Several Things

About Several Things

By John Taylor; 23 December, 2005

One Laptop per Child

This is a snippet from the Globe and Mail's technology page, and it
too could be excerpted as a support for a Baha'i principle: the
principle of promotion of education:

Nicholas Negroponte's "One Laptop per Child" initiative aims to get
cheap, robust sub-$100 laptops into the hands of third-world children.
He describes it thus: "Every single problem you can think of, poverty,
peace, the environment, is solved with education or including
education; so it is an education project, not a laptop project."

The only thing the press has to say about this historic initiative is
how it must be worrying Microsoft, now that open source computers are
being sold en mass, ten million at a shot, to poor nations. How sad
Bill will soon be to have to fight his way into such a huge installed
base of a rival operating system. No sense of joy for how this will
potentially rapidly revolutionize the Third World, stamp out poverty,
and not incidentally turn out to be the best thing that has happened
to the world economy, perhaps ever.

Silverwing

Last month Silvie's grade six teacher read to their class a fantasy
novel about bats called "Silverwing" by Toronto novelist Kenneth
Oppel. She went all starry-eyed about bats and when we came across the
second and third novels in the series in the Dunnville Public Library,
she snatched them up and spent every spare moment reading them until
they were finished. She is not exactly precocious and these were by
far the largest "chapter books" she had ever read on her own. By then
my curiosity was aroused and when I came across Silverwing in the
Wainfleet Library this week I took it out and now Silvie and I are
reading it aloud together -- she was more than happy to go through it
again. I read a page or two and then she reads. We are at about
chapter three now and I recognized the "seed" of the story, one of
Aesop's fables about how the animals and the birds had a war and the
bats switched sides half way through. This angered both sides and the
bats were therefore banished to spend their waking time only in the
dark of night.

Silvie is insatiable about Silverwing. We just went on the author's
website and she insisted on downloading and printing out the teacher's
supplementary questions and answers. She is now happily filling out
the answers to the study questions and checking them with the given
response. Imagine, voluntarily doing homework; I never saw the like.

Albert Camus

I just finished an "Introducing..." book about Camus. One paraphrased
quote from his writing might well be applied as a slogan for the first
two Baha'i principles, "Out of solitude, solidarity." Two Latin
sayings, ruefully quoted by bourgeois members of Germany under Nazism,
also point to principle:

Principiis obsta: Resist the beginnings (of evil)
Finem respice: Consider the end.

Which is why I think that most of the present political discourse of
today will soon be tossed into the garbage bin of history. How can we
resist beginnings or consider ends when there is no means, no
technology for mediating opinions? What does more babble and dredged
up thinking add to the mix? The only thing worth doing is to improve
democracy technically, to computerize it. There is a real revolution
in the making with recent improvements in the mechanics of meetings
called conferencing software. It takes care of group think, absorbs
rapid fire brainstorming, mediates questions and proposals, does a
thousand things at once. For the first time in history, there will
soon be no need, perceived or otherwise, for individual leaders.
People will revere and trust groups because they will see how
extremely effective they can be, given the proper technical mediation.

Synthetic Biology

Consider this, from "Creating first synthetic life form" By Carolyn
Abraham, Globe and Mail, December 19, 2005

Work on the world's first human-made species is well under way at a
research complex in Rockville, Md., and scientists in Canada have been
quietly conducting experiments to help bring such a creature to
life... "We're going from reading to writing the genetic code."... The
work is an extreme example of a burgeoning new field in science known
as synthetic biology. It relies on advances in computer technology
that permit the easy assembly of the chemical bits, known as
nucleotides, that make up DNA.
... Government and scientific bodies in the U.S. have investigated
safeguards for the new technology, given its potential to yield new
pathogens as weapons of bioterror. Ethicists have raised concerns
about humans altering the "nature of nature." But proponents feel the
many benefits of redesigning micro-organisms to do human bidding far
outweigh the risks.

Now I ask you, who are these proponents? They are a handful of curious
scientists and some investors who see a great deal of profit flowing
into their pockets if this catches on. Who stands to lose if the
nature of nature is permanently altered? Everybody else, every human
who will ever be born from now to the end of time. Um, give both sides
a democratic vote and my bet is that foolish gambles like this would
not carry. But both sides do not have a vote.

This is perhaps the greatest flaw of democracy right now, a tiny few
who, admittedly have drive and initiative, want to do something. It
does not matter what it is, everything has good and bad results, and
the bad tends to be irreversibly, especially in this area of
artificial life. The victims have no vote because they are not born
yet. Democracy only gives votes to the living, not to the yet to be
born (YTBB). It doesn't matter that the YTBB is the hugest majority
imaginable.

What ever happened to the idea of sanctity? Holiness? Surely life is
sacred if anything is. And sacred means untouchable. You do not go
into the holy of holies and fool around. That is what the word means.
And what would be lost if we did not make artificial life? Not much.
Anyway, if there are any fellow Baha'i scholars out there, here is a
challenge for you. It seems to me that long ago I read somewhere in
the Baha'i holy writings that creating life is forbidden. But now I
cannot remember where I read it. If you can point out to me where that
is, I would be in your debt.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com