Orice ar zice lumea, per total e mai bine să fii în capul lui Larry Page (așa cum îmi dau seama că am mai zis și cu altă ocazie) decât în capul omului care are senzația că progresul inevitabil o să îl ocolească în mod magic:
As Page sees it, it all comes down to ambition – a commodity of which the world simply doesn’t have a large enough supply. Page estimates that only about 50 investors are chasing the real breakthrough technologies that have the potential to make a material difference to the lives of most people on earth. If there is something holding these big ideas back, it is not a shortage of money or even the barrier of insurmountable technical hurdles. When breakthroughs of the type he has in mind are pursued, it is “not really being driven by any fundamental technical advance. It’s just being driven by people working on it and being ambitious,” he says. Not enough institutions – particularly governments – are thinking expansively enough about these issues: “We’re probably underinvested as a world in that.”
A perennial optimist when it comes to technology, he argues that all that will change. Rapid improvements in artificial intelligence, for instance, will make computers and robots adept at most jobs. Given the chance to give up work, nine out of 10 people “wouldn’t want to be doing what they’re doing today”. What of people who might regret losing their work? Once jobs have been rendered obsolete by technology, there is no point wasting time hankering after them, says Page. “The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job – that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.”
și oarecum similar, ce-am pierdut de când am schimbat orele de somn și am inventat lumina artificială cu ajutorul curentului electric:
Electricity greatly extended light exposure, and daytime activities stretched into night; illuminated streets were safer and it became fashionable to be out socialising. Bedtimes got later and night-waking, incompatible with an extended day, was squeezed out. Ekirch believes that we lost not only night-waking, but its special qualities, too.
Night-waking, he told me, was different in nature from waking during the day, at least according to the documents he found. The third US president Thomas Jefferson, for example, read books on moral philosophy before bed so that he could ‘ruminate’ over them between his two sleeps. When dreaming, our minds create imagery from memories, hopes and fears. And in the dead of night, drowsy brains can conjure up new ideas from the debris of dreams and apply them to our creative pursuits. In the essay ‘Sleep We Have Lost’ (2001), Ekirch wrote that many had probably been immersed in dreams moments before waking up from the first of the two sleeps, ‘thereby affording fresh visions to absorb before returning to unconsciousness. Unless distracted by noise, sickness, or some other discomfort, their mood was probably relaxed and their concentration complete’. It is this dreamy flow that seems to characterise creative work undertaken in the middle of the night. Between sleeps, there is the stillness, the lack of distraction and perhaps a stronger connection to our dreams.