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San Francisco, 4:59 PM
Sun Nov 29
11 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/19/09
Well, that's a bit much, isn't it?
These people depended entirely upon the Machine for their existence. The internet is mostly an entertainment medium, and a convenience.
My life would go on pretty much normally w/o the internet, I'd just use the TV, telephone, and mail more often.
-Kle.
11/19/09
It'd tear the crap out of all financial markets, for one thing. Most trading nowadays is super-computerized; something like 97 percent of NYSE trading is on electronic networks (1). The implosion of all that would make the recent financial problems look tiny. And that's just one facet of the problem.
Think of all the things that would really go of the rails if the internet just stopped. All electronic commerce, of course (goodbye Amazon), but all kinds of other things, too. The DMV or your insurance company wouldn't be able to access any of your records; the police wouldn't be able to use any criminal databases. Any company that uses electronic inventory tracking or management (ie, every large company, nowadays) would have operations grind to a halt, at least for a while. Half the time HR, accounting, etc is all online now too. And, anecdotally, every federal office I've ever seen runs on email. Internet failure would be a clusterf*ck of epic proportions.
And that's even assuming all the peripheral systems like phone systems and wire transfers and credit card transactions and ATMs were unaffected (and how many people do you know that don't carry cash anymore?)
Now, I'm not saying it would be the end of civilization as we know it. We'd deal. But a sudden, prolonged internet shutdown would be a massive disaster, and unless you live totally and entirely off the grid, it would probably disrupt your life in all kinds of ways.
1) [arstechnica.com]
11/20/09
Most of the things you describe wouldn't affect me directly, and many of them I would see as positive.
For example, everyone loves Amazon, and everyone hates WalMart. However, they are exactly the same thing. The death of Amazon would please me greatly. The world financial system shutting down? That's what should have happened last year - at least then the people who caused it would be suffering along with the rest of us, instead of raking in bonuses.
The world ran just fine before the internet, it's loss would be a speedbump.
-Kle.
11/20/09
The world ran just fine before the automobile, too, yet if they all stopped working suddenly, it be a colossal disaster affecting pretty much everyone- even those without cars. To borrow your metaphor, hitting a speedbump is fine if you see it coming and brake accordingly. But a sudden internet failure would be hitting a speedbump at 90 mph with your foot on the gas.
My main point, above, was that a lot of the infrastructure underpinning every aspect of modern society has moved online, even the core things like managing supply lines for food and basic services. And yeah, we could probably move it all back off again if we planned it out and had warning. But if everything ground to a halt unexpectedly, I maintain it would just shut down huge swathes of every industrialized society. Which would a) cause a lot of damage to society as we know it, and b) worsen a lot of people's lives individually.
[Aside: I picked Amazon simply because it's a big, recognizable name. The same, however, applies to the mom-and-pop couple selling hand-knitted baby clothes online, or the small engineering firm that's a collaboration between ten people on three continents. And ecommerce is ALL peripheral damage; the real harm would come from the fact that every other company uses the internet a lot these days too.]
Now, I don't know your circumstances; it's possible that you live on a farm and grow your own food and really wouldn't see any change in your life except using mail and TV any more, and economic collapse is something that happens to other people. If so, good for you. Most people in the industrialized world aren't so lucky.
But your last post above seems to suggest "it's not a disaster if everyone's life is ruined equally". I don't buy that. Or the idea that it's not a disaster because some good comes of it. ("Hey, a plague killed everyone over age 40, but guess what? No more Alzheimers!") In seriousness, it's possible a world without the internet might be a better place. That doesn't mean that suddenly stopping it right now wouldn't cause a colossal clusterf*ck.
11/21/09
I don't think the world would be a better place w/o the internet.
I do think that people use the internet for all sorts of amazingly imprudent purposes - and I think that if people suffer for making decisions a child could have told them were stupid, just because they are convenient, it's funny.
The world financial system (for example) shouldn't rely upon the internet, because the internet is inherently unreliable and unsecure. People shouldn't really manage their money electronically, because of the above reason, and the simple fact that banks are out to screw them.
Here, this xkcd should explain my position pretty clearly:
[xkcd.com]
Most things that are important to the function of society, that rely on the internet, should not.
-Kle.
11/21/09
It is funny when someone's obviously boneheaded decisions catch up with them. It's much less funny when you get hit by collateral damage from their bad choices.
11/22/09
"It is funny when someone's obviously boneheaded decisions catch up with them. It's much less funny when you get hit by collateral damage from their bad choices."
Yeah, but I'm willing to take the hit, if it wakes people up. Same with the current economic troubles; I don't think there should have been a bailout.
People rarely learn w/o pain.
-Kle.
11/18/09
11/18/09
11/18/09
'i am make science! i tame machine for use for man!'
'you go to far! you am play gods!'
'no, am progress! am automation! machine work for man!'
*machine fails and no one can fix it
'me am play gods!'
