Passing Through (ireland.delete@this.web.ie) on September 7, 2018 4:48 pm wrote:
> 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.

I'll have to listen to his talk. I have it queued up.

Certainly re-evaluating what you thought in your youth is rare. Valley of Genius is an interesting recent history of Silicon Valley done entirely as oral history. What struck me about it was just how fixed so many people were in the beliefs of their youth. When computing failed to develop the way they'd expected, there was never a re-evaluation of "perhaps my mental model about human behavior, or social evolution, is wrong"; always a blaming on conspiracy theories of how "the man" stole computing from its natural evolution as something where everyone was a programmer, or whatever.

Gave me even more respect for Jobs as the one (and pretty much only) in the list who, for all his many faults, WAS actually willing to re-evaluate his initial ideas and recalibrate them. Unclear so far whether the big names of the later generation (people like Larry and Sergei, or Zuck) will likewise recalibrate in the face of evidence and experience...