What to do with all this magic?
 

Before too long, all information that exists will be instantly available, to anybody, anywhere. You could very well argue that this has already happened. And it doesn't even sound like a big deal anymore. But think about it...

Every morsel of knowledge that has ever been compiled, ever, popping up inside your head at the exact instant you need it. That is sorcery, it's omnipotence! And it's inevitable that every living person will have this ability and not think twice about it.

The only question is: how will we choose to use these powers?

Oh, and the other question: how will having these powers shape our evolution?

The only question is: how will we choose to use these powers? Well, I had this power 15 seconds before you stated your question and was already bored with it.

Oh, and the other question: how will having these powers shape our evolution? Except for the extra appendage and the new eye in the back of my head, I don't expect any major changes.

Flint is crazy.

No he's not. He's right on target. The intelligence of the human race is rising. We can more easily see what's true and what's not true, and this will have a multiplicative effect. With an iphone and the net we share the intelligence of the world at all times. It's magic nobody could have predicted. In fact the richest and one of the most computer/tech of all people on the earth wrote a book called The Road Ahead in 1994 and failed to mention the internet. Meanwhile the changes that the net brings us continue to be revolutionary.

Have you ever browsed through a brick-and-mortar store, and wished you had access to Amazon reviews?

Have you ever heard somebody talking about something and immediately fact-checked their ass with Wikipedia?

Have you ever seen something really cool, then taken a picture of it and shared it with your Cellar friends, then had them have a conversation about it by the time you got home?

Have you ever had a really difficult problem at work that you solved by Googling?

Have you ever gotten your news of the day entirely from the Cellar? Did you understand it better than when you got it from the talking heads?

Yes, absolutely. And that's often amazing to me. What's even more amazing is when I see talking heads talking about stuff that's already been covered on the Cellar, and they aren't getting huge parts of it right. The only possible explanation besides incompetence is that they are pushing their own agenda instead of seeking the truth, and it's much easier to see through their sham after visiting the Cellar.

Ditto to that, glatt. I can't stomach most of the news shows because many times they are so far behind what is happening here. For example, the guy who wrote the "Angry White Male" article was on a radio show about a week after it was written, posted and discussed (including clone threads) here on the cellar.

I for one intend to use them to say big words....like 'multiplicative'.

I, too, am interested in this "magic." I think it's so revolutionary that we can't fathom "the road ahead." It's absofuckinglutely amazing.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the answer is obvious: We will choose to use them in any way that gets us a better caliber of reproductive partner. :doit:

I'm proud to say I'm an E-Harmony reject!

There is a difference between say: Looking up an entry in the dictionary and actually knowing the definition. Being able to look something up does not mean we have become informed gods. If anything I think that we are giving up recalling information for quick, lazy, typing in the google bar. I love that computers have enhanced the quality of my life. I just think that we need to learn the material instead of recalling only the web address where information is stored.

We can choose to use these powers to become genius and expand on our own ideas or we can become lazier slobs that drool on ourselves and think we are clever because we can find an image or caption to fit anything and know absolutely nothing. I do it all the time.....


Let's not forget that a lot of online sources for information aren't even legit. yet. Some are..most aren't. People know that so you have to pay, usually, for real information built inside programs. We are not information gods for knowing the specific address of specious wikipedia cites. I really don't trust the quality of information I am getting. There are trusted sources and credible sources, but you also have to know enough already about the topic to know what those are, and when you are being fed a line of bs.

This society is dumbing down. This isn't power, this is the ultimate laziness. Instead of figuring things out for myself, or grabbing a credible text...I look it up first on the internet....Maybe even watch a google video on how someone else did it. That makes me an idiot that is capable of watching images and mimicry. Right now I'm relying on this spell checker to spell things I would have normally looked up, and I used to know how to spell everything. I'm becoming an idiot.

The people on the cellar, if anything good can be said about cellarites as a group, are usually at least average or above. A lot of them know things about topics before sourcing something to back it up. Remember that other people have a harder time figuring things out and what they are learning in mass is specious....

