Correct - it's the increasing *gap* between our old evolutionary psychology and our exponentially advancing technology that is so dangerous.
We can only hope that Intelligence Amplification (IA/AI), mind 'uploading' off of fragile bioware, space exploration, and other tech arrives *before* some selfish Joe Schmoe primate tribe is too easily able to take out humanity in one bang/whimper.
I think a lot of people will come around to the absurdity of intellectual property once it is actually possible to make a copy of a loaf of bread (with cheap molecular manufacturing) with free solar and recycled local material.
Once we are able to treat matter like data, a lot of the selfish arguments for artificial scarcity will go out the window. Not as often will we hear, "Don't download my bread.molecular.blueprint! Otherwise how will I feed my children?...... oh.":) The mentality can't go away completely, however, because there will always be some who will want to have MORE than the next schmuck, even in an economy of true abundance.
I bet at least some of them were probably thinking, "Screw the facts. MSFT stock is in the dow30, so what's good for MSFT has be good for my various bigcap weighted investments! And maybe I can get an under the table bribe out of this too."
If seeing a tit on TV causes moral decay, as you blindly believe, why hasn't Europe descended into barbarism with rapes left and right, etc.? They've got more primetime Tits & Ass in the media over there than violence, and the U.S. is just the opposite.
Could it be that sexual freedom isn't a BAD thing at all? That is, unless you're a religious control freak getting bitter with age.
And what was your paper's "unacceptable" clickthrough rate? Pornvertisers are lucky if they get better than a 1% CTR and a 1:200 conversion ratio. Increasing the CTR through deception usually lowers the conversion ratio in any case; nobody likes being tricked.
And who will stand up for the cause of free refrigerated tap water? I will! I will use every guerilla tactic available to get the message out to the unwashed gaming masses!
My in-game culture jamming methods will include:
Manually spraying ACME decal graffiti over actual ads (ala 'goatsecx' decal assholes in counterstrike)
Righteous stealth marketing in in-game chat conversations. "tap 0wnz"
How-To-Hack your local advertising textures out and keep the game quiet about checksum mismatches.
How-To-Block foreign server advertising with a simple proxy.
How-To-Block game-server advertising with patches OR an advanced frame-buffer adimage-recognition and ACME-overlay proxy.
How-To-Write-an-Angry-Letter to the game publisher telling them you will no longer buy their games because Star Trek was dropped due to being advertising incompatibile.
To make guys buy: Gorgeous women implying the purchase of a product makes said guy more attractive.
Really, only dumb Homer Simpson-type guys are influenced by that kind of thing. Everybody else with an ounce of healthy cynicism and an extra IQ point or two recognizes that content-free crap as an obvious attempt at mental engineering.
To make smart guys buy: Show unbiased feature comparisons, reviews, and price comparisons, so we know the meat of what we're getting and how much of a profit margin we're being raped for.
To make smart guys buy (#2): Make sure there are fewer smart guys being added to the population by Leaving Every Child Behind (except the rich ones).
The point of all of this is that even though YOU might not care it's still blatant marketing and you are falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
But... But... we need this kind of bullshit more than ever! You see, with fewer and fewer people required to work at useful jobs, because of accelerating productivity, we instead need to rely on this bullshit economy. We have to happily consume BS and produce more BS, otherwise we'll have to reevaluate the welfare system.:)
Kurzweil says that people tend to overestimate the impact of technology in short run and underestimate it in long run.
Well, it's usually Arthur C. Clark who gets the credit for that quote: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
There is no doubt in my mind that this technological hiccup will be resolved either by improving existing silicon technology in some new and innovative way or, if we hit a "silicon dead end", by something completely new.
Yes, if you can stand the buzzword, the next "paradigm shift" is computing is in the works. We haven't even started building (growing) chips in the 3rd dimension yet.
technological advances make us no less assholes and idiots.
Technology CAN take the asshole out of people-- we just don't understand the brain well enough yet to change ourselves faster than natural selection. That's the problem: a mismatch between our tech and our old greedy brains that evolved in environments of scarcity. The hope is that we can close the gap before us unenlightend primates destroy ourselves.
The basic flaw in Kurzweil's notions are that he believes that intelligence is a disembodied effect, when (if the likes of Ramachandran are correct) intelligence is an embodied effect and specifically dependent on wetware.
Ah, so that's it -- you're one of those frightened bio-chauvinists who's comforted by the idea that the current human condition is necessary (and desirable) for sentience; that our wetware brains can't be transfered to more efficient self-modifiable substrates because of consciousness depending on spooky quantum effects.
How old are you? 70? You sound bitter that you probably won't be able to live long enough to live forever, so you've resigned yourself to pessimism for all.
they can't see the obvious future trends. Some people, like Kurzweil (and many others) can.
