Are your skills obsolete?

[Tom Johnson]

All:

Some of us may recall Bruce Sterling's fun site, "Dead Media,"
technologies that no longer are necessary or exist.
http://www.deadmedia.org/

The human side of all that can now be found at "Obsolete Skills"
http://obsoleteskills.com/Skills/Skills

Build your personal timeline of obsolescence, friends.

-tom

--
==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com                 [hidden email]

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller
==========================================

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Phil Henshaw-2]

Does it just accelerate indefinitely, like the singularity guys propose??
Or does it reach some point of stabilization as a process, and a relative
completion of the process of exploding rates of change?

Phil Henshaw  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On
> Behalf Of Tom Johnson
> Sent: Monday, November 10, 2008 3:35 PM
> To: Friam@redfish. com
> Subject: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete?
>
> All:
>
> Some of us may recall Bruce Sterling's fun site, "Dead Media,"
> technologies that no longer are necessary or exist.
> http://www.deadmedia.org/
>
> The human side of all that can now be found at "Obsolete Skills"
> http://obsoleteskills.com/Skills/Skills
>
> Build your personal timeline of obsolescence, friends.
>
> -tom
>
> --
> ==========================================
> J. T. Johnson
> Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
> www.analyticjournalism.com
> 505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
> http://www.jtjohnson.com                 [hidden email]
>
> "You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
> To change something, build a new model that makes the
> existing model obsolete."
> -- Buckminster Fuller
> ==========================================
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Steve Smith]

Phil Henshaw wrote:

Does it just accelerate indefinitely, like the singularity guys propose??
Or does it reach some point of stabilization as a process, and a relative
completion of the process of exploding rates of change?

  

I feel that I am an anachronism, though I am probably not alone on this list.  In reviewing the list of "obsolete skills" I find that I hold over half of them and actually practice half of those. 

For example:  I still adjust the timing, gap the plugs and points, and clean the carbuerator on my 1949 ford truck.  I cut my own firewood (often with handsaw and axe rather than chainsaw and logsplitter).  I cook my meals on a wood cookstove which is my only heat other than the sun.  I have built my own structures of mud and straw.  I make my own charcoal and use it to forge my own iron and steel implements.  I grow (some of) my own food.  I have not owned a television for 20 years.   I still own an operable manual typewriter.

I was born just before Sputnik went up.  I watched men walk on the moon.  I've seen every square meter (literally) of the earth mapped from orbit.   I've seen the surface of Mars via telepresence.  I've watched global climate change go from a rough concept to a conspiracy theory to  a widely accepted theory to an almost-directly experienced phenomena.  The sunburn I got in NZ after 10 minutes on the beach at Sea Level helped to make the Ozone hole more real to me, for example.

I have also personally experienced the accelerated advance of knowledge and technology.   I have worked on some of the most advanced big physics, new biology, and advanced computing projects in the world.  I was already a veteran user of the internet (NSFnet, ArpaNet, UUNet, etc.) when it was opened up to the world.   I read Drexler's seminal nanotechnology-coining "Engines of Creation" while it was still only his master's thesis.  I attended Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" (first given the year I was born!) and "Reversible Computing" lectures.   The list goes on.

I am not unlike most of you on this list in this extreme contrast of experiences.  Some here are at least a few years older than me, and many are much more well connected/embedded in the science and technology realm.  Some here were born before the Manhattan Project.  Many of you may even be mildly bionic (replaced hip or knee, pacemaker, etc.) and many of you will become moreso, possibly unto immortality.

<Singularian Rant>

We are perhaps at a unique cusp in time.   I believe (but do not so much approve of) Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity up to the question of what it means to be *human*.   If some of us do succeed in living forever, which almost requires replacing all of our meat, one piece at a time (like the Tin Man of Oz) or all at once (Kurzweil's upload), will we be the same person?   Will we even be the same "species"?  Would we even recognize ourselves?  What is intelligence/cognition/self without embodiment?

The turmoil in politics (last 8 years), economics (coming on hard as I type), and religion (fomenting for decades with possible more-acute symptoms any year now) may only be a mild tremor leading up to the extreme and abrupt changes we may be in for.   Maybe I've read too much Science Fiction, too much Utopian/Dystopian fantasy.  Maybe I am too easily fueled by Morbid Fascination. 

