From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Sat Sep 11 1999 - 00:55:20 MDT
About a week ago Alex Bokov posted something that has been
rattling around in my brain ever since: that our society is threatened
by hitting local maxima and stagnating. Perhaps this is a greater
threat than military nanotech or singularity.
When you think of it, history is full of examples of exactly that,
societies that stagnated. But *in some areas* of our lives, our
own society seems to be stuck at a local maximum now. One
example is the air car thing: we are STUCK right now, have
been for 30 or more years, in personal transportation. We
spend more and more money, like desperate and hopeless
addicts, on more highways and more roads and more more more,
yet no matter what, every day, its ten lanes across and all those
cars are crawling. We are at a local maximum in that area.
Other examples? spike
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