When will we stop to understand the world around us?

peasant

Maybe we have already ...

I don't know ...maybe it's my advancing age or my braincells are dying quicker than I thought, but I can't shake the feeling that technology has overtaken my mental capabilities and that I have lost control ...and most importantly, that I'm not the only one.

simple example:
We all fly happily around the world in modern airplanes, because we think we know how they work and we trust others to assemble and control them correctly.

now ...if you were to take apart a modern airbus down to the last screw, down to every single wire, down to every single electronic component on the PCB's and scattered all the bits in random order on the floor of a big hangar ...do you think there is one single person who would know how to put it all together and make it work?

I don't think so.

All the components have become so complicated that most of them need their own group of experts to understand them and make them work. And because they are so complicated, there simply isn't enough brain capacity left to understand it all at once.
The electronics experts will understand how to make the circuit boards work, but they will be baffled by the hydraulic valve that the board is supposed to control so they will need to consult the hydraulics experts and only the aerodynamics engineer will be able to tell them if they came up with the right results together.


And that's just aeroplanes ...never mind nuclear power stations or hadron colliders.

The ordinary, non-expert-in-the-field person has at best a vague idea of what's that all about ...yet we are supposed to make conscious decisions if we want one in our backyard or not.

I can't help it ...but I'm scared

deadhead13

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Astrogeek

I know a handful of men who could put together an aeroplane... No one person is ever going to be able to understand or have the talent to design and build everything modern society uses.
Hence the need for civilisation?

Joey the lips

I bad news for you... Your heading towards a panic attack or the madhouse. Your own body countains the most complex peice of machinery that is impossible to control "THe heart" and the most comple maze "the mind" it does not stop people having heart and brain operations.

This is life i am afraid. Just concentrate on whats beautiful and relax!

Is it necessarily a bad thing, though? You're right in saying that the vast majority of people don't have a clue about the vast majority of technology (or anything, for that matter), but the simple beauty of our modern society is that we're capable of interconnecting our expertises and forming an end product that is in some ways, technologically, greater than the sum of its contributers' contributions.

What I'm saying, basically, is that we can never know all that our contemporaries know, and it's that which is great about our modern civilisation. Why? Because it means we have amassed such a huge amount of knowledge that it's impossible to know it all.

I once read of a man who, in the 17th century, had read every book there was. It's impossible to even dream of doing that in today's world. Long gone are the days of the polymaths, we're now in the days of the specialist. This is a direct consequence of our level of advancement, and one of the issues with that is that we cannot know how a plane that flies us works while knowing many other things, too.

I'm not sure if it's a bad thing; I personally feel that it's a good thing. If it were any different we would be living 1000 years in the past.

turgon

peasant wrote: »

now ...if you were to take apart a modern airbus down to the last screw, down to every single wire, down to every single electronic component on the PCB's and scattered all the bits in random order on the floor of a big hangar ...do you think there is one single person who would know how to put it all together and make it work?

Welcome to the division of labour

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

peasant

The thing is though ...me not understanding the workings of the universe, the atom or my own body for that matter, that's one thing. All of these work (or stop to work) without my doing, and more importantly, without somebody elses doing.

Once I submit myself to manmade things however, the picture changes.
There now is a massive amount of trust involved. I trust that all those experts really knew what they were doing, that the different groups of experts weren't so far up their own fields of expertise that they still understood each other and the design brief and that the expert comittee at the top checked and double checked it all before it was realesed to market/switched on/let fly.

I'm far from wearing a tin foil hat, but the more I think about this, the more I understand those that do.

Something else:
Technological development is exponential. What you learn at university today will be an old hat once you graduate. To keep up with technological development in your field, you have to ever narrow your horizon to keep looking ahead. Early nuclear scientists were happy just to split the atom ...these days every subatomic particle is a nuclear science in itself.
Will there come a day when all specialties are so special, immense and intricate that we loose cohesion? Will we still be able to see and understand the big picture in a few years/decades?
Who will have enough knowledge and understanding to bring direction to this information overload, sift through it and extract the useful from the merely interesting ...and more importantly ...who will keep it in check so that we don't accidentally kill ourselves because we overlooked a minor, but important detail in the mountain of details?

turgon

(#7) +1; oh to have donegalellas eloquence!!