For better and/or worse, there are big changes afoot.   Can Complexity Science help us to predict anything specific, help us to avoid any of the least desireable changes, or mitigate the worst effects?   I'm not sure.

Some of us seem to have a fundamentalist-like belief in Complexity.  We believe that by increasing the complexity and/or diversity of a system, we get "good" results.   Some of us seem to believe that our complex systems theories can help us model "everything that linear science cannot".  

I am not so sure, not so impressed, yet I *am* highly entertained and sometimes even hopeful at the meager understandings and predictions and even interventions we *have* achieved.   As a member of this culture (high-tech Western Civ) and of this species (Homo Sapiens) and of the class mammalia and of the subphylum vertebrate and the general category of life itself, I am totally amazed and taken in by what we are.   Not the pinnacle of evolution, whatever that means, but something uniquely interesting. Life seemingly being an antidote to entropy or at least a brave challenger in the face of entropy's statistical inevitability. 

If I survive the distortions we are entering into, and can still recognize my humanity, my membership in the family of all life, I hope that what I find in the PostHuman result is not a terrible aberration of all I currently hold dear and familiar.    I doubt I will survive this time, possibly only because the time will be too long for the body I was born into and I personally have little interest in taking on the many changes and technologies implicated in singularian survival/advancement.   I will most likely die in the next 20 years of one of the many human/mammalian frailties our ancestors died of.

I do question the Singularians, the wisdom and implications of living forever.  When a cell "chooses" to live forever, I think it becomes a cancer which seems always and ultimately to kill the body it was formerly a member in good standing of.   The Singularian Utopia may be nothing more than the beginning of a not-so-benign tumor in the body of humanity.   In another vision of Singularian Utopia, those who transition to PostHuman will simply retire from humanity unnoticed, not unlike Ayn Rand's John Galt.   Methinks too many of the Singularian/PostHumanists read too much of Ayn Rand like John McCain.

I am a died-in-the-wool Godelian and by extension of the halting-problem, believe that for most (all?) interesting things, we must simply wait for the "Fullness of Time".

</Singularian Rant>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Roger Critchlow-2]

The story of my life: curses, obsolesced again!

-- rec --

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Phil Henshaw-2]

Steve,

 

I recognize much of your experience of a rush toward a vanishing point and sense of expectation about that.    My question is how can you tell the difference between the usual kind and the unusual kind?     We’ve had exploding economic change for a couple hundred years, doubling in size every 20 years and radically transforming everything everywhere all the time.   Look at how vastly each generations life experience has been from the last, going back as many generations as we have any personal knowledge of.   People have declared the “sky is falling” and the “end is near” endlessly it seems too.    I think when I set about to find the answer to that question, to see if I could validate some of feelings of expectation, I asked some of the useful questions and narrowed it down quite a bit.   The question though, is what question would you ask to tell if a feeling of impending grand transformation was real or not?

 

I don’t think “magic” is what we’re talking about.     One would not have any way of confirming a “premonition” of magic.    I do think quite sincerely and confidently that foresight about real complex system transformations, approaching ‘water shed moments’ is very likely to be verifiable if they’re real.

 

Phil Henshaw  

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:56 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete?

 

Phil Henshaw wrote:

Does it just accelerate indefinitely, like the singularity guys propose??

Or does it reach some point of stabilization as a process, and a relative

completion of the process of exploding rates of change?

I feel that I am an anachronism, though I am probably not alone on this list.  In reviewing the list of "obsolete skills" I find that I hold over half of them and actually practice half of those. 

For example:  I still adjust the timing, gap the plugs and points, and clean the carbuerator on my 1949 ford truck.  I cut my own firewood (often with handsaw and axe rather than chainsaw and logsplitter).  I cook my meals on a wood cookstove which is my only heat other than the sun.  I have built my own structures of mud and straw.  I make my own charcoal and use it to forge my own iron and steel implements.  I grow (some of) my own food.  I have not owned a television for 20 years.   I still own an operable manual typewriter.

