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Sent from: sasha1@netcom.com (Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko)
[Forwarding my own message from the transhuman mailing list.
The message is a short reply to a recent post on the great difficulties
of adaptation to information technologies; this topic is also extensively
discussed in the issue of Futurist I found today in my mail box ]
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I would like to note that the information revolution is not imposing
transformation requirements on people that are unheard of in human
history, which is filled with transitions both more profound and more
abrupt. Transitions from nomadic life to settlements, or from
agriculture to industry seem much more difficult. Wars and natural
disasters put many nations into radically new and very hard situations.
In the personal domain, the death of the bread-winner in the family, sudden
disease, fire, and other personal disasters put billions of people into
conditions requiring extremely urgent and dramatic changes in lifestyle
and occupation.
People in modern industiral societies are more affluent and more educated
then they ever have been, with much greater social protection and a wealth
of information spoon-fed to them about the nature of the situation and what
they should do about it. Not to mention that the developments here are not
disasters, but positive evolutionary breakthroughs.
The only historically unprecedented thing that I see in the current
situation is massive whining, coming from infantile people spoiled by
overprotection of the state.
Can you imagine a nomadic warrior and his horse spending day after day
complaining about unusual, difficult, and stressful tasks of transition
to earth-plowing, and demanding financial assistance and psychological
counseling?
If we do have a protective state, though, it better be governed by
visionaries who understand where the society is headed in the long-term
and can direct it so that people do not get "suddenly hit" by trends that
were clearly visible decades ago.
With the existing emphasis on catering to the current whims of their
shortsighted infants, modern governments seem about as capable of guiding
social and technological transformations as a permissive grandmother - of
bringing up a warrior.
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Alexander Chislenko <sasha1@netcom.com>
Home: http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html
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