From: Bathsheba Grossman (sheba@protoshape.com)
Date: Mon Mar 25 2002 - 11:46:16 EET
On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, Priit Kull wrote:
> There exists a future scenario stating that the end of the world,
> as known to us, arrives in the form of the development
> singularity. That means that the development of technology will
> accelerate endlessly and the time between the generations is ever
> shorter and shorter. If you buy a fancy new gadget that allows you
> to produce more, cheaper and in the better quality than your
> competition, it makes your competition very disturbed and they
> invest in the next generation of the technology and outperform
> you. If the space of develoment exceeds the possibility to earn back
> the investment you will be dead in either way. If you do not invest
> you are outperformed by the competition, if you invest you could
> never pay back your debts. How the world will function after this
> event horizon, ther is no way to tell.
Pish. We've been living beyond this development horizon for many
years in at least one industry: the PC. Any computer that's a year
old is a piece of ordure compared to a new computer: half the speed,
half the memory, half the computrons, hopelessly obsolete peripherals.
We don't like this because it means that most of us, most of the time,
have lame machines. But it doesn't constitute an economic disaster,
in which it's never worthwhile to invest in any computer and you're
better off learning to lay bricks, because the value of a computer
comes not from what it does, but from what we do. That you, my
competition, can compute ten times faster than me doesn't matter,
because I'm not selling raw computrons, but my particular application
of them.
Prototypers likewise. While the technology is still crude, these
performance measures matter. This is still an embryonic,
patent-hobbled field, and I agree that short-sighted business models
and (at least the appearance of) customer-hostile policy are rife.
But we need not fear a coming breakdown in which nobody will be able
to invest, because none of us, except manufacturers, are actually in
the business of selling raw machine capacity.
>Still, there is no sense to be angry about this. If you can not
>change it, change your attitude.
Or build a better mousetrap part....
-Sheba
Bathsheba Grossman (831) 429-8224
Creative prototyping protoshape.com
Microsculpture microsculpture.com
Bronze sculpture bathsheba.com
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