I've scanned over comments on slashdot and in other forums and no one seems to believe that there could be brain damage without physical manipulation of the brain. Here is one example associated simply with the vision system:
Steve was overlaying computer generated images and "real world" images in his visual field. To prevent confusion between the two, he presented one to his eye sideways (I believe but am not sure it was the RL info because sideways text is usually processed by parts of the brain used in face recognition and mostly work rightside up) and the other normally oriented.
There have been studies where college students wore glasses that totally inverted the world and after a few days of motion sickness their brain figured out how to deal with it. When they took the glasses off, they went through the whole thing again.
What if they had worn the glasses for years and their brain plasticity decreased? It is possible (though of course never studied due to ethical considerations until it happened to Steve) that after a while, beyond a certain age, the brain can't rewire. (Some might claim that this means the equipment damaged Mr. Mann, but if you consider the equipment itself part of his body because that is what being a cyborg means, then the damage to the necessary equipment IS brain damage.) Simple bad eyesight can cause pounding headaches, what do you think this would feel like?
To directly respond to the previous poster:
However, I guess I just don't understand his situation if his brain can be damaged by rebooting this system he's attached to.
Most (but not all) noncyborgs have developed and practiced senses of location and mental maps. People without these senses are used to it and have coping mechanisms developed over a life time.
If Steve had automated the process but was running his navigation system like a server that was never expected to shut down, he might not have the resources or backups to restart it in the airport. This would leave him with no sense of where he was. Not a fun thing in a strange place surrounded by hostile people you see as intent on humiliating you. Imagine he'd had a stroke (something that impaired one of the processing modules "in brain" that he relied on) and the airport treating him this way...
Keep in mind that I know little about the details, I'm just trying to give a sense of what some specific problems might be.
We *cannot* go somewhere other than Earth to alleviate near term overpopulation. It costs about $10,000/pound to put stuff into LEO. To get a billion people off the planet (not considering the food or life-support to prevent their death when they left) 10^9 people * 10^2 pounds/person * 10^4 dollars/pound is a rough approximation of the cost. Anyone have a quadrillion dollars in spare change?
>(intentionally not talking 'bout money, there will be enough in case of emergency)
The value-token system isn't something that exists independent of reality. It was invented in order to model reality in ways that allow the kind of paper-napkin calculation above. If it costs a quadrillion then it means we'd have to reallocate about that many resources to get the job done. The Earth's GDP is around $40 trillion and you can be sure lots of those resources are not flexible enough to be reallocated to something as specific as space migration.
Way long term something might work out. Space elevators and orbital ships built from asteroids might be able to handle a few billion if we had to abandon the solar system, but that would be quite a few decades away even if we started serious work now. By the time we can do anything serious about space migration the population will have shrunk due to the wealth effect in some parts of the globe and famine and disease in other parts.
Look carefully here, its the key to the whole thing: "the original has more real value than the copy."
Purely digital information is either copied or not. If even one bit is misplaced (line static or diskdrive magnet damage?) that can be easily detected and repaired. The only place to add value is at the very beginning: creating media and ascribing meaning to it. Given that people will write music for free for fun, and computers are/will making it easier to make well produced sound... the only place that a corporation has a real chance to add value is in the meaning construction.
Because music producers like The Beatles, Britney Spears, or even Vivaldi have a lot of mind share, they are more valuable. Hundreds of strangers can come together for a shared listening experience. This makes the sounds more valuable to them, and the value, fundamentally, exists for little reason other than mass distribution by some means or another.
Note the irony: only by successfully spamming the culture with a media product can corporations add any sort of unique value to a product... but if they're using the stuff as spam material how are they supposed to get money out of the deal??? Answer: with words like "digital rights" backed up by government guns and prison.
In a free society... in a somewhat pure "capitalist" society... the only way to get money from people is when scarcity exists. Digital information has to be forced back into scarcity for people to make money off of it.
Last thought: All of capitalism and money/token exchanges are a sort of social hack on the problem of scarcity in anonymous groups. If we start causing scarcity for the sake of a bunch of silly tokens then something is seriously wrong. We really need to clarify this fact and set up a system of values not based on scarcity so that when something like nanotechnology comes along and makes everything out of dirt and information, we already have limited precedents in the field of digital media. Get things done correctly now, or we could hurt out chances to solve the problem of actual physical scarcity in the future.
That doesn't protect you for a variety of reasons, some obvious, some requiring research:
1. Analog devices can perform operations on digital information. Modems use different tones to stand in for different bits, same principle.
2. The definition from SSSCA 109(3)
INTERACTIVE DIGITAL DEVICE. -- The term "interactive digital device" means any machine, device, product, software, or technology, whether or not included with or as part of some other machine, device, product, software, or technology, that is designed, marketed or used for the primary purpose of, and that is capable of, storing, retrieving, processing, performing, transmitting, receiving, or copying information in digital form.