11/18/09
i mean it's easy to look around and see complacancey everywhere if that's what you're looking for but it's just as easy to look throughout history and notice that there have always been individuals who would never have been satisfied with such a life. they would never have created a machine capable of these things to use it themselves because they would have been to busy making something newer and cooler. edison didn't invent the light bulb and then bask in the glow of his invention for the rest of his life. no, he went on to experiment with newer and more interesting things in addition to leveraging his invention to his own social, political, and financial advantage. that's what people do, not create things and then think 'well i'm done i'll just do nothing from here on out because i can.'
11/18/09
06/19/09
06/19/09
NERDDDDDD.
06/19/09
06/19/09
05/19/09
Capek's absurdist War of the Newts has similar themes with some very cool metafictional elements. I loved his inclusion of articles and advertisements about the discovery and marketing of the Newts.
05/19/09
Response. Sometimes, two units develop an artificial symbiotic relationship that permits the pair to function at above peak capacity in tandem. The primary portion of the binary unit inserts the male adapter into the female receptacle.
After a series of compute cycles, the fabrication plant dispatches a tertiary unit to supplement the binary coupling.
Summation. That is where robots come from. Further inquiries should be directed to your paternal unit.
05/19/09
That's going to be a very tricky point.
But maybe there will be transitional point. Currently our robots are as smart as insects but before they are as smart or smarter than us, they will be as smart as other mammals. We have a limited set of laws that prevent cruelty and mistreatment of other mammals, we have some protecting them. Perhaps with semi-intelligent robots it might happen the same way.
On another point in this essay, I think one of the other often overlooked messages of Shelly's Frankenstein is: If you are going to create life, the very least you should is try to be a good parent to it. Frankenstein's creature only became destructive because he rejected it in horror.
05/19/09
05/19/09
Frankenstein's monster was inherently something outside of nature. His very creation was a taboo. The reason Frankenstein rejected the creature was that at the moment he saw into the creature's eyes for the first time, he was struck by the blind horror of what he had done. The communion of souls that takes place when you look into someone's eyes was perverted and evil.
This is not to say that the monster was necessarily evil. He was simply what he was - a creature that was far more able and far more powerful than humanity. He was a creature created outside of nature, and could not possibly find a place within it and its morality. That's why he moved so easily into murder and violence, and why he ultimately fled to the Arctic wastes. Given a mate, his race would have destroyed ours. That's why Doctor F. balked at creating one.
05/19/09
Except that your opposition to corpore-metal's argument is a shabby one. Shelley was absolutely informed by her husband's rabid atheism and the theory they both shared that God had potentially created and then abandoned humanity.
The idea is fully supported in the book and has been considered legitimate interpretation of the novel for quite some time now, your protests to its "accuracy" notwithstanding.
05/19/09
05/20/09
Shelley himself was an Atheist, and published the pamphlet "The Necessity of Atheism". Mary Shelley's father was well known atheist philosopher William Godwin, so I very much doubt that either Shelley regarded God as having created, and then abandoned mankind. That's not actually what atheism is about. AT ALL. In fact, his Prometheus Unbound was simply about the fact that man's mind and creative spirit could only be fully realized when wedded to nature (Prometheus is wed to Asia, the goddess of Nature), and that the God Jupiter simply exists to enslave us. There's no God in Shelley's view of the world. In Mary Shelley's either. The only thing they may have shared is an affinity for the Gnostic creation myth, where the creator-demon demiurge makes mankind imperfectly by trapping souls within a poorly made material world. And even that wasn't a genuine religious belief, but a way of exploding the idea that God is necessary to human spiritual perfection.
And as to that article you linked me to. You do realize that the thing you linked to actually doesn't support that argument much at all? Maybe you should actually read the things that you link to? Page 127 in particular. The monster DOES accord in many places with Rousseau's "natural man". But the problem is that he is NOT a man, and thus has no place in man's world. He can live a blessed life in solitude, but that's not his place as a creature. As a Romantic being, he requires society and interaction, but he is a creature from a different species, wholly unable to integrate himself into humanity. He does share elements of humanity, which is what makes the story tragic, but he also reflects the murderous, terrifying elements of humanity. He leaps directly to murder and chaos, he blames everything in his world on the fact of his creation, which is senseless and stupid. He's a murderous unnatural creature and his creation also removes Frankenstein himself from man's nature. Together the two of them form a sort of unique dyad, and as with all sualities, they reflect a lot of what you want to see in them - man vs. god, the poet's vision of the divine nature vs. the animal nature in man.... it's able to be read in many ways, which makes it a powerful symbol.
The title "The Modern Prometheus" is very apt, as Frankenstein himself acts as the old greek titan here, giving life to a new people. But Prometheus's sin was the same as Frankenstein's - he was warned that should man possess fire, he would grow to rival and supplant the gods. For his acts he was chained and enslaved, and indeed Zeus turned out to be right - humanity DID supplant the Gods for all intents and purposes. And this monster would have supplanted humanity.
Anyhow - I could go on for a long time, but suffice to say my arguments are certainly NOT shabby. I've spent a lot of time and effort thinking them out, so don't call me out on something I know about unless you're fully prepared, because I certainly am. I'm not just speaking out of my ass, like you are. I can actually back shit up.
05/19/09
Plus citing wikipedia almost seems like an insult.
05/19/09
05/19/09