Oh, goddamn, I suppose there should be a link involved in all that!

This thought was all kicked off by reading this and this.

We should learn from our past, is what I'm saying, 'cause it's on us again and accelerating.

We should learn from our past I'd be happy if we just learned from shit that happened yesterday.

≡ Click to see image ≡
You Maniacs! You blew it up!

The degree of change experienced in the industrial revolution was unheard of in human history and I'd be surprised if we saw that kind of transformation again any time soon.

The people who lived the bulk of their lives during the 1800s saw more and more rapid change than any generations before or since. Imagine: If you were born in 1830 and died in 1910, you'd have seen every aspect of life and work significantly transformed - family structure, use of time, transportation, language, agricultural practices, manufacturing, the value of material objects, education, control of light and home climate through new technology, and so on.

We haven't seen anything like that upheaval since, nothing comparable to going from a relatively primitive, extremely stable through centuries, handmade world of manual labor to a world of mass-manufactured goods and large-scale, regulated social systems. Someone who was alive in 1910, if they were transported to today, would be impressed with the speed, ease and convenience of what we've done with the ideas of the industrial revolution, but there's nothing they wouldn't recognize once its function was understood. But somebody from 1810 would be hard pressed to figure out how a telephone or electric light bulb worked without resorting to religious analogy. Only a very few enlightenment-minded people were beginning to throw around ideas about unseeable forces and empirical evidence at that time.

I do think we'll see tremendous technological change around adapting to our environmental problems, but I don't think it will be on the order of a new industrial revolution any time soon. We're still basically using the models formed in the late 19th century for our social, educational, and business structures, and even our scientific understanding is still based on the methods of modern science posited during the late 1800s.

Our past is China's present. I hope they can weather the Industrial Revolution as well or better than we did. Maybe they'll be a little quicker about environmental and child-labor controls than we were. If not, we'd better get used to taking asthma medicine and water purification tablets and reading about seven thousand dead in a Xinjian coal mine collapse.

Not that they shouldn't move forward; after all, the West did and look at the life of leisure we live. How could we deny that to the rest of the world?

The singularity is coming! It will save us!

Seriously, though, I think there's something to the notion that technology is on the verge of advancing/determining itself and exceeding our capacity to control or understand it. Whether that involves genuine artificial intelligence or not, I don't know (I see that as more of a metaphysical question rather than a practical one), but it probably will involve nanotechnology, which is, IMO, pretty damn scary.

I guess my point is that while we can speculate about resource availability, etc., potential advances in technology throw a huge wildcard into the equation.

I don't think the change is going to be technological. I'm not saying we're going through the next iteration of Industrial Revolution.

No, I think the change we're going to go through will be biological.

Our environment is going to be radically changed. We are going to need to make radical changes in order to survive.

Well, I can't speak for others, but I'm really looking forward to growing gills. That's how it'll happen, isn't it?