Media X Timeline
This is the first draft of a timeline showing the interaction between technology and society. It is part of a project to create scenarios that show future possibilities for their interaction. It is not a complete map in itself, but meant to be sugestive, t a resource to further discussions.
The mission of Media X is to explore the interaction between new technologies and social implications. It is clear that in the well known population curve
was driven throughout by technologies. The question can be asked, we are at A, what is the role of technology now in resolving the complications and creating a better future? What are the opportunity's and responsibilities?
Stewart Kaufman, the well-known Santa FE institute explore of automata, writes
BREAKING THE GALILEAN SPELL
By Stuart A. Kauffman
... Even deeper than emergence and its challenge to reductionism in this new scientific worldview is what I call breaking the Galilean spell. Galileo rolled balls down incline planes and showed that the distance traveled varied as the square of the time elapsed. From this he obtained a universal law of motion. Newton followed with his PRINCIPIA, setting the stage for all of modern science. With these triumphs, the Western world came to the view that all that happens in the universe is governed by natural law. Indeed, this is the heart of reductionism. Another Nobel laureate physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, has defined a natural law as a compressed description, available beforehand, of the regularities of a phenomenon. The Galilean spell that has driven so much science is the faith that all aspects of the natural world can be described by such laws. Perhaps my most radical scientific claim is that we can and must break the Galilean spell. Evolution of the biosphere, human economic life, and human history are partially indescribable by natural law. This claim flies in the face of our settled convictions since Galileo, Newton, and the Enlightenment. ...
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We are part of a moment in time that people are increasingly calling the perfect storm, when we are running out of capital, food, energy, water, and jobs simultaneously. Some have speculated that the problem with biotechnology and nanotechnology is that, while they hold out interesting technical possibilities for the future, and will continue the trend towards the concentration of wealth which many city as the key symptom of our current difficulties in governance and economy.
Looking at the past and that got us here does not solve the problems of the future, but we probably can not solve the problems of the future if we do not understand the range of issues that got us here.
Carl Woese, one of the new recognized statesman of science, writes:
The emerging mainstream scientific view of human nature, full of interest and discoveries, has limits, limits of assumptions, and of goals. Face it, much of what we are learning about humans is research driven by agendas of artificial intelligence, data mining, drug specificities, and a general view that man is a machine. The alternative view, probably more useful to those concerned with history, belief, governance, taste, and education is the view that machines are reductions of human nature, effective and cheap substitutes for specific purposes, and often not our purposes.…. We need to:
Create a biology that embraces collective phenomena and supersedes the molecular reductionism of the twentieth century. …it is not a good approximation (except perhaps within the sterile laboratory) to regard microbes as organisms that are dominated by individual characteristics.
That microbial behavior must be understood as predominantly cooperative.
Equally exciting is the growing realization that the virosphere plays an absolutely fundamental role in the biosphere on both immediate arid long-term evolutionary senses[15, 16]. Recent work, including our own unpublished work, suggests that viruses may play an important role as a repository and memory of a community’s genetic information, contributing to the evolutionary dynamics?, 18] and the stability of the syste
If the interactions are collective effects dominant, then an organism cannot even be considered in isolation. Indeed, we would go so far as to suggest, that, a defining characteristic of life is the strong dependency on flux from the environment, be it energy-giving, chemical-giving, metabolism giving, or genetically-giving. This inherently biocornplex perspective renders academic such debates as “is a virus dead or alive.
… A society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that science to slip into the role of without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself. Modern society knows that it desperately needs to learn how to live in harmony with the biosphere. Today more than ever we are in need of a science of biology : that helps us to do this, shows the way. An engineering biology is needed that will still show us how to get there; it just doesn’t know where ‘there” is.
Carl R. Woese* A New Biology for a New Century MICROBIOLOGY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY REVIEWS, June 2004, p. 173-186
The challenge for technology is working in the intermediate realm of service, mediating between humans and humans, humans and machines, and machines and machines, is to understand the way in which these broader issues can impact their work. It is not just a question of profit, but of identity, and of sustainability. Paul Hawken has written that the resources available on the earth on average per person by 2030 will be half of what they were in 2000. This timeline and the upcoming scenarios are hopefully a modest contribution to the many conversations that need to happen.
This timeline will be updated as comments received. You can also take one of the PostIts and just post it. Additions, questions, comments welcome.
The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Media X nor of Stanford University.
The timeline was produced with a free software called Compendium.
Comments to dcarmich@stanford.edu
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