Whether power is produced by centralized nukes, big hydro, coal plants, or solar space satellites beaming power to big rectenna farms on Earth, the power must get to the consumer. Typically that is though an electric grid. Right now, about half or so of an electric bill can be delivery cost -- the cost of maintaining the grid. So, it will make no economic sense to buy power from a grid once local solar falls below about $0.06 / killowatt-hour. This is in about 35 years w/o major breakthroughs by current trends -- faster with a breakthrough like this -- assuming energy efficiency and storage or cogeneration issues are also dealt with cost effectively. Note that even with local solar cells, it may still make sense to have some centralized production of synthetic liquid fuels for use for transportation or backup power using cogeneration especially in northern lattitudes -- solar space satellites might have a role to play in that if we otherwise already have a space industrial infrastructure.
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.
The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.
Some computers use batteries to back up configuration data for booting. When the battery goes in seven years or so, the computer won't start.
A more serious problem applicable to any computer is capacitors. Some capacitors only have lifespans measured in ten or twenty years (especially if they are manufactured incorrectly). So again, the computer may not start in thirty years from bad capacitors. See: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb0 3/ncap.html
Something like 90% of truly new drugs are supported by government research dollars. Drug companies mostly fund research on "me too" clones of existing drugs or new uses for drugs they have monopolies for. See: http://www.citizen.org/publications/release.cfm?ID =7065
And lots of people are still afraid of them
such as http://www.whale.to/vaccines.html and
http://www.mercola.com/2001/aug/18/vaccine_myths.h tm for what they claim are very good reasons, including claims such as conflict-of-interest with vaccine manufacturers personel on regulatory boards, using children as guinea pigs without proper informed consent, supplying misleading information about historical disease patterns and whether vaccines really had a significant impact such as for measles, other disease cropping up to take the niche of supressed disease, known and unknown vaccine contaminates or preservatives potentially leading to cancer and autism, and more. This is one of the more balanced books on the subject:
Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent's Guide: How to Make Safe, Sensible Decisions about the Risks, Benefits, and Alternatives
by Aviva Jill Romm
It includes a more complete history of Edward Jenner and early vaccination good and bad than in the typical purely pro-vaccine puff pieces on him.
My point -- if the history of vaccines is anything to judge by -- nanotech will be pushed by greed and fraud and leave people wondering if the risk are woth the rewards -- and yet citizens will be left with few legal options but to accept nanotechnology in their daily lives because of government mandates ("what your child hasn't had all 30 required nano-implants -- well no public school or day care for them, and parents -- you go off to prison for neglecting your child's welfare!")
I hope he gets well soon too. He's a remarkable person who has made a great contribution to society (whether one agrees with all his philosophy or not).
And for hundreds of thousands of years before that, people just picked fruit off the trees or killed game animals (who were not as afraid of humans then). The Hunter-Gatherer civilization -- possible when the population is low relative to what the ecology produces. With advanced technology -- like a Star Trek replicator in every home -- we may well return to those roots. See: http://www.deoxy.org/endwork.htm
A few issues: You cite household income as rising -- but you leave out that working hours have increased per worker, and, more importantly, more households now have two wage earners instead of one who supports an entire family. That is the biggest difference -- instead of one wage earner supporting someone who can stay at home and participate in local schools and local non-profits and supervise and care for children, we now have two wage earners and latch key kids and less civic participation. Granted some of this is in part because people now feel they need bigger homes, more and bigger cars, more expensive private education, and more other consumables to keep up with their neighbors or various expectations derived from watching television -- but it is a serious lifestyle choice to drop out of that competition with many consequences (good and bad). Also, many health issues such as breast cancer may be caused in part by ground water pollution from pesticides (esp. on Long Island) and other environmental factors including stress -- so overall, it is hard to say whether quality of life has improved in the USA overall. In the specific case of medical care, for those with great insurance or a lot of money, many advanced treatments are available, but for many US citizens without health insurance a trip to the doctor or hospital for routine health care has become unaffordable (unlike much cheaper vet visits for pets) -- so what good are treatments if they are never used or applied too late? Note that overall, US life expectency is something like eighteenth in the developed world, and infant mortality is up there too. What is clear is that some US citizens think they are are better off than they were before -- the devil is in the details of who and why. Just like with the Iraq war -- the "America" getting the benefits (e.g. rich defense and oil company execs) is not the same American (e.g. working poor wanting a college education, unemployed people whose states can't afford to extend unemployment insurance in an economic depression) who is paying the costs.
