Opinion: Liberal arts and tech

MOST INTERESTING, especially the comment “tyranny of the majority” or other disconcerting sociological phenomena.

We've fallen directly into 1984 Orwellian outcome where society serves technology and when the bell rings we salivate. It's so bad that Hawaii passed a law forbidding "distracted walking watching a cellphone" (personally doubt it will have any impact however). There's a restaurant now in Los Angeles that offers a discount if all parties at the table will surrender their cellphones while dining -- BEGGING everyone to be in the moment. IMO, it's heart breaking to see multiple adults at a table texting someone not present :sigh:

The study of physics tells us "nature abhors a vacuum" and thus entropy will cause it to be filled with something. Having few interests, hobbies or activities then quickly leads to the social media where interactions are substituted for meaningful relationships and activities. Even here on TS, there's lots of comments on all kinds of subjects, but over the past months, technical issues and problem solving has been waning significantly.

It will be interesting to see how history will view the social media vs the political circumstances in which it arose.

 

There are plenty of liberal arts majors in tech. Unfortunately they've all been assigned to working on user interfaces.

 

I think the author is over-prescribing his own personal traits onto the same fellow liberal arts graduates who didn't see any ongoing problems coming any better than anyone else. Half of these supposed latent "the impact of technology in the modern world" prophets despite being perfectly healthy with no physical or mental disability, now need disability aids to cross a road safely due to the same social-addiction problem they're supposed to be smart enough to warn everyone else of in advance - that's how much "tech foresight" they have in actual practise...

 

@BSim500 OMG; what a heartless, narrow minded comment. Sure glad I didn't have to work in your company/department

 

I have to agree with BSim500 and disagree with Bob O'Donnell here on one point: Liberal Arts degrees do NOT teach critical thinking, or not very well, and certainly not as a focal point. We can see this in every field, from physics to painting, from literature to polemics to music. I know maybe five real critical thinkers in the entire world (who are better than me, I should say). Most people simply don't have the capacity to see through the media smokescreens, much less analyze anything of social or philosophical import.

We also see this directly in the tech world. Here we are in 2017, with charge field theory a decade old already, and yet the entire tech industry is still focused on the electron. Maxwell and Tesla knew about charge almost two centuries ago, yet it's been completely ignored by the mainstream and outright forbidden by the Copenhagen Interpretation, Bohr and Heisenberg's manufactured "victory" over Einstein and Schrodinger. Our devices could be millions of times faster and smaller, but nobody even questions what electricity is, or how magnetism works. They still think charge is + and - signs, and that electrons orbit the nucleus, and a thousand other falsified errors.

Ever wonder why CPUs and GPUs generate so much heat? It's because they're sloppy, slow, inefficient, and chasing the electron still in transistor technology. The should be chasing the real charge particle, the photon.

 

I doubt that many misunderstand the difference between physical science and the arts. It's a major mistake to assume that one is superior or has contributed more than the other. To do so is myopic at the very least. Divisive attitudes pitting one side of ANY argument against another is to deny the human genius that allows both to co-exist.

There's a topic here on TS "Why so much hate?" raising the issue of tolerance of other OS choices and now this topic falls into a similar pit too.

At one time it was a flat earth, geocentric universe and heretics were burnt. Shall we return to My way or the Hiway - - oh please! I'm listening to KUSC Classic Radio from Los Angeles as I write. Life is more than objects, particle theory and Objective C. Read some literature and expand horizons, perhaps

• Tale of Two Cities
• Frankenstein (it's not at all as depicted by Hollywood)
• Merchant of Venice
• John Locke's "Rights of Man"

At least you will avoid walking into the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, SW while texting your buddies.

Please ... save us from the lemmings.

PS: Bachelor Of Science, 1968 CSULB,
Short Wave Radio, Computer Science, Aviation buff, and first violinist.
(apologies to all, but this one punched my buttons).