Things like the microprocessor and TV are definitely significant, but I think the *really* important things (by nature) don't immediately occur to you.
I remember reading, years ago, a preface by Robert Heinlein to some collection of short stories, where he claimed that the premise of most good science fiction could be traced to a single idea; for example, what would the world have looked like without automobiles (I don't mean the combustion engine); North American human mating rituals would have evolved very differently...etc etc.
What about the plastic out of which most credit cards are made? (sorry, can't remember which it is) How would the world be without that? Maybe some other technology would have produced the same phenomenon, maybe not...
The obvious high-impact technologies might not really be the most significant, is my point.
cheers Jonathan (sorry if I misrepresented RH -- I can't remember the detail)
this is key -- for years and years good AI indexing has been around the corner. it hasn't materialised, and i don't think it's likely to in my lifetime.
there simply is no substitute for a human domain expert doing a detailed job of indexing. look at how hopeless most automagically generated indexes are; key words are frequently omitted from text which discusses the ideas they represent, and often pop up in marginally relevant contexts, so without complex ontological analysis (which is way too hard to do properly right now, although easy for humans) it's no surprise that most indexes are full of pointless references.
key word searching is pretty well dead, mainly because of the way HTML turned out -- noone can make any semantic sense of an HTML document based on markup anymore.
i think there's two ways to go if you want reasonable searching, and both require quite extensive human up-front effort. first, standalone metadata. by this i mean a shared data model and means of representing the model (such as, say, the dublin core and rdf). second, adoption of new markup for content, using not only a shared grammar (ie the actual markup) but also a shared vocabulary (that is, a shared semantic for the grammar, and a shared understanding of context -- the context being dependent on grammar, but not limited by grammar).
the first approach is easier (but not easy) to implement and applicable to all 'documents', including non-textual documents. the second is much harder to do, but will make search algorithms simpler, faster, and more predictably useful.
there's no pain-free way out of the mess that we have currently though.
Slashdot Mirror
Things like the microprocessor and TV are definitely significant, but I think the *really* important things (by nature) don't immediately occur to you.
I remember reading, years ago, a preface by Robert Heinlein to some collection of short stories, where he claimed that the premise of most good science fiction could be traced to a single idea; for example, what would the world have looked like without automobiles (I don't mean the combustion engine); North American human mating rituals would have evolved very differently...etc etc.
What about the plastic out of which most credit cards are made? (sorry, can't remember which it is) How would the world be without that? Maybe some other technology would have produced the same phenomenon, maybe not...
The obvious high-impact technologies might not really be the most significant, is my point.
cheers
Jonathan
(sorry if I misrepresented RH -- I can't remember the detail)
this is key -- for years and years good AI indexing has been around the corner. it hasn't materialised, and i don't think it's likely to in my lifetime.
there simply is no substitute for a human domain expert doing a detailed job of indexing. look at how hopeless most automagically generated indexes are; key words are frequently omitted from text which discusses the ideas they represent, and often pop up in marginally relevant contexts, so without complex ontological analysis (which is way too hard to do properly right now, although easy for humans) it's no surprise that most indexes are full of pointless references.
key word searching is pretty well dead, mainly because of the way HTML turned out -- noone can make any semantic sense of an HTML document based on markup anymore.
i think there's two ways to go if you want reasonable searching, and both require quite extensive human up-front effort. first, standalone metadata. by this i mean a shared data model and means of representing the model (such as, say, the dublin core and rdf). second, adoption of new markup for content, using not only a shared grammar (ie the actual markup) but also a shared vocabulary (that is, a shared semantic for the grammar, and a shared understanding of context -- the context being dependent on grammar, but not limited by grammar).
the first approach is easier (but not easy) to implement and applicable to all 'documents', including non-textual documents. the second is much harder to do, but will make search algorithms simpler, faster, and more predictably useful.
there's no pain-free way out of the mess that we have currently though.
cheers
j