Chipping the web: December 4th
December 4th, 2008 11:00:13 am pst by 
Sterling Camden
- What’s New In Python 3.0
Lots of Simon says rules for those upgrading from 2.x, thanks to Python's "one right way" mantra.
Tags: python - Who’s the worst programmer on your team? How can you tell?
Everyone seems to know except the manager who is focusing on metrics.
I agree completely, Arjan.
Tags: metrics management programming - Google cutting costs – what, me worry?
When the gorilla is running scared, what will all the little monkeys do?
Tags: google business culture economy perks employers
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Imagine a world without search engines
We’ve forgotten what it was like (& it was only a few years ago).
So true. My kids will grow up wondering what life was like before Google, just as I wondered how my parents got along before home electricity, indoor toilets, and television.
But you’re right, even those of us who never saw a computer before adulthood have become dependent on search engines, and can hardly remember what life was like without them. I’m reminded of the short story “The Shape of Things That Came” by Richard Demming. His character had traveled in time from 1900 to 1950 and returned to report what he had seen. But his story was unbelievable, not because of the technology he had witnessed, but because he said that everyone took it all for granted. How much more has been introduced and become everyday since 1950!
When my grandmother was a girl, men had not yet flown (Lilienthal, Wright etc).
But before she died, some were on the moon (Armstrong ff).
I knew my great-grandmother well. She grew up on a farm where former slaves still lived and worked for room and board (you’re free, but where will you go?). She was 15 when Wright flew, and she saw her first automobile when she was 20. She was 39 when Lindy crossed the Atlantic, and she was already a grandmother by WWII.
In July of 1969 she was living with us, and she stayed up late that night to watch Armstrong step out onto the moon.
That’s a helluva life — and the sort of thing that makes me believe the singularity really is near.
Yes, look how technology has accelerated since 1969 (with the sadly notable exception of space travel).
But I’m not certain that the singularity will be all that singular. From the perspective of 100 years ago, we’re already well into it.
Good point.
Maybe the singularity is relative — when today’s conception of the singularity happens, it’d seem really “singular” by today’s standards, but by the standards of the day it’ll just seem like hectic living as usual.
That’s actually kinda depressing, in some ways. Without the sort of breakage the singularity is expected to represent, it would just mean that the ongoing growth of badness in life will continue at a faster pace. At least the goodness should, in theory, continue at a faster pace as well. I just don’t like the idea that we wouldn’t likely make any significant progress, on balance.
I think we do make progress — I’d rather live in today’s world than, for instance, the fourteenth century. It’s just that we accustom ourselves so quickly to innovations that we don’t appreciate them.
I can’t remember how long it has been since I gave thanks for cheap toilet paper. But when my father was a child, they used dried corn cobs — the more plentiful red ones to wipe, and the rarer white ones to “check”. If you’ve ever found yourself in the wild without toilet paper, you’ve at least experienced true appreciation for that innovation. Searching for appropriate leaves — not so dry that your fingers poke through, not so wet that they don’t collect anything, and certainly not poison oak.
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I’m not just talking about technology — I’m talking about sociopolitical matters, as well. In fact, as technology advances, it seems like it enables greater centralization of power and authoritarian intrusion into our lives.
In short, life gets better in some ways, and simultaneously worse in others.
That’s a very good point.
A hundred years ago, you could go completely off the grid pretty easily, and government would have absolutely no idea that you even existed. That’s not so easy to do any more.
“When the gorilla is running scared, what will all the little monkeys do?”
Yeah, especially when all the banana are dying, too.
Wow, that’s some history of Chiquita, Shelley.
Shelley,
Einstein gives humanity four years after the bees die out (inadequate pollination thereafter). So there’s a bit of a scare in the UK this year, as the bee population decreases sharply…
You may remember Einstein, he’s the guy with the patents on a new-fangled type of refrigerator
If we don’t die out when the bees are gone, we’ll have invented some substitute technology. At which point (if not before), we will be literally unable to survive without our technology.
You might argue that we’re already there — very few people could survive in the wild without so much as a single tool or piece of clothing.
To me, the loss of bees and other “natural” phenomena (as if humans aren’t natural — but for lack of a better term) is more tragic in terms of the planet (loss of diversity spells a spiral towards sterility) than in terms of humanity — though the two are interwoven, naturally.
I’d rather worry about what might actually have some reasonable likelihood of occurring than the magical vanishing of all technology. We’re likely to have quite a few useful tools lying around, even if much of the mass energy generation technology vanishes (and takes a lot of the higher-tech stuff like cellphones and cars with it). Even so, if all our tech disappeared, it’d mostly be those with a combination of intelligence and mental flexibility who would have the best chance of survival. Survivalists tend to assume they’ll have their guns and knives, good boots, et cetera, at least — and tend to be very skills-focused, which means they’ve specialized for conditions that would no longer be relevant. Then again, there’s also the problem of how we might adjust emotionally: if civilization vanished wholesale, some might just consider it not worth the effort, no matter how good their chances of survival.
Screw the “tragic in terms of the planet” spiel. Without intelligent life, all the planet is going to do is, at best, maintain a changing ecology until things finally tilt far enough out of whack that everything dies anyway. As far as I’m concerned, the real tragedy would be killing off intelligent life — because without it, I have to ask: What was it all for?
“What was it all for?”
I used to ask that question all the time. Intelligent life, for me, is no better justification than anything else. Humanity is only valuable from a human perspective.
I’ve come to believe that the question is irrelevant. Purpose itself is only a human value, IMHO.
I believed that at one point — and the end result, for me, was a dreadful sort of philosophical nihilism (kinda extistentialism minus minus). Now I have this sort of bet hedging thing going on, with a holistic, taoist metaphysical belief system on one hand and an empirical, materialist belief in the value of intelligence (not necessarily human — but human intelligence is the intelligence we’ve got) on the other hand.
Throw out the empirical side, cutting away the value and purpose represented by intelligent life, and I’ll just give up my broadband Internet connection, my interaction with most of the world, and become a modern day Henry David Thoreau, living in the mountains of Montana or the woods of New Hampshire or the icy wastes of northern Alaska in a human-produced radiation blackout zone, getting in touch with my peaceful inner self, giving no damn at all about civilization and its dubious comforts.
. . . so, if you want to keep me writing for TR, don’t try too hard to convince me that human intelligence and the very concept of purpose are manufactured values with no real underlying meaning. Heh.
Well I do have to back of a little bit from what I said. Even though I firmly believe that even the concept of value itself is merely human and has no intrinsic meaning, I also believe it to be impossible for us to transcend our need for meaning and purpose in our lives.
So I do find life meaningful, if only in a provisional sort of way. What’s meaningful to me may not be meaningful to someone else, and almost certainly has no real meaning beyond the meaning I give it. But that’s OK.