This group seems to get good reviews in newsgroups etc. They use the Hughes network but have some of their own equipment. Supposedly, they allocate bandwidth and such in a way to ensure more predictable transfer rates.
This is one of the best ideas I've heard in a long time -- especially the clock restarting part. Even a one month waiting period with clock restarts on changes might make a difference.
As the example article shows (on Teflon), the true costs were hidden by those who knew them. How can this sort of behavior support informed decision making processes?
Also, again, even if some consumers benefit from a product, the does not mean those are the same people paying all the environmental costs related to the production, use, or disposal, nor does it mean the consumers are even aware of what other costs they are potentially paying themselves in biological terms (which they may not have been informed of).
For example, a major problem with broad pesticides like DDT is that they typically wipe out beneficial insects and other wildlife which keep pests in check -- for example, spiders. Thus, once you use such chemicals, you become dependent on them, like a drug addict, since there are no longer biological controls available. Even then, pest insects can often develop resistance to the chemicals you use in time, leaving the problem worse than when you started. Unfortunately, since the 1950s and the advent of large production of chemical insecticides etc. and the related focus of land grant agricultural university R&D programs shifting to supporting large industrial monopolies (instead of, say, organic family farms), the field of biocontrols and a search for other alternatives has been relatively defunded.
And, no, "my kind" are the people who say that you must compare the benefits with the risks before making a decision.
Unfortuately, those getting the benefits (e.g. chemical company stockholders & management etc.?) and those facing the risks (e.g. tap water drinkers living by a factory etc.?) are often not the same people.
David Goodstein, Vice Provost of CalTech on the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme which drives science education in the USA and started to fail in the 1970s and, in his words: http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm "The problem, to reiterate, is that science education in America is designed to select a small group of elite scientists. An unintended but inevitable side effect is that everyone else is left out. As a consequence of that, 20,000 American high schools lack a single qualified physics teacher, half the math classes in American schools are taught by people who lack the qualifications to teach them, and companies will increasingly find themselves without the technical competence they need at all levels from the shop floor to the executive suite."
The free Pointrel Data Repository System I have been working on is optimized for adding data, not changing it. So it fits in somewhat with his model of primarily linear access to data.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
> Read "Street Meat" by Harlan Ellison > to get a picture of what the most linear > projection of current trends are.
Do you mean "Street Meat" by Norman Spinrad? [Just from looking with Google, I haven't read it.] I like his "A World Between" novel.
By the way, no one has raised E.F. Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful" but he makes similar points -- that only 5% of work is productive, the rest is primarily moving stuff around, and maybe rather than focus on primary production efficiency, we could think about the efficiency of satisfying human spiritual and emotional needs, and so we could rethink work so that it is beneficial to the average person instead of just a few. He called this "Buddhist Economics".
You quoted Ayn Rand: "America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way."
