[extropy-chat] Times article: "Technology and Us"

[Lifespan Pharma Inc.]

I read the article and it seems that global connectivity is happening 
country by country.
The trick will be to add every country regardless of language to the 
collective voices.
The newest language translation and voice conversion to text loaded into 
laptop mobile devices  might just do it.
That "$130 laptop computer project" might become  the "weapon of mass 
instruction".
Then you can have a group of unilingual  mandarin chinese, sunni muslim, 
kurdish afgan, swedish, german, japanese , brazilian and canadian people 
conversing with each other freely in their own language each hearing 
everything mostly verbatim
of what the others have to say.

Yes, it will expose the conflict and other baggage built up over the 
last 3000 years , but in doing so it may bring resolution that could 
never have happened without this close connectivity contact.

Rather than bombing those guys its a wireless net and social grid we 
should be investing in to secure a safer future for us and
a more rich and rewarding future for them.

The next USA president should be more a global communicator rather than 
a patriarchal authoritarian.
We tried the stick, now lets do the carrot.

MFJ

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[extropy-chat] Times article: "Technology and Us"
Date: 	Wed, 19 Oct 2005 14:59:38 +0200
From: 	Amara Graps <amara at amara.com>
Reply-To: 	ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
To: 	extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org, wta-talk at transhumanism.org



I just skimmed the first few paragraphs, but this looks to be a
worthwhile read.

Amara


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1118376,00.html

The Road Ahead

We assembled some of the smartest people we know to identify the trends
that are most likely to affect our future. What we got was a fascinating
discussion about religion, technology and politics and why no one's golf
scores seem to be getting any better.


Posted Sunday, Oct. 16, 2005
TECHNOLOGY AND US

TIME: WHAT INNOVATION WILL MOST ALTER HOW WE LIVE IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS?

TIM O'REILLY, publisher and technology advocate: Collective
intelligence. Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user
annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are
bleeding out into other applications. I think we're at the first stages
of something that will be profoundly different from anything we have
seen before, in terms of the ability of connected computers to deliver
results. We're entering an era in which software learns from its users
and all of the users are connected.

DON'T WE ALSO RUN THE RISK OF HARNESSING OUR COLLECTIVE IDIOCY? EVERYONE
WHO HAS BEEN ON THE WEB KNOWS THAT THE RATIO OF SIGNAL TO NOISE IS NOT
ALWAYS OPTIMAL.

O'REILLY: Right, but remember what Google did. They basically said,
let's look at what all the millions of individual users are linking to,
and let's use that information to get the good stuff to float to the
top. That turned out to be a very powerful idea, the ramifications of
which we're exploring in other areas, such as with tagging on Flickr or
blogs. People are finding more ways to have the wisdom of crowds filter
that signal-to-noise.

MARK DERY, author and cultural critic: I find the fetishization of the
wisdom of crowds fascinating. It has a whiff of '90s cyberhype about it.
I'm fascinated by the way in which it contrasts with individual
subjectivity. A lot of technologies, such as Flickr, blogging, the iPod,
seem to turn the psyche inside out, to extrude the private self into the
public sphere. You have people walking down the street listening to
iPods, seemingly oblivious to the world, singing. More and more, we're
alone in public.


[see the link for the rest of the long article]
-- 

***********************************************************************
Amara Graps, PhD             email: amara at amara.com
Computational Physics        vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers            URL:   http://www.amara.com/
***********************************************************************
"There's only one thing more beautiful than a beautiful dream, and
that's a beautiful reality."        --Ashleigh Brilliant
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