Post: #1

I came across this video and it fascinated me. What do you guys think? Is humanity likely to start going backwards, technologically speaking, at some point during our own lifetimes? If so, what do you think the consequences, for better or worse, might be? If not, why not?

Post: #2

Depends. A dark age for who?

it's gonna be a bad time for stupid, poor and weak people. The rich will be using gene therapies and pharmaceuticals to effectively make themselves another species while the poor and unfortunate will flounder at the bottom.

Post: #3

Yes, some technology seems to have been already lost, like putting man on the moon.

There is this guy, Bruce Charlton, who was editor of a journal "Medical Hypotheses", one of the few journals which was not run by a peer review but by a board of eminent scientists. They published as-of-yet-unproven hypotheses. They were popular, but in spite of that and their clear title they fell in the wake of AIDS scandal, i.e. they published an article which suggested that AIDS may not be caused solely by a virus (the researcher who wrote it was backing up the South Africa AIDS strategy).

Bruce Charlton claims that science is falling because what he calls the decline of revolutionary science. What is surely observovable is much smaller returns (ratio of discoveries) on science investments.

Another point is that science is less and less intuitive, meaning based on mental images. A lot of science is more and more database-based, like biology, for example. Your success is finally defined as a statistical correlation.

Moroever, it is sometimes hard to say whether nowadays there is a progress in science.
For example, now so popular epigenetics looks to me like a rehash of Lamarckianism, which was one of the Darwinism competitors. It makes you aware that maybe even the scientific ideas with which you try to captivate reality, e.g. "gen", may not be so stable as you wish for. Maybe the Kantian world of noumena (raw, unprocessed reality so to say) is really beyond our reach.

I think that the managerial revolution is slowly destroying science, by introducing a sense and a demand for "profit" in science, even if this "profit" is defined as "recognized novelty" (your citation rate) primarily. In this way science is becoming more and more like social enterprise, a contest of beauty, a sum of your "likes" on Facebook, finally, just a rhetoric. It is not anymore the 19th century science of lonely geniuses.

Personally I am more for a model like in "The Glass Bead Game" of Hermann Hesse. It was his last novel, I presume he knew what he was writing at the end of his life. It is also worth to notice that the German title, "Glassperlenspiel", consists of a word "Spiel" which is actually a bit broader than the English "game", it is like both game+play. This is important as there is definitely an aspect of art in Hesse's conception.

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/20...-dull.html

Post: #4

Almost all of the information in the known universe is available via the internet

But all anyone cares about is posting pictures of their shitty overpriced food

Australia's over here getting anti-privacy laws

And "cyber bullying" is becoming a genuine hate crime

We might not be there just yet, but we're heading towards some real proper dark ages type shit

The tactics are even the same - provoking inaction with fear

Except this holy religious battle isn't trying to keep the belief in the light alive

It's a religion wholeheartedly aimed at darkness, ignorance, and degeneracy

Post: #5

>Poll: If all of the things described in this video occurred, would it be a net positive or net negative for humanity in the long term?

• Yes
• No
  

...would it be a net positive or net negative...

>Yes
>No

I tried to answer the poll, but it's so confusing.



_______________________________________________

Here's the 10 from the video:

• 10. We Are Running Out Of A Lot Of Important Metals For Making Smartphones
• 9. Technology Is Becoming Increasingly Complex And Increasingly Layered
• 8. The Amount Of People Who Can Make An Entire Piece Of Technology Is Dwindling
• 7. Some Arts Are Already Mostly Lost To Time And Could Be Lost Entirely
• 6. Data Is Stored In Ways That May One Day Be Entirely Irretrievable
• 5. If The Environment Continues To Worsen, A Lot Of Infrastructure Will Be Destroyed
• 4. We May Have To Rediscover More “Primitive” Technologies From The Recent Past
• 3. Global Trade Could Be Very Easily And Very Quickly Disrupted By Environmental Disaster
• 2. Satellite Damage Could Further Weaken Our Ability To Communicate And Learn
• 1. People Could Be More Concerned With Resources In The Near Future Than Technology
  

Click here for the text article | Mirror Link: http://archive.vn/bmHVQ

One thing that was not discussed is where the Virtual Reality projects are progressing. It's something to keep an eye on over the next decade or two.

This is a possible [virtual] reality:


This is a possible reality:

_______________________________________________

To summarise Post #3, I think science is generally another religion these days.

