I wonder what the post-Moore's law world will look like.
The past couple centuries has been dominated by consumers and businesses automating and digitizing increasing parts of their lives as computers become more capable to handle them at the same low cost. (And the power the Internet gives us for being able to share information)
As creating faster chips becomes harder, institutions will start to invest more in other promising fields and technologies. I wonder if the next few decades will be dominated with developments from an entirely new discipline and culture.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but don't most of what we know about pre-Socratic philosophers come from secondary texts reporting on these philosophers' views? If so, then it will be difficult to consider these texts that have informed us about these authors as philosophical texts themselves.
His parents also had the "lots of money" that allowed him to "replace the wheels every few weeks".
I know that when I was a child, if I had a scooter and the wheels broke, I would never get to own a scooter again. So that's the kind of opportunity I'd have missed out on.
I'm thinking that consciousness, as it stands right now, is associated with a lot of things that should and ought to be reduced to mere sensation.
Consciousness is associated with thought, emotion, and sensation. Yet as neuroscience progresses, I think we will eventually functionalize thought, emotion, and sensation as biological processes.
Some may argue that our mental processes are fundamentally differently perceived from our external senses. But as a human being, we have internal sensations as well. We can feel internal pain and stomachaches. These have a fundamentally different sensation from the sensations that can be externally induced in us. Extrapolating further, we can say that thinking and feeling and other mental activity are mere sensations of the consciousness induced by the brain.
Before physics, there was a large role for divinities in the world. Gods and the Abrahamic God ruled Nature and Fortune, the parts of the world that we do not understand. But as human beings gained mastery and confidence over the external world, the domain of divinities shrank and shrank. We now attribute causes of phenomena to the natural world, rather than divinities; divinities used to be the natural law of the universe, today they have to be content with the supernatural.
Regardless of the philosophical justifications of consciousness, I see it going the way of divinities. The popularity of consciousness will wane as mental functions and mental states and cognition are understood. Societies will begin to use neuroscientific explanations to justify perception and behavior that provide actionable innovation and correction instead of attributing them to black-box consciousness.
When that happens, the idea of consciousness will, I think, seem as absurd as divinities.
I don't think the philosophy of "I need to know what X does before I use it" is extrapolatable. With jQuery, your frustration is mildly justified, in my perspective, as jQuery is in constant development, has bugs and breaks stuff.
But consider the number of times you've used systems and libraries that you do not understand beyond the subset of its API that interests you. I do not understand the details of my computer's microprocessor's architecture, yet through several layers of abstraction it is a useful tool for me to get my job done.
There are other systems, too, like processed food. Traffic control. The power grid. The military-industrial complex. Whole industries have their internal workings abstracted out but for the tiny intersection between them and our individual lives.
Sometimes the guy who's using the jQuery library is, say, running a startup that has other, more pressing priorities, and has no time to learn anything beyond .ajax() and .append() .
So while your specific example makes sense, I don't think the point you are trying to get across is extrapolatable beyond it.
What I'm beginning to think is that the "make life easier" and more convenient isn't the primary reason for doing what Google is doing nowadays.
Sure, these things make your life that much more accessible, but as opposed to that being the selling point of the product, it is a sort of a hook, an enticement.
It seems to be that by capturing more parts of our personal lives, Google will be able to develop better human language algorithms and sentiment analysis algorithms.
I think what we say and correspond in public is a filtered, impersonal language highly adapted to the audience we are speaking to. In addition, language deals a lot with the environment and a lot with contextual and non-verbal clues, more, I suspect, than linguists think. Hence it is difficult to develop accurate human language models from impersonal, public correspondence.
But by going into the home, Google will have a better opportunity to directly observe the emotional core that shapes the deepest beliefs and opinions of its consumers, and serve targeted ads to the categories of people who will respond best to said targeted ads.
Of course, the data collected have more value than targeted ads. But I think it's well worth keeping an eye on the advertising industry and taking note how their advertisements shape (irrational) demand.
The past couple centuries has been dominated by consumers and businesses automating and digitizing increasing parts of their lives as computers become more capable to handle them at the same low cost. (And the power the Internet gives us for being able to share information)
As creating faster chips becomes harder, institutions will start to invest more in other promising fields and technologies. I wonder if the next few decades will be dominated with developments from an entirely new discipline and culture.