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Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

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Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#11

Post by pbhjpbhj »

grrdotcloud wrote: post #4

I am not sure when it happened but I discovered that every game I played over the last twenty years, reduced to it's bare minimum functional components, was aligning a pointer on an X/Y axis and pressing the correct button within a time window. The goal of computers, reduction or multiplication of work, is often lost because the output does not last longer that the work required to generate. Computers are tools. They…

Sports are just a series of muscle contractions with timing; music is just different accelerations of the air; ... I think these statements, and yours concerning video games, are overly reductive.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#13

Post by tobr »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #3

This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…

Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that someone would write a piece where computers were inherently old.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#14

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #3

This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…

Step 1: for some reason, the world stops making computers, but keeps the ones that already exist

Step 2: 100 years pass

Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines.

Was that so hard?

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#16

Post by andai »

tobr wrote: post #13
nh23423fefe wrote: post #3

This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…

Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that someone would write a piece where computers were inherently old.

Expert prompt crafting!

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#17

Post by entropicdrifter »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #2

> Computers are seldom privately owned – they are considered essentially communal rather than personal This struck me as true of most people's use of computers now. Almost everyone I know who isn't either an old fashioned developer or a gamer uses a mobile phone or tablet merely as a graphical terminal; the actual computer is some mysterious entity elsewhere on the Net. The golden age of computing when 'everyone' had…

I wouldn't say it's "long past", but rather in its last gasps outside of niche hobbyist communities. There are plenty of people whose primary computer use is still local, they're just considered old-fashioned

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#18

Post by curtisblaine »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #14
nh23423fefe wrote: post #3

This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…

Step 1: for some reason, the world stops making computers, but keeps the ones that already exist Step 2: 100 years pass Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines. Was that so hard?

Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply not believable: a society that has machines that could, at the minimum, help solving complex calculations and engineering problems much better than humans decides to completely ignore them. That's not how societies work.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#19

Post by curtisblaine »

curtisblaine wrote: post #18
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: for some reason, the world stops making computers, but keeps the ones that already exist Step 2: 100 years pass Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines. Was that so hard?

Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply not believable: a society that has machines that could, at the minimum, help solving complex calculations and engineering problems much better than humans decides to completely ignore them. That's not how societies work.

Unless they have other means of solving those calculations better than computers; in that case, call those other means "computers" and the study of older computers "retro-computing".

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#20

Post by actionfromafar »

curtisblaine wrote: post #18
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: for some reason, the world stops making computers, but keeps the ones that already exist Step 2: 100 years pass Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines. Was that so hard?

Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply not believable: a society that has machines that could, at the minimum, help solving complex calculations and engineering problems much better than humans decides to completely ignore them. That's not how societies work.

1 is easy to imagine - a large enough collapse that making new ones is very very hard, especially compared to scrounging and repurposing the huge amount of existing ones. Imagine a huge population decline, and search parties looking through the ruins for useful tech, like computers, decades later.

Such a society could probably make new computers, but the cost of making new, much worse specced computers, may not be cost effective for a long time as long as old computers can be found and repaired.

Edit: such a movie or novel would make for great Fallout-ish world-building. Imagine for instance a large hotel in a big city running the booking system on an old laptop in a central secure location, and new 8-bit computers used as terminals at the front desk. Public access 8-bit computer terminals at public libraries connected to copies of WikiPedia running on some old gaming rig and such things. :-)

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