(01-03-2019 04:55 AM)Architekt Wrote:  Almost all of the information in the known universe is available via the internet

There's so much knowledge yet to be discovered and the internet is not required to find some of it.

(01-03-2019 04:55 AM)Architekt Wrote:  And "cyber bullying" is becoming a genuine hate crime

(01-03-2019 04:55 AM)Architekt Wrote:  But all anyone cares about is posting pictures of their shitty overpriced food

Australia's over here getting anti-privacy laws

We might not be there just yet, but we're heading towards some real proper dark ages type shit

The tactics are even the same - provoking inaction with fear

Except this holy religious battle isn't trying to keep the belief in the light alive

It's a religion wholeheartedly aimed at darkness, ignorance, and degeneracy

I think if the world experiences a globally disruptive or existentially threatening event, everyone will be doing business as usual. As the saying goes, expect the unexpected. However, don't expect things to go in the direction you wish as it's unlikely to happen as expected.

Quote:Matthew 24:37-39 (KJV)
37 But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark,
39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

Luke 17:26-37 (KJV)
26 And as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.
27 They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.
28 Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded;
29 But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all.
30 Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.
31 In that day, he which shall be upon the housetop, and his stuff in the house, let him not come down to take it away: and he that is in the field, let him likewise not return back.
32 Remember Lot's wife.
33 Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.
34 I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.
35 Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
36 Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
37 And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord? And he said unto them, Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together.

Regarding the continuing religious battle, it has always been about worship, hence the displays of grandiosity by the leaders of major religions to steer people towards their religious organisation. Many religions don't disseminate the truth, but rather do an indirect version of giving their followers what they want to hear, instead of what they must hear. The only differences between them are whether they enforce worship through love or fear.

Just make sure not to become too black pilled while the degeneracy continues its course.
_______________________________________________
"For in the multitude of dreams and many words there are also divers vanities." #265

Post: #6

I'm still not used to when Built to fade does anything other than like posts. WTF.

Post: #7

Put it this way. There is never going to be a Dead Sea Flash Drive.

Post: #8

Ugh I couldn't last more than 5 seconds into that video before I turned it off. That guy with his soy boy English accent and waifu appearance makes me sick.

To answer the OP, yes I believe we are. Our consumer electronics are losing features. Look at the headphone jacks on phone and external ports on laptops as evidence of that.

Computers haven't been getting any faster than last year. A brand spanking $3000 laptop is only slightly faster than a laptop from 2015. WTF!

As an electronics nerd growing up in the halcyon days of the 90s and early 00s technology was exciting, actually helpful, and manufacturers were willing to try something new.

IOS and Android absolutely destroyed mobile computing from being a useful on the go work tool to media consumption. What Apple has done to the current generation of Macbook Pros is even more horrendous. They've turned one of the best work mobility platforms into a painful media consumption machine.

Automobiles are still depressing as hell. Absolutely nothing special about them other than being generic jelly beans being driven more by bullshit EPA regulations, design committees, and car focus groups. Self driving cars aren't going to help anyone but massive tech companies. Electric cars are just a stop gap technology. It would be a miracle if every Tesla owners' car locked the drivers in and caught on fire.

The fact that we're starting to pass over the uncanny valley in 3D video makes cinema and special effects even lamer and more frightening. Now I don't trust what is recorded on television or film anymore. At least porn will be interesting.

Thankfully, this is all starting to come to head. Apple finally has acknowledged that their new products suck and missed several 2018 milestones. Their stock took a nice 8% hit. Maybe they'll pull their head out of their asses, but I doubt it.

I have hope for the future that maybe people will start rejecting smartphones, social media, and other cursed problems of our time. Just recently I threw a party and a significant number of people I know don't have facebook anymore. I had to *gasp* call them to let them know they were invited like it was 1999 or something.

Though, I'm terrified what the techunists have planned for quantum computing. Please God, destroy these companies before they turn this miracle technology into the ultimate slave tool.

Post: #9

(01-03-2019 03:52 AM)Fortis Wrote:  Depends. A dark age for who?

it's gonna be a bad time for stupid, poor and weak people. The rich will be using gene therapies and pharmaceuticals to effectively make themselves another species while the poor and unfortunate will flounder at the bottom.

