I've come to some sort of conclusiony idea about all this

[B_M_W]

Bestest threadjack evar.

[Jasper]

I'd like to resurrect this thread's discussion.  It seems pretty clear that the world's on the verge of a lot of technological change.  The technology industry has been able to keep proprietary is now becoming open source; Really useful and impactful technology has started to trickle down to common availability, and it seems crucial to me that there's a high opportunity for gaining an edge over most by implementing the newest ideas and devices before others. 

Thoughts?  Am I off my nut on this one?  I think not.

[BootyBay]

I'd like to resurrect this thread's discussion.  It seems pretty clear that the world's on the verge of a lot of technological change.  The technology industry has been able to keep proprietary is now becoming open source; Really useful and impactful technology has started to trickle down to common availability, and it seems crucial to me that there's a high opportunity for gaining an edge over most by implementing the newest ideas and devices before others. 

Thoughts?  Am I off my nut on this one?  I think not.

Innovation being the driving force of society (or one of them) is supposed to be what this country (USA) is about.  It isn't, though, currently.  The American Dream of having our best and brightest get to the top through "working smarter" has long since died out and the new means for attaining power is the overly  simplistic idea of making generating capital and nothing more.  If the rush of innovation in technology really does end up benefiting the innovators themselves (and not their managers/CEOs), we might see a resurrection of the American Dream. 

[Jasper]

Heheheh.  The new money is information, material, and human lives.  The CEOs of the world are going to get tired of trading money sooner than later.  Money's on the way out one way or the other.

The American Dream?  The Amurrican Sham, more like it. 

[BadBeast]

Heheheh.  The new money is information, material, and human lives.  The CEOs of the world are going to get tired of trading money sooner than later.  Money's on the way out one way or the other.

The American Dream?  The Amurrican Sham, more like it. 

Yet still, they flock around it, like  Moths to a candle!

[Storebrand]

Hey, Sig

http://www.rdmag.com/News/2010/05/Information-Technology-Artificial-Intelligence-Probabilistic-Programming-Building-Better-Machine-Learning-Systems/

probabilistic programming, inference algorithm

[BabylonHoruv]

I think technology will pick up where the surrealists could not follow in their main goal.  Technology will transform the mind and all that resembles it.  It's already done so when compared with how we used to live. 

Technology seems to dictate a huge amount of our culture and lifestyle.  More than I thought when I had this forum in mind.  Name one activity or aspect of life that is not altered or caused by modern technology.

And of course I mean YOUR life, not S'wada in Djambouti.

When I am visiting my parents, pooping.  My father has an outhouse and this was what I grew up with.  Now I have a toilet, although that's been around since the Victorian era so I don't know if it really counts as modern.

[BabylonHoruv]

I know several people who don't have computers. Their lives are actually pretty similar to mine, other than that. I mean, of course computers have changed a lot about the way people communicate, and at this point they're pretty ubiquitous, but fundamentally, life itself remains relatively unchanged by them.

Cars, on the other hand, really make a huge difference. Not just in individual lives, but in society.

I'm talking about changes that pervade more deeply than what you buy or what you do for a living.  We have a  different mindset than previous generations because what we are is made of bits and pieces of society's memes that just didn't exist in previous ages.  We're made of different information, and a lot more of it.  Most of the information inside our heads is garbage like television and advertisements, but there's also a lot more useful information in our heads these days too. 

As for cars, it's true.  They have changed everything from where we can go, what we can import and export, to the very air we breathe.  Asthma was not a big deal to us before cars, and neither was the environment.  There are literally more cars in america than there are people, and you cannot meaningfully live in our society without depending on them.  They're a quintessential example of technology changing our lives.

The mechanization and offshoring of all manufacture is tanking our economy. If manufactured goods were still made the long slow way by hand, they would cost a great deal more because they would require more labor by more laborers. I don't think I need to go on, it's an old principle that most people are familiar with.

When it comes down to it, what's tanking our economy is bad business and worse politics, and has nothing to do with manufacturing and only a very little amount to do with offshore manufacturing itself.

Cars are bad.  I think they are the most destructive technology to come along in the last 200 years.  They are responsible for a great deal of pollution as well as stratifying communities, funding repressive regimes, the ecological repercussions of roads, and a fair amount of direct human death to to drunk or reckless driving.

[Telarus]

Not to mention that the Freeway System pretty much killed the economic activity of every small town that wasn't 10 minutes or less from the freeway.

[Jasper]

You guys make Gary Numan cry.

Also, imagine the last century if it didn't feature civilian automobiles.

Kinda sucks.

[BabylonHoruv]

You guys make Gary Numan cry.

Also, imagine the last century if it didn't feature civilian automobiles.

Kinda sucks.

It's really hard to do.  Civilian automobiles changed life really dramatically.

[Requia ☣]

Decades earlier, when horses were less plentiful in cities, there was a smooth-functioning market for
manure, with farmers buying it to truck off (via horse, of course) to their fields. But as the urban equine
population exploded, there was a massive glut. In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It
lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summertime, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy
stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people's basements. Today, when you admire
old New York brownstones and their elegant stoops, rising from street level to the second-story parlor, keep in
mind that this was a design necessity, allowing a homeowner to rise above the sea of horse manure.
All of this dung was terrifically unhealthy. It was a breeding ground for billions of flies that spread a host of
deadly diseases. Rats and other vermin swarmed the mountains of manure to pick out undigested oats and
other horse feed—crops that were becoming more costly for human consumption thanks to higher horse
demand.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

For a long time, there was a happy middle ground where cars, horses and trains co-existed. Then the freeways came.

[Requia ☣]

There were horses on city streets until the 1950s?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

There were horses on city streets until the 1950s?

I think in most cities horses kind of went out of common use by the early 30's. But things didn't really get fucked up until the 50's, when the freeways supplanted public transportation.