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The Great Bifurcation

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131–140 of 168 posts

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#131

I am utterly confused about the visions for the Metaverse. Would it be a parallel economy where people can find work, start businesses, buy and sell "3D" property, talk to audiences in an imaginary 3D world? Or probably some kind of a channel that substitutes in-person meetings and social life? In both ways it looks like a dangerous proposition where some arbitrary company defines your reality and the rules of life,…

I think the idea is that it's all of the above. Facebook is trying to create an all encompassing space that effectively replaces the internet.

It will be censored, curated, moderated, and filtered by Facebook. No thanks.

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#132
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the zeitgeist change: don’t you think that expectation windows for results based on success of disrupting markets by tech have shrunk to a point where it’s not possible for a more long term and complex projects (biology being one of them) to attract enough talent? I feel like such changes are only possible based on big crises

I do, but I also think that we'll see this biology flowering from non-tech people who have some tech skill. So it won't be tech companies moving into biology space, it will be lab workers and students who know some coding realizing that 'hey, I could do this thing using my phone' and sharing with each other. I also think that as the sector grows and we see more people trained, we'll see a medical research boom the sa…

> Likewise, there's no Microsoft, Google, or FB waiting in the wings to buy up/bury any advancements

Why is "big pharma" not this?

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#133
post #102
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously wonder whether there will be a cultural rebellion against the digitization of our lived experiences. It seems like everyone (even the youngest who grew up in a fully digital world) feels like we're on this path to black mirror dystopia, but there's yet to be a collective awakening/action to combat it. It wouldn't surprise me if down the road there's a cultural movement that decides "we're opting out of al…

I'm going to call it now: The zeitgeist of the 2030s and 2040s will be a focus on biology to contrast with technology. So instead of trying to eliminate humans from the equation, we'll see a group of people who take parts of tech they like (such as systems thinking) and focus it on human improvement instead of external tech. Think genetically engineered humans vs. cyborgs; there will be a focus on holistic 'working w…

This is starting to happen now, and we're working on it related to neurology and improving sleep at https://soundmind.co

Cyborg always has the feeling of a severely augmented and strange human. I'm surprised by the number of people who have no interest in Neuralink, and say they wouldn't go near it.

As we're seeing the mental health benefits of sometimes turning off our digital devices and focusing on ourselves, I think this will drive the future of us not being always connected, but being connected when we want to.

I think what you're pointing to is correct, Augmented Humanity, rather than Augmented Reality.

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on this path to black mirror dystopia A bunch of episodes of Black Mirror aren't really even about the future. They're criticism of things right now (or, rather, when the episodes were made).

I took a course in university on sci-fi and the professor said that all science fiction was a reflection of the moment it was written, and had almost nothing to do with prognosticating.

Ursula K LeGuin’s introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, 1976 https://www.penguin.com/ajax/books/excerpt/9780441007318

“The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.”

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#135

I still cannot see any reason I'd want to connect any identifier or avatar across different online worlds apart from gaming. Am I missing something? For sure Meta wants to connect everything so it has a whole picture of its users so it can serve ads but why would people be compelled to connect their discords/linkedin/facebook or whatever personas when a key part of the web is anonymity, I don't even use the same hand…

It seems to me that Reddit would be a far more interesting place if you had separate identity with its own reputation / karma per subreddit.

That's one of the nice things about StackOverflow/StackExchange. On the flip side, some (maybe most? all?) communities are tyrannical about the question/answer format and the discussion forums on SO/SX are pretty awful. Why can't everything be exactly the way that I want it?

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#136
post #76

> This gets to the other mistake Diehl makes in that article, which, ironically, echoes a similar mistake made by many crypto absolutists: there is no reason why the Metaverse, or any web application for that matter, will be built on the blockchain. Why would you use the world’s slowest database when a centralized one is far more scalable and performant? It is not as if WhatsApp or Signal are built on top of the plai…

What the hell is a DAO anyway? The link on the article was to a paywalled article and I know it only as Data Access Object.

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#137
post #42
post #9

I'm glad he addresses Stephen Diehl and his anti-crypto screeds. Nearly all of Diehl's criticism is some form of “None of this digital stuff has any real world value.” But the thing is, this digital stuff does have value to the people that own them. Diehl's opinion that the value is zero does not make it true. It's very reminiscent of Clifford Stoll's articles. Stoll was a brilliant engineer and writer, but a terribl…

Terrible predictor? "While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued."