How will the gene therapies and such work without electronics to process the information? And how would the super elite maintain their monopolies without the same electronics to keep track of all of the components of their various wealth generating enterprises? Also, what would stop normal people from just unplugging from the system that these super rich elites created and lord over if the electronic systems which monitor their activities should suddenly become less effective or even cease to be effective at all?

Even in North Korea, it is widely considered strange for a family to not have some sort of off-the-books black market business as the salaries for state jobs (all jobs) are insufficient to support even a single individual, the state lost its ability to provide rations to most of the populace outside of Pyongyang nearly 3 decades ago, and the country has virtually no electronic infrastructure for the state to monitor people with and, even if it did, the state is not equipped with the technology to be able to effectively monitor and control most of the country by any way other than word of mouth and physical boots on the ground.

Architekt Wrote:Almost all of the information in the known universe is available via the internet

I think we still don't know most of what there is to know and a lot of what we think we know is probably incorrect. Most of the information we know about or that we think is correct is online somewhere but even that is fragile as all information on the internet is still stored in a physical location somewhere and that location can be compromised, the electronics required to keep it running can break, and those electronics can succumb to wear, hacking, and all other forms of damage. And if it becomes impossible or prohibitively expensive and difficult to repair and/or replace said electronics, what happens then?

Would humanity lose all of that information or would there be some elite cabal of people to decide which bits of information are worth preserving by expending their scarce resources on what few replacement electronics can be acquired while the rest of the information is lost forever like the contents of all the scrolls in the Library of Alexandria when it burned, the wisdom and art of the "4 Olds" destroyed by the Red Guard when they perpetrated the Cultural Revolution in China, or the repositories of Baghdad when the city was sacked by the Mongols and the Tigris "ran black with ink?"

Built to Fade Wrote:I tried to answer the poll, but it's so confusing.

As I intended it to be.

Built to Fade Wrote:This is a possible [virtual] reality:

I've seen Sword Art Online. Interesting show. The same questions still come up when I think about it too though. Virtual reality, especially of the power (computing power and energy) and scale that would be required to plug the entire species into the Matrix would require a kind and quantity of electronics which we do not have and, it seems, do not even have the raw materials necessary to create.

And, if some group, probably of super rich elites, were to ever attempt to plug themselves and a sizable chunk of the human species into such a Matrix, leaving the rest of humanity to endure whatever may come, what would there be to stop some faction or even mob from somehow sabotaging and/or destroying the electronics, power sources, etc. necessary to keep those people in the Matrix. Also, how are those people going to be nourished and kept alive physically while in the Matrix? A major driving motivation for the characters in SAO to beat the game and unplug everyone was the fact that they only had about 2 years before their bodies, atrophied to the point of non-function from immobility, simply shut down and died.

debeguiled Wrote:Put it this way. There is never going to be a Dead Sea Flash Drive.

True. The salt from the sea and rust from exposure to the elements alone would surely make a flash drive unreadable and useless after probably less than a century.

Hilariously, it might be the case that paper, clay, and stone are still the most durable and, in the very long term, reliable methods of recording our histories and discoveries for posterity in the same way that the methods and materials used to construct temples and cities in ancient times are more reliable than our modern ones as evidenced by the fact that modern buildings start decaying and collapsing after only a decade or so, requiring constant maintenance and replacement of worn out parts, whereas the primary structures and many of the less important structures of Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu, Luxor, Angkor, Great Zimbabwe, Axum, Petra, Persepolis, Bath, Rome, Byblos, Mohenjo Daro, and many other ancient cites still stand mostly if not entirely intact despite having being exposed to the elements, having very little to no maintenance, and constantly having the crap beaten out of them by every war to erupt in their respective regions for eons.

The Beast1 Wrote:Ugh I couldn't last more than 5 seconds into that video before I turned it off. That guy with his soy boy English accent and waifu appearance makes me sick.

You must already be familiar with his main channel, VisualPolitik EN. He is a lefty soyboy from what I can tell and not someone I normally would watch but I found the main idea of this particular video to be very thought provoking.

Post: #10

I believe that some eras are more about evolution, while others are more about revolution. At the moment, it seems that the tech industry has to provide evolutionary solutions to people's needs and problems and make the best out of the already existing technology. As an example, the 5G specification is more about combining the various standards into a single one, than about creating new mechanisms for the functioning of wireless systems.

Post: #11

(01-03-2019 02:25 PM)The Beast1 Wrote:  To answer the OP, yes I believe we are. Our consumer electronics are losing features. Look at the headphone jacks on phone and external ports on laptops as evidence of that.

