My impression is that language is almost always evolving, and most of the evolution is in an essentially noisy and random and half-broken direction, as people make mistakes, or tell lies, or whatever, and then regularly try to reconstruct the ability to communicate meaning coherently using the words and interpretive schemes at hand.
In my idiolect, “nanotechnology” still means “nanotechnology” but also I’m aware that semantic parasites have ruined its original clean definition, and so in the presence of people who don’t want to keep using the old term in spite of the damage to the language I am happy to code switch and say “precise atom-by-atom manufacturing of arbitrary molecules by generic molecular assemblers based on arbitrary programming signals” or whatever other phrase helps people understand that I’m talking about a technology that could exist but doesn’t exist yet, and which would have radical implications if developed.
I saw the original essay as an attempt to record my idiolect, and my impression of what was happening, at this moment in history, before this moment ends.
(Maybe it will be a slightly useful datapoint for posthuman historians, as they try to pinpoint the precise month that it became inevitable that humans would go extinct or whatever, because we couldn’t successfully coordinate to do otherwise, because we couldn’t even speak to each other coherently about what the fuck was even happening… and this is a GENERAL problem for humans, in MANY fields of study.)
Just so!
My impression is that language is almost always evolving, and most of the evolution is in an essentially noisy and random and half-broken direction, as people make mistakes, or tell lies, or whatever, and then regularly try to reconstruct the ability to communicate meaning coherently using the words and interpretive schemes at hand.
In my idiolect, “nanotechnology” still means “nanotechnology” but also I’m aware that semantic parasites have ruined its original clean definition, and so in the presence of people who don’t want to keep using the old term in spite of the damage to the language I am happy to code switch and say “precise atom-by-atom manufacturing of arbitrary molecules by generic molecular assemblers based on arbitrary programming signals” or whatever other phrase helps people understand that I’m talking about a technology that could exist but doesn’t exist yet, and which would have radical implications if developed.
I saw the original essay as an attempt to record my idiolect, and my impression of what was happening, at this moment in history, before this moment ends.
(Maybe it will be a slightly useful datapoint for posthuman historians, as they try to pinpoint the precise month that it became inevitable that humans would go extinct or whatever, because we couldn’t successfully coordinate to do otherwise, because we couldn’t even speak to each other coherently about what the fuck was even happening… and this is a GENERAL problem for humans, in MANY fields of study.)