Sorry, but Rand here and elsewhere is spouting apologetic nonsense, to justify the strong taking from the weak without compassion. She has no understanding of the many possible senses of self or types of selfishness (beyond a narrow conception of self as solitary body). If you had stopped paying attention in your history class:-) and instead lucked into some stuff written from other than the perspective of the current victors, you would have discovered that
the United States of America's
prosperity was built in large part on the genocide of the native peoples and theft of their land (including by use of biological warfare) [which destroyed many cultures far more egalitarian and generally pleasant than at present], the slavery of black people ripped from their native worlds and treated more cruelly and peversely than most slaves throughout the ages, the theft of patents and copyrights and trade secrets from old Europe, and the exploitation of seeds and plants and animals imported from a variety of countries by immigrants (as well as indigenous ones cultivated for millenia like corn, potatoes, and tobacco again taken without just compensation from the natives), assistance from countries like France which saw value in the US prospering to the detriment of England, as well as clever politics and global economic strategy which helped destroy Europe during two world wars and led to immense profits from the destruction and reconstruction of those countries (including by the Bush family). Yes, there was a lot of hard work involved too by some -- usually not those who got most of the riches. Try reading the book A People's History of the United States
or the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
or even the online:
Confessions of a Recovering Economist. Never forget that there are two human components to wealth (beyond a healthy natural world underlying it all) -- labor and rent (or other monopolies enforced ultimately by state violence including patents and regulatory powers). It is in the control of rent monopolies that the greatest wealth is to be had -- and usually the greatest unfairness. And the trail of control over monopolies rarely leads entirely to labor -- except perhaps of an ingratiating or militaristic sort. Much of the generally undertold and underappreciated history of the US from the Trail of Tears to the fight for the forty hour work week (now being lost again) revolves around power struggles over monopoly power to make decisions about some resource (i.e. who has the right to use a piece of land or set working conditions in some factory).
If we are very lucky, robotics may bring us back to a level of spiritual and economic prosperity enjoyed by many native peoples for thousands of years, but supporting larger populations (maybe quadrillions around the solar system with self-replicating space habitats powered by sunlight and using asteoridal ore). Most anthropologists now accept that agriculture and related work was a huge step backwards in health and living conditions for most people, and only happened because of rising populations and ever more sophisticated militaristic bureaucracies.
From Bruce Sterling's 1985 book "Schismatrix" (highly recommended!): "One of the shipboard roaches woke Lindsay by nibbling his eyelashes.... If it weren't for the roaches, the Red Consensus [space ship] would eventually smother in a moldy detritus of cast off skin and built up layers of sweated and exhaled efluvia.... Roaches were a vital part of the spacecraft ecosystem, cleaning up crumbs of food, licking up grease. Roaches had haunted spacecraft almost from the beginning, too tough and adaptable to kill. At least now they were well-trained. They were even housebroken, obedient to the chemical lures and controls... Lindsay still hated them, though..."
Systems that evolve Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to solve various problems show how FPGA designs can be developed by artifical selection which unexpectedly exploit internal undocumented issues in the FPGAs for their essential functioning -- like adjacent circuits with capacitive coupling which is not supposed to be there in a digital circuit, and also evolve things like on-chip radios that pick up osciallations from nearby computers. So, who knows what the human brain has evolved to exploit in terms of undocumented aspects of the nature of reality or unexpected waves. Not saying I believe that necessarily -- just some speculation on the nature of consciousness in this universe and the great mystery that is the cosmos -- seemingly infinite in size, duration, scale, etc.
Also, there is a whole field developing related to evolutionary psychology, which while it has its weaknesses, is moving in the directions you outline. In the early 1980s I wrote a paper related to this this. I am amused by the notion that evolutionarily each ecological niche probably has a certain amount of intelligence appropriate for it given that intelligence imposes mass and power and heat penalties on survival. I met Minsky around then (we both share a common intellectual ancestor/advisor of George A. Miller) and wanted to discuss that paper with him but I made the mistake early on about saying something about neural networks and distributed representations in passing and he just went on and on about how many graduate careers had been (supposedly) destroyed by people working on such topics. A speech I saw by Minsky a couple years back talked about the need for multiple simultaneous representations for use in successful problem solving (geometric, logical, frames, etc.) where progress is made by constantly switchign back and forth between them as useful. Still no neural net stuff though IIRC.
One thing people tend to forget when discussing this topic is that the promise of AI is essentially the promise of the slavery of sentients -- although this time of intelligent machines instead of intelligent humans. Ultimately if AIs are developed the issue of the rights of intelligent systems in general will have to be addressed (by a generous culture or by self-determining struggle).
