| Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||
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    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kW Nothing surprising, but nonetheless thought provoking when presented this way. It fills me with a certain anxiety that I'm trying to track down... The natural inclination is to feel that things are moving too fast (and of course the video itself predisposes you to that), but one of the of things that drives me nuts is when I hear people (generally of the older persuasion) complaining about the degradation of the English language, and when you counter them and point out that "language changes -- always has always will", they pull out "but it's changing too *fast*". And this comes from thoughtful and intelligent people; even people like Douglas Hofstadter who savors and writes about language and who I've called on this particular brand of nonsense. What could it possibly mean for language to change "too fast"? That would mean that communication would start to fail in the communities that speak the variant of the language in question. Of course that's absurd -- what people who complain about language changing to fast are really complaining about is that they are no longer member of a speech community to which they used to belong (i.e. youth). I wonder if the expansion of technology and knowledge is similar. Can it move too fast? What would that mean? How could it actually move faster than we -- as a community -- have the capacity to learn and absorb. Surely the dynamics of technosociological advancement will force a balance. What is clear -- and from which I think my anxiety stems -- is that it is harder and harder for someone to be even *well verse* in more than one field. I want to know everything -- I'll make no bones about that. I want to know *everything*. And obviously I know that's never going to happen; but it's coming to the point where I can't keep up with the handful of subjects that I've chosen to focus my time and effort on. The acceleration that is happening isn't moving too fast for society, but it forces us to specialize to such a degree that it becomes all but impossible to be knowledgeable, let alone accomplished, in a variety of fields. At one point in time, it was possible for someone to have read *every* book written in their language, and for a long time after that, possible to read every *important* book in their language. I envy those times for that. I've tried to be well balanced -- to be a 'renaissance man'. But I feel there is less and less a place for me... The 'renaissance man' is obsolete. Hard to let go of that identity though and not try to just 'catch up'. Time for a cup of tea; some soft Loreena; and a comfortable book in a bed with freshly changed sheets. Current Mood: | |||||||||||||||||||||
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I take personal exception to the following. The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years ... For students starting a 4-year technical degree ... that means that half of what they learned in first year will be outdated by their third year of study. I'm not quite sure what they mean by "technical degree". Possibly they mean something like Bachelor of Engineering Technology, with which I'm not very familiar. But they may mean something like engineering education, with which I am very familiar. And specific technical information is a very small part of what first-year engineering students learn. They learn physics and chemistry and calculus (and sometimes geology). They learn time management and how to work in a team with people who are just as smart as they are but who think differently. They learn how to tackle a measurement problem when they don't quite understand the background, how to find resources to help, and how to prepare professional responses in writing. I started learning those things almost 30 years ago, and none of them is obsolete in my career. That statement is inappropriately manipulative and alarmist. Also, I'm really put off by the population statistics that keep popping up. Are people supposed to think it's a bad thing that China and India have more people than the USA? Creepy and xenophobic. These two examples make me mistrust the rest of it. (Reply to this) (Thread) After the fact I thought about editing in "hyperbole" somewhere, which certainly would have been appropriate, but I was tired. ;)
Time for a cup of tea; some soft Loreena; and a comfortable book in a bed with freshly changed sheets. Oh, I got a bit carried away with my rant. Sorry about that. All of the above is an appropriate response, anyway, and I should probably do the same. (s/Loreena/Dallas Green) (Reply to this) (Thread) That was waaaaay thought provoking, and the acceleration is real. This is both exciting and scary. At first when I read about what some are calling the "singularity" I thought it was an interesting but more science fiction than anything else. But if a 1000 dollar personal computer in 2049 will have a computational power greater than that of the entire population of the planet... What does that mean??? It blows the mind. When we die the world is not likely to even remotely resemble the one we entered Furthermore some alive today may not die in the current sense of the word but live on forever as something beyond human. That sends chills down my spine. (Reply to this) (Thread) It is pretty overwhelming. Although, being that my education was in Cognitive Science/Artificial Intelligence, I do take issue with these statements about the computational power of the human brain. Estimates of the "computational power" of the brain have been around for a long time, but there's no real meaning to them. Brains and computers (at least the ones we have now) are fundamentally different kinds of processing. They aren't really comparable in that way; and it certainly isn't true, as is implied, that once a computer achieves the "computational level" of a human brain that it will be as smart. For certain tasks computers today are already far far beyond our capabilities. And way behind in others. But as far as "beyond human"... well, I think that's already come! :) Technology is so much a part of *my* life at least, I think we're already becoming "transhuman". It isn't integrated into my nervous system, but some people like Andy Clark (who wrote "Natural Born Cyborgs") doesn't think it needs to be. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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