Reprinting and expanding this item from two years ago because it fills in the origin story for monsters like Altman and Elon and Ellison. They’re the third generation of Tech Psychopaths, and they’re implementing the agenda gradually developed by the first two generations. Bezos is the LITERAL third generation, since his own grandpa helped to create DARPA in 1958.
Before 1958, tech hubs were widely distributed, centered on different types of industries. Telephone and telegraph covered New Jersey. Computing was in upstate New York. Defense electronics was in Boston (MIT). Agriculture was centered on KC. Petroleum was in Okla and Texas. Autos were in Detroit. Steel was in Pittsburgh.
After 1958 electronic tech converged on the Frisco area, at the same time when tech was abandoning consumers and focusing on defense and spy work. The other branches (except petroleum) moved to China when their industries moved to China.
By 1962 the mixture** of spy tech and hippie drugs had given birth to the Effective Altruism viewpoint. The new way was documented in a special publication by IEEE.
This 1962 publication by IRE (now IEEE) celebrated the 50th anniversary of the organization and featured alt-histories supposedly written in 2012. The supermodern superadvanced world-peaceful 2012 inhabitants looked back with contempt at horrible neanderthal 1962.
The specifically technical alt-histories were easy predictions since all the necessary parts were either already commercial or clearly visible in ’62. The NSA web was in active development and would be officially announced in ’68. Bell and Western Union had networks of microwave towers in ’50. The laser was invented in ’56. Digital ICs were already in commercial production. The idea of the pocket videophone was dreamed and developed since 1910. Bell himself invented optical transmission in 1880. Optical pipes were ancient, but the modern use of fibers went commercial in 1962.
This author didn’t get the alt-history message and wrote forward:
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The optical maser is only one recent victory in a triumphant campaign that has won the triode, the klystron, the traveling-wave tube, a host of transistors and ferrite devices, and the Esaki diode. During the next fifty years, local communication will profit richly from these victories and others unmentioned or unborn. Today, and for the foreseeable future, device costs are rapidly being pushed down. This economic revolution will stimulate communication in several ways. A notable example is two-way television in every home – a technical possibility now but not an economic one. An abundant supply of cheap, high-frequency components and assembly techniques will make the “videophone” as commonplace in 2012 as the telephone is today.
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Pretty damn close. He also understood that materials and manufacturing methods were the real keys to progress, not ideas. Very few writers grasp this basic fact.
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The specifically social predictions were prophetic. Education inspired the same dystopian tech optimism that now infects all of our tech monsters. Effective Altruism, eugenics, slaughtering all Negative Externalities to benefit the future.
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Some sociologists have theorized that the biggest change in the last half century has been the reversal in human attitudes toward education. Of course this has primarily been brought about by the advances in teaching machine technology, which have made a good education not only possible, but absolutely necessary for everyone in our society.
Life without the modern inexpensive direct-dial televideo receptor in the home, linking us through substations to the main memory-information banks and capable of analyzing handwriting, understanding voice commands and requests, giving verbal responses, bringing us a free education in any subject that interests us, and even serving as a companion to the aged and the lonely, is now as inconceivable as an uneducated man.
I personally do not long for the “good old days” of years past. It would surprise him to learn that our national sport is the mass participation televideo quiz game, in which the entire audience is armed with brains rather than muscles, for it was not until 1989 that DIAG IV recommended to the General Assembly the outlawing of all physical contact sports. In many other ways, compared to today’s standards, the man of 1962 faced a hard dreary life. If he had marriage problems, he could not dial the proper code on a televideo and have instantaneous access to the thinking of the world’s best minds on the subject. Instead he had to visit another human being placing his future well being in the hands of a single individual who was probably little better equipped to solve his problems than he was.
But the worst thing about life then, as I see it, was the uncertainty about the future man carried in his heart. There was no international language, little international understanding, and no international peace, because there was not yet a worldwide system of televideo teaching machines. Therefore, the benefits and rewards of advanced technology were not available to all peoples.
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Speaking from my own specific expertise, teaching machines were advancing until they shifted to the web. Simple physical display mechanisms were the best, collaborating with real muscles and senses. Analog computers with some digital elements were even more promising but never fully developed. The digital dystopians halted development of analog because it was too humanistic, too close to real muscles and senses. Purely digital teaching machines were still capable of some useful experiential learning. The web, with its ever-narrowing range of capabilities, choked off the potentials of plain old Windows or Mac executables.
Again the tech side is correct. The social side follows the old idiotic Esperanto notion that wars result from miscommunication. After everyone can communicate through the benevolent WEF, war and uncertainty will disappear.
NOBODY WITH ANY SENSE EVER BELIEVED THIS.
The world’s best minds understand each other perfectly. They all agree that permanent universal war is the best way to enrich and empower the monsters and kill everyone else. Machiavelli, not Zamenhof.
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Bionics is the most horribly optimistic. This author started with the accurate idea that most living things communicate through the ether, an ability that humans have lost after millenia of relying on language. Definitely correct but still not established in a practical way. He then allowed the monsters to apply this idea for their own purposes, which seemed wonderful and dreamy to him.
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Thus, the art of bionics and allied nerve-to-brain studies, moving slowly and disappointingly, but irrepressibly forward, became the big news in communication advancement. Obviously, surgical experiments and tests had to follow and confirm theories derived from such observations. In due time, it became necessary and practical to make experiments on animals whose neuromechanics could be considered a reasonable counterpart of the human being’s. Certain haunting anomalies always seemed to appear when least expected during the course of carrying on the seemingly obvious experiments of attempting to simulate, by externally initiated electronics, the internal action of nerve currents.
Science’s real mandate was now evident. A way had to be found to “unlearn” just the right things to reacquire enough of our original animal-like extrasensory perceptive powers. Yet mankind could not afford to lose the necessary scientific stature and advances that had been acquired over the centuries. Various laboratories devoted themselves feverishly to the task. The large foundations liberally supported work to such an extent that government financing was not even necessary.
[Right about the foundations, wrong about the government.]
By the year 2000, sufficient progress had been made so that elementary communication could be carried on over very short distances between suitably and carefully trained human subjects.
Then, with the additional aid of certain bioelectronic augmentation, the technique was refined so that individuals who had been so equipped and previously trained were able to make adjustments whereby they could communicate over quite substantial distances but always by appointment – a most fortunate limitation. As of this writing, in 2012,there are no doubts in any circles as to the ultimate full success of the program. Tests have proceeded now so that if the parents consent (HAH!), newborn infants can be operated upon and the latest submicroelectronic equipment installed in the brain and at certain critical points in the spinal column so that they are almost certainly assured not only of the benefits of full nonradio communicative powers but also that their scientific creative ability will be enhanced. Logically enough, this operation must be performed within two weeks of birth because if the infant is only slightly exposed to contacts with its family who still have not completed their “unlearning” and readjustment, he might never become a good subject for the modern system of communication.
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** Hippie drugs were created and popularized in the first place by the spy agencies in MKUltra. Tim Leary also worked for CIA. So this mixture isn’t a meeting of opposite forces, it’s just CIA.
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