Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!isishq!doug From: doug@isishq.FIDONET.ORG (Doug Thompson) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: Horseless Carriages [was: desktop of the future] Message-ID: <1281.23DA0392@isishq.FIDONET.ORG> Date: 21 Jan 89 22:07:32 GMT Organization: International Student Information Service -- Headquarters Lines: 78 AZ>From: alex@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Alex Zbyslaw) AZ>In article <210@maths.tcd.ie> writes: AZ>>In fact the only *real* differences are that cars go faster AZ>and can travel for AZ>>longer distances more easily. Socially and psychologically they AZ>perform the AZ>>same function. AZ> AZ>Couldn't disagree more. The fact that you can travel long distances in AZ>short times, at your convenience is a considerable factor both socially and AZ>psychologically. Scale really does matter. AZ> AZ>The same, I think, hold for computers. Eniac (if it still exists) is not AZ>equivalent to a Sun or a Cray, which (hopefully) won't be equivalent to the AZ>nth next generation. AZ> AZ>What matters most is what you can do with it, not some abstract functional AZ>equivalence. Agreed! The auto was a horseless carriage, and initially filled the role of the horse-drawn carriage and existed side-by-side with it. However the auto has done much that the horse-drawn vehicle could not do. It transformed rural communities within 100 Km of a city into suburbs, because it provided economical and convenient access to the metropolis which the horse could not. It reduced travelling time, so people could take jobs that were 70 Km distant. So people took those jobs. Horse-drawn vehicles would never have inspired freeways, nor the degree of daily mobility which billions enjoy because of it. Social mobility was enhanced, and demographic patterns were transformed. In agriculture, the tractor (an ancestor of the car) created a labour revolution, increasing the work which one person could do in a day quite dramatically. This too had its demographic and economic effects. It meant cheaper food, more food with less labour, and contributed the the historically unique proportion of city-dwellers in the modern first and second worlds. Without the tractor most of us would still be living on the farm. When you significantly alter cost and speed factors, everything else tends to change to reflect that. The printing press revolutionized communication, even though it used the same alphabet as hand-writing. It did so because one writer could address millions with a press, and only a few thousand without one. The press also reduced the cost of information on paper dramatically which permitted more people to make more use of it. That too had important side effects. The auto is one of the best examples though, because it has so dramatically changed the appearance and the demography of every place it has been widely deployed. And it has happened within a couple of generations. In 1899 when my grandmother was born, autos were less common than computers are today. Today she lives near a freeway and comments sometimes about the changes. The compounded side-effects are such that almost nothing is the same as it was in 1899! The auto is not the only agent of change, but it is involved in most. The world wars shaped our era very much. Both were massively influenced by internal combustion engines in surface and air vehicles. Blitzkrieg and submarine warfare, aerial bombing, and many of the remarkable phenomenon of the world wars would not really have been possible without internal combustion engines. Their development was very much a product of the auto industry. This is more than a horseless carriage we're dealing with here . . . =Doug -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fido 1:221/162 -- 1:221/0 280 Phillip St., UUCP: !watmath!isishq!doug Unit B-4-11 DAS: [DEZCDT]doug Waterloo, Ontario Bitnet: fido@water Canada N2L 3X1 Internet: doug@isishq.math.fidonet.org (519) 746-5022 ------------------------------------------------------------------------