More On Accelerating Technology

MORE ON ACCELERATING TECHNOLOGY Let’s start with a letter . . . Hartford, May 24/89 To Walt Whitman: You have lived simply the seventy years that are greatest on the earth’s historical past & richest in profit & development to its peoples. These seventy years have done far more to widen the interval between man & the other animals than was achieved by any five centuries which preceded them. Walt Whitman What great births you could have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the metal ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the photograph, picture-gravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electrical mild, the sewing machine, & the amazing, infinitely various & innumerable merchandise of coal tar, these latest & strangest marvels of a wonderful age. And you've seen even larger births than these; for you could have seen the appliance of anesthesia to surgery-apply, whereby the ancient dominion of ache, which began with the primary created life, came to an f inish on this earth eternally; you could have seen the slave set free, you could have seen the monarchy banished from France, & reduced in England to a machine which makes an imposing present of diligence & consideration to enterprise, however isn’t linked with the works. Yes, you have certainly seen a lotâ€"but tarry but some time, for the greatest is but to return. Wait thirty years, & then look out over the earth! You shall see marvels upon marvels added to those whose nativity you have witnessed; & conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Resultâ€"Man at nearly his full stature eventually!â€"& nonetheless growing, visibly rising while you look. In that day, who that hath a throne, or a gilded privilege not attainable by his neighbor, let him procure his slippers & get ready to bounce, for there may be going to be music. Abide, & see these items! Thirty of us who honor & love you, offer the opportunity. We have amongst us 600 years, good & sound, left within the ba nk of life. Take 30 of themâ€"the richest birth-day present ever offered to poet in this worldâ€"& sit down & wait. Wait till you see that great determine seem, & catch the far glint of the sun upon his banner; then you may depart satisfied, as understanding you've seen him for whom the earth was made, & that he will proclaim that human wheat is worth more than human tares, & proceed to arrange human values on that foundation. Mark Twain The poet Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, so the seventy years Twain is referring to gets us to 1889. Whitman would reside another ten years after that, a decade in which “the interval between man & the other animals” was widened much more, although Twain’s want that he stay one other thirty would have proven Mr. Whitman much more. What would both of these men consider 2014? Mark Twain Are we but at our “full stature”? I don’t suppose so, however although we've a ways to go, it’s clear that we’re gettin’ there. And if you’r e pissed off by the pace, wait a minute . . . If we were to go back in time to the year 1014, seize some unsuspecting peasant off the streets of, say Paris, and convey him a thousand tears forward in time, what about our world would he acknowledge? I’d say pretty much none of it. This could be very true if we didn’t stay in Paris but brought him to, say, Seattle. In 1014 North America was home to a widespread inhabitants of Native Americans who had no idea that such a place as Paris existed, and the Parisians had no idea that a pair other continents have been sitting over the horizon to the west. This man would have been dragged out of a feudal societyâ€"we think the hole between wealthy and poor, the haves and the have-nots, is just too big now? This guy would beg to vary. He can be completely flabbergasted by America’s racial, cultural, and religious diversity. I assume its truthful to say that 11th century Paris had pretty much none of that. Women operating around doing stu ff like working firmsâ€"wait, what’s a “company?” Let alone having jobs like Secretary of State (Foreign Minister), or, say, Chancellor of Germany or Prime Minister of England, properly . . . he might need heard of queens and so on, but girls don’t get appointed to jobs like that, hired for jobs like that . . . and what’s this “voting”? He wouldn’t know what that word even means. How to you explain your sensible telephone to a guy from 1014? You haven't any widespread language, no shared set of experiences. You would literally have to return to nicely before the Industrial Revolution and then some. How do you explain electronics to someone who’s never heard of atoms and has no purpose to believe such issues exist? Now take that same man off the streets of Paris is 1014 and as an alternative of bringing him all the way in which to the present, go solely a hundred years later to 1114. The city might have modified a smidge. He’d have to get caught up on who the king is, and so on, but I think he’d find everyday life within the metropolis largely unchanged. So then, what if we took a guy off the streets of Seattle in 1914 and brought him a hundred years into the longer term to 2014. Would he be in the same boatâ€"a number of different buildings but in any other case, not a lot has modified? Except: There’s extra, but it’s clear that although it’s apparent that a hundred years isn’t fairly as impenetrable as a thousand years, the sort of acceleration of expertise that Mark Twain tried to explain has been occurring, and continues to happenâ€"it continues to accelerate. So if the distinction between the worlds of 1914 and 2014 far outweigh the differences between 1014 and 1114, what does that mean for the world of 2114? What would surprise us? What might be commonplace that we are able to’t even start to grasp? Then go one other century from 2114 to 2214 and we’re still accelerating, so the place will we get to the purpose that the d istinction between 1014 and 2014 happens in a century as a substitute of a millennium? If the growth truly is exponential, meaning someplace between 2314 and 2414. f a child alive right now will live till 2134 then that baby’s youngsters, born in, say, 2044 will stay until no less than 2164, but then wouldn’t life expectancy grow at the same price, so he’d stay until 2284? And if technology in 2134 may simply be able to add another hundred years or so to at present’s baby’s life span, after which throughout that hundred years they add one other 2 hundred and so on until that baby born, this yr, is immortal. This is why I found the ending of Interstellar no less than reasonably plausible, however not the beginning. â€"Philip Athans About Philip Athans Fill in your particulars under or click an icon to log in: