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I found this article massively disappointing just because it drowns out the central, important question (is technological progress really accelerating and to wh

I found this article massively disappointing just because it drowns out the central, important question (is technological progress really accelerating and to what end?) in all this human-interest nonsense about the quaint fervency of futurists like Kurzweil. Fervent belief doesn't always mean false belief, and its not clear to me how the author has earned the right to this apparent condescension. The article gives people who don't care to think about the future consequences of present developments an easy out, which, when you think about it, is a good way of helping to ensure that the very people we're laughing at, and are slightly worried about, are left to follow their own agenda.

hugh3 16y ago
its not clear to me how the author has earned the right to this apparent condescension Do we have to earn the right to be condescending nowadays? If you ask me, condescension should be the default posture to adopt towards anyone making wild, overconfident assertions based on flimsy evidence. Now, since evidence about the future is awfully hard to come by...
- pigbucket 16y ago
  Do we have to earn the right to be condescending nowadays? To me that's kind of like asking do you have to climb the stairs in order to look down from the balcony, so, yeah, I think it needs to be earned, and I think you have earned it if you've already done the work necessary to determine that a conjecture is wild and based on flimsy evidence. The author of the article didn't do that work. I won't be seduced into conjecture about the ellipsis, but evidence about the future is not so much hard to find (it's everywhere in fact; it's the present state of things) as hard to interpret. Still, there are lots of smart people working on predicting one or another aspect of the future. Often they're wrong, so I share your skepticism, but skepticism is different from denial or dismissal.

hugh3 16y ago

its not clear to me how the author has earned the right to this apparent condescension Do we have to earn the right to be condescending nowadays? If you ask me, condescension should be the default posture to adopt towards anyone making wild, overconfident assertions based on flimsy evidence. Now, since evidence about the future is awfully hard to come by...

pigbucket 16y ago
Do we have to earn the right to be condescending nowadays? To me that's kind of like asking do you have to climb the stairs in order to look down from the balcony, so, yeah, I think it needs to be earned, and I think you have earned it if you've already done the work necessary to determine that a conjecture is wild and based on flimsy evidence. The author of the article didn't do that work. I won't be seduced into conjecture about the ellipsis, but evidence about the future is not so much hard to find (it's everywhere in fact; it's the present state of things) as hard to interpret. Still, there are lots of smart people working on predicting one or another aspect of the future. Often they're wrong, so I share your skepticism, but skepticism is different from denial or dismissal.