Word: progressivity
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Other than his fetish for Chinese clavicle, Rheingold is able to provide little that's useful in the way of information or specs. And in the nine years since he published his personal fantasies, there has been surprisingly little progress. Vivid, the world's largest producer of adult entertainment, promised to deliver an interactive bodysuit last September but missed its deadline. Sure, it had a $200,000 black neoprene suit with 36 electrodes stuck to the chest, crotch and other special places, but the suit didn't look very appetizing. Nor did it do anything. Vivid says it's waiting...
...1960s and '70s, but only after the mid-1990s did it begin to have a serious public impact. Since 1994, the population of users has grown from about 13 million to more than 300 million around the world. About half are in North America, and most--despite significant progress in rolling out high-speed access--still reach the Internet by way of the public telephone network...
High tech implies progress, while low tech feels outdated. A stone wheel, an arrowhead, a shuttle loom were once high tech; today they are museum pieces. Phonographs, at one time considered high tech, are now collectibles, as are 45s and LPs. (See, for example, the offerings on eBay.) High tech becomes low tech with longevity and familiarity and as old technologies are replaced...
...well are we doing at creating living, wanting robots? We are making progress, both from the bottom up and from the top down. At one end, researchers are taking apart the simplest living bacteria--mycoplasmas--whose genome can be stored in less than a quarter of a megabyte, to better understand the process of life at the molecular level. Meanwhile, computer programs that reproduce and evolve are starting to exhibit behaviors we expect from simple living creatures, such as interaction with complex environments and sexual reproduction. Artificial life forms that "live" inside computers have evolved to the point where they...
...transition from the old-fashioned high heel (which women wore when I was young) to today's model does not look to me like progress for women. The old heel may have been just as hard to walk in, but was infinitely more graceful. The new shoes look as if they have a Frankenstein life and motion of their own; young women walk in them (ungainly and swaying, waving their arms for balance) the way an inexperienced rider sits an energetic horse that is barely under control. These shoes are a dangerous responsibility. Not much liberation there. In fact...