I think that this topic has great relevance when examining economic and political systems that certain people propose. I suppose the primary reason such division of labour has occurred is because it is fundamentally more efficient, and in our capitalist world efficiency brings rewards to its maker. In fact in our Internet age to find sizable one project that is controlled by one person is unheard of.

If I consider the operating system Im using (Linux) I realize that thousands of people have contributed, and all under their own specializations. You probably have many people who designed the GUI and never really looked at whats under the hood. But that makes sense. Theres no point in have two people who are moderately good at GUI's and moderately good at OS Kernels; you should have one person excellent at GUI's and one excellent at Kernels; even if this means they dont know what theyre doing.

To come back to economics, I think division of labour is one aspect that fails in communism (which would be the alternative). Communists are convinced we all need to be in touch with the finished product; that we need pride in our work (and many communists will ironically point to Open Source ^). However if every component designer of an aeroplane needs to know the whole design to be in touch with the final plane, efficiency will go down. There simply will not be enough aeroplanes! End €3 flights to Geneva!!

Its one of those things that on the face of it look "bad." But if you look deeper you will see that it really is the only way.

turgon

peasant wrote: »

Will there come a day when all specialties are so special, immense and intricate that we loose cohesion? Will we still be able to see and understand the big picture in a few years/decades?

Well, fundamentally, if such specialization is unsustainable economically then it will not survive. So I couldnt see specializations becoming irrelevant or out of touch with reality.

peasant wrote: »

Who will have enough knowledge and understanding to bring direction to this information overload, sift through it and extract the useful from the merely interesting

In a capitalist system, if it merely interesting then it will not be a viable career path but rather a hobby.

peasant

peasant wrote: »

Technological development is exponential. What you learn at university today will be an old hat once you graduate. To keep up with technological development in your field, you have to ever narrow your horizon to keep looking ahead. Early nuclear scientists were happy just to split the atom ...these days every subatomic particle is a nuclear science in itself.

Come over to Expand Your Horizons and maybe we can widen that horizon for you again.:pac: (I'm sorry, that was a terrible plug).

Is it necessarily a bad thing that our body of knowledge is requiring of us greater and greater levels of specialisation? I don't feel that it is. It's the only way (with our current intellect) to progress at a sufficient rate.

Will there come a day when all specialties are so special, immense and intricate that we loose cohesion? Will we still be able to see and understand the big picture in a few years/decades?

I doubt it. You have to remember that not every person who enters into study of a particular field specialises so greatly. There are many people who know a large amount about a particular broad area, while there are others who specialise their study to particular elements of that area. The people who understand a large amount -- in not so great a detail -- are the elements of our knowledge base that will provide the cohesion.

I doubt we'll ever lose sight of the greater picture, although it may become somewhat out of focus for many people.

What I've said above is my hope, at least.

Who will have enough knowledge and understanding to bring direction to this information overload, sift through it and extract the useful from the merely interesting

You could say that about today's sum total of knowledge too, couldn't you? There is such a huge amount of information out there, yet what's important still manages to surface, does it not?

...and more importantly ...who will keep it in check so that we don't accidentally kill ourselves because we overlooked a minor, but important detail in the mountain of details?

Nobody, I suppose. It's all part of the fun of life.

peasant

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Interesting question.
The history of (technological) knowledge has certainly been one of attempted mastery of everything.
Early technology helped man to survive and develop, with the industrial revolution came exploration and experimentation on a large scale, giving the impression that we understood and knew all that there was to know.

Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899 (attributed)

So how do we cope with the realisation that the more we know, the more remains to be discovered?
I know that my ego has taken some denting in realising that there are many things around us that I will simply never have the capability to fully understand.

