Let's Hope the Robots Are Nice

[Marcus Bryant]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704433904576213683603852312.html


The most disturbing passage in "Physics of the Future" doesn't concern the future; it's about the present. In that passage, Mr. Kaku recounts a lunchtime conversation with physicist Freeman Dyson at Princeton. Mr. Dyson described growing up in the late days of the British Empire and seeing that most of his smartest classmates were not—as prior generations had been—interested in developing new forms of electrical and chemical plants, but rather in massaging and managing other people's money. The result was a loss of England's science and engineering base.

Now, Mr. Dyson said, he was seeing the phenomenon for the second time in his life, in America. Mr. Kaku, summarizing the scientist's message: "The brightest minds at Princeton were no longer tackling the difficult problems in physics and mathematics but were being drawn into careers like investment banking. Again, he thought, this might be a sign of decay, when the leaders of a society can no longer support the inventions and technology that made their society great."

[Marcus Bryant]

A familiar critique in the US, though usually the dastardly siren is a legal education.

[Marcus Bryant]

Still, the focus is on the social utility of education and intellect. The best education consists of useless knowledge, forgotten. (http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~ckank/FultonsLair/013/nock/useless_knowledge.html)

[DarrinS]

You have successfully carpet bombed the forum with new threads. Nice work.

[Marcus Bryant]

I'm not finished. Any YouTube recommendations?

[Wild Cobra]

I'm not finished. Any YouTube recommendations?
How many will we find with your name attached?

[Nbadan]

I'd like Dyson to name a specific society which collapsed with a military technological and strategic advantage over its enemies 10x stronger than its closest adversary like the U.S....

...Yes, societies collapse, but when the U.S. collapses, we'll all be dead.....

[boutons_deux]

America's anti-intellectualism, incarnated now by Repugs, tea baggers, conservatives, has a long history. See Hostadter's Anti-Intellectualism In American Life from 45 years ago.

It's common to consider education as nothing but a system to produce employees and taxpayers, as stepping stone to a job.

The less one can think critically about "the system", or anything, the better. Critical thinkers tend to be harder to sucker, harder to intimidate, stampede, inflame, to be more subversive, ie, not ideal employees nor ideal right-wing voters.

It has been commented over the years that the finance sector sucks up the best science and math students with very high starting salaries, when before the conservatives slashed taxes on the wealthy and the finance sector took a huge bite out of the national income, these students went into the Real (Productive) Economy of science, engineering, manufacturing, government.

Combined with the decreased and decreasing social/economic mobility it USA, it's a very good formula for letting the VRWC (eg, corporatocracy) run UCA to increase VRWC's power and wealth rather than solving real problems and advancing civilization for everybody. UCA has been on a downward trajectory (household real income) since the 1970s, and it has nothing to do with that "socialist, fist-bumping, gun-confiscating, illegal-foreigner nigga" in the WH.

[RandomGuy]

The Great Wall Street Sucking Sound


Ever wonder how investment bankers, a breed known in the past more for its social skills and golf handicaps than for its mathematical prowess, ever invented products like those crazily sophisticated, synthetic collateralized debt obligations that brought down the financial system?

Well, they didn't.

They hired rocket scientists to do that - a whole lot of them. In fact, Wall Street hires more math, engineering and science graduates than the semiconductor industry, Big Pharma or the telecommunications business. As one mathematician-turned-trader friend recently put it to me, why should he work on new high-tech products at Bell Labs when he could make five times as much crafting 12-dimensional models of the stock-buying and -selling behaviors of average Joes for a major global-investment house, which could then turn around and make massive profits by betting against those very patterns?

...

Now there's even more compelling historical evidence that Wall Street's favorite argument doesn't hold water.

A new study from the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo. - based nonprofit that researches and funds entrepreneurship, has found that over the past several decades, the growth in size and importance of the financial sector has run in tandem with lower - not higher - rates of new-business formation.

In the 1980s, when Wall Street really took off, the number of new firms created fell, and in the 1990s, it plateaued and has been stagnant ever since. Basically, the facts show the opposite of what Wall Street would have us believe. A number of factors explain that, but one of the most important, argue the study's authors, is that the financial sector is sucking talent and entrepreneurial energy from more socially beneficial sectors of the economy.

Financial sector "innovation" is a drain on the rest of the economy, and not just of talented minds, as the mortgage meltdown proved.

(edit)
Article is from Time, posted at Yahoo.news:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/09171206122000

[cheguevara]

Reality TV will do that to a civilization