An amazing amount of ignorance from SciAm. The danger does exist and can be found in another bit of wrongness in the article.
Quote:
|
...Second, when these tech changes do occur, they tend not to wipe out the existing technologies; instead they just add on.
|
Some do, some don't and some are not add ons. Aside from sharing the EMF spectrum I don't think TV was an add on to radio (or to X-ray machines and microwaves)
Our ability to produce vacuum tubes has been essentially lost and we would have to start over again if the need arose.
The same thing could happen with book
storage the hardware and software parts are unimportant.
What with the newer ability to transfer the entire contents of the library of science between medium in a few seconds and what Google is doing with books, I don't see this as a problem