Ostrom

-JammyDodger- wrote: »

Is it necessarily a bad thing that our body of knowledge is requiring of us greater and greater levels of specialisation? I don't feel that it is. It's the only way (with our current intellect) to progress at a sufficient rate

At the same time, I can see what peasant means. It does take a lot more self-control to focus down with so much to intrigue, and so many ways to source information. I find myself spending 30%+ of my day picking at other topics that interest me when I'm supposed to be 'specialising', and it frustrates me all the more when I come across something new from within a field I have vague knowledge of that I dont fully understand. Its too tempting not to seek out the information, or to throw yourself into a new pattern of learning.

It is a shame that education now places so much emphasis on specialisation and utility without allowing students to expand

I cant remember the source, but one of my favourite quotes is 'education is the progressive discovery of our own ignorance' (* google tells me it was Will Durant) - or knowing more and more about less and less

scanlas

This causes individuals to take on board ridiculous beliefs such as that of varous religions. Ancient civilisations would build incredible feats of engineering such as the pyramids which allowed them to imprint their beliefs on their citiznes thus gaining control over the population. People would see the pyramid and be both amazed and confused, then the pharoah says the God of Sand created the universe and says you will go to hell if you don't obey the rules I lay down in the ancient manuscript. The average citizen thinks, well they can build pyramids really well so they must be right about this God and his rules they speak of. Thus the population is under control of it's rulers.

It's similar today.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Earthhorse

To answer the OP's question, as it has already been answered, this actually happened a long time ago. We may never entirely understand the world around us (and by we, I mean the human race) but we reached the point where no one person could remember and understand all we had learnt a long, long time ago. No disagreement there.

However, when it comes to whether this being a benevolent thing I am not so sure I agree. So far, the examples posted have been, believe it or not, trivial. There is no specific need for one person to know how to piece a Boeing 747 together. Provided the people who do it know what they're doing, and they are trained crew who know how to maintain or fix the plane there is little to worry about. One might worry about the flight crew's monopoly of knowledge once the aircraft has taken off; they could effectively hold the passengers to ransom. But there is little incentive for them to do so - the scenario is quite dramatic but not really realistic.

There are, unfortunately, plenty of realistic scenarios where the threat is more real. Recently, we've seen the near collapse of the banking industry. It's a complex situation but one which largely involved people with specialist knowledge exploting those without it. Those who knew better - technically better, that is, they did not know morally better, or they did but they didn't care - gave loans to people who could not afford to repay them (and who did not know they could not afford to repay them). As a result, people have lost their homes and their jobs at a root level, and possibly their relationships, their security, their future and their faith in those who "know better" (so it's not all bad).

The bottom line is, this will happen again in the future (don't think I'm saying similar exploitations did not take place in the past) or something similar to it will, wherever there are huge incentives (such as big bonuses) to do so and the division of labour allows you to pull a fast one. It'd be nice to think that the various checks and balances we have in place (government, regulatory bodies) will prevent it but unfortunately in areas as complex as finance, politics and law, there is probably more incentive to obfuscate than others; these areas are essentially exponentially complex, unlike jet engines, say, which must obey the laws of physics, these fields are the sole province of those who govern them and they have sole say, in many cases, as to what goes on in them.

There's no reason to believe the sky is falling but I wouldn't be so quick to think it's all good.

Ostrom

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

A personal hate of mine. I'm amazed that so long after Sokal et al, and Latours 'other' writings on relativity that the approach still has currency. The worst of excuses to avoid empirical work; extremes of epistemic relativism in social science are truly awful.

peasant

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Who would you think was happiest / most content ?

- the bronze age farmer who had all the knowledge and technology to have a reasonably secure existence and left all the unexplainable things to the shamans/druids/gods

- the victorian who believed that while he personally might not know "everything" that mankind as a whole soon would

- or modern man who has to realise that every answer yields ever more questions and that despite his best efforts to keep up with every new development he can only hang on to a few threads in the massive web of knowledge


Which is worse ...knowing that you simply don't know, or knowing that despite your best efforts you still won't understand?