I find it interesting that someone mentioned wikipedia already in this thread for fact-checking. Wikipedia is consistently wrong about a lot of subjects, or has left very valuable information out. It's completely unreliable and we have decided as a society that it is completely legit. It's kind of like presidents...People voted it in as a socially acceptable knowledge base. I will admit that there are items I've looked up there that were helpful or there were obscure details I didn't know before that I found illuminating. But mostly it's poor quality and people eat it up.

Ok. I'm torn and I think about this topic a lot because I'm usually at a computer for 7-10 hours a day, and now I'm getting a new computer today (yeah!) for home and home office use. So we can say I'll be on the computer all the time, even while I'm watching a movie!! But I found myself trying to calculate tax this morning without the use of my books program and found out that I'm a complete idiot that has resources. Refined laziness. It's a fucking art form. My laziness is about to become even more sophisticated with my new computer. I am obviously misusing technology if I don't know things myself. (I still know some things thank god)


This is a book, I'm sorry, but I'm headed in two different extremes when it comes to this, and I don't have any real conclusion yet. You should have seen how ecstatic I was the first time I got to create an illusion of something in photoshop, now that was magic! When I got to remove an object in a photo, then patch it. I said woo-hoo!!! Magic!!! Maybe there would be more magic in real life if I weren't at this computer boring everyone.

:)

Thanks for listening.

Question Wikipedia's credibility? Fine, then show me an error in it.

Should be easy huh? Just give us an URL to the offending page.

The smart man doesn't know everything, he knows how and where to find the correct answers. Why memorize everyone's phone number, if you know how to use a phone book?

This is a pretty good article.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...opic_set=(none)

You can't be patronizing and then expect that I do as you request at all. After all of my discussion about this topic you chose to extract that. Forget it.

Just feeling the magic here.

Fail.

all this collective knowledge is too big for my small cranium

That's why its distributed. :)

bless bookmarks :)

There was a time when educated people spoke dead languages, and could remember lots of crazy ass shit by creating an association like a memory palace in their mind. simply amazing. People don't remember as much today...not much need with all this computer memory available.

Hate to see what would happen if the lights go out.


I don't think that people are any smarter today then at any other time in our recorded history. I'm sure there is someone here who wants me to back that statement up with facts. All I have to say to that is...google it yourself!

we dont remember as much because we are expected to keep so much more active memory in use. Aristotle didn't have to remember his PIN or his SS# or his home phone......he had all that grey matter available for philosophy.

IE! my son once recited every penny he got from the tooth fairy, tooth by tooth. is he a genius? or is his mind uncluttered by buulllllshit like mine isn't?

He didn't have to worry where the money was coming from, just count it.

Absolutely. Just look at the engineering they did. Our IQ scores are going up because they measure the kinds of intelligence we presently value and teach to. When/if civilization fails a lot of folks won't have much to offer.

Collectively we are smarter and our facts are more accurate. We are throwing aside the cruft. Our capacity to learn is the same; our ability to find information to learn, solved in a flash.

Sharing information is what has pushed the human race ahead fastest. The dark ages end with the arrival of the printing press. Modern civilization showed up with the newspaper, radio and then TV. The internet brings us faster and bigger changes and we will see innovation sprout ahead again.

I still say Flint is crazy.

I don't think flint's right. I think that the availability of knowledge has NOTHING to do with how much people care.
for example... my sister asks questions all the time, when the rest of the family is watching the news or the West Wing or whatever. questions than anybody who cares about what goes on in the world would be able to answer, stupid questions like, 'thats a country?' or 'wait what does congress do?', things like that.
but by the time one of us has finished explaining it to her, all she has to say about it is 'um, i stopped listening. i dont really care'.


ignorance is not caused by lack of information. ignorance is caused by apathy.

