technology history

Gappy (Giuseppe Pale...) (verified) @__paleo... · 1h If someone had told me in 1990 that I would be sending a post on a microblogging site (not a thing), about writing natural language instructions to an AI agent to create symbolic mathematics, rewrite a paper, then write the code in a readable language (python, not released) to simulate the algorithm in the paper, while on a plane with fast wi-fi (not existing), on a 3lb fast mac with a hi-res color screen (the first powerbook with a color screen came in 1993, 640x400, 7lbs) and 10+ hours of battery life, I would not have believed them. All of these things ranged from the "does not exist yet" to the "are you completely bonkers". 35 years. Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

Ethan Mollick @emollick · 23h This might be the first hot take on how technology tells us how to live our lives, destroying our ability to make human decisions. The technology in question is the sundial. From a 3rd century BCE Roman adaptation of a Greek play, as discussed in Kerr's "The Ordered Day" [Quoted image, block of printed text:] > QUOTED: May the gods destroy the one who first discovered hours and who also first set up a sundial here! He has reduced my day to pieces. For when I was a boy my belly was my sundial, by far the best and more truthful than all those ones. You would eat when it told you, except when there was nothing. Now even what there is, is not eaten, except with solar approval. And thus the town is now so stuffed with sundials, most of the people are on their knees, parched with hunger. (NA 3.3.5, ll. 1–9)

we built tools, to make smaller tools, until we got to atoms and used those to make computers to simulate gravity and light and worlds and mind. progress went invisible (microscopic) - then suddenly the seeds of our photons and bytes bloomed like wildflowers; reshaping the world