Comment 42489

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted June 27, 2010 at 20:22:42

Technological "progress" simply is not necessary for human life and society. Finding the right mix of technologies that work together is. That's why so little of it has gone on historically (and prehistorically). Adopting new technologies en mass is costly and chaotic, and has led to the collapse of many Great Civilizations who didn't totally understand their implications (read Collapse by Jared Diamond for some great examples). I don't disagree that certain new technologies (eg: spaceships) would be nice, but they're by means a NEED in the way that food, water or energy are.

Some evolution is fairly natural - people learning to make, use and repair a technology will inevitably find better ways to do things. Technologies diffuse as people travel, migrate and trade. And plants and animals bred through constant generations of agriculture will (and always have been) improve genetically in terms of traits we desire like drought tolerance or yield. For all of that, it's simply important to let people do it. And the kind of proprietary, totalitarian control that Apple uses with their iPhones would be a pretty good example of how modern elites keep the needed skills and abilities from people who would otherwise find ways to make them better (and still often do - I'll never forget the first time I saw a dude playing Doom at the bar on a Nano).

Wanna really encourage design innovation? Abolish patents. Use the registry to house a grand collection of open-source designs and improvements, starting with the old patent records (which are actually often a great read). Next add a wealth of digital copies of textbooks and industrial publications on a wide variety of technological subjects. And then encourage users to share the site and situation-specific innovations they've developed, and "peer review" each other's works like academic papers.

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