Max M:
>I think that's either a defeatist, fatalistic or impassionate attitude to
>hold. And apart from that we have to make shure that there will not be a
>too small elite as it will stop the exponential growth.
Over the past year, I have read many books on the progress of
technology and its historical impact on society. Aside from the
inevitable growing pains and periods of socio-economic instability,
there seems to be a repeating pattern of the "new" technologies
becoming more accessible, easier to use, less expensive, more available
to people with lower levels of training. The "elites" move on to newer
applications or the invention of newer technologies, and everyone
else gets a crack at the goodies that were previously unavailable.
Let's use the Internet as an example. It used to be the province of
highly-trained technologists of various fields, and us non-technical
dweebs only got into it through the efforts of our (very patient) friends
to train us. And we discovered our own instinctual abilities to
navigate the abstractions of cyberspace, thereby adding to the pool
of human evolution. Over the past twenty years, through economic and
career incentives, millions of public portals have been added,
guidebooks published, training classes established. An entire
movement has arisen based on a commitment to retaining free access
("freenets"). The "elites" that gripe about the newbies found that
they could simply move to more private forums--plenty of bandwidth for
all.
I could see where this separation between the technological vanguard
and everyone else could become deadly significant--the point at which
someone invents a transformational technology that renders the users
nonhuman. That might rupture the process of information dissemination
and leave a lot of people behind, unless this was taken into account
during the development of the technology.
Merry ho ho,
Kathryn Aegis