Consider a device composed of paper and pencil and a human mind. I personally use this for the primary purpose of "storing, retrieving, processing, performing, transmitting, receiving, or copying information in digital form." The only reason I wouldn't is brain damage. I don't *think* they'd go so far as to admit that their definition covers my Turing Complete mind, because literal thought control is not something they would admit to... but that's a matter of PR, not of clear verbal distinctions which have correspondingly obvious distinctions in the world.
You can certainly object that neurons are analog, because that's a common view (political reality is mostly based on that sort of thing anyway) but the more time I spend studying neuro-psych the less I tend to agree with that. Neurons are fundamentally on/off devices which simulate analog with firing rates variation.
Hmmm... I was going to add more, but this probably covers it. I'll leave the rest of the reasons "as an exercise for the reader":)
"Memory is theft, memory is impossible, memory is liberty" --My paraphrase of Proudhon
I've taken the opposite approach. I went to a local Junior College and spent four years on four different majors: Physics, Philosophy, Communications (Competitive Debate mostly), and Psychology... Now I'm at four year institution where I'm adding CS to NeuroPsych as a double major... the problem is that I'm 23 and still no Bachelor's even:)
I remember that first year in physics where I looked at what would be necessary to transfer in 2 years from the Junior College. It looked like a headlong rush to cover lots of basic science without even covering the basic (school required) breadth requirements because "that would come later at the four year institution". I *like* knowing lots of science and being able to converse with "technical people", but I value my public speaking experience and the year I spent taking philosphy almost as much. In terms of my ability to think about really big pictures and distill that down to practical rhetoric in a discussion I'm having here and now; the non-technical stuff has been very useful.
With respect to the original posting, I think either my approach or Coryoth's would be better than leaping between very specialized classes in different fields, but note that in any of the situations, there are reservations from people who've done it. Either time "wasted", lack of breadth, or frustration with the un-useful breadth you do get. Mostly it probably comes down to a value judgement... What do I want out of my life? What do I want out of the first few adult years of my life?
It's not technology, it's society....
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 1
Aceticon put (a longer version of) this in bold in an earlier response as a tag lineof sorts, but I wanted to point out some details and emphasize:
You could remove every reference to technology in Jon's essay and leave all the stuff about "management in the US etc" and it would still be true.
Perhaps on Slashdot the word technology must be randomly inserted to make a piece seem appropriate, but really, the causes of this job instability are mostly social: corporate fads, little worker power, a system of economics that wobbles no matter how stable the Fed tries to make it...
Market speculation happens. That the latest bubble was over Internet companies and not highrise office space (just to grab an example from the past), does mean that "technology" is related to the hard times some people are facing, but it does not make it the cause of those hard times.
Seth Bokelman $10.00 Mon, 11 Jun 2001
Brent Eubanks $10.00 Mon, 11 Jun 2001
ProZ.com $25.00 Mon, 11 Jun 2001
Jeffrey Seifert $10.00 Mon, 11 Jun 2001
Matthew Franklin $100.00 Mon, 11 Jun 2001
Of course this might just be the slashdot effect showing up in their donations, but just from the ten values posted so far we've got a >$50/day average...
Slashdot Mirror
Steve was overlaying computer generated images and "real world" images in his visual field. To prevent confusion between the two, he presented one to his eye sideways (I believe but am not sure it was the RL info because sideways text is usually processed by parts of the brain used in face recognition and mostly work rightside up) and the other normally oriented.
There have been studies where college students wore glasses that totally inverted the world and after a few days of motion sickness their brain figured out how to deal with it. When they took the glasses off, they went through the whole thing again.
What if they had worn the glasses for years and their brain plasticity decreased? It is possible (though of course never studied due to ethical considerations until it happened to Steve) that after a while, beyond a certain age, the brain can't rewire. (Some might claim that this means the equipment damaged Mr. Mann, but if you consider the equipment itself part of his body because that is what being a cyborg means, then the damage to the necessary equipment IS brain damage.) Simple bad eyesight can cause pounding headaches, what do you think this would feel like?
To directly respond to the previous poster:
Most (but not all) noncyborgs have developed and practiced senses of location and mental maps. People without these senses are used to it and have coping mechanisms developed over a life time.If Steve had automated the process but was running his navigation system like a server that was never expected to shut down, he might not have the resources or backups to restart it in the airport. This would leave him with no sense of where he was. Not a fun thing in a strange place surrounded by hostile people you see as intent on humiliating you. Imagine he'd had a stroke (something that impaired one of the processing modules "in brain" that he relied on) and the airport treating him this way...
Keep in mind that I know little about the details, I'm just trying to give a sense of what some specific problems might be.
We *cannot* go somewhere other than Earth to alleviate near term overpopulation. It costs about $10,000/pound to put stuff into LEO. To get a billion people off the planet (not considering the food or life-support to prevent their death when they left) 10^9 people * 10^2 pounds/person * 10^4 dollars/pound is a rough approximation of the cost. Anyone have a quadrillion dollars in spare change?
