Cyborg Google Krugman Luminary Nobel RS Future

Looking at Rolling Stone from last November. The special topic was The Future. For me it is back to The Future, just catching up with the reading. A number of luminaries and pseudo luminaries in the issue – Tim Berners-Lee, Bruce Springsteen, others. Everyone looks even less prescient a year later.

One I found of interest was Paul Krugman, who is by now even a more luminous luminary, having last month won a Nobel prize .  

Economist and columnist Krugan seems to foreshadow recent events – he says what has been under way during the last four years is the dismantling of government. The collapse of credit markets for my money is proof of that.

Looking back: What is the most interesting thing he never saw coming. The pooling of human and machine intelligence.
 
Google is amazing. People don’t usually think of it in this way, but Google uses information technology to pool human judgment. It’s not the computer making decisions for us, but it’s not the computer working in a mechanical way, either – it’s computer enhanced intelligence. In an odd way, I guess you can say were all becoming cyborgs.

Wasn’t there not a type of human judgment pool in the preWeb world? That being the News.  Did the editors control the pool more than they do now? In the heyday of the news, let’s say the late 19th Century, these editors were maniacally competing to sell papers, the decision of the public to pluck down two cents was the vote on the editor’s understanding of the pool’s notions. The pool spanned from the powerless [newly literate] up to the powerful. If you think today’s moguls and liberals control the news, you’d probably take the same view of Pulitzer…

Let’s not forget that the brilliance of the Google boys’ invention was based on a ready non-IT analog: The weighted reference merit system of learned articles. There was a judegment pool – though not a pool of a great large swath of humanity.

Getting back to Krugman’s future – and the question: Did the future turn out the way you imagined it when you were growing up? Krugman’s memories are much like mine, with the 1964 World’s Fair in prominence. I talked with a girl on the ATT World’s Fair Video phone from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and will never forget. And 2001, still top of the shelf at my pad. He mentions Asimov’s Foundation series as an inspiration. That I aint read.  He says the books influenced him to be an economist although their goal was to tell the tale of psycho historians.

Note: This blog entry here seems as though it could appear on each of my  web sites.  It muses, so it could be on Moon Traveller Herald. It is on media so it could be Epitomime/Epitome. But it is here, on RJ-11 Amazing Techno Stories. Go configure.