There is entropy, then there are social actors whose material interest clash with a life of sustainability adding to the drama we already must face in society.
There is entropy, then there are social actors whose material interest clash with a life of sustainability adding to the drama we already must face in society.
Here's the part of the script comparing the simple lives of the native bushmen of the Kalahari desert to "civilized man":
These Bushmen have never seen a stone or a rock in their lives.
The hardest things they know are wood and bone.
They live in a gentle world, where nothing is as hard as rock, steel or concrete.
Only miles to the south, there's a vast city.
And here you find civilized man.
Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment.
Instead he adapted his environment to suit him.
So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery.
And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices.
But he didn't know when to stop.
The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier...
...the more complicated he made it.
Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn...
...how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat.
And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings...
...now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt...
...every hour of the day to his self-created environment.And patriarchy was never contingent on those things anyhow. It's just a cultural choice that got stuck because it was woven into the form of citified civilization.
> Childbirth works better squatting.
I would like to see citations indicating that these statements are true to a significant degree that modern improvements are of little value.
I can't even find data on maternal mortality before 1800.
The point was "knowing when to stop".
Civilization creates these juggernauts that start moving and when they reach their goals their momentum carries them past need and reason.
How many laws do we need? Do we need more roads (or lanes)? Should taxes increase? in percentage!? Do we need to "add value" to every product ever? Do kids need more homework? Do you need another iPhone?
Douglas Adams wrote: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
I like to look at classic car ads, and I saw one for a car from the 60s or whatever, and I forget the exact phrasing, but it said it had had a modern type of stereo installed, which had AM/FM and a CD player. Which I thought was funny, because that kind of pinpoints the assumed age/generation of a buyer. Going by Adams, someone who thinks car CDs are new, but good, could have been up to 35 in 1985 when the first car CD players came out. Which is exactly the age to remember mid to late 60s cars as desirable as a teenager. But now they are close to 70 years old, and that's why the prices of such cars are trending down.
I'm not sure that it's inevitable that you hate new things as you get older. Maybe it's more that people feel insecure about their ability to choose which new things they like, because it becomes a disorienting flood.
Actually, the question is still not easy to answer, even if you'd those same fundamentals. Both because effects of stuff like a $15 minimum wage on evolutionary fitness are incredibly hard to predict and out fitness function is theoretically steady a "1" until the last leaf dies. We have to make guesses based on highly incomplete data. But there are some predictions we can be quite confident in based on life on earth: Improving the ability to accumulate knowledge and manipulate our environment (or even yourselves) seems like a highly effective strategy. We should keep moving it forward as best as we can. If that is in the form of millions of man hours "wasted" playing computer games and generations of obsolete graphic cards so those cards could become cheap and highly capable, in the process giving mankind tools to boost AI research, then so be it. Even if it makes life more complicated. Even if we need to learn a lot. Even if it requires tons of collaboration. I'm eager to witness all the other stuff we will come up with by mastering additional technologies.
Freezing or significantly slowing down technological progress in the name of what's natural seems crazy to me. I suppose we at least all agree to "only" have like 5b years to get off this rock. But waiting that long and in the mean time relying on subsistence farming doesn't seem like an optimal survival strategy...
Most problems we currently face are not a result of civilization itself. Count of laws or roads doesn't seem very material to me. Adding value treadmills just indicate some failure points of capitalism. But everything else we had before was even worse.
What is the purpose of this exposition? We have many problems to fix, but none of them will get fixed by going backwards.
Interestingly, I found the following link which mentions that there is a form of tumor in humans (that may or may not be benign) which produces horn-like protrusions. Obviously this is not generally considered attractive, but if it were, society would change!
https://www.quora.com/How-can-natural-selection-explain-the-...
> planned obsolescence
It amazes me that people keep using this term -- which was associated with washing machines in the 1940's -- to rant about buggy software and engineering improvements.
Stop perpetuating the myth. There is zero truth to it. (And before you say it: Slowing down older phones to account for battery decay and balance battery life is intentional and it PROLONGS the device ... exactly the opposite of planned obsolecense).
Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete. I use an Ipod Mini from 2004 when I work out at the gym. It is 15 years old and works FINE. My iPhone 7 crashes weekly. Prior to that I used an iPhone 4 for six years until I kicked it down a storm drain. (Long story.)