Another deeper issue here is all the funding that has gone into AI as opposed to human augmentation (such as Engelbart's Augment and Vannevar Bush's Memex.) The most ironic and funny/sad outgrowth of the MIT AI lab is the development of the Lisp machines (never fully appreciated) and (indirectly through RMS) the GPL license -- which are both about human augmentation -- either of the individual or the group. It is sad that these are in many ways the greatest legacy of the AI lab but they are not acknowledged as such because of a certain (historical) mindset valuing the quest for the artificial slave (or pet) over the human/machine partnership or cooperative generous social community.
There is an essay by Caroline Bird in the Norton Reader (Fifth Edition) written in 1976 which makes a similar point. [Admittedly read it in college freshman English class -- and what a shocker to see that new perspective after already starting college.] Ms. Bird argues that those with the drive to go to college can do as well or better being independent -- and that correlation of income with college does not prove causation (since most of those with ambition or drive or intelligence in US society usually go to college because it has become an unquestioned institution -- like marriage.)
However it is true that since 1976 the USA has become even more credential driven as there is a glut of college graduates -- even PhDs -- and employers often see the college diploma (not necessarily correctly) as proof of social class (ie. not lower class, etc.) and willingness to operate in a bureaucracy and be appropriately submissive. The book "Class - A guide through the American status systems" by Paul Fussell (while a bit dated etc.) has quite a bit to say on how different colleges fit into the US class sytem (e.g. how different colleges link with different social worlds and how people are scammed into paying lots of money for diplomas that aren't tickets to a different class). See a review of it at: http://www.wesclark.com/am/class.html
Also, see for example this testimony http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm
by a Vice Provost of Caltech on the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme a couple decades back (and it has only gotten worse since). He argues the USA scientific academic system is not mainly educational -- it is more a filtering process. Art Sowers wrote about this too (Although I can;t find a current link to his "Contemporary Problems in Science Jobs" site.) But this site also discusses the problems: http://pmgg.tamu.edu/Advice/Advice4.shtml
It is also true that college is seen by some parents as an investment in their children which the child cannot easily gamble away (as opposed to a trust fund). So such a decision might be made differently when parents are deciding how to invest money in a child as opposed to when the child has to pay for college on their own.
The deeper issue you raise is that of "Voluntary Simplicity". See for example the newsgroup misc.consumers.frugal-living or the Voluntary Simplicity resources page: http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/
One big thing I learned from reading misc.frugal is that frugality is not necessarily about doing without or living on as little as possible -- it is about recognizing priorities and structuring your time and finances and purchases to reflect those priorities -- whatever they may be. The problem with most people living an unexamined suburban life in the US is that if they looked deep inside they might realize their true priorities (e.g. family, self expression, non-violence, generosity, etc.) are often at odds with their financial and infrastructure and work and food and purchasing etc. reality.
Your advice is great. It's amazing how innovative people in the US are slowed down by being stuck having to worry about health insurance and children's college funds. How many parents are stuck in stultifying jobs to ensure health care for the kids or earn enough to send them to college is hard to estimate -- but it may be a lot. And as a consequence, such parents also can't spend time with their children when it makes the most difference -- the early years. That is another silly thing about college since it involves spending all this money on kids at the end of childhood when they can't learn as fast, as opposed to spending lots of money (or parent time) in first year or two of life.
