Echoes

April 14, 2010

Three strangely echoing visions of the future:

2010: "As humans rely on the Internet for all aspects of our lives, our ability to think increasingly depends on fast, reliable applications. The web is our collective consciousness, which means web operators become the brain surgeons of our distributed nervous system. Each technology we embrace makes us more and more reliant on the web ... For much of the Western world, technology, culture, and society are indistinguishable ... Today's web tells you what's interesting. It learns from your behavior. It shares, connects, and suggests. It's real-time and contextual. These connected systems augment humanity, and we rely on them more and more while realizing that dependency less and less ... Take away our peripheral brains, and we're helpless. We'll suddenly be unable to do things we took for granted, much as a stroke victim loses the ability to speak ... A slow-down will feel like collective Alzheimers." -Alistair Croll
2005: "What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy." -Kevin Kelly

1995: “[As] machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.” -Theodore Kaczynski

Mad rant becomes ecstatic rhapsody becomes offhand remark.

Posted by nick at April 14, 2010 02:27 PM

Comments

Mr. Carr, this post is over the top. Please bring a modicum of balance to your strangely edited piece. You are no Leonardo

http://www.mos.org/sln/leonardo/visionsofthefuture.html

Posted by: alan at April 14, 2010 03:36 PM

Nick, you clearly didn't waste enough of your youth reading science fiction.

Kaczynski was merely regurgitating memes that date back to the Sci Fi of his youth in the 1970s. Those memes were good then and they're good now.

That's how things work. I can't do square roots by hand, and medical interns don't know their drug formulations any more.

Really, it's not to late to start reading science fiction. Start with the 80s and work your way up.

Posted by: John Faughnan at April 14, 2010 11:31 PM

This article is amazing and is so true. We talk about this in 80% of our meetings over here at [redacted] web design. Looking forward to reading more.

Posted by: Joshua Munroe at April 15, 2010 06:35 PM

I think Nick's more the 60's "New Wave" Science Fiction than the 80's.

Too much punditry is just a long-winded rehashing of Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" (1946).

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at April 15, 2010 10:58 PM

I liked "The Martian Chronicles." Was that new wave?

And I strongly recommend Chris Marker's short film "La Jetée" - where sci-fi new wave meets new-wave cinema.

Posted by: Nick Carr at April 16, 2010 12:04 AM

Agents of the justice department are rounding up the machines now. But these machines, these inventions of another planet, have been cunningly conceived to prey on our most mortal weakness. In the last analysis, dear friends, whether O.B.I.T. lives up to its name or not will depend on you.

Posted by: Linuxguru1968 at April 20, 2010 04:10 PM

Echoes

April 14, 2010

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