There would also be an effect on society as a whole. To an ever increasing amount, people won't be communicating with each other, not even at each other anymore, but past each other. Different aereas of expertise don't converge anymore, even simplyfied concepts these days are hugely complicated and just go over people's heads.

Important decisions for society as a whole can't be argued within society itself anymore. Groups of experts have to try and "dumb down" the principles and implications of what is proposed and society is then supposed to make a decision, not knowing the full extent of what is being proposed. Even if they tried to understand the full extend, they wouldn't be able to for lack of expertise.

Decisions are made on buzzwords, hazy ideas and slogans because the facts are simply too complicated to understand.

Simple example ...the Lisbon treaty discussion. To actually discuss the treaty and its implications, the whole country would have to take a month out and go to lectures every day on how the EU works now and how it is supposed to work post treaty.

Yet we are led into making a decision by leaders who openly confess that they themselves haven't got the foggiest what the treaty is actually about.

This opens the back door to all sorts of primitive and irrational sideline and off-topic arguments that get dragged into the Lisbon discussion even though they've got nothing to do with it.

The decision will not be made on the subject matter, but on a subjective and emotional level, where one guages ones attitude towards Europe as one understands it, throws in a bit of reward or punishment for the governement for good measure ...and that will be it ...nothing to do with the treaty.

And all because it's just too complicated to understand.

Now imagine the referendum were about something that is actually really important

tech77

peasant wrote: »

Maybe we have already ...

I don't know ...maybe it's my advancing age or my braincells are dying quicker than I thought, but I can't shake the feeling that technology has overtaken my mental capabilities and that I have lost control ...and most importantly, that I'm not the only one.

simple example:
We all fly happily around the world in modern airplanes, because we think we know how they work and we trust others to assemble and control them correctly.

now ...if you were to take apart a modern airbus down to the last screw, down to every single wire, down to every single electronic component on the PCB's and scattered all the bits in random order on the floor of a big hangar ...do you think there is one single person who would know how to put it all together and make it work?

I don't think so.

All the components have become so complicated that most of them need their own group of experts to understand them and make them work. And because they are so complicated, there simply isn't enough brain capacity left to understand it all at once.
The electronics experts will understand how to make the circuit boards work, but they will be baffled by the hydraulic valve that the board is supposed to control so they will need to consult the hydraulics experts and only the aerodynamics engineer will be able to tell them if they came up with the right results together.


And that's just aeroplanes ...never mind nuclear power stations or hadron colliders.

The ordinary, non-expert-in-the-field person has at best a vague idea of what's that all about ...yet we are supposed to make conscious decisions if we want one in our backyard or not.

I can't help it ...but I'm scared

This is a Star Trek Borg thing, isn't it.
Individual vs the hive mind and all that...

tech77

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Surely this won't always be the case though.
Development of human superknowledge/super-intelligence isn't beyond the realms of possibility.
The only real issue would be the psychological implications/desirability of this.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Earthhorse

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

To speculate, I would imagine he's talking about the ability to integrate technology directly into our lives; a chip in the brain.

I know Kung Fu.

peasant

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Hmmm ...no matter how much we devide society into subsections/interest groups or whatever you want to call it ...in the case of Ireland we still live on the one island, we still get sick, we still have children, we still need to organise ourselves within these parameters. Whether that is a partnership of convenience/necessity or a society is an excercise for the linguists, but it still has to be done.

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

I think even what we have now can hardly be called a democracy. Other than selecting so called "representatives" every now and then, the people have very little influence over what is decided in their name. In regard to the ever more complex issues at stake, that is probably for the better.
There is one proviso however: The current crop of politicians (be that in Ireland or elswhere) are usually not known for their expertise in certain fields but rather for some obscure social skills that keep getting them elected.
Difficult decisions get referred to specialist committees or outside advisors. As this will be increasingly the case, we would need "leaders" that at least have the expertise/capacity to understand (and more importantly: question!)the summarised recommendations of those advisors.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

peasant

Both "democracy" and "society" are subjects which could be discussed endlessly, but they are only peripheral to the subject of this thread.

