My Writing Archives - Mark Niemann-Ross

Beyond One World and One Species

Millennia of diaspora from Old Home Terra would almost certainly produce any number of subvariants of humanity including genetically engineered transhumans and cyborgs. Consider not “the” future of humanity but “the futures” of humanity. Save for a common heritage distant in time, they might be alien species. What might that be like?

Crappy Science Fiction

Good science fiction shows us strange new worlds and futures we haven’t considered. It introduces us to new technologies like tablets and genetic manipulation, as well as new societies like The Handmaid’s Tale and Stranger in a Strange Land. It helps us consider worlds outside of our experience.

AI for Business, Internet, and Theft

Remember your TI-30? Great little calculator. Pricey, but handheld, and did amazing things. Push the right buttons and it gives the answers to complex problems without lookup tables … and with greater precision than a pencil or slide rule.

It trashed what everyone assumed was the skill to be a mathematician. Math teachers working from twenty-year-old textbooks declared the scientific calculator the enemy of all that was holy and good. How would students know how to use engineering tables to look up a log or sin? Imaginative doomsayers predicted the apocalypse when batteries ran dry, leaving engineering students without their electronic crutch and no ability to fall back on the trusty slide rule. Wise sages told us the calculator heralded the end of America’s dominance of technology.

In hindsight – not true. We overestimate short-term impact but underestimate the long-term.