Election 2020

[David Horn]

(12-29-2020, 09:23 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I still like the age boundaries.

The four are hunter gatherer, Agricultural, Industrial, Information.  The weapons are rocks, swords, gunpowder and nukes.  Power is provided by humans, animals, steam engines and renewable.   Information is stored by memory, writing, printing, computer networks.

Feel free to develop alternate names, but it is an established field of study.

We're on the same page here.  I put nukes at the end of the Industrial Age, and add IT and cyberwarfare as the Information Age weapons of choice, but otherwise we agree in full.  But this brings us to the next big question: how transitory is the Information Age?  Look at the predecessors:

• Hunter-Gatherer -- existed for at least 60,000 years of Homo-Sapien, and longer if we include premodern humans
  
• Agricultural -- existed for roughly 10,000-12,000 years, with most alternatives to the royalty-based political systems being temporary
  
• Industrial -- existed for roughly 200-250 years prior to the rising dominance of computers
  
• Information -- in its adolescence at roughly 40-50 years, and surely not a final state.
  

I guess we might become one with the technology and merge into a human-machine hybrid, but ethics will slow that march a bit I think.  We've discussed transhumanism before, so I'll leave it there for now.  None of us will see this next level in any case.