I think if more people would just read Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns then they wouldn't be so quick to dismiss him out of hand. History shows that overall progress is exponential - which most people simply haven't considered (beyond the specialized Moore's Law component of the acceleration.)
The few who do understand the scientific reasoning for a Singularity in our lifetime usually object to it for emotional reasons. The cognitive dissonance is such that it is too frightening to take such a radical future seriously even if the evidence points that way.
Once humans move to faster and smarter brain substrates, we'll not only live longer objectively, but since we're thinking faster, we'll also be cramming more subjective living into a shorter space of time.
Living until the heat death of the universe isn't such a bad thing (and even then there may be fantastic ways to actually slip to other realities).
Even if it is OK here, a lot of people think it's somehow "sophisticated" or "professional" to self-censor. They're usually over 30 years old and have been conditioned such that never offending and never breaking any rule is a good way to stay safe and keep a job.
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Re:Fixing fundamental design mistakes?
on
Linus Interviewed
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· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
We can only hope that Intelligence Amplification (IA/AI), mind 'uploading' off of fragile bioware, space exploration, and other tech arrives *before* some selfish Joe Schmoe primate tribe is too easily able to take out humanity in one bang/whimper.
A good read on this idea: The Great Filter
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Once we are able to treat matter like data, a lot of the selfish arguments for artificial scarcity will go out the window. Not as often will we hear, "Don't download my bread.molecular.blueprint! Otherwise how will I feed my children?...... oh." :) The mentality can't go away completely, however, because there will always be some who will want to have MORE than the next schmuck, even in an economy of true abundance.
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Oops.
--And I think I'll "benchmark" the site a few million times.
e =XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
/usr/sbin/ab2 -n 10000000 -c 10 'http://www.fedora-redhat.com/?you=asshole&garbag
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev <$Revision: 1.121.2.8 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.fedora-redhat.com (be patient)
I bet at least some of them were probably thinking, "Screw the facts. MSFT stock is in the dow30, so what's good for MSFT has be good for my various bigcap weighted investments! And maybe I can get an under the table bribe out of this too."
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Reagan wrote that one:
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Could it be that sexual freedom isn't a BAD thing at all? That is, unless you're a religious control freak getting bitter with age.
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My in-game culture jamming methods will include:
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Really, only dumb Homer Simpson-type guys are influenced by that kind of thing. Everybody else with an ounce of healthy cynicism and an extra IQ point or two recognizes that content-free crap as an obvious attempt at mental engineering.
To make smart guys buy: Show unbiased feature comparisons, reviews, and price comparisons, so we know the meat of what we're getting and how much of a profit margin we're being raped for.
To make smart guys buy (#2): Make sure there are fewer smart guys being added to the population by Leaving Every Child Behind (except the rich ones).
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But... But... we need this kind of bullshit more than ever! You see, with fewer and fewer people required to work at useful jobs, because of accelerating productivity, we instead need to rely on this bullshit economy. We have to happily consume BS and produce more BS, otherwise we'll have to reevaluate the welfare system. :)
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A $150 soft-modded XBox pre-installed with the more capable XBox Media Center, and a $100 gift certificate with the money left over? :)
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Well, it's usually Arthur C. Clark who gets the credit for that quote: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
There is no doubt in my mind that this technological hiccup will be resolved either by improving existing silicon technology in some new and innovative way or, if we hit a "silicon dead end", by something completely new.
Yes, if you can stand the buzzword, the next "paradigm shift" is computing is in the works. We haven't even started building (growing) chips in the 3rd dimension yet.
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Technology CAN take the asshole out of people-- we just don't understand the brain well enough yet to change ourselves faster than natural selection. That's the problem: a mismatch between our tech and our old greedy brains that evolved in environments of scarcity. The hope is that we can close the gap before us unenlightend primates destroy ourselves.
--
Ah, so that's it -- you're one of those frightened bio-chauvinists who's comforted by the idea that the current human condition is necessary (and desirable) for sentience; that our wetware brains can't be transfered to more efficient self-modifiable substrates because of consciousness depending on spooky quantum effects.
Biology isn't destiny.
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I think if more people would just read Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns then they wouldn't be so quick to dismiss him out of hand. History shows that overall progress is exponential - which most people simply haven't considered (beyond the specialized Moore's Law component of the acceleration.)
The few who do understand the scientific reasoning for a Singularity in our lifetime usually object to it for emotional reasons. The cognitive dissonance is such that it is too frightening to take such a radical future seriously even if the evidence points that way.
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Living until the heat death of the universe isn't such a bad thing (and even then there may be fantastic ways to actually slip to other realities).
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-rw-r--r----- ... application, user, group, everybody?
(I really haven't thought or read much about this, if you couldn't tell)
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