With more and more work using nanotechnology create clothing and other materials that are resistant to water and staining, it may not be too long before we never have to do the laundry again – because our clothes are always clean. Imagine the time, money, energy and money that would save. Especially imagine the benefits for people living in developing countries where all the laundry is done by hand. Not only does the lack of laundry mean cleaner water, it means that people can be spared hours of tedious, backbreaking labor. This is one of those things that seems kind of neat at first – hey look, no stains! But when you think about it, the ramifications for day to day life are pretty extraordinary. I’m excited to see where this technology goes. Also, I look forward to never having to do laundry again. I’m also glad that robots won’t be doing the laundry, either. That’s just one less reason for them to want to rise up and overthrow their human masters.
Just a reminder that things are always happening, though slowly, at The Gospel of the Trees.
What I want to suggest is that any process of evolution that relies on exploring an unknown space, such as genes or such as our neurons exploring the unknown space in our brains, and trying to create connections in our brains, and such as our brain’s trying to come up with new ideas that explore the space of alternatives that will lead us to what we call creativity in our social world, might be very close to random.We know they’re random in the genetic case. We think they’re random in the case of neurons exploring connections in our brain. And I want to suggest that our own creative process might be pretty close to random itself. And that our brains might be whirring around at a subconscious level, creating ideas over and over and over again, and part of our subconscious mind is testing those ideas. And the ones that leak into our consciousness might feel like they’re well-formed, but they might have sorted through literally a random array of ideas before they got to our consciousness.
Karl Popper famously said the way we differ from other animals is that our hypotheses die in our stead; rather than going out and actually having to try out things, and maybe dying as a result, we can test out ideas in our minds. But what I want to suggest is that the generative process itself might be pretty close to random.
Putting these two things together has lots of implications for where we’re going as societies. As I say, as our societies get bigger, and rely more and more on the Internet, fewer and fewer of us have to be very good at these creative and imaginative processes. And so, humanity might be moving towards becoming more docile, more oriented towards following, copying others, prone to fads, prone to going down blind alleys, because part of our evolutionary history that we could have never anticipated was leading us towards making use of the small number of other innovations that people come up with, rather than having to produce them ourselves.
Apple would have never shipped a device like the Fire. It’s got way too many rough edges (sluggish touchscreen, magazine apps that don’t really fit the smaller screen, an easy-to-hit power button). And even little things like how the power cord jiggles when plugged in wouldn’t have made it past the demo room in Cupertino. But the Fire’s not made for Apple’s customers — or to win thumbs up from usability critics. It’s for the millions of people who: a) don’t have $500-plus to spend on an iPad and b) really want to be part of the touchscreen revolution that’s changing how we control devices.Think about all the stuff a non-nitpicky, non-iPad veteran can do with the Fire: email, good-enough web browsing, Twitter, Facebook, watch movies and TV, read e-books, and play dozens of the most popular app games (Angry Birds, Words With Friends). For $200, is that enough to satisfy millions — maybe even Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos’ predicted ‘many millions’? I think for sure the answer’s ‘yes.’ Will Amazon fix the bugs, polish the chassis, and improve this thing, same as it did with the original Kindle? Of course.
Hospitals and doctors’ offices, hoping to curb medical error, have invested heavily to put computers, smartphones and other devices into the hands of medical staff for instant access to patient data, drug information and case studies.But like many cures, this solution has come with an unintended side effect: doctors and nurses can be focused on the screen and not the patient, even during moments of critical care. And they are not always doing work; examples include a neurosurgeon making personal calls during an operation, a nurse checking airfares during surgery and a poll showing that half of technicians running bypass machines had admitted texting during a procedure.
This phenomenon has set off an intensifying discussion at hospitals and medical schools about a problem perhaps best described as “distracted doctoring.” In response, some hospitals have begun limiting the use of devices in critical settings, while schools have started reminding medical students to focus on patients instead of gadgets, even as the students are being given more devices.
The Gospel came to the Greeks and the Greeks turned it into a philosophy. The Gospel came to the Romans and the Romans turned it into a system. The Gospel came to the Europeans and the Europeans turned it into a culture. The Gospel came to America and the Americans turned it into a business.
It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings – to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, if we were slave masters our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter, that were we poor and black our sense of Protestant industry would be a mighty power sending gang leaders, gang members, hunger, depression and sickle cell into flight. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We’d die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that’s ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, but on the whole, mediocre.
That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook–but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.
It’s so damn interesting though to be doing this. I feel like I have a front seat to a really cool … thing. I don’t even know what it is. I think it’s really interesting that i brought the price so close to stealing and made the movie so easy to get and made it so clear that it’s a human offering it that it sparked a debate about pirating.To steal from someone and not feel bad, you either have to be a sociopath or view the act differently. One way is to remove “Someone” from the equation. You’re not stealing from a person. Big companies do a lot to help people view them as less than human. I heard a speech by Noam Chomsky who said that corporations are like super humans. They cannot be hurt like a human can and they never die. They are not succeptible to scrutiny or accountability. This makes them more profitable. If companies want to enjoy these benifits to some degree they have to live with what else comes with being not human. You miss out on compassion, forgiveness, comraderie, empathy, trust — all kinds of shit.
The other thing is I can only do this because I’m an individual and I can decide what my risks are that are acceptable and I can make my own goals for what is success. So I forwent (is that a word?) a lot of conventional routes and tried this. I am risking and there may be a celing to the success, but for me it’s okay. I feel like as of this year, I make enough money as a standup my goal now is to bring the cost down for those who buy my stuff. I really mean that. It makes me much happier. Also I did see that there might be a tremendous upswing to this. I was really excited about this material and I though it would be really cool to just put it out there myself witha little electronic hat that only takes fives and just see what happens.