From: j.Maxwell Legg (income@ihug.co.nz)
Date: Thu Nov 27 2003 - 16:09:25 MST
Being new to the list and this is my first post, please
don't tread on me. Most of your names are recognized from my
experience seven years ago when I was on the extropy list.
Let's just say that I've been busy developing my application.
I read what Jaron Lanier had to say and was expecting to see
the glaringly obvious but I was dumbfounded that it wasn't
stated. So I will do it even though some of you will think
I'm being tactless.
My view is that Governments are like the little thing on top
of the pressure cooker. The pressure in this discussion is
none other than complexity and they let off steam in the
form of chaos. In governmental terms this chaos is war
My keyboard just jammed so I'll be brief. People like
Stafford Beer knew of this chaos first hand and would have
been closest to breaking through the complexity barrier. Who
knows where we would have been today if his cybernetic
revolution wasn't crushed by the CIA when they planned to
murder Chile's Salvador Allende back in 1973. It is also my
view that the mistakes were made hundreds of years earlier
when Capitalism scarred human nature into this condition.
Not Egyptian mathematics but Capitalism and the early
Christian concepts of zero, and how the debit and credit
system evolved into our present monetary systems, is what
did us in. Not respecting zero as the inverse of infinity is
what stops us. In their naivety, what those computer
pioneers didn't get right was how to cope with the frailty
and fear inherent in human nature; - spam, FUD, etc.
But cope I do until they will take this keyboard from me and
then my mind will turn to mush.
Jim
computer pioneer
Aaron McBride wrote:
> Here is a new article (and video) by Jaron Lanier:
> http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier03/lanier_index.html
>
> "I've had a suspicion for a while that despite the astonishing success
> of the first generation of computer scientists like Shannon, Turing, von
> Neumann, and Wiener, somehow they didn't get a few important starting
> points quite right, and some things in the foundations of computer
> science are fundamentally askew."
>
>
> -Aaron
>
>
>
>
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