From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat May 29 1999 - 04:29:11 MDT
Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net> writes:
> > Lee Daniel Crocker wrote: ... It is idle fantasy to
> > imagine that (1) technology can move backwards, ...
>
> The latest Star Wars episode made me wonder: can technology
> go backwards? They seemed to imply technology was going
> violently aft. Can anyone think of an example, now or in any time
> past, where a society had it and later didn't? Descended from
> enlightenment to superstition? Would dark ages Europe qualify? spike
Partially. To have a technology, you need to have the supporting
infrastructure to make it work. When the Roman empire fell, many
technologies such as building techniques were no longer useful or even
possible due to lack of transports and materials, so they fell into
disuse and were at least partially lost.
Something like this is less likely today due to the wide dispersal of
information on how to make (say) silicon chips and everything
else. But if we imagine a major economic disaster that for a period of
a few decades forces society back to basic farming and industry,
bootstrapping chip production afterwards would not be entirely trivial
even whith handbooks and old engineers at hand. To make a chip, you
need the machines for that, and they in turn require other technology,
and so on - it would be very hard to make a copy of a current Intel
plant without having to make a copy of much of the current
technological infrastructure.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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