[ExI] Fwd: [Body Hacking] Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2030, Expert Predicts

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010, BillK wrote:

> 2010/8/19 Adrian Tymes wrote:
> <snip>
> > That's still a lot faster than most people appear to think change is
> > happening, though.
> >
> >
> 
> Have you seen this year's Beloit College Mindset List for college
> freshmen -- a group mostly born in 1992?
> 
> They can't do joined-up writing, think email is too slow, that
> Beethoven's a dog and Michelangelo a computer virus. For them
> Czechoslovakia has never existed, Fergie is a pop singer, not a
> duchess; Clint Eastwood is a sensitive movie director, not Dirty
> Harry; and John McEnroe stars in TV ads, not on the tennis court.
> They've never had a cord on their phone and they don't wear a watch.
> 
> <http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100817/ts_alt_afp/lifestyleuschildrenoffbeat>
> <http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2014.php>

Truly interesting read, as it gives some insights (at least to me). 
However, as soon as I get over the first shock (Beethoven-the-dog? well, I 
prefer Mozart, Bach and Haydn but this old deaf musician had good kick, 
too) I mostly think that nothing really changes so much. Of course, we all 
get older and so on, but on the other hand... Think, email is too slow? 
Not so. I have once read about the problem of delivering terabytes of data 
to the cloud - there is so much of it that internet is close to useless 
and it's more practical to load tapes or disks on the truck and drive the 
whole shebang down the road. So, slow truck is more proper mean of data 
transfer sometimes, it just depends on size. Guys don't email - well, 
maybe they don't have anything worth an email? This reminds me, in every 
generation the majority has not so much interesting to say. I don't mean 
offense, they may be great pals but, well... myself I find not so many 
people from whom I could learn (even thou I can learn at least one thing 
from anybody).

So, in some very inoffensive way, I perceive many people as being kind of 
crippled. They never heard of Michelangelo-the-artist, so they lost not 
just a good name for a turtle. On the other hand, I can probably be 
perceived similarly by older folks, who had proper linguistic training in 
Latin and Greek and can think of themselves as rooted in very interesting 
culture, which from time to time can give them advantage over me. At least 
very often when I hear them talking on the radio (radio, you know, the box 
with knobs and antenna) I find them to have a lot of interesting thoughts. 
Every time this happens, I wonder how much of it is related to the way 
they had been brought up.

So, I could also put things the other way. I grow wiser (hopefully) and 
technology gives me even more opportunities to do things... (here comes 
Dirty Harry). Whatever youngster can do, I can learn to do, too (maybe 
except some dances and strange street language). But I don't have to do 
everything - this mail is worth few kilos of text, how many tweets would 
that be? Fifty? Do I have to tell the world that it's raining outside? And 
that it just stopped? I would rather read a book (a paper book, whooa!).

But, as I have just guesstimated, my recently bought cpu+mobo would quite 
easily qualify among the best of 1993 "top 500" supercomputers. And it 
would have probably stayed on this list until end of 1998. However, I need 
to verify all those claims - maybe running linpack would do the job. And 
it was budget upgrade, so nothing extreme. Now, that's kind of change that 
I like to think about.

Yet it seems, this way of thinking isn't very popular in the media. 
Strange. Too optimistic or what.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **