what is technological determinism as stated by Marshall Mc Luhan?
814827
Technological Determinism states that technology forces our society to change verses the gradual change that our cultures causes. \nI don't know who Marshall McLuhan is he might have added some twist to it.
37851
I quite disagree with Darrius. The law of accelerating returns and Moore's law make it inevitable that by no later than 2040 we will have advanced so far technologically that we will be able to do all that they do in the Matrix movies and more. We won't need  a huge spike driven into a hole in the back of our heads though. (Ever hear of wireless networks?)\n\nWithin a decade or two we will be able to supplement our brains with implants allowing us to parallel process (multi-task), enjoy instant and total memory recall, and communicate via the then ubiquitous, wireless Internet with other people or computers including being able to download information. \n\nThis is just scratching the surface. Check out my source links and hang on, we're all about to go on one heck of a ride.
543280
Yes, theoretically its possible to make the computer think. This is called as AI (Artificial Intelligence). However the current technologies are good enough to make machines think within a narrow domain.\n\nYou tell the computer how a human would take a decision. The computer then analyses several such responses and decides the best course of action.
263448
If you are part of nature, then is it meddling?  Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Selfish Gene where he discussed the concept of memes as opposed to genes.  Memes are ideas - like irrigation, the wheel, etc. - that were devised by man and changed the planet.  Man's concept of the wheel - which made roads happen of course - resulted from nature just as forests resulted from it.  To go into the concept of "right" you need to ask about values and then you are confronted with a range of preferences which is never so simple as right and wrong.  Your range of preferences may differ from mine, and there needs to be accomodation of individual rights vs. public good, and that's a whole other discussion.
363716
For an engineer you have committed an uncommon error -- creating a general rule based purely on a limited (and likely flawed)sample. \n\nIn your own words: "I have never met a computer programmer... who had any real engineering skills(or an real engineering degree)."\n\nIs not THE foundational principle of Engineering that only calculable, repeatable, verifable infomation should be the basis for decisions?\n\nI assure you there ARE plenty of people who "write code" that have REAL enginnering degrees, those degrees may be in the traditional engineering disciplines of ME, EE, CE, ChemE as well as Industrial Engineering, Systems Engineering, Software Engineering, and other fields from schools as "hard core" as Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Purdue, Univeristy of Illinions, Cal Tech or others. Typically people with such skills are much more likely to be found in highly techincal fields, were their skills are more valuable. You certainly would want not the same person hacking together a website that you would trust to write the code that guides the Space Shuttle, manages doses of gamma radiation, or powers the internal workings of life-safety communication equipment.\n\nComputer Science is a field of study that has existed at the University level for over fifty years. While the logic contructs that are its underpinnings are shared by both fundamental mathematics and linguistics, its reliance on technolgy set it distinctly apart from those related fields -- just as chemistry & physics share many foundational tenants one deals primarly with the constituents of matter while the other deals with its motion/energy.\n\nVirtually all complex software can be reduced to a small decision tree, just all virtually all engineering problems can be reduced to simple calculations, yet I wonder if engineers who oversee pot hole repairs need to rely on as robust a set of calculations as those who construct bridges that span San Francisco Bay?\n\nThere ARE standards to become a Licensed Professional Engineer in CE, ME, EE, ChemE, and there are standards  for those interested in Computer Engineering as well. I suspect that the number of CEs that are LPEs far far exceeds those who are Software Engineers...\n\nRight now I know of no "search engine" that can tell me instantly how many engineers are in the US and the world. Further there is no simple query that I know of that would separate out those that are restricted to "computer code writers". I suspect that if and when such search engines and query facilites are built it will be by those who have a thorough knowledge of both Computer Science and Engineering...
321436
Actually a man named Ray Kurzweil (something of a big name in these circles) has been writing about this very topic for the past twenty years. Kurzweil is a researcher, inventor, and developer of computer electronics as well as the recipient of a couple presidential awards. Furthermore he is a published author of numerous books and articles regarding technology and human interactions with technology. \n\nOne of the things that he points out is that computers are becoming more and more sophisticated and capable of carrying out more and more computations at faster and faster rates with the passing of each year. That’s not to say that your machine is doing this, but that we’re creating computers that are faster and able to hold more information constantly. As a result we’re rapidly approaching a time when computers are going to be as capable of processing information as the human brain. According to some of his predictions we should be first seeing these advanced machines within the next ten to fifteen years. And with market demands in the US being what they are, the price on these machines will have a tendency to steadily decrease as the technology for making these computers becomes cheaper and more readily available. As a result we as a public may end up owning one of these smarter computers within the next twenty years. \n\nThere are two additional points that he makes though: It will also be likely that research into increasing computer speeds as well as processing, memory storage and retrieval probably wont stop at the point of having a computer that’s as ‘intelligent’ as the human mind. Also, with the aforementioned decline in prices in creating these smarter computers and technology making the production of these machines easier, we may find these computers cropping up in smaller and smaller packages and in more and more things. As a result, we could possibly find ourselves surrounded with this technology quite easily. \n\nI’m not trying to paint a Matrix looking future, but it is possible that we may find ourselves outnumbered by our machines, so we had better have a good idea of what we’re doing when we create them.
23908
Computer science is not quite the same thing as software engineering. I'll assume that you meant computer science, and suggest a concept that is theoretically central but not often applicable in practical settings.\n\nI would argue for computability theory - the study of what exactly a computer is and what it can accomplish. Specifically, the concept of an abstract universal Turing machine, and how pretty much every computing machine currently known can be emulated by a TM.\n\nThis is a key underlying concept because it gives an formal definition of what computation actually is and provides a framework for understanding what can and cannot be computed.
424826
This is a book about learning, that arrives at a new paradigm by merging ideas from biology, cybernetics and psychology. \nThe American psychologist Gary Cziko takes inspiration from the 19th-century French psychologist Claude Bernard, who "discovered" the self-regulating nature of living organisms. \nBernard realized that each living organism is a system built to maintain a constant internal state in the face of changing external conditions. The regulation of this "mieliu interieur" is life itself, because it is this stable state that gives the organism its independence from the environment, its identity. This is the dividing line that separates animate and inanimate matter: inanimate matter obeys Newton's laws of cause and effect, animate matter tends to maintain its state no matter what external forces are applied. Unlike objects, whose state is changed when a force is applied, the state of a living organism is not changed by an external force. The living organism, as long as it is alive, maintains its state constant. \nThe "purposeful" behavior of a living organism is the reaction to environmental forces: the organism needs to act in order to continuously restore its state. A body seems to "want", "intend", "desire" to maintain its internal state (either by eating, moving, sleeping, etc), a state that, ultimately, is a combination of chemical content and temperature. Living bodies appear to act purposedly, but they are simply reacting to the environment. \nFor Bernard "freedom" is independence from the environment. Control of the internal state allows a living organism to live in many different environments. The living organism is "free" in that is not a slave of its environment. \nBernard's idea of self-regulation extended to all living organisms. Humans are not the only ones to have "goals". \nNow Cziko turns to another important precursor, although in a completely different discipline: cybernetics. \nThe American electrical engineer William Powers extended these ideas to a hierarchical organization of control systems. First of all, he realized that a control system controls what it senses: it controls its input (the perception), not its output (the behavior). A thermostat controls the temperature, not the gas consumed by the heater. Organisms change their behavior, but they do it in order to control a perception. Behavior is the control of perception. \nNext, he envisioned a system which is made of a pyramid of control systems, each one sending its output to some "lower-level" control systems. The lowest level in the hierarchy is made of control systems that use sensors to sense the environment and effectors to act on the environment, and some "reference level" to determine what they have to maintain constant. For example, a thermostat would sense the environment's temperature, effect the heater and maintain constant the measured temperature. At a higher level, a control system senses and effects the reference level of lower-level control systems. An engine could direct a thermostat to maintain a certain temperature. The reference level of the lower level is determined by the control systems of the higher level. \nLiving organisms are made of such hierarchies of control systems. "Instinctive" behavior is the control system (organized in a hierarchy) that the organism inherits at birth. They determine internally what parameters have to be maintain constant, and at which magnitude. Behavior is a backward chain of behaviors: walking up the hierarchy one finds out why the system is doing what it is doing (e.g., it is keeping the temperature at some many degrees because the engine is running at so many RPMs because... etc etc). The hierarchy is a hierarchy of goals (goals that have to be achieved in order to achieve other goals in order to achieve other goals in order to...) \nNext, Cziko turns
1141358
When I read the Foundation trilogy for the first time I wondered about this too. I thought a bit about the equivalent of a gas law\np V T =constant for populations as deduced from the behavious of molecules. But I guess that even planet size populations are too small to be predictable. \n\nPsychohistory  as a science exist (see my references)  but it different from the Asimovian  science.
1158227
what you just described is what is reeferred to in political science as state of nature.human beings have grown beyond that today the general agreement is that we need each other.that is why marshal mcluhan's global village concept is such a success
348945
Technically, all things are written in a long enough random sequence of numbers.  For example, the number Pi contains an infinite sequence of unpatterned numbers, so if you looked deeply enough, you could find any piece of information you wanted was already encoded in it.  But in practical terms, you can only find what you already know, so it has no predictive value.  So the answer is, no, a random event generator is not a real way to see into the future.