>(intentionally not talking 'bout money, there will be enough in case of emergency)
The value-token system isn't something that exists independent of reality. It was invented in order to model reality in ways that allow the kind of paper-napkin calculation above. If it costs a quadrillion then it means we'd have to reallocate about that many resources to get the job done. The Earth's GDP is around $40 trillion and you can be sure lots of those resources are not flexible enough to be reallocated to something as specific as space migration.
Way long term something might work out. Space elevators and orbital ships built from asteroids might be able to handle a few billion if we had to abandon the solar system, but that would be quite a few decades away even if we started serious work now. By the time we can do anything serious about space migration the population will have shrunk due to the wealth effect in some parts of the globe and famine and disease in other parts.
-------
Purely digital information is either copied or not. If even one bit is misplaced (line static or diskdrive magnet damage?) that can be easily detected and repaired. The only place to add value is at the very beginning: creating media and ascribing meaning to it. Given that people will write music for free for fun, and computers are/will making it easier to make well produced sound... the only place that a corporation has a real chance to add value is in the meaning construction.
Because music producers like The Beatles, Britney Spears, or even Vivaldi have a lot of mind share, they are more valuable. Hundreds of strangers can come together for a shared listening experience. This makes the sounds more valuable to them, and the value, fundamentally, exists for little reason other than mass distribution by some means or another.
Note the irony: only by successfully spamming the culture with a media product can corporations add any sort of unique value to a product... but if they're using the stuff as spam material how are they supposed to get money out of the deal??? Answer: with words like "digital rights" backed up by government guns and prison.
In a free society... in a somewhat pure "capitalist" society... the only way to get money from people is when scarcity exists. Digital information has to be forced back into scarcity for people to make money off of it.
Last thought: All of capitalism and money/token exchanges are a sort of social hack on the problem of scarcity in anonymous groups. If we start causing scarcity for the sake of a bunch of silly tokens then something is seriously wrong. We really need to clarify this fact and set up a system of values not based on scarcity so that when something like nanotechnology comes along and makes everything out of dirt and information, we already have limited precedents in the field of digital media. Get things done correctly now, or we could hurt out chances to solve the problem of actual physical scarcity in the future.
1. Analog devices can perform operations on digital information. Modems use different tones to stand in for different bits, same principle.
2. The definition from SSSCA 109(3)
Consider a device composed of paper and pencil and a human mind. I personally use this for the primary purpose of "storing, retrieving, processing, performing, transmitting, receiving, or copying information in digital form." The only reason I wouldn't is brain damage. I don't *think* they'd go so far as to admit that their definition covers my Turing Complete mind, because literal thought control is not something they would admit to... but that's a matter of PR, not of clear verbal distinctions which have correspondingly obvious distinctions in the world.
You can certainly object that neurons are analog, because that's a common view (political reality is mostly based on that sort of thing anyway) but the more time I spend studying neuro-psych the less I tend to agree with that. Neurons are fundamentally on/off devices which simulate analog with firing rates variation.
Hmmm... I was going to add more, but this probably covers it. I'll leave the rest of the reasons "as an exercise for the reader" :)
"Memory is theft, memory is impossible, memory is liberty" --My paraphrase of Proudhon
I've taken the opposite approach. I went to a local Junior College and spent four years on four different majors: Physics, Philosophy, Communications (Competitive Debate mostly), and Psychology... Now I'm at four year institution where I'm adding CS to NeuroPsych as a double major... the problem is that I'm 23 and still no Bachelor's even :)
I remember that first year in physics where I looked at what would be necessary to transfer in 2 years from the Junior College. It looked like a headlong rush to cover lots of basic science without even covering the basic (school required) breadth requirements because "that would come later at the four year institution". I *like* knowing lots of science and being able to converse with "technical people", but I value my public speaking experience and the year I spent taking philosphy almost as much. In terms of my ability to think about really big pictures and distill that down to practical rhetoric in a discussion I'm having here and now; the non-technical stuff has been very useful.
With respect to the original posting, I think either my approach or Coryoth's would be better than leaping between very specialized classes in different fields, but note that in any of the situations, there are reservations from people who've done it. Either time "wasted", lack of breadth, or frustration with the un-useful breadth you do get. Mostly it probably comes down to a value judgement... What do I want out of my life? What do I want out of the first few adult years of my life?
You could remove every reference to technology in Jon's essay and leave all the stuff about "management in the US etc" and it would still be true.
Perhaps on Slashdot the word technology must be randomly inserted to make a piece seem appropriate, but really, the causes of this job instability are mostly social: corporate fads, little worker power, a system of economics that wobbles no matter how stable the Fed tries to make it...
Market speculation happens. That the latest bubble was over Internet companies and not highrise office space (just to grab an example from the past), does mean that "technology" is related to the hard times some people are facing, but it does not make it the cause of those hard times.
Brent Eubanks $10.00 Mon, 11 Jun 2001
ProZ.com $25.00 Mon, 11 Jun 2001
Jeffrey Seifert $10.00 Mon, 11 Jun 2001
Matthew Franklin $100.00 Mon, 11 Jun 2001
Of course this might just be the slashdot effect showing up in their donations, but just from the ten values posted so far we've got a >$50/day average...