So what happened to the optimism for the "consciousness III society"?
Maybe it was naive but It's a shame we don't have that same forward looking feeling today.
Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
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Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#12> Eyles and some of his fellow Consciousness IIIers regard computer programming as a fine craft that might some day be elevated to the status of an art. “It’s possible to envision a time when there are professors of the literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a language there’s no audience for. It’s like Nabokov’s book about Gogol where at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol, there’s no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It’s sort of discouraging.”
As I read this, I was aware that there is a steaming pile of JavaScript a single Alt-Tab away on my laptop. I think there's a profound lesson here - buried in the path between these dreams of programmers in the 70s and today's reality.
This was a really good read. Gave me something to think about.
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#13Don Eyles has a web site, where there's an interesting article called "Tales From the Lunar Module Guidance Computer": https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html
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Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#14A recent discussion of straights and freaks:
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#15> Eyles and some of his fellow Consciousness IIIers regard computer programming as a fine craft that might some day be elevated to the status of an art. “It’s possible to envision a time when there are professors of the literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a language there’s no audience for. It’s like Nabokov’s…
> a steaming pile of JavaScript a single Alt-Tab away on my laptop
Most of the poetry written in Shakespere's time has been lost to history because it was utter drivel. Some is still scratched on 400-year-old walls.
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#16So what happened to the optimism for the "consciousness III society"? Maybe it was naive but It's a shame we don't have that same forward looking feeling today.
you, not we :)
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#17So what happened to the optimism for the "consciousness III society"? Maybe it was naive but It's a shame we don't have that same forward looking feeling today.
The climate happened, I think. Difficult to maintain optimism on the ultimate destiny of consciousness when the science is telling you there's an extinction event on your doorstep.
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#18> Eyles and some of his fellow Consciousness IIIers regard computer programming as a fine craft that might some day be elevated to the status of an art. “It’s possible to envision a time when there are professors of the literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a language there’s no audience for. It’s like Nabokov’s…
Whytheluckystiff wrote some Ruby code that can only be described as good poetry (including at least one project used in production in some places, the Camping web framework) circa 2005. I'm sure some people write poetry-level code today (obviously the folks at shadertoy.com, but they're writing in a classical style, and I'm sure someone's writing code poetry that could not have been written before 2020).
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#19that ride to the moon seems to have been quite a rough one - at each mission it needed some hero who had to save the mission...
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#20So what happened to the optimism for the "consciousness III society"? Maybe it was naive but It's a shame we don't have that same forward looking feeling today.
The climate happened, I think. Difficult to maintain optimism on the ultimate destiny of consciousness when the science is telling you there's an extinction event on your doorstep.
Living through the Cold War brought us a constant and very close awareness of the potential for a nuclear extinction event so I don’t think it’s climate change. If anything it was scarier then because there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error in a highly complex socio-technical system.
I’m of the opinion that much of the change in our culture was driven by a concerted pushback on the part of the “straights” to reassert the primacy of their worldview. The threat felt by those in power by the rise of the civil rights, anti-war and nascent environmentalist movement was a direct threat to business as usual. So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan, we have adopted a worldview that for decades has told us that happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success and conventional career paths.