I was born just before Sputnik went up.  I watched men walk on the moon.  I've seen every square meter (literally) of the earth mapped from orbit.   I've seen the surface of Mars via telepresence.  I've watched global climate change go from a rough concept to a conspiracy theory to  a widely accepted theory to an almost-directly experienced phenomena.  The sunburn I got in NZ after 10 minutes on the beach at Sea Level helped to make the Ozone hole more real to me, for example.

I have also personally experienced the accelerated advance of knowledge and technology.   I have worked on some of the most advanced big physics, new biology, and advanced computing projects in the world.  I was already a veteran user of the internet (NSFnet, ArpaNet, UUNet, etc.) when it was opened up to the world.   I read Drexler's seminal nanotechnology-coining "Engines of Creation" while it was still only his master's thesis.  I attended Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" (first given the year I was born!) and "Reversible Computing" lectures.   The list goes on.

I am not unlike most of you on this list in this extreme contrast of experiences.  Some here are at least a few years older than me, and many are much more well connected/embedded in the science and technology realm.  Some here were born before the Manhattan Project.  Many of you may even be mildly bionic (replaced hip or knee, pacemaker, etc.) and many of you will become moreso, possibly unto immortality.

<Singularian Rant>

We are perhaps at a unique cusp in time.   I believe (but do not so much approve of) Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity up to the question of what it means to be *human*.   If some of us do succeed in living forever, which almost requires replacing all of our meat, one piece at a time (like the Tin Man of Oz) or all at once (Kurzweil's upload), will we be the same person?   Will we even be the same "species"?  Would we even recognize ourselves?  What is intelligence/cognition/self without embodiment?

The turmoil in politics (last 8 years), economics (coming on hard as I type), and religion (fomenting for decades with possible more-acute symptoms any year now) may only be a mild tremor leading up to the extreme and abrupt changes we may be in for.   Maybe I've read too much Science Fiction, too much Utopian/Dystopian fantasy.  Maybe I am too easily fueled by Morbid Fascination. 

For better and/or worse, there are big changes afoot.   Can Complexity Science help us to predict anything specific, help us to avoid any of the least desireable changes, or mitigate the worst effects?   I'm not sure.

Some of us seem to have a fundamentalist-like belief in Complexity.  We believe that by increasing the complexity and/or diversity of a system, we get "good" results.   Some of us seem to believe that our complex systems theories can help us model "everything that linear science cannot".  

I am not so sure, not so impressed, yet I *am* highly entertained and sometimes even hopeful at the meager understandings and predictions and even interventions we *have* achieved.   As a member of this culture (high-tech Western Civ) and of this species (Homo Sapiens) and of the class mammalia and of the subphylum vertebrate and the general category of life itself, I am totally amazed and taken in by what we are.   Not the pinnacle of evolution, whatever that means, but something uniquely interesting. Life seemingly being an antidote to entropy or at least a brave challenger in the face of entropy's statistical inevitability. 

If I survive the distortions we are entering into, and can still recognize my humanity, my membership in the family of all life, I hope that what I find in the PostHuman result is not a terrible aberration of all I currently hold dear and familiar.    I doubt I will survive this time, possibly only because the time will be too long for the body I was born into and I personally have little interest in taking on the many changes and technologies implicated in singularian survival/advancement.   I will most likely die in the next 20 years of one of the many human/mammalian frailties our ancestors died of.

I do question the Singularians, the wisdom and implications of living forever.  When a cell "chooses" to live forever, I think it becomes a cancer which seems always and ultimately to kill the body it was formerly a member in good standing of.   The Singularian Utopia may be nothing more than the beginning of a not-so-benign tumor in the body of humanity.   In another vision of Singularian Utopia, those who transition to PostHuman will simply retire from humanity unnoticed, not unlike Ayn Rand's John Galt.   Methinks too many of the Singularian/PostHumanists read too much of Ayn Rand like John McCain.

I am a died-in-the-wool Godelian and by extension of the halting-problem, believe that for most (all?) interesting things, we must simply wait for the "Fullness of Time".

