corrupted and subjugated by a powerful wealthy few, playing out their primate drives amplified a billion-fold to the detriment of all humanity and for that matter all life itself on this tiny planet.
The advent of automation should have freed millions to pursue lives of self fulfillment and discovery, increased productivity, wealth, and abundance should have resulted in a new era of growing human understanding and fulfillment. Instead an increasingly small goup of people become caught up in a never ending cycle of self consumption, and hedonism, power mongering, while the vast majority are left falling further and further into a life given by growing poverty, endless drugery, and little satisfaction. Every single measure of wealth and personal autonomy shows the masses have been robbed of the benefits generated by advances of technology. On the other hand, the weathy are far wealthier, wildly wealthier, rediculously wealthier. And instead of addressing the fundamentally broken, illogical, unsustainable nature of this paradigm, the naked apes in this society buy lottery tickets so they can become one of the dominant primates. Technology is a means. It will however make possible the extinction of our species if we don't do some very powerful evolving in the next decade or two.
We need to address our humanity, own it, be responsible for it, and be present to it's pervasive influence. We need to be conscious of our own tendencies, and begin the process of moving from the adolescence of our species to a technological adulthood. The wisdom of not using technology to inflict our egos upon one another and the surface of our world. The intelligence of not letting our tools and our basest instincts determine our future, or there will cetainly be no future save the fossil record.
Part of what it means to mature as a species is to begin looking at what serves our future, enobles our endeavors, honors that which is most magnificent in the human spirit, and ultimately preserves our posterity. Technology is not going away unless we go away. We can no longer serve the past, we must invent the future. To that end we stand at the threshold of tomorrow, hammer firmly in hand.
If the technology keeps advancing there will always be jobs for humans I think. Until our brains are outdated.
The war, and the closing of the internet industry is slowing down technology though. Before it was there wasn't enough original ideas. Now there are 10,000 ideas anyone can make money with, but legal issues, patents, and heavy competition with old technology are killing the industry.
I used to believe in that. I don't any more.
Here is a few industries that do not have to please the customer
These companies only have to convince the customer that he/she will be pleased -- before the sale. They rely completely on deception, heavy marketing, and tricking "dumb" customers to survive. I wouldn't consider these to be efficient (in any sense) for pleasing the customer.
A hundred years ago, people worked 100 hours a week or more in terrible conditions, with a small, crumbling house to live in and just enough food to survive, and had to run ten miles each way to work. Today, people sit for 8 hours a day in comfortable offices (which they drove to), and have a house with double-glazing, a roof that doesn't leak, central heating, electricity, indoor plumbing, a life expectancy in the 70s or 80s, retirement, endless forms of entertainment, several weeks off work a year (a century ago you were lucky to get Christmas Day off), all the food we can eat flown in from around the world, and endless other benefits.
So in the old days, people lived simple lives, exercised every day and ate freshly killed food? Not quite all bad...
Your view of current lifestyles only applies for a portion of the "middle class" population of the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. In terms of world population, this represents only a minority.
I think you will find that (overall) much of Mexico, parts of Eastern Europe, India, China, most of Africa, parts of Russia, do not have such luxuries. In terms of population, this IS "most of the world". Also keep in mind that our current lifestyle is not sustainable. Our current luxuries are derived from extracting metals/minerals/oil/coal/natural gas out of the ground.
After enough petroleum products are consumed, it may become infeasible to sustain other operations (mining, water purification, etc). In some sense, we are consuming the resources from future generations TODAY. To some extent, all "civilized" lifestyles are unsustainable. But it seems to me that ours today will be very short-lived.
Disclaimer: I am not an environmentalist. I just have an morbid fascination of what the future holds for us.
And think about this. Under what conditions were all the nice things you enjoy produced? Here's a hint: things "made in China" often involve much more human labor than you might think. And this labor doesn't live very well.
> Without credit cards (for example), you'd have to bargain with an
> individual each time you borrowed money
Or, alternatively, live within your means. It's not hard.
Getting to sleep all day in heaven and having your dick licked whenever you feel like it.
I just can't believe how ignorant and narrowminded many of the comments are. This technology driven life of developed countries and consumerism is having much more serious impact on people than has been discussed so far.
You can start meeting the reality here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty
A better option would be to get out of your comfty chair and visit a third world country yourself. For example go to Mumbai and see how +40% of people live in slums/streets.
This should give you enough food for thought about pros and cons of technology, consumerism and globalisation.
Read "Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man" by Marshall McLuhan.
Nothing I can say will come anywhere close to dispelling all the confused notions I'm reading.
First of all we are moving away from mechanization and toward automation.
There is a huge difference between the two.
Read the wiki on Marshall
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
In our increasingly mechanized world, we repeatedly hear promises that every new digital product, computerized service, or other form of technology, will make our lives easier -- bestowing greater leisure, health, and happiness.
