[extropy-chat] no electronics at Singularity Summit???

[Hal Finney]

I hadn't heard about this restriction - where did you hear it?

Anyway, I actually see it as a good thing.  I gave a talk last year
at a semi "hackers" conference and it was pretty shocking to see the
inattention of audience members to all the speakers.  The whole time
someone was talking, most of the audience had their heads down in their
laptops, IM'ing away or otherwise passing the time.

In my case, I lucked out because the projector lightbulb blew out
just before my speech.  I had the slides online so I told everyone
the URL at the beginning, and asked those with laptops to hold them so
their neighbors could see them and follow along with my presentation.
This way people were kind of forced to pay attention to what I was saying,
otherwise they looked rude by preventing those around them from being
able to see my slides.  So I got more attention than any of the other
speakers that day.

But here, we've got people like Hofstadter, like Drexler, Kurzweill, etc,
I'd hate to see them being rudely ignored like so many of the speakers
were at my conference last year.  These guys have travelled a long way,
some of them, and it's a real privilege that we'll get to hear what they
say.  Paying undivided attention is not too much to ask of an audience.

This reminds me of a scene in Vinge's new novel Rainbows End.
The teachers at the junior high fight a constant battle with the kids
trying to keep them focused.  All the kids wear HUDs so it's hard to
tell who is paying attention and who's off playing a game somewhere.

If and when we get to the point where our IMing and net browsing is
this unobtrusive, then fine, I don't see a problem with people doing
that during talks (although they're largely wasting their own time).
But at present there is no way for it to happen without the speaker
noticing that he's being ignored.

Hal