Although it isn't exactly off-base to say that this (article/comic?) is an attack on the current state of society, it IS off-base to equate the attack to the "oft-repeated wail that capitalism ... thrill seekers."
I would just like to remind everyone that BNW (the examples you chose seem to be parallels to BNW rather than 1984) doesn't have much to say about "capitalism." There seems to be a conflation here of capitalism with "consumerism" - consumerism being one of the pillars of the dystopia that the novel imagines, capitalism notwithstanding. You have to be careful where you draw the parallels. For example, the hedonistic thrill seekers in Brave New World were quite literally engineered to be that way - they were born in test-tubes and raised in a finely tuned environment. If anything, BNW is an argument against a utopia, not against a free market and the opportunities it provides. Actually, "opportunity" is unnecessary in BNW, because everyone is already mired in consumption and ecstasy. Nobody wants or needs it.
Whether capitalism is leading to that type of dystopia is another argument entirely, and one not addressed by the book... or even the article/comic.
"The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself." - Kierkgaard
Up-voted because I sort of agree: although it's fun to see achievements pop up, and some of these are comical ("I’m Sorry – Created a new Visual Basic Project") some others might encourage bad practices ("The Mathematician – Defined 15 local variables with a single character name"). I mean if they were just in the periphery, that's cute. But if people actually try to "achieve" these achievements, as they do in Steam games, I have a feeling that company might quickly decide to remove such functionality from their VS.
The trouble is, most of the time (i.e. almost all the time), it's more efficient to assume that the common wisdom is correct. If you don't accept this wisdom, you'll end up making noob mistakes long after you "should know better".
It also doesn't help that society almost colludes in this. People are more forgiving of youngsters making mistakes; they are far more likely to dismiss the same when the person is older, as they infer that since that person hasn't learned by now, they're clearly not very bright / good at what they do / whatever.
I think the common wisdom of what's possible is only broken by breaking one of the links in the chain of reasoning that makes people think it's impossible, and all those links form common wisdom in general.
Usually, when you think something is impossible that turns out not to be, it's because one of your assumptions was incorrect. But looking for the bad assumption is usually like looking for the bad stone in a pyramid - each assumption is in turn held up by other assumptions, and so on. And it's made more complicated by cross-relationships which can add an exponential aspect to the problem.
Usually, the bad assumption looks obvious in retrospect, but it's seldom that way before the insight.
"It is true that the brain gains a great deal of information by interacting with its environment – it is an adaptive learning system. But we should not confuse the information that is learned with the innate design of the brain."
He is misunderstanding Myers here - Myers is talking about the physical ontogenesis of the brain during development (in utero), proteins interacting with proteins (and the environment and such) during its development, not the development of the brain through "adaptive learning"
"But we can take a much more direct route to understanding the amount of information in the brain’s innate design, which I also discussed: to look at the brain itself. There, we also see massive redundancy. Yes there are trillions of connections, but they follow massively repeated patterns."
"Yes, the system learns and adapts to its environment..."
Again, Kurzweil is failing to address the crux of Myers argument, that the design of the brain is not only in the genetic code, but in the intricate "playing out" of cells during brain development. Myers did not talk about the brain adapting to a system in the holistic or psychological sense, but on a much more fine-grained biological level.
If this comment was meant to be sarcastic then it was expertly executed! BTW, you really don't need a teacher to learn meditation... just sit down, shut up and focus on your breathing for a few minutes each day... and watch how wild your mind is.
Back in school we used to call them "Think Sticks" in spite of those that called them "Cancer Sticks". In reality I guess they are both, as nicotine does have proven cognitive benefits.