Taking it as read that any individual no longer has the capacity to completely understand all the issues that arise (and will arise in the rapid developments that are forecast for the future), we're still at a loss though as to how decisions on them can be made.

How can you decide over something that you don't understand? You'll have to rely on those that do to make the "right" decision to make the decision for you / with you.

Traditionally those would be our democratically elected representatives, but as they know as little as we do about any given new technology they would be as much at a loss as we. So they bring in the experts to advise them.

But who then, at the end of the day makes the decisions? Our democratically elected representatives? The men in the white coats by virtue of deciding which information they give out and which possible drawbacks they brush under the carpet? The industrial interest groups who hope to make some money out of this new technology?
And the decision that is finally reached, who is it good for? Everyone or just a select few?

Rule by vested interest has been going on for a long time, even in democracies. But up until now, the people had at least half a chance (if they cared enough) to understand the issues at stake and voice their protest if they found something untoward going on.

What for the future then? Will we become unable to reach a decision on anything or will we just bow to those "in the know", hoping (sometimes against better judgement) that it'll be ok in the end?

peasant

peasant wrote: »

Taking it as read that any individual no longer has the capacity to completely understand all the issues that arise (and will arise in the rapid developments that are forecast for the future), we're still at a loss though as to how decisions on them can be made.

How can you decide over something that you don't understand? You'll have to rely on those that do to make the "right" decision to make the decision for you / with you.

Traditionally those would be our democratically elected representatives, but as they know as little as we do about any given new technology they would be as much at a loss as we. So they bring in the experts to advise them.

But who then, at the end of the day makes the decisions? Our democratically elected representatives? The men in the white coats by virtue of deciding which information they give out and which possible drawbacks they brush under the carpet? The industrial interest groups who hope to make some money out of this new technology?
And the decision that is finally reached, who is it good for? Everyone or just a select few?

Rule by vested interest has been going on for a long time, even in democracies. But up until now, the people had at least half a chance (if they cared enough) to understand the issues at stake and voice their protest if they found something untoward going on.

What for the future then? Will we become unable to reach a decision on anything or will we just bow to those "in the know", hoping (sometimes against better judgement) that it'll be ok in the end?

If we stay with your original question, which was regarding scientific and technological issues, then there's one simple answer: science is not a democracy. One individual person does not and cannot decide which theory is correct and which theory isn't. It doesn't matter if the vast masses of the public don't understand the intricacies of a scientific model; they don't have to wonder if it's correct or not: the scientific method does this for them.

It doesn't necessarily matter how complicated our body of scientific knowledge becomes, what matters is that the integrity of the scientific method is maintained. A different question, which has also been touched on, is what uses will these new scientific and technological models be put to, and who decides what uses they're put to. That's not a question regarding science, it's a question regarding power and politics.

The two questions -- will it matter if the masses don't understand scientific and technological theories/models, and what will these models be used for, and who will decide their uses -- are completely seperate; the two shouldn't be conflated as, in my opinion, the latter question is a political one moreso than a knowledge based one, which was the original question.

peasant

But science and technological advancement doesn't exist in an ivory tower. It affects us all, ever more so and ever faster. The intervals between conception and application of new technologies become ever shorter, with little time to reflect on them, never mind understand them.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

peasant

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Interesting idea, however I see one major glitch:
Who is going to legislate the laws that keep up with development so that disgressors can actually be held accountable?
If the majority of the populace is only interest in affairs within the shadow of their church spire /that affect their back pocket ...who will keep an eye out for the "nashional intrest"? Who will make sure that minorities don't get totally trampled upon or that some ruthless interest group doesn't run away with all the family silver?