Agricultural Google

Twenty years ago, if I wanted to know about, say, aardvarks, I'd go to a library, check out a book, and read it. Today, I go a web browser, search via Google, and read ten bits and pieces from a range of sources. There are two important differences (and a hundred less important ones): first, I don't have to go anywhere (assuming, of course, that I have a web browser near by); second, I don't get one monolithic source, but a plethora of smaller pieces, selected for me from the immense infosphere by Google's search technology. Of course, I won't currently get that original book I would have started and ended with twenty years ago, but that will no doubt change.

This is all true because information has become mobile, and the conduits through which we access it have become, if not quite ubiquitous, at least widespread. A similar change is bound to happen to physical things as computer-based intelligence is pushed out into the physical world and becomes widespread. This will happen as the computers already in most devices become more sophisticated, as nanotechnology makes those devices smaller and more distributed, and perhaps also as biotechnology matures (and eventually merges with nanotechnology).

Currently, we maintain a separation between nature and civilization. And where we employ nature toward civilization's ends, we order and structure it as much as we can in the name of efficiency. Thus, we grow our food away from where we live, and we grow it in unnatural neatly organized rows. This is all done for the sake of efficiency. But local intelligence makes it unnecessary. Local intelligence allows each plant to be dealt with individually, rather than as part of a row of plants.

So imagine instead, a world where separation and order are not required. And while you're at it, a world where clustering in cities is not important either. Rather than fenced off rows of agriculture out away from where you live, there would be a world-wide garden. And it would be a garden in the true sense: not nature left to grow however it likes, but guided into aesthetically pleasing lines and colors and vistas, with robot-maintained pathways. The divisions between human space, agricultural space, and nature would disappear.

Some of us, no doubt, would even choose to return to an idealized nomadic lifestyle, made up of days wandering through lush vegetation (via convenient pathways), stopping occasionally to grab and eat low lying fruit (made with biotech and nanotech that has long since eliminated pesticides and pests that would make the fruit dangerous to eat right off the vine), working all the while via cell phone or portable web browser with others. Each evening, the family would rendezvous at an inn for dinner and a place to sleep, or their robotic servants would set up a picnic dinner and tents in the forest, filled with their favorite possessions and toys.

Comments

[Doug Sharp]

I am writing games in a wilderness cabin. Does that count?

And I started posting chapters of Channel Zilch at channelzilch.com .

Doing that made me remember the valuable advice you gave me about CZ.

Doug

[madhands]

No, thanks.