Posted on 10/13/2009 9:06:08 PM PDT by neverdem
And of course in the '60s - '70s we had plenty of schoolbooks warning of the perils of a technology explosion, how we would all become inanimate beings confined to some sort of life support capsules in the vast wasteland of earth, things like that.
And of course there are implications to the idea of all information processing being universally connected about which folks ought to be concerned.
Good or bad? I don't know but certainly each successive generation (not even generation really but a term for a smaller set escapes me) has a different attitude about the extent to which they are willing to embrace and put their affairs into the connected world. For me, I like to think I have control over what I'll freely share with the world and what I'll put forth as needed. But more and more I see what I am trying to maintain be less voluntary and more dictated by someone else (especially government). I don't like it.
The ancient prophecy seems to warn about such a time but that's not central in forming my attitude. I like my debit card, online banking and bill paying, shopping, etc. It is convenient and saves a lot of time, energy, and hassle. I like being able to communicate in near real time with anyone willing about matters of mutual interest. I like having my phone everywhere I go and I like some of the extra things it does. And so on. But at the same time I prefer to be aware of what goes on inside the beast, so to speak, and it is evermore tedious staying up on who has access to what and keeping some manner of control.
And beyond that there is the matter of dependence. The technological infrastructure is not infallible under normal circumstances and certainly it's ripe with soft targets. I don't know if those issues will be resolved in my lifetime and I am prepared to survive in an outage should it occur.
But there, a sort of self healing distributed computing model presents an effective solution to those shortcomings, and the expense would be almost negligible as you say, but what are the other costs?
By “ancient prophesy” you are referring to the bible’s book of revelation?
So in your mind the “beast” of the bible is a super computer or the internet?
I referred to the “ancient prophecy” in my post and I even spelled it correctly. But if you read the whole post you’d know that my concerns about technology are not based on that, but on real here and now things, and that we are in agreement about most of the shortcomings of today and how what is likely to come in the next few years can fix some of those problems.
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