</Singularian Rant>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Robert J. Cordingley]

When I graduated in Engineering I was told my knowledge had a half life of 4 years.  This from a Continuing Education specialist.  That means that of my degree training only 1/861 st of it is still useful.  Trouble is I can't figure out which bit that was or where I left it!
R

Tom Johnson wrote:

All:

Some of us may recall Bruce Sterling's fun site, "Dead Media,"
technologies that no longer are necessary or exist.
http://www.deadmedia.org/

The human side of all that can now be found at "Obsolete Skills"
http://obsoleteskills.com/Skills/Skills

Build your personal timeline of obsolescence, friends.

-tom

  

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Steve Smith]

Phil Henshaw wrote:

 

I recognize much of your experience of a rush toward a vanishing point and sense of expectation about that.    My question is how can you tell the difference between the usual kind and the unusual kind?

I agree that this is the essential question.   I vary, depending on mood and recent experience, as to how I answer this question.  I also wanted to show the tension that I (and others?) feel of being completely grounded in the "old ways".   For example, my saws and axes and woodstove can easily outlast me by another generation or more with only a modicum of care. 

     We’ve had exploding economic change for a couple hundred years, doubling in size every 20 years and radically transforming everything everywhere all the time. 

Yes, My grandfather was born before internal combustion, automobile and airplane, but lived to see the moon landing and more. 

 Look at how vastly each generations life experience has been from the last, going back as many generations as we have any personal knowledge of.   People have declared the “sky is falling” and the “end is near” endlessly it seems too.

There are plenty of other times and places when the sky WAS/IS falling compared to today.  I am usually in the position of arguing your point.

  I think when I set about to find the answer to that question, to see if I could validate some of feelings of expectation, I asked some of the useful questions and narrowed it down quite a bit.   The question though, is what question would you ask to tell if a feeling of impending grand transformation was real or not?

There are two key, qualitative differences having to do with human scale.   One is that by having longer productive periods in life, under accelerated change, most adults have to endure several important changes in their lifetime.  The other is that much of our technology is becoming life-extending and personal capability enhancing.   There may be thresholds we have already crossed or on the verge of crossing which are pivotal.

 

I don’t think “magic” is what we’re talking about.     One would not have any way of confirming a “premonition” of magic. 

I don't know that "magic" is relevant, if I understand your point.   What I think is important is positive feedback loops and time constants dropping below certain thresholds.  

What I don't know I can agree with is  the following:
  I do think quite sincerely and confidently that foresight about real complex system transformations, approaching ‘water shed moments’ is very likely to be verifiable if they’re real.

I think that precisely the opposite is true.  I think the best we can do is avoid regimes where such change is likely to be precipitated, not precisely when the system will go through a phase transition or what the phase it is transitioning to looks like.

- Steve


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Phil Henshaw-2]

Steve,

 

[ph] So we see many of the same historic signs of explosive acceleration, it’s just a fact, and how it’s been accumulative (till last month anyway… :-) )

 Look at how vastly each generations life experience has been from the last, going back as many generations as we have any personal knowledge of.   People have declared the “sky is falling” and the “end is near” endlessly it seems too.

There are plenty of other times and places when the sky WAS/IS falling compared to today.  I am usually in the position of arguing your point.

[ph] Oh, I’m not saying the ‘sky isn’t falling’, but observe that when people thought so the real part of it just fell on the half the world that was replaced by the multiplications of the other.     I think part of that persistent illusion was that it wasn’t an illusion for the part of the world the rest of us stopped caring about… or something vaguely like that.   I suppose we could now be being fooled the other way, by trusting that the appearance of danger isn’t dangerous.    In personal terms the continual acceleration of change has just seemed to mean excessive generation gaps and people with rich life experience not having much to teach the next generation…whizzing along in somewhat of a daze it seems.

  I think when I set about to find the answer to that question, to see if I could validate some of feelings of expectation, I asked some of the useful questions and narrowed it down quite a bit.   The question though, is what question would you ask to tell if a feeling of impending grand transformation was real or not?

There are two key, qualitative differences having to do with human scale.   One is that by having longer productive periods in life, under accelerated change, most adults have to endure several important changes in their lifetime.  The other is that much of our technology is becoming life-extending and personal capability enhancing.   There may be thresholds we have already crossed or on the verge of crossing which are pivotal.