/. will say 'But we live busy lives, there is not enough time to make all meals from scratch' - this simply isn't true, in my experience (you can cook a good, basic meal in the same time it takes preparing most ready meals). Or people say 'We can manage without our cars' - well, perhaps you can't commute as easily without a car, although in many countries public transport is good enough to enable people top do that. And I'll guarantee the if you suddenly find that you have to live without a car, you will find a way to do so, and you will get used to that too. What I am trying to say here is that people are not as dependent and helpless as all that - not even in America, not by a long way.
It is well known that health and happiness come, not from using mechanical devices or electronic gadgets, but from using your mind and body to achieve things. But the author of this article - and by the look of things the author of the book too - sounds shrill, verging on hysterical.
I must admit, I didn't manage to read the entire thing, I must one of the impatient technophiles, but there is, to be fair, a core of truth in what he says - people are increasingly made to believe that they are helpless without electronic gadgets, ready made meals and mechanical aids. The amazing thing is how much people buy into it, considering how little truth there actually is in it.
We've had this discussion before - a lot of people on
I've read some callous stuff on Slashdot before, but I think that a post longing for the good old days when bankruptcy was punished by "death, prison, slavery, etc", tops them all. Congratulations - I didn't think it was possible for me to be shocked anymore. I also like how you've managed to completely disclaim any responsibility on the part of irresponsible creditors, who've been pushing credit to people who are unlikely to be able to manage it, for any of these problems.
WTF are you even talking about here? If I run up massive debt, it doesn't affect you in any way. You won't be making the payments. You, having (presumably) good credit, are not going to be asked to pay any more interest than you were before. So what's this about how "we all" are bearing the burden?
It seems rather anticlimactic to bring this up at this point in the post, but I think you've missed the point here. He's not talking about the fiscal problems with "gluttony" - it's the emotional problems associated with it, which are also experienced by the "wealthy".
Other people have made some very valid points and well thought out responses to this book, but I don't think any of them say it strongly enough so I'm going to jump on the soap box with a brief rant.
These fucking Luddites are nothing more than a vestigial nuisance. They will be crushed under the tank treads and metal feet of The Machine, and the rest of us who are willing to embrace the fruits of technology and become one with it will be better off for it.
Normally I take no issue with people choosing to live their lives however they see fit, and I'll actively fight long and hard for their right to live in tents or caves or whatever makes them happy. But when they start advocating a deliberate slowdown in technological progress then they make themselves the enemy of intelligent life- whether it be it human, machine, or somewhere in between. Like all barriers to progress they must either be circumvented or destroyed.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Doesn't transhumanism reject out of hand anything but a basic materialist viewpoint of humanity to start with? I thought the point was using technology to make that a reality, not to reveal it. That's where it differs from Buddhism.
Sorry if I'm putting too fine a point on this, but I don't think that's a fair way to summarize Buddhism. And there isn't really a problem with *wanting* things, the problem comes from being *driven* by want, by taking your wants too seriously.
Buddhism has a lot of subtleties that take a good teacher to explain. I'm not a great teacher or anything, and this is hardly the place to get into a deep discussion about Buddhism. For those who are interested I've found Shinzen Young (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinzen_Young) to be a wonderful teacher. He puts a lot of esoteric eastern concepts into a very easily understood western framework. They play his talks on KPFK (http://www.kpfk.org), on Roy of Hollywood's show Something's Happening (http://www.somethingshappening.com/). They play them on Thursday night/Friday morning, along with Alan Watts and a bunch of other great teachers. You can get talks from his website, too.
"Eye halve a spelling chequer, It came with my pea sea, It plainly marques four my revue, Miss steaks eye kin knot sea"
His prescription for humanity's emergence from this present Dark Age...
What planet is this book referring to? The problems that the writer sees may or may not be real, but they've got very little to do with those faced by people in the actual Dark Age.
Now: Angst, ennui, malaise
Then: Plague, barbarians, famine, monarchy...
Revive the Constitution.
I wonder why you were modded down. This is how I understand the economy "works" as well, if you can call it working. It's a house of cards really.
Ever been in a situation where you do not have enough money to pay your bills? Ever been afraid to even look at your bills, because you know there's no way you can afford to pay them out? Ever been evicted from your apartment? Ever had to sell your car? Ever been ordered by a court to give every cent you earn (except what the court determines covers your living costs) to the people you owe money? Ever been through the social stigma of never (and by "never", I don't mean one or two months) being able to afford even the slightest bit of luxury? Even for your kids? I think todays punishment is adequate. It is not fun to be a debtor, and people who get into this situation often get severely depressed, making it an evil self-amplifying circle. The likelihood of death, prison, or slavery creating fewer debtors, is about as high as that of death, prison, or slavery preventing heroin (or even alcohol) abuse.
Most of the body of philosophy was done by professional, full-time philosophers who were employed at universities. The "monastic tradition" did not produce much philosophy--spiritual introspection, perhaps. Theology, perhaps. Scholarship, certainly. But not philosophy. Of course, if you want to measure by "person-hours spent engaged in philosophical inquiry" (instead of, for instance, "body of unique work produced in philosophy"), and further if you want to use your nebulous idea of "philosophy" which in almost no way corresponds to the real thing, I'm going to bet that "people stoned on drugs" far outnumber, in person-hours, the monks.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199