A Wired article and Instapundit entry about the idea that the Information Age has been driven by left brain skills (add, subtract) while the coming Conceptual Age will be driven by right brain skills (art, come up with new proof method). The basic premise is that all the left brain stuff will either be outsourced or done by machines. I don't think things are quite as cut and dry as the book (idea is from this book) presents. I would suggest that America has risen in the Information Age because of a combination of left brain technical ability and right brain type innovation. I don't think we are going to see a wholesale paradigm shift away from the Information Age anytime soon. If those who care about such things decide to lable a new age, it will probably be the Nano Age or the Bio Age.
Maybe this book is just a bit ahead of it's time. Once we can make anything we want via molecular assembly, be anything we want via bioengineering, and solve any problem with quantum computers, then maybe productive humanity will start to shift more toward touchy feely right brain stuff. Until then, there's a whole lot more information to be extracted from the Information Age.
Monday, June 06, 2005
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That's an interesting premise. I think we are really still just reaping the benefits of the Enlightenment now, and nothing has really changed since that time (Newton, Faraday, etc.). Certainly an age where all "mechanical" mental tasks are outsourced to machines would be a new age. I think that maybe the first inkling of this age comes from Einstein, whose genius lied in his inventive and imaginative ways of thinking of theories, echoing the need for right-brain imagination.
The computer age might also be counterproductive also. Now that computers can solve previously unsolvable problems, the art of explaining phenomena with simple theories is sort of lost because there is no need for it when the computer can solve a previously intractable problem using current theory. We'll see where we end up in a few years....
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