I can't help but be reminded of an incident about 15 years ago when I was visiting my parents. My mom and I had stopped at the grocery store to get some stuff.. the cash register system crashed. I was actually very impressed at the efficiency of the cashiers in adding things up with legal pads and pencils.

Anyway. It almost goes without saying, but the concept of what it means to be "educated" is constantly changing. Also the number of people who are "educated" is a moving target. It used to be that only a small proportion of the US population went to high school, much less college. Now it seems you need a college degree for anything better than "do you want fries with that?"


I'm currently reading "What is intelligence?" by James Flynn. He talks about the so-called Flynn Effect--rising IQ scores over time. In a nutshell IQ tests have been "renormalized" over the years so that the average is steady at 100. But the performance needed to achieve that 100 has changed. What would have earned a 100 in the 1920s might get a 65 or 70 now. So if you accept the scores at face value, either we are now become a race of supergeniuses, or our great-grandparents were mentally retarded.

I would have to say his mind is cluttered by a completely different sort of bullshit than yours!

Maybe.... maybe.... maybe... maybe...

You're kidding right? Whether it's the latest celebrity party girl who forgot to stop at Victoria's Secret for some panties, or Television Without Pity, or entire discussion boards devoted to the ephemera of past decades' children, we currently have access to more cruft than ever before. Mounds and mounds of cruft, glorious cruft the likes of which previous generations could only imagine.

Yeah, but....

Whenever I hear talk like this, I'm reminded of my last job, which partially involved some astronomers. They would apply for time on, say, the Hubble Space Telescope. It would gather information as requested. It would get sent back to us via the Internet. Our astronomers and their students would process and analyze the data using specialized software running on UNIX workstations. (My job was to keep the computers running.)

Contrast this with 16th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. He made some of the first accurate astronomical measurements, producing data which Kepler would later use to calculate planetary orbits. And how did Tycho do this? Did he have a Sun workstation to crunch his number and process image files? No, actually he held a ruler up to the sky and measured.

And so I wonder what we would do without all our infrastructure. The answer, I suppose, is die off down to a level of population that would support subsistence farming and start all over. (Could you grow your own food? I sure as hell couldn't, and the amount of land where I live is woefully inadequate to support the number of people who live here if they expect anything other than a house and a yard.)

If you had told me 20 years ago that , I will have a computer on my desk, and that I can not live with out it, I would have laughed in your face. Now it is my primary source of news, and information.

what to do with all this magic ,

Easy

PORN SURF !!!!!

That's the attitude!

I was thinking about the slide rule getting us to the moon recently and how we sometimes just smash things into Mars due to conversion errors.

Google will control your minds and eventually the world. Buy stock now.

What I really want to do is look at all of your web address info. including time signatures for the past 2 months and really see for myself if "we" are "collectively intelligent" or just spoiled, over- stimulated, hedonistic freaks...:) Maybe all of that. But if you pm me all the requested information I'm willing to study it.......

The proof is in the pudding........I think we are always looking for distractions. Advertisements and the constant barrage of marketing isn't making me a genius. Last night I played pretty good pool games on my computer for about 5 hours with my husband....We are brilliant. We probably have a lot of tools to solve all the problems of the universe, but we are busy aiming and shooting at colored balls digitally, thank you.:)

How computers enhance our lives. vs. Actually using computers to enhance our lives.

I really think you're painting with an overly broad brush. For example, if you look at the new oh hey strip sudoku, that looks cool . . . .

Porn is easier to get.

you can buy stock in Google?

http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/s...te?Symbol=GooG

I can't. Others can...



Did someone say sritp pool? I thought I heard sritp pool...
:D

I think we'll all implode before any of this 'magic' happens.
Although they were thinking of putting chips in young children in case they got lost or kidnapped. Can't give you a link because it was so long ago., back when they were micro chipping animals. The argument was 'what's next?'. They were also thinking of micro chipping soldiers so there would be no need for dog tags anymore.

No, it's already here. I'm only describing a few minor interface tweaks.

