http://techandsoc.com/2009/12/24/1533/ An international CONFERENCE, a scholarly JOURNAL, a BOOK series, and an online KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITY Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:12:48 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://techandsoc.com/2009/12/24/1533/comment-page-1/#comment-1032 Igor Fodor Mon, 14 Jun 2010 08:17:15 +0000 http://techandsoc.mu.commongroundpublishing.com/2009/12/24/1533/#comment-1032 Generally speaking it is, of course, correct. But when one looks at the emergence of those radical new technologies mentioned above, one can see straight away they all originated either directly in military reseach labs or as government-contracted research: jet engines were developed in conjuction with the new fighter planes, GPS was developed in the 1970s by the Dept. of Defence satellite navigation, the first computers were built at the Penn. Univ. for the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Lab. The same could be said about the predecessor of today's Internet, which was the packet-switched ARPAnet, also designed and built originally for the military. Therefore , in my opinion, they cannot be compared with purely civilian, commercial technologies, since the military have other funding, other experimental facilities, other priorities, other decision-making and are dependent on the defence policies and politics. By the way, the same could be said about the radar and the first nuclear reactors. Let's see what the newly propsed ARPA-E will bring in terms of developing new energy technologies. Commercial examples of the radical new technologies could be, for example, compact disks/DVDs which did not arise from the gramophone records, semiconductor chips did not arise from the electronic tubes, cell phones did not emerge from the plane, old telephones. What Dr. Arthur has not mentioned is not only recombination of existing technologies, but the convergence of existing technologies, sometimes called the triple play (internet, TV/video-on-demand, IP telephony) and the quadruple play: the same as the previos example plus the cell phone. The new generation of the cell phones contains also GPS. The latest initiative is NBIC: nano-bio-info-cogno. U.S. government studies now recognize that the convergence of the NBIC technologies can vastly “improve human performance over the next ten to twenty years.” Generally speaking it is, of course, correct. But when one looks at the emergence of those radical new technologies mentioned above, one can see straight away they all originated either directly in military reseach labs or as government-contracted research: jet engines were developed in conjuction with the new fighter planes, GPS was developed in the 1970s by the Dept. of Defence satellite navigation, the first computers were built at the Penn. Univ. for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Lab. The same could be said about the predecessor of today’s Internet, which was the packet-switched ARPAnet, also designed and built originally for the military. Therefore , in my opinion, they cannot be compared with purely civilian, commercial technologies, since the military have other funding, other experimental facilities, other priorities, other decision-making and are dependent on the defence policies and politics. By the way, the same could be said about the radar and the first nuclear reactors. Let’s see what the newly propsed ARPA-E will bring in terms of developing new energy technologies.
Commercial examples of the radical new technologies could be, for example, compact disks/DVDs which did not arise from the gramophone records, semiconductor chips did not arise from the electronic tubes, cell phones did not emerge from the plane, old telephones. What Dr. Arthur has not mentioned is not only recombination of existing technologies, but the convergence of existing technologies, sometimes called the triple play (internet, TV/video-on-demand, IP telephony) and the quadruple play: the same as the previos example plus the cell phone. The new generation of the cell phones contains also GPS.
The latest initiative is NBIC: nano-bio-info-cogno. U.S. government studies now recognize that the convergence of the NBIC technologies can vastly “improve human performance over the next ten to twenty years.”

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