Perhaps throughout the entire history of technology (which is to say, throughout the entire history of genus Homo), innovations in technology have been imagined and disseminated on the basis that they would re-make every member of society, even the lowest, in the image of society's noblest elements (in the sense of the Greek aristo).
What we see instead is the poorest and least educated elements of society gaining abilities formerly available only to the wealthy and/or educated few (the dissemination of gangsta rap via digital technology springs vigorously to mind).
We can debate the various goods and bads of this process (e.g., "uneducated people with nothing to lose gain access to powerful weapons" vs. "yes, this will keep the rich from oppressing them"), but I don't think we can deny that it very often occurs.
"The proposal is to build a very large orbiting shield which will intercept sunlight before it reaches the Earth and reflect it back into space. In order to minimize the cost, the materials needed for this shield will come from the Moon. The shield will be built robotically both to save cost and because humans are not suited to working in space. How large a shield will be necessary? Our initial estimate is 6 percent of the cross-sectional area of the Earth. Since the cross-sectional area of Earth is about 50 million square miles, the shield will need to be about 3 million square miles."
"A University of New South Wales academic, Dr Norman Wildberger, has rewritten the arcane rules of trigonometry and eliminated sines, cosines and tangents from the trigonometric toolkit. ...
"Generations of students have struggled with classical trigonometry because the framework is wrong," says Wildberger, whose book is titled Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry (Wild Egg books).
Dr Wildberger has replaced traditional ideas of angles and distance with new concepts called "spread" and "quadrance"."
"In 1990 (or 2004), it simply is not possible for a doctor to race to a medical emergency -- in his horse and buggy. The doctor may have a horse and a buggy, but a horse and buggy is no longer a rapid transportation vehicle. Whereas a doctor in 1900 who raced to a medical emergency in his horse and buggy would have been deemed to be doing the right thing, a doctor who did the same thing in 2001 would be sued for malpractice (and might be defended with an insanity plea...)."(Yes, I suppose that we can, without too much trouble, imagine contemporary scenarios in which racing by horse and buggy would be the most effective means of transportation. But the point is that it's no longer the usual thing.)
"A more realistic example: A reason homicide rates have declined during recent years has been due, not to persons having fewer murderous intentions (the "message"/content), but rather to advances in emergency medical treatment (the "medium"/context), which have transformed crimes that would in past have resulted in death, into assaults the victim survives."I know this last one as the World War I helmet story.
"Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don't have electricity. Those figures add up to a big problem for the world -- and an equally big opportunity for entrepreneurs.
To solve the problem, he's invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.
'Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water', says Kamen. 'The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.' ...
The real invention here, though, may be the economic model that Kamen and Quadir hope to use to distribute the machines. It is fashioned after Grameen Phone's business, where village entrepreneurs (mostly women) are given micro-loans to purchase a cell phone and service. The women, in turn, charge other villagers to make calls.
'We have 200,000 rural entrepreneurs who are selling telephone services in their communities', notes Quadir. 'The vision is to replicate that with electricity.' "
"TechGnosis” really does provide a fairly cogent account of the cultural effects of information theory. The Internet is only the most conspicuous such effect, and the author notes many other ways in which the “triumph of technique,” so deplored by Jacques Ellul, both antedated the Internet and provides the context in which it now operates. Nevertheless, the book may be most valuable for explaining why the wired world is so permeated by the weird triumvirate of libertarianism, neopaganism and paranoia. ...
This degree of freedom from the human condition (available in the Internet experience) has its price. When matter and social norms become fetters that can be cast aside for brief periods, the question arises of who forged them in the first place and who maintains them now. This paranoia was characteristic of ancient Gnosticism, and it is typical of much of the Internet today. Rumors of all sorts spread instantly and universally, each depicting some yet more subtle strategy of oppression deployed by the dark controllers. In a purely mental world, after all, all control is thought control, so the conspiracy theories most characteristic of online culture tend to smack of the blackest spiritual wickedness."
Copyright © 1999 by John J. Reilly
This review first appeared in the May, 1999, issue of First Things.
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"Panasonic is ... now announcing that it will launch a massive lithium-ion storage battery capable of powering an average home for up to a week, the company says."
"During Brazil's slave period ... (escaped slaves) and their quilombos (settlements or strongholds of escaped slaves) ... fought a guerrilla war against the Portuguese (colonists, slaveowners). ...For what it's worth, the summary of Brazilian history in this seems slightly different from my own understanding. I also don't know anything about the reference to the Third Reich using an IBM census system. (They obviously had some sort of government administrative system.)
What made the Quilombos possible is that the slave masters couldn't find them. ... If the slave masters could just click a “find the Quilombo” button on a web browser then Brazil's history would have been quite different.
In World War II Germany there was something just like this “find Quilombo” button. Right before Hitler and the Nazis rounded up the Jews, they hired IBM to create a computer they could use in their next census. This computer took information from the most recent census and literally spit out a list of all the Jewish people in Germany. Then, one day (actually, of course, over a period of some years), the Germans moved in and collected men, women, and children to be exploited and exterminated. ...
These bits of history demonstrate that humans frequently use technology to kill and enslave other humans. During Brazil's history the technology was ships, transportation, steel, and firearms. In Hitler's case it was practically the same stuff, but with a new even more devastating weapon: information processing. These days it's common that if a government finds a new way to analyze its citizens then the next step is oppression. You laugh, but look at how traditionally oppressive governments like China have used technology to find and prosecute dissidents. ...
The purpose of the Semantic Web is to make the Web machine processable. ...(But) Think of the semantic web in terms of Government information processing needs. Imagine if President Bush wants the Secret Service to find everyone online who has said anything bad about him. ... The Secret Service does a search for the semantic phrase “? -> hates -> Bush” and pulls up all the people who hate GW. Then they use FOAF to figure out who knows these people. Instantly the Secret Service is able to go after you, and if they can't then they can go after your friends, lovers, children, and anyone who owes you money. ... And this is just the US. Countries with even poorer human rights records wouldn't have any problem doing this."
"Now I am reading S.M. Stirling's novel, Dies the Fire, which is part of the Emberverse Series (which in turn is a spinoff of the Nantucket Series). The novel was published in 2004, but the story begins on St. Patrick's Day in 1998, so technically it's Alternative History. The premise is that quite suddenly, with a flash and a bang, all electrical and explosive technology stops working; even steam engines become too inefficient to be used for transportation. ...
As for the premise of the book, its most interesting feature is that it is not quite ridiculous. The hypothesis that some physical constants are not as constant as we suppose is by no means alien to 21st-century physics. Neither is it new to science fiction: Poul Anderson made a plausible attempt in his novel Brain Wave (1954) to describe how such a change could spark a vast increase in human intelligence. (H.G. Wells dealt with the intelligence-rise in "Days of the Comet," but his device for causing it was perfunctory: the influence of cometary gasses.) Actually, what the Change in Dies the Fires sounds most like is the epochal dispensationalism found in several esoteric models of history, a point to which the book seems to allude. Mechanical technology did not advance for tens of thousands of years, in this view, because nature did not allow it. Then a new dispensation began, and the rules changed. This book contemplates them changing again."
The "robots are stealing our women thing" is hardly news,
especially not in Diesel Sweeties
Diesel Sweeties #1
Diesel Sweeties #4
Diesel Sweeties #8
Diesel Sweeties #15