> software bloat
OK. Two. This is due to technoculture determining how technology can be used. New features are added before old features are optimized, and software bloats and breaks. This is a result of pushing the boundaries of tech. Some features will survive the evolution, some will not. But it is not intentional, it is a side effect of insanely rapid development and productization due to customer demand.
No one has a gun to your head making you buy they latest tech. As long as people demand the latest and greatest, the industry will rush to provide. This is a consequence of accelerated innovation.
Running on an upgraded late 2008 MacBook and running Mojave, but only thanks to people keeping it compatable as a hobby. According to Apple, this setup is obsolete and incompatable with Mojave.
For example, I have an old iPad2 (last Apple device I bought) that is working perfectly (the hardware). But I'm not able to install anything "new" on it because iOS 9 is no more supported by applications. Why Apple doesn't open specifications so i can install Linux on it to extends its life for many years to come?
I take an example from Apple but it's applicable to ANY companies.
How long is it reasonable?
One of the reasons I have heard about people buying Apple hardware is that it has great resale value.
So the answer is: Long enough to keep this true.
If Apple keeps its current path, people will stop buying Apple hardware and it will hurt Apple's bottom line.
But yes, I concede they have the money to make mistakes for about 20 years. So they do make the mistakes.
In this case, they bothered to make this thing with decent build quality and for that I thank them. It is even easily upgradable and the battery is accessable.
However, if I want dev tools to work on it, Apple requires me to use their recent OS, which they claim will not run on this hardware.
Now if they had a good point economically and it was a massive ballache requiring a lot of resources, then fair enough. But the patching utility appears to be the work of one person in their spare time, which in the grand scheme of things, especially since Apple is hardly strapped for cash and resources, does look like Apple have decided to economically obsolete this machine for reasons that have very little to do with it being technically obsolete.
Sandy Bridge laptops are not supported by Mojave and up, but will probably be softwarematically fine while continuing to get more features while running the latest versions of Linux or Windows. Amazing technologies like changing your wallpaper over the course of the day (GNOME in the '00s onward) or making your screen yellow are all supposedly not functional on macOS on those Sandy Bridge laptops.
That's why I put more ram in it.
The yearly cycle of education means that the next time I do something might not be until a year later. This is plenty of time for link rot or for an edtech start-up to go out of business (or even for a surviving company to break things in incompatible ways). This makes me reluctant to rely of technology in the classroom. Of course, a year is a long time in the tech world so these things are reasonable. In education, though, it feels like “I can’t believe I only used this website twice (I.e. two years) and they already went out of business.”
I have an HP2420dn laser printer. I have had it so long I can't even remember when I bought it, but it has probably been around 20 years. Every 10 years or so it needs maintenance to replace the wear parts. Nowadays I can't find anyone who will do this work because new printers are so ridiculously cheap that the maintenance market has collapsed. So my perfectly serviceable printer is probably going to end up in the landfill. Sometimes I despair at the state of "civilization".
Contra the "firmware bloat is deliberately making old devices useless" argument, a 3GS on the original firmware is miserably sluggish and laggy. With modern eyes, you become painfully aware of how Apple used animated UI transitions to disguise a fundamentally very slow device. The original iOS 3.0 firmware is also strikingly primitive - at launch, the exciting new feature was copy and paste.
3G connectivity is woefully, miserably slow when you're used to 4G. A 480x320 LCD is visibly pixelated, even when it's only 3.5". It feels like peering through a broken telescope. There's no front-facing camera, the main camera is terrible, the battery life is atrocious even with a new battery, the GPS receiver takes an eternity to get a location fix.
Try one out for ten minutes, try out the cheapest of contemporary Chinese smartphones and I guarantee that you'd prefer to keep the no-name Android phone.
It all depends on exactly what software you're running on what hardware.
Even for programmers, the fact that many are still living in vim/emacs shows how little the core operations of computing have changed.
I would love an OS that focuses on offering stable, well integrated, well designed functionality and interfaces, and does not change every 12 months because the marketing/design people were bored. Releases would instead focus on stability, performance, and bug fixes. Adding support for new data formats as they appear would be required, but not in a way that needs to change anything on the end user side of things (your photo editor can now open/export HEIC, great!).
I know that most of my family would be happy with something like this, because I hear them complain all the time about how some software update changed where everything was, or even worse - removes functionality they needed.
In a weird way, I think the closest thing to this that exists today is Mathematica - reading interviews with Stephen Wolfram about how he uses it is fascinating. I’d want that, but for everyday users, not geeky mathematicians :)