 

I don’t think “magic” is what we’re talking about.     One would not have any way of confirming a “premonition” of magic. 

I don't know that "magic" is relevant, if I understand your point.   What I think is important is positive feedback loops and time constants dropping below certain thresholds.  

[ph] right, the time constants, or in my focus, the learning response lag times

What I don't know I can agree with is  the following:

 I do think quite sincerely and confidently that foresight about real complex system transformations, approaching ‘water shed moments’ is very likely to be verifiable if they’re real.

I think that precisely the opposite is true.  I think the best we can do is avoid regimes where such change is likely to be precipitated, not precisely when the system will go through a phase transition or what the phase it is transitioning to looks like.

[ph]I didn’t mean to suggest that one can’t be caught by surprise when crossing unobserved  and unsuspected thresholds or ‘trip wires’ in a changing world.   The main one of those may be psychological, being fixated on our stereotypes for things and not paying attention to the independently changing and behaving things of the world they represent.   What  I’m saying is that if you do “feel something coming” it should be possible, using my approach of identifying developmental continuities anyway, to tell whether you know enough about it to be referring to something real or not.    

 

At one point I felt that same general acceleration of change and saw how it gave us the power to decide things with ever more far reaching effects with ever less thought, and it seemed suspicious.   I then did dig to the bottom of it I think, and found very substantial reason why acceleration would continue until we were blindsided by errors of judgment resulting in cascading failures due to faults no one would have thought to look for.     I got it down to continuous growth being a direct violation of the conservation laws actually, because the complexity of it’s response demands would naturally exceed the learning lag times of its unchanging parts, and instantaneous responses require infinite forces.    That our world is now indeed collapsing for essentially that reason isn’t what proves the theorem.    It’s examining the reasoning, perhaps aided by the example of in happening before our eyes, to see that there are no other options.       It’s a fascinating puzzle.

 

Others have seen the same radical acceleration of change and imagined a sort of ‘convergence’ in other areas like in computing power, and imagined other previously unimaginable things must be quickly approaching, like the machines of the world gaining consciousness.     In that case I’d just say, well point to it, and show me where it’s developing.   That’s the *sign* of a valid premonition to me, being able to point to the substantial leading signs showing where it’s actually happening, not just some projection or theory.    I, myself, don’t yet see computers becoming very good at learning at all, especially not about things *they* are interested in.   So if someone can show me how the stages of that are in fact developing, and likely to continue, then maybe I’d see the premonition of it coming to fruition as real too.  

 

I guess I think humans and all other animals survive on the validity of what amounts to their ‘premonitions’.   They sense danger, an approaching change in weather or feeling hungry or someone near looking for fun, all ‘premonitions’ of something abut to happen.     We have hunches and questions about things, and then we go poke around and look to find something real about them.     It’s just another way to say how it seems the ‘wet ware’ is programmed to learn, by prompted searches, that may then prompt searches...etc.  

 

That’s one of the characteristics of natural learning perhaps an ABM might try to emulate.

 

Phil

- Steve

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Peter-2-2]

I don't think any skill sets no mater esoteric ever become obsolete

Heck I would say that most of the tasks that Phil talked about are totally soul fulfilling making them skill sets you need to stay sane

Whats the old mantra about the more things change the more they stay the same and lets not forget perspective as most of our viewpoints are taken from a current position in time and place, change either and the whole game changes.

Personally when the sturm and drangers / end is niers  ( its a skill after all ) get to much for me I just pull out Terry Pratchett Discworld and go to the flat world mounted on the back of four elephants standing on a giant turtle and it all makes perfect sense

( : ( : pete


Phil Henshaw wrote:

Steve,

 

I recognize much of your experience of a rush toward a vanishing point and sense of expectation about that.    My question is how can you tell the difference between the usual kind and the unusual kind?     We’ve had exploding economic change for a couple hundred years, doubling in size every 20 years and radically transforming everything everywhere all the time.   Look at how vastly each generations life experience has been from the last, going back as many generations as we have any personal knowledge of.   People have declared the “sky is falling” and the “end is near” endlessly it seems too.    I think when I set about to find the answer to that question, to see if I could validate some of feelings of expectation, I asked some of the useful questions and narrowed it down quite a bit.   The question though, is what question would you ask to tell if a feeling of impending grand transformation was real or not?

