107
edits
Changes
→What is Humanity and what makes us different?
Similarly radio. television, advances in transportation increased our ability to cooperate and communicate. Slave labor has now been replaced by machines. But when we invented the transistor we crossed yet another line because soon came logic circuits and the computer. (Yes, I know early computers predated transistors)
Similarly radio. television, advances in transportation increased our ability to cooperate and communicate. Slave labor has now been replaced by machines. But when we invented the transistor we crossed yet another line because soon came logic circuits and the computer. (Yes, I know early computers predated transistors)
With the computer we could offload mental processes to machines. They could calculate far faster and more accurately than humans, and had more accurate memory for data and could compare and manipulate it for us much faster.
With the computer we could offload mental processes to machines. They could calculate far faster and more accurately than humans, and had more accurate memory for data and could compare and manipulate it for us much faster. These machines made it possible to offload a lot of our thinking the way machines allowed us to offload physical labor.
But when computers started to be networked even new emergent propertied surfaced. The networked computers were far more than the sum of their CPUs, memory, and storage. It allowed computers to be optimized for special functions that they made available to the whole network and if any part of the Internet had a new ability then they whole of humanity had that ability. And those abilities combined together to form new abilities as an emergent property of the network.
For example, I used my cell phone app Fandango to look up a movie. It accessed information about the movie from publishers and then accessed where it was playing from data that came from theaters. After selecting the movie I could then buy a ticket. The ticket sale talked to a credit card clearing process and the ticket was sold to me and that sale was communicated back to the theater along with a process that divided up the money to everyong getting their cut which was electronically deposited into their respective accounts.
The app then asked me if I wanted to add it as an event to my calendar, and I touched "Yes". The calendar sent the data to Google where it knew both when and where the movie was.