Re: FYI:Re: incomprehensible changes? (fwd)

Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)
Wed, 19 Mar 1997 14:31:34 +0100 (MET)


> > From: Eugene Leitl
>
> > I'll give you a different problem to worry about... There are
> > people of all ages today who are falling off the technological
> > bandwagon. Those who manage to stay on the tiger (Mixed metaphores?
> > Why not?), are getting further and further ahead of those not on
> > board. Will there be a point at which no one not already on the train
> > can get on? Sure looks like it. That is the problem I worry about.

I agree. While I certainly find transhumanism and progress worthwhile even
if they will be used by a smaller subset of humanity, I would like to make
it accessible to everyone. Maybe I'm a bleeding heart transhumanist :-)

On Wed, 19 Mar 1997, Max M (Not MORE... not less) wrote:

> What we need to do is to make technology teach about itself. The only
> teacher that can keep up with technology's pace is technology itself.

Good idea. One problem is that a teacher is just a half of the team, the
student must be able to learn well too. And this might be hard to do if
technology accelerates too much and we don't have good intelligence
amplification systems.

One of the things I have been thinking of is to create a "knowledge
infrastructure" for people to learn in. After all, what we learn in
school is quickly forgotten or obsolete, so we need to learn continually.
The idea is to use the Net for "micro-course" you could take to orient
yourself in a subject you briefly need (for example, today I needed
to learn about Hidden Markov Models so that I could write a subsection of
my thesis), helping you get a feel for what it is about. If you need
deeper knowledge, you could enroll in more elaborate courses, both
net-based and physical, or in classical education. The idea is to make
learning accessible and possible in daily life; ideally everybody should
learn new things continously throughout life, with few strictly
educational or working periods.

> Technology should be dead simple and yet still explain the underlying
> technology/methods.

Exactly. This is the goal of much interface design, but it is a very hard
problem. I fear that we might get nanotech and uploading long before
somebody invents a truly good GUI.

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