 

I don’t think “magic” is what we’re talking about.     One would not have any way of confirming a “premonition” of magic.    I do think quite sincerely and confidently that foresight about real complex system transformations, approaching ‘water shed moments’ is very likely to be verifiable if they’re real.

 

Phil Henshaw  

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:56 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete?

 

Phil Henshaw wrote:

Does it just accelerate indefinitely, like the singularity guys propose??

Or does it reach some point of stabilization as a process, and a relative

completion of the process of exploding rates of change?

I feel that I am an anachronism, though I am probably not alone on this list.  In reviewing the list of "obsolete skills" I find that I hold over half of them and actually practice half of those. 

For example:  I still adjust the timing, gap the plugs and points, and clean the carbuerator on my 1949 ford truck.  I cut my own firewood (often with handsaw and axe rather than chainsaw and logsplitter).  I cook my meals on a wood cookstove which is my only heat other than the sun.  I have built my own structures of mud and straw.  I make my own charcoal and use it to forge my own iron and steel implements.  I grow (some of) my own food.  I have not owned a television for 20 years.   I still own an operable manual typewriter.

I was born just before Sputnik went up.  I watched men walk on the moon.  I've seen every square meter (literally) of the earth mapped from orbit.   I've seen the surface of Mars via telepresence.  I've watched global climate change go from a rough concept to a conspiracy theory to  a widely accepted theory to an almost-directly experienced phenomena.  The sunburn I got in NZ after 10 minutes on the beach at Sea Level helped to make the Ozone hole more real to me, for example.

I have also personally experienced the accelerated advance of knowledge and technology.   I have worked on some of the most advanced big physics, new biology, and advanced computing projects in the world.  I was already a veteran user of the internet (NSFnet, ArpaNet, UUNet, etc.) when it was opened up to the world.   I read Drexler's seminal nanotechnology-coining "Engines of Creation" while it was still only his master's thesis.  I attended Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" (first given the year I was born!) and "Reversible Computing" lectures.   The list goes on.

I am not unlike most of you on this list in this extreme contrast of experiences.  Some here are at least a few years older than me, and many are much more well connected/embedded in the science and technology realm.  Some here were born before the Manhattan Project.  Many of you may even be mildly bionic (replaced hip or knee, pacemaker, etc.) and many of you will become moreso, possibly unto immortality.

<Singularian Rant>

We are perhaps at a unique cusp in time.   I believe (but do not so much approve of) Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity up to the question of what it means to be *human*.   If some of us do succeed in living forever, which almost requires replacing all of our meat, one piece at a time (like the Tin Man of Oz) or all at once (Kurzweil's upload), will we be the same person?   Will we even be the same "species"?  Would we even recognize ourselves?  What is intelligence/cognition/self without embodiment?

The turmoil in politics (last 8 years), economics (coming on hard as I type), and religion (fomenting for decades with possible more-acute symptoms any year now) may only be a mild tremor leading up to the extreme and abrupt changes we may be in for.   Maybe I've read too much Science Fiction, too much Utopian/Dystopian fantasy.  Maybe I am too easily fueled by Morbid Fascination. 

For better and/or worse, there are big changes afoot.   Can Complexity Science help us to predict anything specific, help us to avoid any of the least desireable changes, or mitigate the worst effects?   I'm not sure.

Some of us seem to have a fundamentalist-like belief in Complexity.  We believe that by increasing the complexity and/or diversity of a system, we get "good" results.   Some of us seem to believe that our complex systems theories can help us model "everything that linear science cannot".  

I am not so sure, not so impressed, yet I *am* highly entertained and sometimes even hopeful at the meager understandings and predictions and even interventions we *have* achieved.   As a member of this culture (high-tech Western Civ) and of this species (Homo Sapiens) and of the class mammalia and of the subphylum vertebrate and the general category of life itself, I am totally amazed and taken in by what we are.   Not the pinnacle of evolution, whatever that means, but something uniquely interesting. Life seemingly being an antidote to entropy or at least a brave challenger in the face of entropy's statistical inevitability. 

