Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on September 7, 2018 4:10 pm wrote:
>
> I don't know what to make of Jaron Lanier.
> I think he's largely correct when it comes to the actual (as opposed to possible/ideal)
> consequences of many of the ideas that get a certain type of Silicon Valleyhead frothing
> -- things like "the gig economy" and the details of Who Owns the Future.
> On the other hand, when it comes to VR he feels very much like all those other (IMHO) misguided
> prophets of disappearing up your own fundament and leaving the real world behind, whether via
> drugs, meditation, or VR; just another Timothy Leary (and that's not a compliment).

Well, yeah. It was the point that I was making. There's a whole generation out there now, for whom the eighties or the nineties is ancient history. We were having a conversation one day, one of the best engineers in the group said she didn't remember something. We all said to her, you must remember it, it only happened around 1990. Then she piped up and informed us, she'd been born in that year. There was another female engineer in the group. She just said, go away, you're only making me feel ancient. One does encounter those strange sort of generational overlaps, and places in group conversations like that one, where you smash straight into the inter-generational barriers. So I think, from the point of view of some folk born in certain decades, it's probably a good idea to learn something about where it started. What I found interesting about his talks, was how he had managed to live long enough to realize the stupidity of many of the things he had wrote and believed, when he had started out. I always wondered if anyone from that generation would have been able after, to come to that realization, or not.

I couldn't believe the other day, when mowing the grass in a lawn, and I had to pick up a laptop computer that had been just left out in the rain by kids. That wouldn't have happened when I was growing up. And that generation still haven't got out of primary school, not to mind think about what college courses they'll end up doing, or what kind of systems and technology they will work with some day. The generation now, who're into stuff like leaving computers out in the rain to get destroyed will no doubt make the generation born in the 1990's, feel as old as I do compared to them. It goes in cycles. When I was in high school, an institution of around seven hundred pupils, a piece of machinery like that would have been it's center piece, for students who were into computers. And I remember too, what students managed to get done with extremely limited computational resources. A friend I remember once did a picture using a computer, that was used for the cover of a school magazine. Nowadays, all the kids are walking around with computers in their hands, constantly making and editing pictures of various kinds and sending them to each other without even using wires.