bv3456@leah.albany.edu (Victor @ The Concrete Museum) (11/30/89)
Could someone give me an address of where I could contact Charles Moore? I would like to discuss the possibility of him writing an article on Forth for an encyclopedia I'm involved with. Thanks! - victor
dwp@willett.UUCP (Doug Philips) (02/15/90)
The following quotes are extracted from the discussion session
following a talk Charles Moore gave in October 1979 at the FORTH
Convention in San Francisco. The quotes are extracted from the
transcript printed in Vol I, Issue #6 of Forth Dimensions. Typos
and other mistakes are mine.
Question: Could you extrapolate present trends to the future?
Mr. Moore: I think the obvious extrapolation is telepathy. That
in 20 years we will have the functional equivalent of telepathy.
If you want to talk to anyone in the world you will be able to do
so with minimal apparatus and you will be able to talk to them
in the sense of not intruding upon them as telephones do now, but
rather relaying messages from your computer to their computer and
holding vast dialogues in the way computer mediated conferencing
is being done today through terminals. This will be a very
natural way of conducting our lives. It requires _nothing_ in
the way of technological breakthroughs! It merely wants the
implementation of optical communication links worldwide.
I'm reluctant to quote science-fiction books, but there
was one recently dealing with the first manned Mars mission and
the fact that the United States came up with project management
techniques of an advanced order through the use of computers --
and completely outstripped the rest of the world. We gained an
ascendant position in the world and earned the hatred of the rest
of the world for our superiority, tried desperately to export
technology and failed. The same thing can happen here. If we
have a very tightly integrated community in terms of human
reasources and the rest of the world is excluded, we are going
to have one helluva problem. I think this will happen. I think
it will happen without any deliberate planning, and I think it is
going to cause problems as great as those we have today between
the haves and have-nots. But it will probably also generate the
solution.
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