Postumous human
I am outside lecture room EBG08 – this translates as East Building ground floor room 08 – I am there for a book launch. The invite says it’s between 3.30 and 5 so I think 4 is probably an okay time to arrive but it seems I have come in mid way through the guest speakers speech. Suddenly I feel like an aberrant student. Still I quickly squirrel myself away in a seat at the edge of the front row and keep a low profile. I don’t make a habit of going to lectures in other departments but something about the blurb on the polite invitation drew me in. It’s all about post humanism and escaping the strictures of Newtonian analysis (although here I am already embellishing their copy). The guest speaker is talking about how innovation comes about not through individuals but through groups of ideas happening at the same time and somehow coalescing over time to make a new system that makes the old system obsolete. He is clearly tickled, as am I, by the metaphor of the fax-machine that once ru...