The Victorians had the same concerns about technology as we do
diseasesofmodernlife.org
diseasesofmodernlife.org
>sulphurous vapours were asphyxiating passengers on the London Underground.
Early underground trains were powered by steam engines. My understanding is that ventilation was horrific for many years as well.
> The philosopher and essayist Thomas Carlyle, for example, lamented the new lack of direct contact with society and nature caused by the intervention of machinery in every aspect of life. Print publications were fast becoming the principal medium of public debate and influence, and they were shaping and, in Carlyle’s view, distorting human learning and communications.
Very true -- 20th century politics in the US shifted away from the pub local political folks acting as tastemakers to national and regional movements. Modern periodical media shaped opinion.
> In his 2008 article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, journalist Nicolas Carr speculated that “we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think”. Reading online, he posits, discourages long and thoughtful immersion in texts in favour of a form of skipping, scanning and digressing via hyperlinks that will ultimately diminish our capacity for concentration and contemplation.
Is there any question here that this has happened?
If you look at books like "Bowling Alone", it's also pretty clear that ready access to entertainment, cars, and other resources has had a pretty glaring impact on social structures. The clubs, leagues and church gatherings that were huge part of life in 20th century america have largely faded away.
Yes. The notion that our capacity for "concentration and contemplation" has been diminished is a testable claim, of which I have seen no evidence, and I would approach any attempt to quantify that with an enormous amount of skepticism. (It's a hard thing to quantify in a meaningful way, and easy to do poorly.) Further showing that any such diminished capacity is caused by how we consume information online is even more difficult, and as far as I know, not done.
Information access is so cheap today that the framework for how I learn now is very different than how it was when I was growing up 25 years ago.
Most knowledge is bundled up into bite-sized chunks and indexed by Google. In 1991, you'd be consulting a reference manual or some other physical medium to get the information to answer a question. Today, that answer is pre-interpreted and available on Stack Exchange via Google.
That said to master your craft, whatever it is, still requires that attention to detail and complemative approach.
And given I'd say most people on HN take it as fact the the internet has caused concentration and contemplation issues you need evidence of the opposite.
With everyone believing something on anecdotal evidence it becomes up to the opposing view.
I grew up with the internet, having been born just after the first Gulf War. I am about as old as the linux kernel.
I'm not debating the specific points, but the general reasoning.
Is it not plausible that sometimes we periodically really do lose something valuable and the conservatives in society notice this?
Otherwise we are postulating or at least heavily implying that conservatism is always wrong.
Why then... would it exist at all? Are we not creatures of evolution?
This point isn't that all of conservatism is always wrong, but that that romantic nostalgia aspect of it mostly is. Of course, conservatives hardly have a monopoly on romantic nostalgia.
Having said that, I don't think that invalidates all conservatism since the value of the casualties of progress is subjective.
It makes perfect sense if you replace "liberal" with "neophilic" or something like that. Looks like a bad choice of words, I don't think it is aligned with the meaning of "liberal" and "conservative" on US politics, but I'm not from there, so I'm not sure.
I believe some political discussion is on topic should the political circumstances be particularly novel e.g. Brexit, but not the everyday fighting that goes on all the time I agree.
Actually I am not an American but am Irish.
Absolutely plausible. I'd even say it's probable! But we usually gain something valuable as well.
Look here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Change_w... This are responses of different PID controllers to the change of target value. You can notice that controller can overshoot target value to get near target value faster. I see conservatives working for one side of this graph and liberals for the other. You probably just need both.
There is something about cybernetics and control theory, that, if applied to governance would be of enormous value, but I've never seen a real world application. I wonder if we'll get to see such a thing in our lifetimes.
In the cyberpunk Pyscho-Pass there exists a nice fictional account of such a system.
> You probably just need both.
Yes, today. My complaint is that this is a very crude algorithm! There has got to be a better way that represents people's true interests. My own hypothesis is that in the year 20XX there will exist a <country> with a combination of intelligence agency with a vastly expanded remit and a computer system which produces most central governance.
Did you believe/think/feel X today? Your inputs have been factored and there are Y resolution proposals! The resolution you have chosen shall be weighted against counterproposals and if selected shall be converted into contracts for activities that a new arm of the State shall spring into existence to deal with. Government functions can scale backwards and forwards in an orderly and consistent fashion with the desires/knowledge of the citizenry.
I think it can only work by illustrating trade-offs in order to keep stakeholders in the loop. As long as the system is comprehensible it should work. Pray we never fork.
We should try experiments like these on a Seastead first before we kill everybody.
It is high time these kinds of projects were revisited, not as an attempt to provide a new economic system per se as some envisioned in the past, but to change central government.
As you probably already know many governments in the West are approaching half of the real economy. Things are starting to get weird, which is normal when the territory has evolved beyond the map. I think there shall be a phase change sooner rather than later in how government is managed. I mean a deep structural change in how administration works and not an ideological one.
The question is not so much how and why, since there are lots of productive lines of inquiry and the value proposition is endless, but what must be done to accomplish political decision making moving from a network of men to one partly/wholly composed of machines making autonomous decisions?
My guess is that governance does not require an AGI. It is already a slow moving narrow AI that lives partly in the legal realm and partly in the human realm. I suspect the technology to do this existed decades ago and the real reason the idea has not been developed is inertia. That and it's slightly scary. It is like fiddling with the boot sector! Better recreate a backup...
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
-- Socrates
According to wikiquote that is "a paraphrase of a quote from Aristophanes' Clouds, a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates."
I'd argue it's plainly obvious that the end results of technological innovation are unpredictable (how many of us here make novel use of tech to earn our livings every day? who conceived of all this when computers were first imagined?) and that it's plainly obvious that some technological innovation has not been to the greater benefit of man (e.g., the industrialization of war and genocide over the last century)--none of that has much to do with children misbehaving or society losing manners.
I don't think this quote proves what people think it does.
- Penn Jillette
Of course, the full context of the statement transforms this from a head nodder into a well reasoned argument:
"It's because you get older, your responsibilities are different. Now I'm taking care of children instead of being a child. It makes the world look scarier. That happens to everyone."
That is a period were human activity has been dramatically changed in a way that has not happened before. I remember reading that the 40 hours is only good compared to that period, we have always worked less than that earlier in history (1). The changes in that period were so dramatic that we even forgot how we slept before it.
Seems that both the article and xkcd make the mistake of comparing the same period in history which is also only a very short 200 year period to lightly suggest that things never change. Well, that's like observing that soccer fan are as anxious about the score 30 min in the match than they were after 15 min. It gives some idea of how the match is going, but not really anything concrete.
Not saying it is not interesting or informative, but there is limited wisdom to extract from it.
(1) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
Are you referring to the idea that we used to sleep in two stretches each night? I've yet to see any credible evidence for that claim.
I'm not so sure about that.
Most people lived on farms, and if you know about farms, you know it's almost 12 hours, 7 days a week. Or rather, it's an 'all consuming' type of business.
That said, this is North American farming wherein farmers owned their land.
Then again, said wars may well be seen as a extension of the great game. A game that continued through the cold war, and is now once more in the headlines...
I elaborated on this idea a bit in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10549103
It's the never ending game of balance of power.
I'd argue that the Russian Empire is maybe more important to the equation.