Not entirely sure if this is numerology or gematria or what! But those of you into finding meaning in this sort of thing, try putting the following pattern …
Into a Conway’s Life simulator such as https://playgameoflife.com/
Continue readingCategory Archives: Philosophy
“ERIC”: How a Bad Think-Thing Destroyed the World
“ERIC”
How a Bad Think-Thing Destroyed the World
A short story by Vic Grout
Download as a PDF: https://vicgrout.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/eric-1.pdf
On the planet ‘Arth’ (which, if it helps, you can think of as being like Earth but without the ‘E’), things were going pretty smoothly. Arth society was organised roughly into three groups of people: doers, thinkers, and leaders. There was no great difference in status or esteem among the three groups but there were a good many more doers than thinkers and a lot more of both than leaders.
So, yes, most people were doers: they did things. They found raw materials and turned them into what people needed; they made clothes, built shelter, grew food; they moved it all to where it had to go; they repaired and cleaned. They cared and treated mind and body; kept people safe; raised families; looked after the young, the old and the ill; they taught new generations. There were also doers that entertained; made nice things to look at, told stories, played music or sport. All of these doers together made Arth a comfortable and happy place to live.
Continue readingFully Automated Luxury … Dancing? (A futuristic conspiracy theory)
Fully Automated Luxury … Dancing? (A futuristic conspiracy theory in the making)
Vic Grout, Professor of Computing Futures, Wrexham Glyndŵr University
Download the PDF version: Fully Automated Luxury Dancing – Download Version 1
[Note/Disclaimer: Some of the discussion in this piece is shockingly brief. A limit of 10,000 words was planned and (just) adhered to.]
We’ve encountered Michael Moorcock’s masterpiece, Dancers at the End of Time, before on these pages: both as an example of sci-fi doing what it does best (providing a blank canvas for a bigger discussion) and the problems futurologists have with not seeing key disruptive technology (the Internet, in Moorcock’s case). But, for this post, an entirely different question to ponder: who exactly ARE ‘The Dancers’?
Because answering that puzzle (there aren’t that many clues to go on in the novel itself and obviously it is only a story) takes us to considering problems in (apparently) entirely different fields: environment, politics, economics, etc. (which is the important point really, of course) and may lead us to a view of the future quite at odds with current thinking right across the political spectrum. Specifically, what’s usually wrong with long-term ‘futuristic’ political and economic prophesising? Particularly the very well-intentioned left-wing stuff. What’s the one thing that everything from Karl Marx’s Das Capital to Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism appear to take for granted? (Spoiler alert: in simple terms it’s the belief that just because a political/economic system’s crap, it will naturally yield to something better – but we’ll come to that.)
And so it continues …
Following on from the recent More Predictions Coming True? post, ‘more predictions coming truer!’
See Shazam for People? in 2014 …
Ends.
Under the lamp
Turing's Radiator 