If I survive the distortions we are entering into, and can still recognize my humanity, my membership in the family of all life, I hope that what I find in the PostHuman result is not a terrible aberration of all I currently hold dear and familiar.    I doubt I will survive this time, possibly only because the time will be too long for the body I was born into and I personally have little interest in taking on the many changes and technologies implicated in singularian survival/advancement.   I will most likely die in the next 20 years of one of the many human/mammalian frailties our ancestors died of.

I do question the Singularians, the wisdom and implications of living forever.  When a cell "chooses" to live forever, I think it becomes a cancer which seems always and ultimately to kill the body it was formerly a member in good standing of.   The Singularian Utopia may be nothing more than the beginning of a not-so-benign tumor in the body of humanity.   In another vision of Singularian Utopia, those who transition to PostHuman will simply retire from humanity unnoticed, not unlike Ayn Rand's John Galt.   Methinks too many of the Singularian/PostHumanists read too much of Ayn Rand like John McCain.

I am a died-in-the-wool Godelian and by extension of the halting-problem, believe that for most (all?) interesting things, we must simply wait for the "Fullness of Time".

</Singularian Rant>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Peter-2-2]

Could not help noticing that both DOS and Basic listed in the OBskills

There is a software company in ABQ making a ton of money that specializes in both as most of the German and Eastern European banking system depends on it.

Just because a skill set is no longer mainstream does not mean its obsolete and the shortage of experts elevates those few hardy souls with the remaining knowledge to GURU status

( Anyone noticed the comeback of vacuumtube systems in the audioficainado arena and what the prices are going for ) Heck there is a swiss company resurrecting steam car technology and it outperforms electric carts by a mile ( or kilometer as they say )

( : ( : pete


Phil Henshaw wrote:

Steve,

 

I recognize much of your experience of a rush toward a vanishing point and sense of expectation about that.    My question is how can you tell the difference between the usual kind and the unusual kind?     We’ve had exploding economic change for a couple hundred years, doubling in size every 20 years and radically transforming everything everywhere all the time.   Look at how vastly each generations life experience has been from the last, going back as many generations as we have any personal knowledge of.   People have declared the “sky is falling” and the “end is near” endlessly it seems too.    I think when I set about to find the answer to that question, to see if I could validate some of feelings of expectation, I asked some of the useful questions and narrowed it down quite a bit.   The question though, is what question would you ask to tell if a feeling of impending grand transformation was real or not?

 

I don’t think “magic” is what we’re talking about.     One would not have any way of confirming a “premonition” of magic.    I do think quite sincerely and confidently that foresight about real complex system transformations, approaching ‘water shed moments’ is very likely to be verifiable if they’re real.

 

Phil Henshaw  

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:56 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete?

 

Phil Henshaw wrote:

Does it just accelerate indefinitely, like the singularity guys propose??

Or does it reach some point of stabilization as a process, and a relative

completion of the process of exploding rates of change?

I feel that I am an anachronism, though I am probably not alone on this list.  In reviewing the list of "obsolete skills" I find that I hold over half of them and actually practice half of those. 

For example:  I still adjust the timing, gap the plugs and points, and clean the carbuerator on my 1949 ford truck.  I cut my own firewood (often with handsaw and axe rather than chainsaw and logsplitter).  I cook my meals on a wood cookstove which is my only heat other than the sun.  I have built my own structures of mud and straw.  I make my own charcoal and use it to forge my own iron and steel implements.  I grow (some of) my own food.  I have not owned a television for 20 years.   I still own an operable manual typewriter.

I was born just before Sputnik went up.  I watched men walk on the moon.  I've seen every square meter (literally) of the earth mapped from orbit.   I've seen the surface of Mars via telepresence.  I've watched global climate change go from a rough concept to a conspiracy theory to  a widely accepted theory to an almost-directly experienced phenomena.  The sunburn I got in NZ after 10 minutes on the beach at Sea Level helped to make the Ozone hole more real to me, for example.

