Why shouldn’t we transcend the human condition and see how deep this rabbit hole leads?

Because of path-dependence: it’s easy to get stuck on paths which are not necessarily ideal. The fear, my fear, is that most paths are far from ideal. We need backup cultures, but once most people are “transcending” everyone else has to come along with them, not because it’s smarter, faster and more efficient but just for the wasteful reason that everyone else is doing it and they need to keep up. A perfect example of this is tractor debt: farmers all bought into tractors when they came out, often getting them with bank loans, but the influx of the technology drove prices down, forcing farmers to have larger fields just to turn the same absolute profit, driving corporate consolidation and monocropping which destroyed both the economic and bio resilience of the food industry. I slogan this quote: Technology doesn’t make things better, it just makes things faster.

I’ve been reading Stross this week, and stumbled on your blog unrelatedly. It’s interesting to see all your reflections in this category! I have to say that the great matryoshka upload temple in the sky terrifies me because its substrates are a monocrop.

Of course, so long as people of some form continue to exist, values will shift to close the cognitive dissonance gap so we can be better, happier and more successful people, a form of automatic self-healing historian’s fallacy. But just because

most people will probably agree that we are better off now than we were back then.

doesn’t make it true.

Being technophobic just because technology is different is a weak and sad, imo, but rushing into technology because it’s faster

[…] Humanity: Not an Immutable State […]

Fal wrote:

@ StDoodle: In regards to your second point (not as an endorsement of any specific company), I’ve had luck going contract-free with virgin mobile usa.

Thanks! I’ve heard horror stories about Boost and one of the others (re: trying to root and not being able to have the service work anymore) but hadn’t heard anything about VM specifically. I will certainly give them a close look when the time comes.

Sometime people tend to be too dependent on technology. I remember this story from someone where he was buying a bottle of pop for $1 and a chocolate bar for $1.25. Suddenly the power went out and the two ladies at the back of the counter could not compute the total purchase made plus 10% tax. And the guy was giving them $5 for the lot.

@ StDoodle: In regards to your second point (not as an endorsement of any specific company), I’ve had luck going contract-free with virgin mobile usa. Their smartphone offerings may not be the absolute most cutting-edge, but:
1) Their pricing seems fairly reasonable compared to contract carriers
2) I have successfully rooted and wiped all the crap off my moto triumph, replacing the stock install with cyanogen mod 9 alpha. Doing something similar might be a way for you to still use a smartphone, but pay less, be contract free, not be stuck with a 3-year-old OS or have BS-ware on the phone :)

…and then the planet was struck by a massive CME and Luddites inherit the Earth.

Too bad all the tech savvy folks decided to offload half their brains to silicone.

I kid, kinda.

Still, think about the productivity crash when the power is out. Not long ago we would just pull out a lamp/candle/etc. and keep working. Now, even if we’re at home relaxing, we pace around waiting for the internet/cable/satellite to come back on.

And maybe we are becoming better at some things, although it may take many years or centuries to recognize that. James Gleick’s “The Information” tells how the technology of writing allows us to think in ways that pre-literate people don’t. It’s easier to think in abstractions and categories. Here’s a story similar to the one on page 38 of Gleick’s book: From “Death of Reading”

Mostly I agree, but I think I side with your dad regarding “needing” a smart phone. I plan on going back to a “dumb” phone myself when my wife and I are both out of contract.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many things I’ll miss, and I’ll likely end up still using my old droid or getting some kind of tablet and / or ereader, but I have two big problems with smartphones.

1) They just aren’t as comfortable / good as actual phones. They’ve come a long way, yes, but if you’re talking for more than five minutes, it’s distinctly less comfortable on a smart phone than on a plain-old, thin-as-hell, less heat-producing, better quality mic & speaker “dumb” phone, at least in my experience. (Being a glasses wearer probably makes some difference here; whether smart or dumb, I find I have to press a phone fairly close to my head, which squeezes my ear against the frame of my glasses, and is noticeably worse with smartphones.)

2) Pricing. I doubt anyone in the U.S. who pays attention to such things would honestly argue against our phone plans in general, but smart phone plans in particular, being fairly messed up. As soon as I’m contract-free, I don’t see myself going back to contracted phones for quite some time, unless there are major changes. Sure, it’s possible to get a smart phone on one of the contract-free carriers. But you’re saddled with tons of BS-ware as far as I can tell. (Can you realistically root & clean off a phone and have it work with one of the no-contract places? I’ve tried to find out without much luck.) Device selection is pretty horrible, and I really don’t want to use a phone O.S. from three years ago on a “new” phone. There could well be possibilities I’m just not aware of here, but I’m having a difficult time finding them. Sadly, I’m likely to go back to having a separate “dumb” phone and ultra-portable device; it’s inconvenient as hell, but when it’s at least $70/mo. less, without a two-year commitment on a piece of technology that changes drastically on a much quicker cycle…. blech.

1. Right, this is a problem but barring a global catastrophe of some sort, disruption of electricity will only occur locally, and only temporarily. If we design our networks properly and do backups correctly it should not be a huge problem. It will always be annoying and it will always cause inconvenience but that’s about it. If we do have a global collapse of infrastructure, then we are back to the stone age no matter what. The only thing to do is have some contingency plans but there is just no amount of planing and preparation you can do to minimize the damage caused by some planet-wide civilization ending event.

2. Everything I read about such things was BS. There was an article few years ago about a clinic that was set up in Netherlands to treat teens with “video game addiction”. They shut down after about 6 months of functioning because the psychologists and doctors just could not continue working there in good conscience. They all agreed that not a single patient admitted to their institution was actually suffering from “video game addiction” but rather their excessive gaming was a symptom of some other underlying psychological problems and they would have to refer them out to get actual care. Most of the people who talk about the video game addiction usually are trying to sell books, boost ratings or generate web views. It’s a controversial topic that draws a lot of eyeballs, but not actual clinical think. Then again I am not a doctor. I just play one on TV.

3. Yep. Technology will be abused. What I’m afraid more than the actual abuse is the knee-jerk reaction from governments trying to over-regulate it. We are seeing it now with governmental agencies having a seizures trying to wrap their heads around Anonymous, trying to censor wikileaks, cracking down on Megaupload, trying to pass laws like SOPA and etc.. The governments will do more damage to the technology than script kiddies, idiots and “cyber terrorists” could ever possibly do. One of my big fears is that US is going to lose the edge in the technology race (already started happening) and will become an irrelevant third world country as less-regulated nations will dominate markets because growth on their turf was not inhibited by idiot laws. What’s even worse is that US will not go down alone, but will drag most of the western world down to the irrelevancy hell with it seeing how we love to export our dumbest laws all around the world.

I am with you on the topics of change. I love technology and what it does for us. I love that any time I need some obscure fact, all I need is google it. Too bad I don’t think I’ll grt to see some kind of completely new technology in my time but maybe I’m just pessimistic about that :) we have already come far.

Here are my technology fears:
1. Dependance on energy supplies – switch off electricity and we’re back in the Stone age only with no survival skills and no memory and no access to data.
2. Studies on teens that say that their adjustable state of mind is prone to addictions and that’s why computer games are bad for them – they are much more likely to immerse and lose themselves in the game (or form a porn addiction for that matter). I was always dismissing such notions as biased but I’ve read a couple of articles on it and it’s kinda scary.
3. Abuse of technology that can’t be prevented for the most part, and not just terrorism,
plain stupidity works as well.

Other than that I think, technology and bio-tech are our only ways forward.