Stoll basically says (in 1995 when he wrote that) none of what we actually got will happen. He's laughably badly off, almost "But my Bible says the world will end in 2012" wrong.

Stoll even mentions other predictions he suggests are ludicrous, but which of course came true - not because those other predictors were extraordinary but because it was already fairly obvious and Stoll doesn't see it.

"Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."

Or here's Stoll explaining that Amazon isn't possible:

"Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."

This follows a pattern Stoll has. He has no imagination, given the ingredients for a cake, and the tools, and a recipe, and an oven, Stoll can't imagine a cake will result. If it could, thinks Stoll, there surely would already be a cake, there isn't, so making a cake is ipso facto impossible. Stoll won't try, and he's astonished that anybody else would.

Here's the fun thing about that last one by the way. Stoll wrote this piece after Netscape shipped SSL. It wasn't yet popular enough that Stoll would definitely have known about it, but far from being an unpredictable future it was an all-too real present. Yes it's SSL 2.0 and SSL 2.0 is insecure, but that's what we know now in the present where TLS 1.3 is used for transactions underpinning a huge fraction of the global economy. When Stoll dismissed this as impossible it's not because he knows SSL 2.0 is insecure, it's because he can't even conceive of its existence, even though Netscape have it working.

I think the average non-pundit can't imagine announcing new predictions after being wrong. But for a pundit this isn't even embarrassing. Metcalfe literally ate the speech where he'd said he would eat his words if he was wrong, then immediately made the exact same false prediction. They don't learn, because they pay no price at all for being wrong. They are, in fact, completely useless for this reason.

When Warren Buffet invests in X, that's going to cost Buffet money if he's wrong. So, he doesn't make a habit of being wrong over and over without learning anything from it. Pundits like Thompson or Stoll don't care if they're wrong, they pay no price whatsoever for never learning from their mistakes, so why would they do so?

Clifford Stoll seems like a nice guy, I bought one of this products years ago, perfectly satisfied, but he is, in fact, lousy at predicting the future.

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#138
post #136
post #76

> This gets to the other mistake Diehl makes in that article, which, ironically, echoes a similar mistake made by many crypto absolutists: there is no reason why the Metaverse, or any web application for that matter, will be built on the blockchain. Why would you use the world’s slowest database when a centralized one is far more scalable and performant? It is not as if WhatsApp or Signal are built on top of the plai…

What the hell is a DAO anyway? The link on the article was to a paywalled article and I know it only as Data Access Object.

You're in for a treat. Look up the "Decentralized Autonomous Organization", aka "the first big thing written on Ethereum, in which a huge amount of ETH was (predictably) immediately stolen". Thus leading to a fork of Ethereum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#139
post #27

I'm of the age that I remember getting sucked in to the Second Life hype. MMORPGs were also becoming popular, and there was this narrative that "virtual worlds" were on a rocketship to the future. Universities and companies paid stupid amounts of money for digital real estate. Wired ran profiles of Second Life speculators who got rich in the bubble. Now I guess we call virtual worlds "the metaverse" and think it'll b…

I seriously wonder whether there will be a cultural rebellion against the digitization of our lived experiences. It seems like everyone (even the youngest who grew up in a fully digital world) feels like we're on this path to black mirror dystopia, but there's yet to be a collective awakening/action to combat it. It wouldn't surprise me if down the road there's a cultural movement that decides "we're opting out of al…

Tongue-in-cheek but check out The Icelandverse on YouTube :)

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#140
post #27

I'm of the age that I remember getting sucked in to the Second Life hype. MMORPGs were also becoming popular, and there was this narrative that "virtual worlds" were on a rocketship to the future. Universities and companies paid stupid amounts of money for digital real estate. Wired ran profiles of Second Life speculators who got rich in the bubble. Now I guess we call virtual worlds "the metaverse" and think it'll b…

I seriously wonder whether there will be a cultural rebellion against the digitization of our lived experiences. It seems like everyone (even the youngest who grew up in a fully digital world) feels like we're on this path to black mirror dystopia, but there's yet to be a collective awakening/action to combat it. It wouldn't surprise me if down the road there's a cultural movement that decides "we're opting out of al…

I'm totally ok with starting the Butlerian Jihad a few millennia early.

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

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