The power and decline of the polymaths

Great article, a little depressing since I identify with the curiosity and breadth of knowledge that these types of intellects develop. I feel that lots of creative thinkers are not, do not want to be, or simply cannot be specialists, and that there is a real value in this versatility and variety. To a large extent it is the breadth, not the depth of knowledge that inspires me.

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath

Phones in Heads

I was just thinking that it seems like people could do this right now if they wanted to. It's the next logical extension from the bluetooth headset. Get a cell phone implanted right under their skin, near their temple lets say, and using the sound transmission properties of the skull, it could speak the phone number calling you, or whatever and no one could hear it. This might be a drawback though: how would you see anything? Perhaps the cell phone is still present so you can see the numbers to dial and this is just a headset implant. The battery life could be really long, and it could be recharged through induction just like my electric toothbrush is today.

Ok so I'll admit it, this is a pretty creepy idea, bordering on the "not good" ideas that I keep from sharing (the ones that I think would be not good for the world), but also how can humanity resist something like this? Once you start getting phones in heads it borders on telepathy and people always want psychic skills, or at least they say they do. You touch your head and communicate with your friends. Do it right, and the numbers go away, replaced with voice command names. It's crazy how doable all this is now. reading a christensen book on disruptive innovations in education. This would be a disruptive innovation in communication - lots of factors that are currently valued in cell phones (nice screen, web, cool features) would have to go away, but whole new applications would be enabled.

question about our global future

ok so no proposed answer to this one, its a question that boggles my mind: how can the world's population be controlled without being inhuman, immoral, inequal, restrictive, or otherwise not nice?

i am reading a book by Thomas Friedman Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America At times he's saying that we need to control the population on the earth' especially as people begin to consume at american levels, but at other times he is calling for an end to energy poverty, to increase the standard of living worldwide.

if we need to fight population growth
to preserve the environment, why would we fight poverty at all? this is the old malthusian dilemma - except that Malthus was a cold unfeeling dude who didn't care about human suffering. the answer is obvious, we fight poverty to fight human suffering. also its important to note that developed countries have lower birth rates, so that could help with overpopulation, but so far they still consume more!

now again though, how do we keep our world livable for ourselves and the other species without doing something like this though, or enforcing a strict one child policy like they do in china? technology is certainly one idea. actively reducing the standard of living of people across the globe (retrogression) is also one idea, and if you look around it has a surprising number of proponents already. still this goes against all human history so far.

I think part of our species essence is to grow change and catalyse things. this philosophy of constant growth and improvement has been with us for a long time and doesn't seem to be going anywhere. this view however means that we must be willing to kill off our species and many others in the process at some point. is this creative destruction or calamity? from one perspective we are accomplishing in thousands of years something that has taken nature millions of years before. as humans we have a tremendous fear of death and change. We also must not forget that we are natural too, and thus our actions are as well.

i hope you realize i am just being provocative to get us thinking about this tremendously difficult issue so that we can hopefully solve it in a way we can all agree on. we are intelligent and concious of these issues so we should be able to do better and realize we don't need to kill things off and cause pain. nonetheless a solution is needed to humanely limit the human impact on the earth. the hope is that we can do this without abandoning our growth.

I think the premise of Friedman's book is that we can do this. I'm not sure I agree though. how can we both continue to increase people's standard of living, not limit population and not impact the environment? we may need to give up our love of growth at some point to keep ourselves alive. I love creativity and new things, so I hope not though. My view, which I share with scientist Steven Hawking, is that we need to prepare now to colonize other planets. That may be one of the only hopes we have to continue humanity's grand dream of universal knowledge.