Chapter 31
158 took less than eight millennia
Graeme Barker, The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. v ("Ten thousand years ago there were few if any societies which can properly be described as agricultural. Five thousand years ago large numbers of the world's population were farmers....").
159 from 90 to 2 percent of the workforce
Ibid.; Claude Fischer, "Can You Compete with A.I. for the Next Job?," Fiscal Times, April 14, 2011; Carolyn Dimitri, Anne Effland, and Neilson Conklin, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, "The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy," June 2005, http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib3/eib3.htm; United Nations Social Policy and Development Division, Report on the World Social Situation 2007: The Employment Imperative, 2007, http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2007/chapter1.pdf ("Agriculture still accounts for about 45 per cent of the world's labour force, or about 1.3 billion people").
160 less than half of all jobs worldwide are now on farms
United Nations Social Policy and Development Division, Report on the World Social Situation 2007: The Employment Imperative.
161 the Industrial Revolution took only 150 years
Barker, The
162 "indistinguishable from magic"
"Clarke's Third Law," in Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, edited by Jeff Prucher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 22.
163 different from that of our ancestors 200,000 years ago
"Human Brains Enjoy Ongoing Evolution," New Scientist, September 9, 2005.
164 in the world thirty years ago, the Cray-2
John Markoff, "The iPad in Your Hand: As Fast as a Supercomputer of Yore," New York Times, May 9, 2011.
165 jobs of weavers obsolete
Steven E. Jones, Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 5455.
166 "Luddite fallacy"
Ford, Lights in the Tunnel, pp. 95100.
167 technologies as "extensions" of basic human capacities
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
CHAPTER 2: THE GLOBAL MIND.
1 to serve primarily as a distribution service for advertis.e.m.e.nts and junk mail
Steven Greenhouse, "Postal Service Is Nearing Default as Losses Mount," New York Times, September 5, 2011.
2 phenomena-driven by the connection of two billion people (thus far) to the Internet
International Telecommunication Union, "The World in 2011: ICT Facts and Figures," 2011, http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/facts/2011/material/ICTFactsFigures2011.pdf.
3 with no human being involved-already exceeds the population of the Earth
Dave Evans, "The Internet of Things," Cis...o...b..og, July 15, 2011, http://blogs.cisco.com/news/the-internet-of-things-infographic/.
4 connected to the Internet and exchanging information on a continuous basis
Jessi Hempel, "The Hot Tech Gig of 2022: Data Scientist," Fortune, January 6, 2012; Evans, "The Internet of Things."
5 the number of "connected things" is already much larger
Maisie Ramsay, "Cisco: 1 Trillion Connected Devices by 2013," Wireless Week, March 25, 2010.
6 RFID tags in an effort to combat truancy
David Rosen, "Big Brother Invades Our Cla.s.srooms," Salon, October 8, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/10/08/big_brother_invades_our_cla.s.srooms/.