Also, change in technology may find itself outstripping society's ability (or willingness) to integrate it. In fact, I'd say it already is, and has been for quite some time.
We have the technology already to facilitate incredible intelligence - it's just extremely unevenly distributed, and stifled by lack of political will and social inertia.
The author's based his career around the ability to pervert search results - and apparently he's frustrated because this fucks up the results for everybody so badly that Google have to change their algorithm.
Sympathy? Not really. I hope he stubs his toe so hard they have to amputate his foot.
Say I create a follow-protected twitter account, which only I follow, write a couple lines of ruby to retweet stuff randomly to myself and a crontab entry for it ... did I miss anything?
As a motorcyclist, the sound of traffic is almost entirely a non-issue; I can wear canalphones with music at a volume where I can't hear any traffic noise, and still negotiate peak hour inner city traffic.
But then, as a motorcyclist I pay more attention than just about any driver (including myself when I'm behind a wheel). For example, I'm never surprised by a vehicle suddenly appearing in my rear view mirror on a bike, because I move my eyes in a reflexive pattern between the road and both mirrors every few seconds.
If you're really paying attention, sound is almost a non-issue on the road - but that puts you in a very small minority of road users.
Sadly, the article completely fails to mention the amazingly useful innovations made by tiling window managers like wmii, ion3 and xmonad.
Granted, they're not as new as Unity et al, but they offer a compelling, complete and fairly radical departure from tradition, and one that I really do miss on OS X.
And thirdly, and probably most importantly, because piracy is so convenient it's usually my first port of call when I'm wondering what an artist sounds like. I can spend less than a minute typing a search into $COOL_PRIVATE_TRACKER, and in a few minutes be listening to high quality mp3's in my choice of media player.
It's only after I actually decide that I like (and will ever listen to) the music that I would wish to give some money to the artist.
> I have taken it in the middle of the day, in the sun. I have taken it at night, in a dark room. I have taken it at a party (despite people saying its not a party drug).
I was kinda hoping you were going to run with that and turn that into a "green eggs and ham" tribute poem.
I should point out: when artists do sell their music as direct downloads, I buy them.
Perhaps the simplest restatement of this idea is simply a directory / store which sells DRM unencumbered digital media, passes as close to 100% of the profits to the artist as is possible, and falls back to displaying search results for alternate editions if they're not represented.
A couple of reasons. Firstly, because in a traditional record label deal, not much of the money actually finds its way into the artists' pockets.
"In a typical deal, the band gets thirteen or
fourteen percentage points. We’d have to give a few of our own points (four perhaps) to the producer of our record (producers typically get a fee and points). Then we’d be down to ten points. Before calculating the value of those ten points, however, Electra would subtract a large percentage of the gross sales to account for free goods, records given away for promotional and other purposes. Thus, the amount on which our 10 percent was calculated would be reduced by 20 to 25 percent. So we’d be down even further, perhaps 10 percent on 75 percent of the wholesale album revenue. If our CD was sold in stores for fifteen dollars, the band’s share of the revenue might be something between fifty cents and a dollar per CD. Would we get to keep it? No! ..."
A more optimistic (and modern) document which contrasts options such as the iTunes store (which gives the band perhaps 60% of the proceeds and the customer a DRM encumbered copy of the recording):
Secondly, because digital distribution of unencumbered music is in many ways a better experience for the consumer than purchasing physical CDs or DRM encumbered tracks.
I'd be surprised if PayPal didn't see Bitcoin as some form of competition - so, this is fairly unsurprising. Most companies prefer not to facilitate their competitors.
I've been thinking about this stuff all day, and trying to figure out how to reconcile the potential rewards with the dire risks involved; should I recommend dabbling with this crazy mojo, or should I tell people to leave it the hell alone and not to risk it?
I suspect some of the appeal for those of us who've been down this path, especially when young, was the risk itself; because "we are a generation of men raised by women," and we wanted to test ourselves against every boundary we could find - even the borders of reality itself, if we could find them - and to be tested ourselves.
I suppose the socially accepted alternative is to get as drunk as you can and pick a fight.
I'm very suspicious of the use of the word "quantum" as a crowbar to pry open respectable science and fill it with new age bullshit.
I can definitely sympathise with the flavour of insight you're talking about though, and this guy seems to hold some credentials, but phrases like "make brain circuits of positive emotions" trip my hippie detector.
Classical psychedelics like LSD tend to impart hallucinations which are reinterpretations of familiar objects: hearing a song in the sound of flowing water perhaps, rather than a disembodied voice dispensing commands; seeing a cloud as an intricate organism dripping with lacework skirts drifting in the eddies of an invisible current, rather than a creature standing in the middle of the room with no basis at all in reality.
Furthermore, it's generally pretty obvious to those involved that what they're seeing is an "hallucination"; the deliriants, such as scopalomine, are another story, and an altogether more terrifying class of drug.
Bicameralism's emphasis on bona fide auditory hallucinations, especially disembodied voices issuing commands, is quite distinct from the subjective experience of most psychotropics; the inhibited self-awareness and metareflective capacity described by the article - the "zombie mind" - is almost the opposite of a trip, where every perception seems saturated to the point of overflow with deep, often autobiographical, meaning.
What you're suggesting bears some similarity to the writings of Aldous Huxley:
""One explanatory model for the experiences provoked by hallucinogens is the "reducing valve" concept, first articulated in Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception.[7] In this view, the drugs disable the brain's "filtering" ability to selectively prevent certain perceptions, emotions, memories and thoughts from ever reaching the conscious mind.""
In summary, I'd suggest that it's quite possible that inter-hemisphere communication is increased, but certainly so is the way the entire brain functions.
Interesting idea. As I understand it, most of these drugs take the place of existing neurotransmitters like seratonin, or modify their action on receptor sites.
Let me put forward a metaphor: you're currently experiencing reality indirectly, through an imperfect lens which throws into focus an internally coherent system of perceptions we might colloquially call a "seratonin hallucination". You could think of the changes that occur after taking e.g. LSD as replacing that lens with another one.
Is it a less accurate one? Almost certainly it's one less valuable in helping our ancestors adapt to the evolutionary pressures they faced than our normal neurochemistry; in terms of representing an "objective" reality though, there may be some ways in which it affords a more faithful depiction.
Or perhaps not; it's hard to say. I think the value lies not in the affordance of new and more authentic powers of perception, but in shaking up the assumptions we make about how objectively truthful our "normal" experiences might be.
I've given dex to other programmers on occasion; they're often amazed at how much it helps them concentrate and get things done.
It's kind of like coffee that WORKS.
Hence my favourite programming beverage: grind your beans, sprinkle finely powdered amphetamine on the top of the basket, and make yourself a nice motherfuckiato.
We have the technology already to facilitate incredible intelligence - it's just extremely unevenly distributed, and stifled by lack of political will and social inertia.