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Monday, February 26, 2007

Shift Happens

 
This is interesting. I don't agree with everything—especially the idea that things are going to change that much in the next 15 years but it's worth a look. We can discuss the content.

6 comments :

Anonymous said...

You know I generally like these thought provoking things but this one sucks on many levels. First, the media type is completely wrong for the content. Why is it a video when plain text would do? Is that a sign of the future: the world will be more stupid and less convenient? Perhaps the author doesn't want his IP to be easily copied (sure!), but I could have read the content in a few seconds rather than sit through a silly spoon-fed presentation of slides which merely put text on the screen.

The demographic information is useful, providing a hook to think about what it means to be as large as India and China, and the bit about Nintendo investing more in research than the US does in education research is a good stab. But that "If MySpace were a country it would be 11th-largest..." is just the sort of bullshit presented as news on Fox and CNN. It's like saying if the phone system were a country it would be #1.

And why do I have to re-run and pause the video to copy it's text manually from the keyboard? If it was plain text or HTML I could copy/paste. Now that is a sign of what the future will bring: otherwise useful information will be presented in nearly useless formats in order to appeal to the most base instincts of human beings.

"Did you know? We are living in expotential times?" What a load of crap. We have always been living in such times. A far more interesting data point is that we are living on a finite planet with a growing population and vastly growing consumption.

"Half of what students learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study." More bullshit. Obvious bullshit.

Sorry, my blood pressure must be going through the roof. "I'm mad as hell and I won't take this anymore!" Sometimes I think everything since the movie Network is derivative.

[/end brain fart]

Anonymous said...

I bailed out half way through, having become fed up with the format and the low information density.

Some strong points, but overall I didn't like it quite as much as trinifar. :-)

catherine (fairchild) calhoun said...

should i be scared or excited? interesting enough but just like everything these days, still not making me care. is anything capable of engaging my intellect these days? that human race computer may end up really lazy and bored.

Anonymous said...

It's the abiogenesis of artificial life, and we're the enzymes.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, towards the end it just started getting pointless. Our desktop processing power has more than doubled in past couple years but that by itself has not expanded utilization of the computer power. I hardly doubt that a new version of Quake, that requires more CPU power than a mid-90s supercomputer, is going to fling us forward that much.

Anonymous said...

rudyard kipling....how did I arrive at evolutionary psychology when I just wanted to pick up a book and escape into a fantasy for a few minutes. Just So Stories is what it's meant to be to me.Chill out and don't worry about the future and all the predictions of shifts in the world.