[ExI] Is future progress moving to virtual reality?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Sun, 10 Mar 2013, spike wrote:

> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: spike [mailto:spike at rainier66.com] 
> ...
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 
> >...Ja and there is another important thing here.  A huge market today 
> >is in grandparents taking their grandchildren to Disneyland and 
> >Disneyworld, and reliving how it was when they were the age their 
> >grandchildren are now...spike

My own take on BillK's question - they made market research and found out 
majority of visitors had no idea what was being presented to them in this 
Future Something. Pizza is easier to understand and gives same income. 
Possibly bigger, because now the mob will not be scared away by invading 
flying cars and strange looking perverts with glass jars on their heads.

> There is another consideration regarding retro-futurism.  Consider the 
> biggest or most important developments we envisioned 40 years ago 
> regarding how life would be 40 years in the future.  Consider what we 
> missed as well as what we anticipated.  In any group brainstorming this 
> question, someone will envision flying cars and Star Trek transporters.  
> Clearly we wouldn't need both, and just as clearly, the ST transporter 
> is way more advanced.  So let us consider those things.  Assume miracle 
> engineering and manufacturing, so that any prole can afford a flying 
> car.  Why would that be so great?  It would reduce traffic, the time to 
> get to the office, but that would reduce our motivation to reduce 
> travel.

Ok. It would also be great because every crash higher than 20m above the 
ground would have been fatal to everybody involved. Thus we would make 
great circle, from vehicles 60 years ago, in which safety belts and other 
measures were not installed so as to not give buyers impression that this 
particular car was unsafe. Back to such vehicles. A rather exotic way to 
treat overpopulation, but if we could pass a law making aerial bus travel 
obligatory... Very effective. And source of impressive fireworks at night.

> OK consider the ST transporter then.  Travel becomes free and completely 
> unlimited.  COOL!  Except that with travel delays, we say goodbye to all 
> privacy and most security.  Kirk and the lads could beam into anywhere 
> and back out.  So any radical Presbyterian could beam into the bedroom 
> of any teenage couple, slay both unmarried infidels with a hearty Calvin 
> Akbar, beam back out, and we would never know who did that.  If we had 
> sufficient security systems to identify the perp, goodbye privacy.  In 
> place of that, we get the internet, which does cost us privacy to some 
> extent, but at least it is far more secure.

Spike, Spike. Think like a hunter. Set elephant booby-toothed traps 
everywhere in your house. Place an invitation for an orgy in local 
newspaper, go for vacation. When you come back, ten, twenty, maybe hundred 
less radical Presbyterians. No need for security, actually. Just a lot of 
plastic foil, maybe a big fridge. Or a friendly pig farm. Or unfriendly 
one - you can use transporter, too. Think, man.

WRT internet, a nice quotation from Lem:

"I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started 
using the Internet."

[ http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stanisław_Lem ]

So I am not so sure I would trade ability to easily change a world for a 
little better and instead have the network of cretinos tweeting and facing 
over and over. Well, OTOH, now they are busy. If I never get mentioned on 
frakbook, I am remarkably free to perform and think whatever I want. And I 
can even freely post here, hehe.

> What are some of the other future visions?  Many, perhaps most of them 
> had to do with advanced forms of warfare.  Now our most advanced forms 
> of warfare are computer viruses.  Well, OK then, good deal.

Uhum, disagree. You may want to rethink this statement, please.

1. Whoever places bigger cousin of this on the Moon, will have great 
future and all luxuries a rocket can deliver (with possible practical 
jokes about delivery by rocket):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Star

2. Excellent scalability! Pick your size, from hand grenade to city 
leveller! Call 0-800-MY-THERMO and our consultant will help you to make 
the best buy. You have a neighbor? We can help you! Don't like crowd in 
metro? We can help you!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon

3. This is just a beginning. Right now, to make a Stux requires quite some 
funds - I mean, really, you have to buy know-how about automation and you 
have to test it on real hardware before letting it go. This costs. Later 
on, imagine how script kiddies can download, say, tenXuts, and release it 
on infrastructure of neighbor city... because they don't like some bullies 
living there. Or maybe they will be more selective, delivering urine into 
city major's tap water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

And the whole internet is a collection of possibly backdoorable machines.

> Where in 50 year old futurist literature do we find anything analogous 
> to the modern internet?  I never saw it.

I have yet to read the list posted by BillK, but out of my head, here 
goes:

1. Corwainer Smith, "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons", 1961

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Hitton's_Littul_Kittons

The protagonist tries to search electronic (maybe electronic) library, 
triggers an alarm set on a search term. From this moment, his arse is no 
longer his, even thou he realises it much later.

2. Henry Kuttner, "The Fairy Chessmen", 1951

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_%26_The_Fairy_Chessmen

One of the protagonists uses "television network" to read files of 
documents, prepared by some other people on his demand.

> Super advanced robotics?  We are gradually getting there.  Still haven't 
> solved the problem of what to do with all the jobless humans.

Yeah. Slavery, where are you when we need you?
 
> Star Trek communicators?  We pretty much have that one: we can talk to 
> anyone anywhere on the globe in real time, using voice if that is really 
> necessary.  Skype makes it free.  OK, good deal.

Oh Spike. I never allowed skype on my computers. I wouldn't p... on skype 
even if it burned and screamed like hell. In particular, I wound never 
p... on a hardware turned on, because this would electrocut my p-p.

In Star Trek, even though it was perfectly naive, there was assumption 
about gentleman's agreement and no invasion of privacy, unless done by bad 
guys for wrong reasons or by good guys for right reasons. Nowadays, 
gentlemen died off and good guys are doing all kind of stuff for 
questionable reasons (which makes their goodness questionable, I guess). I 
think I would rather become Klingon.

And besides, there is something you will never get now, with NASA's budget 
cuts:

- Orion slave girls, who can enslave any warm man in the known Universe

- Vulcan intellect in a body of commander T'Pol

- passion and compassion in a body of commander Uhura

Are you crying now, Spike? C'mon, admit it. There is nothing wrong if you 
are crying for good reason. I can hear you crying, so don't deny it.

> We still have disease, haven't made all that much progress on many of 
> them, damn.  We still have addiction, all the classic human foible 
> stuff, but it is not at all clear we really want to give up all our 
> favorite vices.

Sure, we will have all this as long as there is a profit to be made. I 
don't expect the future to be better than today or yesterday in this 
aspect.

Certainly, humans can be trained to be as good and self improving as they 
are now stupid and crap loving. But what profit would it give to big 
players?

> Overall, I would give humanity a good solid B, possibly a B+ on how the 
> future has turned out in my adult lifetime.

I wouldn't give it even D. Two (three?) hundred thousand years on the 
planet, and, what, no lunar base and incoming shortages of all kind? The 
Lord's Resistance Army is kidnapping children, brainwashes them to turn 
into soldiers and it cannot be pacified. Ridiculous. Pitiful. We almost 
deserve to join dinos. Don't believe my word for it, stand on the street 
and ask mobsters what Betelgeuse is. The most enlightened would tell you 
it was a film with Geena Davis.

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             **