I have also personally experienced the accelerated advance of knowledge and technology.   I have worked on some of the most advanced big physics, new biology, and advanced computing projects in the world.  I was already a veteran user of the internet (NSFnet, ArpaNet, UUNet, etc.) when it was opened up to the world.   I read Drexler's seminal nanotechnology-coining "Engines of Creation" while it was still only his master's thesis.  I attended Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" (first given the year I was born!) and "Reversible Computing" lectures.   The list goes on.

I am not unlike most of you on this list in this extreme contrast of experiences.  Some here are at least a few years older than me, and many are much more well connected/embedded in the science and technology realm.  Some here were born before the Manhattan Project.  Many of you may even be mildly bionic (replaced hip or knee, pacemaker, etc.) and many of you will become moreso, possibly unto immortality.

<Singularian Rant>

We are perhaps at a unique cusp in time.   I believe (but do not so much approve of) Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity up to the question of what it means to be *human*.   If some of us do succeed in living forever, which almost requires replacing all of our meat, one piece at a time (like the Tin Man of Oz) or all at once (Kurzweil's upload), will we be the same person?   Will we even be the same "species"?  Would we even recognize ourselves?  What is intelligence/cognition/self without embodiment?

The turmoil in politics (last 8 years), economics (coming on hard as I type), and religion (fomenting for decades with possible more-acute symptoms any year now) may only be a mild tremor leading up to the extreme and abrupt changes we may be in for.   Maybe I've read too much Science Fiction, too much Utopian/Dystopian fantasy.  Maybe I am too easily fueled by Morbid Fascination. 

For better and/or worse, there are big changes afoot.   Can Complexity Science help us to predict anything specific, help us to avoid any of the least desireable changes, or mitigate the worst effects?   I'm not sure.

Some of us seem to have a fundamentalist-like belief in Complexity.  We believe that by increasing the complexity and/or diversity of a system, we get "good" results.   Some of us seem to believe that our complex systems theories can help us model "everything that linear science cannot".  

I am not so sure, not so impressed, yet I *am* highly entertained and sometimes even hopeful at the meager understandings and predictions and even interventions we *have* achieved.   As a member of this culture (high-tech Western Civ) and of this species (Homo Sapiens) and of the class mammalia and of the subphylum vertebrate and the general category of life itself, I am totally amazed and taken in by what we are.   Not the pinnacle of evolution, whatever that means, but something uniquely interesting. Life seemingly being an antidote to entropy or at least a brave challenger in the face of entropy's statistical inevitability. 

If I survive the distortions we are entering into, and can still recognize my humanity, my membership in the family of all life, I hope that what I find in the PostHuman result is not a terrible aberration of all I currently hold dear and familiar.    I doubt I will survive this time, possibly only because the time will be too long for the body I was born into and I personally have little interest in taking on the many changes and technologies implicated in singularian survival/advancement.   I will most likely die in the next 20 years of one of the many human/mammalian frailties our ancestors died of.

I do question the Singularians, the wisdom and implications of living forever.  When a cell "chooses" to live forever, I think it becomes a cancer which seems always and ultimately to kill the body it was formerly a member in good standing of.   The Singularian Utopia may be nothing more than the beginning of a not-so-benign tumor in the body of humanity.   In another vision of Singularian Utopia, those who transition to PostHuman will simply retire from humanity unnoticed, not unlike Ayn Rand's John Galt.   Methinks too many of the Singularian/PostHumanists read too much of Ayn Rand like John McCain.

I am a died-in-the-wool Godelian and by extension of the halting-problem, believe that for most (all?) interesting things, we must simply wait for the "Fullness of Time".

</Singularian Rant>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Owen Densmore]

On Nov 12, 2008, at 4:29 PM, peter wrote:
> <snip>
> Personally when the sturm and drangers / end is niers  ( its a skill  
> after all ) get to much for me I just pull out Terry Pratchett  
> Discworld and go to the flat world mounted on the back of four  
> elephants standing on a giant turtle and it all makes perfect sense

When the hero of all coppers, Sam Vimes, declared that the "good old  
boys" war was a crime and then busts in to stop it, I wanted to vote  
for Pratchett.

     -- Owen



============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org