622277
Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make diamond. If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can make computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we can make potatoes. \nTodays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It's like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really snap them together the way you'd like. \n\nIn the future, nanotechnology will let us take off the boxing gloves. We'll be able to snap together the fundamental building blocks of nature easily, inexpensively and in most of the ways permitted by the laws of physics. This will be essential if we are to continue the revolution in computer hardware beyond about the next decade, and will also let us fabricate an entire new generation of products that are cleaner, stronger, lighter, and more precise. \n\nIt's worth pointing out that the word "nanotechnology" has become very popular and is used to describe many types of research where the characteristic dimensions are less than about 1,000 nanometers. For example, continued improvements in lithography have resulted in line widths that are less than one micron: this work is often called "nanotechnology." Sub-micron lithography is clearly very valuable (ask anyone who uses a computer!) but it is equally clear that conventional lithography will not let us build semiconductor devices in which individual dopant atoms are located at specific lattice sites. Many of the exponentially improving trends in computer hardware capability have remained steady for the last 50 years. There is fairly widespread belief that these trends are likely to continue for at least another several years, but then conventional lithography starts to reach its limits. \n\nIf we are to continue these trends we will have to develop a new manufacturing technology which will let us inexpensively build computer systems with mole quantities of logic elements that are molecular in both size and precision and are interconnected in complex and highly idiosyncratic patterns. Nanotechnology will let us do this. \n\nWhen it's unclear from the context whether we're using the specific definition of "nanotechnology" (given here) or the broader and more inclusive definition (often used in the literature), we'll use the terms "molecular nanotechnology" or "molecular manufacturing." \n\nWhatever we call it, it should let us \n\nGet essentially every atom in the right place. \nMake almost any structure consistent with the laws of physics that we can specify in molecular detail. \nHave manufacturing costs not greatly exceeding the cost of the required raw materials and energy. \n\nThere are two more concepts commonly associated with nanotechnology: \nPositional assembly. \nMassive parallelism. \n\nClearly, we would be happy with any method that simultaneously achieved the first three objectives. However, this seems difficult without using some form of positional assembly (to get the right molecular parts in the right places) and some form of massive parallelism (to keep the costs down). \nThe need for positional assembly implies an interest in molecular robotics, e.g., robotic devices that are molecular both in their size and precision. These molecular scale positional devices are likely to resemble very small versions of their everyday macroscopic counterparts. Positional assembly is frequently used in normal macroscopic manufacturing today, and provides tremendous advantages. Imagine trying to build a bicycle with both hands tied behind your back! The idea of manipulating and posit
834169
An idea for a nanobot or robot that would be bad news for the world, depending what it could use as building material.\n\nWe really don't want machines replicating in a geometric progression... which they probably couldn't anyway.\n\nIn Sci-Fi they seed places with these nanobots and when activated they build combat equipment after making enough of themselves. That's just fiction though and lets hope it stays that way.
570121
Is this the give typewriters to an infinate number of monkeys with infinate time and they will eventually \nproduce the entire works of Shakespere??\n\nbasically saying that eventually by pure luck / randomness\nthey will hit exactlt the right keys etc etc.\nOr If you keep at it, you get there in the end.
215211
It's impossible to be all-knowing. The more you know, the more complex your brain would need to be. And that increases the amount of information there is to know. Can a computer be aware of every atom it is composed of? And to know the future is even more impossible.
807994
See my article, Computers, Artificial Intelligence, Brains, and Souls.\n\nhttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/catholiccommunity/message/39009\n\n\n\n\n---
874114
When the term "nanotechnology" was independently coined and popularized by Eric Drexler, who at the time was unaware of Taniguchi's usage, it referred to a future manufacturing technology based on molecular machine systems. The premise was that molecular-scale biological analogies of traditional machine components demonstrated that molecular machines were possible, and that a manufacturing technology based on the mechanical functionality of these components (such as gears, bearings, motors, and structural members) would enable programmable, positional assembly to atomic specification (see the original reference PNAS-1981). The physics and engineering performance of exemplar designs were analyzed in the textbook NanosystemsThe National Science Foundation (a major source of funding for nanotechnology in the United States) funded researcher David Berube to study the field of nanotechnology. His findings are published in the monograph “Nano-Hype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz.” This published study (with a foreword by Mihail Roco, head of the NNI) concludes that much of what is sold as “nanotechnology” is in fact a recasting of straightforward materials science, which is leading to a “nanotech industry built solely on selling nanotubes, nanowires, and the like” which will “end up with a few suppliers selling low margin products in huge volumes."