What is the most badass technology developed by humans?

[Clinton Huxley]

Neither is writing.

A pen is...

[Trolldor]

So is a tape recorder.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Don't confuse the medium with the message.

[Trolldor]

Hence my correlating verbal language to written, and pen to tape recorder, but not each category to one another.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Hence my correlating verbal language to written, and pen to tape recorder, but not each category to one another.

I'm good with that. A guy once scolded for making "fake" copies of WWII documents for my site. His strongest argument was "they didn't even have computers back then!"

[Don't Panic]

Hence my correlating verbal language to written, and pen to tape recorder, but not each category to one another.

I'm good with that. A guy once scolded for making "fake" copies of WWII documents for my site. His strongest argument was "they didn't even have computers back then!"

Yes they did, computers have been invented at least 3 times in the past 200 years.

[Clinton Huxley]

Verbal language allows only limited transmission of knowledge into the future, written allows knowledge accumulation. Verbal language is a pre-requisite but written language is the enabler of a technological society.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Hence my correlating verbal language to written, and pen to tape recorder, but not each category to one another.

I'm good with that. A guy once scolded for making "fake" copies of WWII documents for my site. His strongest argument was "they didn't even have computers back then!"

Yes they did, computers have been invented at least 3 times in the past 200 years.

Yeah, but that was his best one. I was amused. He later built a website with "200,000 errors to be found at" my site. I'm glad I kept him off the streets for a while.

[hackenslash]

Computers. In a couple decades, they'll be smarter than we are.

Roger Penrose might disagree with that. See The Emperor's New Mind.

[JOZeldenrust]

Why writing? Why not verbal language?

Because it's much harder to record and access complex ideas in verbal language.

But without verbal language there was no exchange of ideas at all.

Language isn't really a technology

Neither is writing.

The distinction between behaviour and technology isn't all that clear. Technology is an aspect of human behaviour, and it would seem to me that there is a gradual scale of non-technological behaviour to technological behaviour measured by the mount of material used in the behaviour that isn't part of the human body. So speaking is more technological then punching, writing is more technological then speaking, printing is more technological then writing etc.

Sure spoken language enabled the exchange of ideas, and without spoken language we wouldn't have written language, but writing is the greater technological advancement because it's more technological then spoken language, and because it enabled the transfer of ideas over periods greater then a human life span.

My suggestion wasn't entirely serious, though I do think writing is the most important invention in human history. It's just that questions like these are meaningless. You could argue that any technology is best. You could make an excellent case for division of labour, or money, or the pointed stick, all being the greatest technological advancement.

[Ian]

Computers. In a couple decades, they'll be smarter than we are.

Roger Penrose might disagree with that. See The Emperor's New Mind.

I prefer Ray Kurzweil.

[JOZeldenrust]

Computers. In a couple decades, they'll be smarter than we are.

Roger Penrose might disagree with that. See The Emperor's New Mind.

Indeed. Computers are in many ways already smarter hen we are, but they aren't conscious. It'll be more then a couple of decades before computers become conscious, as the way computers are constructed doesn't lend itself well to the emergence of consciousness: there is only a symbolic link between the "mind" (the hard drive, RAM and processor, mostly) of the computer and its "senses" (input devices). Computers don't "mean" anything. It's the human users that assign meaning to what a computer does.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Computers. In a couple decades, they'll be smarter than we are.

Roger Penrose might disagree with that. See The Emperor's New Mind.

Indeed. Computers are in many ways already smarter hen we are, but they aren't conscious. It'll be more then a couple of decades before computers become conscious, as the way computers are constructed doesn't lend itself well to the emergence of consciousness: there is only a symbolic link between the "mind" (the hard drive, RAM and processor, mostly) of the computer and its "senses" (input devices). Computers don't "mean" anything. It's the human users that assign meaning to what a computer does.

How do we know that "consciousness" will ever be a property of a non-biological entity anyway?

[JOZeldenrust]

Computers. In a couple decades, they'll be smarter than we are.

Roger Penrose might disagree with that. See The Emperor's New Mind.

Indeed. Computers are in many ways already smarter hen we are, but they aren't conscious. It'll be more then a couple of decades before computers become conscious, as the way computers are constructed doesn't lend itself well to the emergence of consciousness: there is only a symbolic link between the "mind" (the hard drive, RAM and processor, mostly) of the computer and its "senses" (input devices). Computers don't "mean" anything. It's the human users that assign meaning to what a computer does.

How do we know that "consciousness" will ever be a property of a non-biological entity anyway?

We don't, at least as far as I can tell. We can tell that computers that are anything like what we have today, even if they have vastly more capacity, will not become conscious, as consciousness requires some connection between stimulus and representation.

[amused]

It's just that questions like these are meaningless. You could argue that any technology is best. You could make an excellent case for division of labour, or money, or the pointed stick, all being the greatest technological advancement.

See James Burke's Connections