Fire and Knowledge

From the LA Times:

Suppose 245,000 Americans had died in terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001. The United States would be beside itself, utterly gripped by a sense of national emergency. Political leaders would speak of nothing else, the United States military would stand at maximum readiness, and the White House would vow not to rest until the danger to Americans had been utterly eradicated.

Yet 245,000 Americans have died because of one specific threat since 9/11, and no one seems to care. While the tragedy of 3,000 lives lost on 9/11 has justified two wars, in which thousands of U.S. soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice, the tragedy of 245,000 lives lost in traffic accidents on the nation’s roads during the same period has justified . . . pretty much no response at all. Terrorism is on the front page day in and day out, but the media rarely even mention road deaths. A few days ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that 42,642 Americans died in traffic in 2006. Did you hear this reported anywhere?

This phenomenon is not just American, it is global. Traffic deaths are the fastest-rising cause of death in the world. Yet you’ve heard far more about H5N1 avian influenza, which has killed 192 people worldwide since being detected five years ago, than about the 6 million people who have died in traffic accidents in the same period. Last year alone, 1.2 million people were killed on the world’s roads, versus about 100,000 dead as a result of combat.

We all own computers today that were considered supercomputers 10 years ago. 10 years ago we owned supercomputers of 20 years ago… and so on. So why on earth is everything so slow? If they’re exponentially faster why does it take longer than ever for our computers to start, for the applications to start and so on? Sure, when they get down to the pure number crunching they’re amazing (just encode a video and be amazed). But in everything else they must be unbelievably slower than ever.

Computers of today may be 1,000 times faster than they were a decade ago, yet the things that matter are slower.

The standard argument people give me in response is ‘but they do such more these days it isn’t a fair comparison’. Well, they’re 10 times slower despite being 1,000 times faster, so they must be doing 10,000 times as many things. Clearly the 10,000 times more things they’re doing are all in the wrong place.

–Interview with Con Kolivas, a former Linux kernel developer: “Computing is boring“

What is it that we need all this extra intelligence to figure out? That we need all this new computer power to do? That robots will be capable of that we aren’t? What is the task to which we must surrender so much?

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 224

If I look back over the last hundred years it seems to me that we have lost more than we have gained, that what we have lost was valuable, and that what we have gained is trifling, for what we have lost was old and what we have gained is merely new.

–Edwin Muir in The Story and the Fable, quoted in Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 74

Since the mid-1950s, pollsters have annually asked Americans if they are happy with their lives. The numbers who say yes have declined slowly but steadily for four decades, even as technology has dropped more and more conveniences from the sky.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 121-2

Teaching cannot do well under the cult of innovation. Devotion to the new enforces a devaluation and dismissal of the old, which is necessarily the subject of teaching…. And here we meet a strange and difficult question that may be uniquely modern: Can the past be taught, can it even be known, by people who have no respect for it?

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 65

We need to decide that we live, most of us in the West, long enough. We need to declare that, in the West, where few of us work ourselves to the bone, we have ease enough. In societies where most of us need storage lockers more than we need nanotech miracle boxes, we need to declare that we have enough stuff. Enough intelligence. Enough capability. Enough.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 109

The first child whose genes come at least in part from some corporate lab, the first child who has been “enhanced” from that came before—that’s the first child who will glance back over his shoulder and see a gap between himself and human history.

But here’s the really awful part: he won’t be able to look forward, either. He won’t be able to imagine himself connected with those who will come after him. Because, of course, by then there will be better upgrades. They’ll be Windows 2050 to his Atari. He’ll be marooned forever on his own small island, as will all who follow him.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 64-5