Did you know that a highschool student built a nuclear reactor in his spare time with off-the-shelf components? Which, somehow, has something to do with what I'm talking about. The acceleration of technological achievement. By the time things are happening, they aren't a big deal anymore.

Are you referring to David Hahn, the "Radioactive Boy Scout"?

http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html

http://www.amazon.com/Radioactive-Bo.../dp/037550351X

Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds? :p

Sorry, couldn't resist.

What happened to the boy? Does the ending raise thoughtful questions or is it just sad? I am thinking it might be a good read for a college student?


funny
........and I didn't know that!

I think in the end of the book David is in the Navy, working on a nuclear sub or carrier.

I found the book to be interesting.

And there in lies the reason I won't give my ten year old a chemistry set. Am I holding him back? You bet your arse I am.:D I found him at the age of eight looking up a bomb site. (he wanted to make a water rocket) God help us all.

thanks!


@ lush,,, chemistry sets are pretty limited. Buy him one so he WON'T go to the net.

Sure, go for it.

We had our Radiation training a couple of weeks ago, I'm the Radiation Safety officer at my workplace, the instructor mentioned this guy, it's only a few miles us.
The latest part of the story is he got out of the Navy last year, and was soon arrested and convicted of stealing smoke detectors, one of his sources of Isotopes :eek:

So looks like he was up to his old tricks :greenface

It's covered on his wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

and this is him, that's not acne those are Beta radiation burns
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/3...vidhahnmu0.jpg

What a freak. No, I'm not talking about him.

I was referring to 15yo Thiago Olson, who built a nuclear reactor in his basement for $3500.

also in Michigan, you wouldn't think there would be two:eek: .

That's seroiusly good work and for $3500, one of those vacuum pumps on it's own costs that much.

don't ask how he knows..... :rolleyes:....:worried: :bolt:

Without the magic, you'd have to resort to this.

Amazing magic...seems that 15 year old's got that touch. He should become a physicist and patent his work ;)

I when I die and wake up in heaven it looks like this.
Twoud be very magical. ( yes heaven should be practical and beautiful)
http://www.curiousexpeditions.org/ST...ALLEN%20().jpg

grr...sorry...I'm sleep deprived. graveyard job :reaper:

Nothing to worry about at all.

First of all, one of those pictures had John the evangelist holding a book. SHOPPED! They didn't have books back then. Secondly, Ill bet in all those libraries pictured, you couldn't find the Leave it to Beaver episode where Eddie Haskell steals the milk money.

spud, quit giving bruce the business.

;)

And I'll bet that on the internet, you won't find a copy of any article from any newspaper, ever. But at a library you can go to the micro-fiche.

And there's the problem: With the internet, we will have omnipotence, instant access to all the information that has been uploaded; BUT we will use this limited knowledge to the exclusion of original source materials; thus dumbing-down our knowledge of the subject, as we repeat only the easily accessible facts, from the top 5% of the subject.

Is there anything more beautiful than a real library, though? I miss the darn card catalog, even!

When the library in my firm threw its card catalog away, I took it home. It's in my shop. One drawer holds cassette tapes, and the other 3 drawers hold misc hardware. It's actually very nice to look at.

What a catch! The neighbor acrsoos from my mom's house found and re-finished one to store craft/sewing supplies.

I believe that a card-catalog-style cabinet would be the ideal storage solution for a large compact disc collection. And, in 1000 years, my relatives would have to go on Antiques Roadshow to find out that the card catalog was not originally intended as a storage unit for this archaic media format.

Our campus nurse was around to snag two of them when our library switched over. She has one cabinet in her office and the other she says her husband uses at home.

I'm way jealous!

Can't believe my dad never came across one. There's nothing on earth he doesn't have, such as some seats from the old hockey arena. He and my uncle brag to each other about their great finds. One day Uncle Jim says to my dad "I bet I have something you don't have. An airport runway light." Dad says "I have three."