http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/abarkurs/Singularityone.html

Site.

 

There’s a lot of speculation about the future of technological development, and a lot of arguments that technological change in the next twenty years will be very rapid. And I think it will be. But I’m not convinced by all the prophets who claim to know what it will look like. Technological development tends to feed off itself; a computer update that makes our lives so much easier is a technological development, but it’s a development on a technology that didn’t exist fifty years ago. That means fifty years ago they couldn’t have predicted that moment of development. I think the future will be similar. Technology often comes by accident and unexpectedly; the thing that takes off isn’t always the thing we expect to take off. Facebook, for example, was suddenly this whole new reality within reality in the social interactions of most young Americans a few years ago, and it wasn’t planned or predicted. We predicted flying cars fifty years ago; instead we got Global Positioning Systems and car bouncing, not to mention tiny boxes that hold thousands of songs and videos. Certainly, we may have become better at predicting the future of technology because we have begun to more self-consciously observe its development, and because the pace of that development is increasing. But development is still unpredictable. In order to know the future of technology we would have to know first, what technologies are being worked on; second, which ones will succeed; third, how, exactly, they will succeed, i.e. what that success will look like; forth, what unexpected developments the intended development will spur; and fifth, what society’s negative, positive, receptive, and rejecting reactions to the possibilities that the developments present will be (remember, this is capitalism, and this is war; if a technology can’t make money either from consumers or from the military, it’s not going anywhere). We can only hope to have a rough idea of the first of these things, and to gauge the fifth. The other three, though, aren’t predictable. As a result, I feel that any attempt to predict the future of technology will be a very rough estimate; an educated guess, really. So while I think it’s fair to say that in twenty years, the world will look very different, the only thing I can say about how it might look, exactly, is that it will probably be very different from anything we expect. I bet if Ray Kurzweil saw a picture of 2029 today, he wouldn’t be able to identify most of the technologies being used in the picture.  

Robotics seem to be one of the least potentially dangerous areas of technological development. They are (unless they are artificially intelligent) to the body as the internet is to the mind. And the body is decidedly less dangerous then the mind now days. Compared with the dangers of a Skynet-style AI, or a self-replicating grey goo, a farmer’s exoskeleton or a windmill-inspecting probe robot seem like very, very mild technological developments. But they are still very useful. Japan’s farmer population is aging; the exoskeletons will allow farmers who would otherwise have to retire, leaving their industry to an unwilling younger generation, to continue working. And robot inspectors are simply convenient. And they’ve developed robotic versions of old technologies, like the car at http://www.forbes.com/2007/11/04/robot-google-revolution-tech-cx_ag_1104robot.html. Robotics are what people imagined technology becoming fifty years ago; mechanisms that perform tasks. And they are doing that. Without the other types of technological development, there would be technological development, but I don’t feel there would be a technological revolution. Now, if robotics combine with the human body, that is obviously a different story; that is the combining of two analogous terms in two separate dualisms. To combine the human body with the body of technology would be to fuse humanity with a part of its own history. Evolution would come into human hands completely. Maybe those exoskeletons are a sign of this kind of future; robotic body enhancements can change our identities.  

http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/abarkurs/devaluation.html

I hope you enjoy my site. It's blue.

http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/abarkurs/willingnesstochange.html

My second minisite features the qualities of willingness to change, vigilance, courage, and reflection. They sort of work together: We must be willing to change in order to receive the benefits of technology, but it's much harder to defend against their drawbacks. We'll need to be both reflective and vigilant, and we'll need to have the courage to act upon potential dangers that those two qualities bring to our attention.

I swear I'm not a Luddite. This class is just making me a little paranoid, and I've decided paranoia can't hurt. It can only help, through keeping me informed.

http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/abarkurs/minisite/militarytechnology.html


Here it is!

I made my first site about the dangers of technology. I did this because it seemed to me that almost all technology has a downside. Who would have guessed that we would just help bacteria evolve when we developed antibiotics? The funny thing, for me, about technological development is that it perpetuates itself. New technologies solve old problems and create new ones to solve with newer technologies. We’ve destroyed the environment with the Industrial Revolution, so we’ve got to develop nanotechnology to clean it up. We will probably have to develop something to clean that up, too (if we’re lucky). Why could this be? It doesn’t seem much different from any human endeavor; changes we bring about almost always solve some problems and create others. Any new system of government would be an example; well, really, any system of government would be an example. I’m reminded of the cyclical nature of ruler-ship in some 3^rd world nations: one leader comes to power, makes things better for a time, and then becomes tyrannical and bloody, leading to the need for a new usurper. Technologies are like usurping rulers. That’s why I wrote about the dangers of technology. I wrote about double edged swords, or things that have negative qualities despite being good; the unforeseeable, or things that go wrong which no one could have easily predicted (like resistant bacteria; not like nuclear weapons); military dangers (these are quite distinct from the unforeseeable; they are the foreseen evils); and the dangers of power consolidation, or the possibility that the rule of technology would necessarily be an oligarchy due to the complex nature of our future lives.

 

They keep saying the newspaper industry is going to figure out how to sustain itself as people read their content for free on the internet. Yet they are simply not figuring it out; they’re firing people. That would go under the “unforeseeable” category. Technology has casualties.

My name is Ariel Barkhurst, and this is my introductory live journal entry. I am an English major, and I don't wake up this early. I'm fairly certain that sleeping patterns are genetic because no matter how many times in my life I wake up at 7 or something like it, I never get used to it.

I am taking this class because I'm going to be a reporter and I want to work on my new media skills. Yes, I know the internet isn't new, but "new media" is like the "modern" period, I think, words that have lost their meaning and become labels. So, new media skills it is.

I know nothing, at this moment, about Web design. I took a computer programming class in high school, but I don't even know what we were using to do the programming and the pinnacle of our achievements in that class involved drawing a square with numbers and parenthesis. I learn most things fast but I'm always on the lookout for an exception (and occasionally finding them [spelling, for example]), so I may or may not actually pick up any skills in this course. We'll see.

Also, I can wiggle my ears, I've always wanted to learn to juggle, and I have 2,300 and something songs on my iPod, I think it is.  

The end.