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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think fifty years down the line we'll see a huge spike in cancer rates caused by continuous exposure to electronic devices. If not from EM radiation, then from the materials they're made of.

And I'm generation Y, we'll invent clinical immortality and we're going to live forever.

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Maybe so, but every new technology comes with side effects. I'm sure the number of paper cuts sky rocketed when books became popular. People's ability to remember things probably also decreased because you don't need to rely on memory so much when you can write things down. And I'm sure someone from the previous generation was loudly protesting all this new fangled writing.

That someone was Socrates: "The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves. So it's not a recipe for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you're equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth. Thanks to you and your invention, your pupils will be widely read without benefit of a teacher's instruction; in consequence, they'll entertain the delusion that they have wide knowledge, while they are, in fact, for the most part incapable of real judgment."

I know, I just didn't want to look up the quote, so I was vague.

Well, he's right, you know. Who needs the method of loci anymore?

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