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JLanier @ jaronlanier.com
| Description | : | Half A Manifesto.
"It is important to remember that craft-based cultures can come up with plenty of useful technologies, and that the motivation for our predecessors to embrace the Enlightenment and the ascent of rationality was not just to make more technologies more quickly. There was also the idea of humanism, and a belief in the goodness of rational thinking and understanding. Are we really ready to abandon that? ... My version of the Terror is different. We can already see how the biotechnology industry is setting itself up for decades of expensive software trouble. While there are all sorts of useful databases and modeling packages being developed by biotech firms and labs, they all exist in isolated developmental bubbles. Each such tool expects the world to conform to its requirements. Since the tools are so valuable, the world will do exactly that, but we should expect to see vast resources applied to the problem of getting data from one bubble into another. There is no giant monolithic electronic brain being created with biological knowledge. There is instead a fractured mess of data and modeling fiefdoms. The medium for biological data transfer will continue to be sleep-deprived individual human researchers until some fabled future time when we know how to make software that is good at bridging bubbles on its own. What is a long-term future scenario like in which hardware keeps getting better and software remains mediocre? The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates. If Moore's law is upheld for another 20 or 30 years, there will not only be a vast amount of computation going on planet Earth, but the maintenance of that computation will consume the efforts of almost every living person. We're talking about a planet of help desks". (the new humanists) GOTO DieMedici GOTO ConfidenceInRawData GOTO QualitaetErmoeglichtFortschritt... GOTO ...STATTReinerSelbstbeschäftigungs-Bürokratie |
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