I'm not the most tech-savvy. What's the issue(s) with the headphone jacks and external ports (USB ports?)?

Post: #12

This might not be a bad thing, all the convenience of technology might actually be driving us crazy. Think about housewives. There use to be alot of work for them when cleaning the dishes didn't involve a machine. Or when doing laundry had to be done by hand and hung up. Or making meals/getting groceries for a family of 5+. Now that all these things are convenient, the only thing they have to do is drink wine, watch Netflix, and look up old flings on facebook.

Post: #13

(01-03-2019 11:47 PM)nek Wrote:  

(01-03-2019 02:25 PM)The Beast1 Wrote:  To answer the OP, yes I believe we are. Our consumer electronics are losing features. Look at the headphone jacks on phone and external ports on laptops as evidence of that.

I'm not the most tech-savvy. What's the issue(s) with the headphone jacks and external ports (USB ports?)?

It's more of a complaint being levied at Apple who sets trends for the industry.

No headphone jack on the iPhone means that pox spreads to other phones .

Removal of useful ports like HDMI, USB 2, and others means we're all stick with USB C which is arguably better but still not mainstream yet.

These design choices spread to other me too manufactures setting us back further.

/Lamentations of a hardware nerd

Post: #14

"some technology seems to have been already lost, like putting man on the moon."

What I've noticed is that out of everyone who was once a fan of something, as that something ages into antique territory there will always be a small number of collectors. Out of those collectors you'll have a smaller number who are so OCD and fanatical that they are really more akin to museum curators. They make sure the history of the thing stays in circulation, run conventions, start museums, restore old stuff, write books, etc...

It's true of pop culture history and also technology. Autists with an interest in old trains, cars, guitars, or computers. You name it.

These are akin to the monks during the dark ages holding onto classical literature and knowledge in monasteries.

Luckily in a world of so many billions of people, even things that have the least interest in the general public will still produce these eccentrics who will invest way too much time and effort into preserving this old stuff and surrounding knowledge. That goes a long way to preventing this stuff from ever completely being "lost" ala the library of Alexandria.

For instance, there is a guy's channel who is fascinated with old computers, not just microcomputers, but mini and mainframes as well. He's been involved with restorations of the Xerox Alto and the PDP-1. I've been following his newest project which is to be the first to resurrect an Apollo Guidance Computer. Note that this project relies upon bringing together a tiny group of people who have just enough specialized knowledge and enough motivation to handle the task. (Not to doxx myself but I have personally been involved in some digital archaeology myself.)

The internet facilitates storing vast amounts of info. Even if the majority of it is porn and cat videos, it has countless dusty little nooks and crannies available to store info about our past that very few people carry around in their brains. It also connects people with similar interests, no matter how "unpopular".

It also allows you to locate old items on places like Ebay. This has made it easier than ever to reconstruct history, fix or restore old/incomplete/damaged stuff, as well as providing a little niche community hub where people who are into this can network.

Point being that as long as we have the internet we have a huge amount of resilience. That the average person is a numbskull won't take that away. The nature of digital data is the ease in copying it. Search engines then make it easier to find. Very rarely is there something that is completely lost to time. Even old webpages have been archived. So you can go look at old lime-green Netscape-friendly pre-Javascript crap from 20 years ago.

So I just don't buy the narrative about digital data being so fragile. Old data that was stored on obsolete media like floppies just get copied over to modern formats in such a way that the original copies could crumble to dust without issue. Old books get scanned. Old films and recordings digitized, and are increasingly cleaned up to expose new detail.





Or the Peter Jackson film processing WWI film footage.





When it comes to concerns of sustainability, energy and the environment, yeah, that's a threat. But as long as the lights stay on, no information will be lost even if 99.9% of us are Idiocracy-grade dummies.

Post: #15

(01-05-2019 01:10 AM)questor70 Wrote:  When it comes to concerns of sustainability, energy and the environment, yeah, that's a threat. But as long as the lights stay on, no information will be lost even if 99.9% of us are Idiocracy-grade dummies.

I'm now imagining a future 'tech priest' worshipping a pentium 4 with a backup of wikipedia from 2005.

Post: #16

The circumstances that we find ourselves in the 21st century are a mixture of Imperial Rome and the Dark Ages. Some areas yes, others no. However, if Hillary Clinton were president, we would not be here typing this as of now!