I get unsolicited email offering to genetically modify rats to my specifications.
I guess this is evidence that we live in a sf novel. Thanks to spam the world’s most powerful supercomputer cluster is now run by criminals:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/08/storm_worm_dwarfs_worlds_top_s_1.html
Maybe it is by Vernor Vinge. Although the spam about buying Canadian steel in bulk (with extra alloys thrown in if I buy more than 150 tons) might on the other hand indicate that it is an Ayn Rand novel.
This whole issue seems to be linked to the question of how predictable the future is. Given that we get blindsided by fairly big trends the problem might not be lack of information nor the chaotic nature of the world, but just that we are bad at ignoring historical clutter. Spam is an obvious and logical result of an email system based on free email and a certain fraction of potential customers for whatever you sell. It ought to have been predictable in the earliest 90′s when the non-academic Net was spreading. But at the time even making predictions about the economics of email would have been an apparently unrewarding activity, so it was ignored in favor of newsgroup management.
Maybe the strangeness of the future is just a side effect of limited attention rather than limited intelligence or prediction ability. The strangeness of the past is similarly caused by limited attention to historical facts (i.e. rational ignorance, who cares to understand the victorian moral system?), making actual historical events look odd to us (Archduke Franz Ferdinand insisted on being sewn into his clothes for a crease-free effect, which contributed to him dying and triggering WWI).
I get unsolicited email offering to genetically modify rats to my specifications.
I guess this is evidence that we live in a sf novel. Thanks to spam the world’s most powerful supercomputer cluster is now run by criminals: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/08/storm_worm_dwarfs_worlds_top_s_1.html Maybe it is by Vernor Vinge. Although the spam about buying Canadian steel in bulk (with extra alloys thrown in if I buy more than 150 tons) might on the other hand indicate that it is an Ayn Rand novel.
This whole issue seems to be linked to the question of how predictable the future is. Given that we get blindsided by fairly big trends the problem might not be lack of information nor the chaotic nature of the world, but just that we are bad at ignoring historical clutter. Spam is an obvious and logical result of an email system based on free email and a certain fraction of potential customers for whatever you sell. It ought to have been predictable in the earliest 90′s when the non-academic Net was spreading. But at the time even making predictions about the economics of email would have been an apparently unrewarding activity, so it was ignored in favor of newsgroup management.
Maybe the strangeness of the future is just a side effect of limited attention rather than limited intelligence or prediction ability. The strangeness of the past is similarly caused by limited attention to historical facts (i.e. rational ignorance, who cares to understand the victorian moral system?), making actual historical events look odd to us (Archduke Franz Ferdinand insisted on being sewn into his clothes for a crease-free effect, which contributed to him dying and triggering WWI).