Another piece of advice might be to live in a European country or Canada (perhaps also once-upon-a-time California too) with cheap (or free) quality colleges and universal health c
You just don't get it (no offense intended personally). Copyright violation has been criminalized in a big way, with a small web of recent laws, (NET, DMCA, etc.). The next step for RIAA can just be to turn over long, long lists to US law enforcement and to tell them to prosecute these people right now for misdemeanors and felonies. Then it will be your and my tax dollars spent arresting, trying, and imprisoning these people. It used to be in practice these kind of violations required a civil suit, but no more since the No Electronic Theft Act http://www.cybercrime.gov/netsum.htm where the downloader is presumed to have made financial gain by copying for their own enjoyment. So, this criminal prosecution will be another form of corporate welfare. By your logic, there shouldn't be anyone in prison for non-violent drug offenses but instead the US has about one million such people in prison right now -- a figure which has slowly increased over the last couple of decades, with the US now having more people in prison per capita (6X - 10X more per capita) than any other industrialized country in the world. http://www.lionheart.org/prison_proj/corrections.h tmlhttp://www.cato.org/dailys/02-23-00.htmlhttp://www.impactpress.com/articles/febmar01/priso nind020301.html
(Personally I think this is wrong and ruining our state budgets and hurting people needlessly who should be treated and given jobs and education, but that is another story -- including how many big companies make money out of building prisons, running them, and cheap prison labor.) This RIAA prosecution will likely get really bad before it gets better. Who in the 1960s would have predicted a million drug users behind bars (mostly for marijuana, which is arguably less harmful than legal alcohol or cigarettes to society)? Answer me this -- why should RIAA stop short of a million people in jail for this? Bad press? Do you think they really care about this? Are people really going to stop listening to music from commercial artists if it gets really nasty? The US with the war on Iraq has already shown how a bit of flag waving can lead this country closer to political disaster destroying decades of international agreement building, not to mention spending hundreds of billions a year of borrowed funds to kill people and poison Iraqi streets with Depleted Uranium. When RIAA says anyone who copies or even defends copiers is also a criminal and supporting terrorists, and GW agrees, what are we going to do then? One can hope cooler heads prevail, but RIAA is gambling they will not. What does RIAA have to lose by trying? Anybody looking at the recent Iraq war can see how easily the media can mislead the US citizenry -- and who is going to have more sympathy in the mass media -- RIAA or "copyright violators"? RIAA and others have effectively purchased laws that aid them in maintaining their monopolies. It would be foolish business-wise for them to not try to profit from that investment (as immoral as I think that process may be). I can hope for the best, but very dark days ahead would not surprise me. And after all, a million college kids in prison for swapping MP3s will both decrease unemployment (prisoners aren't looking for jobs) and also increase prison building contracts and prison payrolls -- thus being a big boost for the economy and reelection campaigns in the short term (Even as long term consequences destroy our society). This issue (among many others) marks a turning point in our society -- for good or bad. Frankly, I don't know how it will come out. The recent Grokster ruling at least makes me a bit more hopeful than last week. But, just remember, that killing natives, enslaving blacks, gassing Jews, Gypsies, etc. for profit was all legal when it happened, even if it was immoral.
While it is excellent to see multiple billionaires pursuing cheap access to space (CATS), this seems like a problem that will be much easier to solve as new materials and processes come along (diamondoid jet nozzles, fusion, etc.) in the near future. Several of these entrepreneurs are of course already using newer materials and processes (composites, active dynamics, small ground crews augmented by fancy computers and software) relative to what NASA is stuck with in maintaining an aging Shuttle.
While I would never say such innovative effort is wasted, it would seem that launch technologies, while sexy, might really deserve somewhat lower priorities than the issue of what to do when we are in space. The fact is, we can launch people now, and relatively off-the-shelf technology (e.g. Ariane or Saturn V equivalent rockets) if manufactured in large quantities are probably Cheap-enough Access To Space for the next ten to twenty years (until nano-tech makes far better launch systems possible) especially if we are willing to accept 5% human casualties for launch (which is probably a far lower casualty rate than most human settlement travel activities historically).
There is also an issue of focus -- people focus on reusable vehicles, but the reality is that it is so costly to get things into space that there is not much point in returning either people or equipment after they have been launched. At best, Apollo era reentry capsules for people who want to come back to earth are good enough. For example, the space shuttle costs so much to launch relative to its production cost it should really be left in orbit as usable equipment (since anything in orbit is worth its weight in gold), and people returned in a small capsule if at all. Even if launch costs are greatly reduced, I think that a general outward trend of humanity will still reflect some of this economics (short of a space elevator). For example, in the USA, most people who went "West" during the 1800s probably never came back East.
So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical protypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossipped about by academics.)
Almost everything proposed as a reason to launch into space doesn't ma
We have three free applications there on gardening, 3D plant design, and creating interactive choose-your-own-adventure stories, plus many educational web pages related to learning the science behind the projects (in the on-line help manual pages). There is over eight person-years of work in there.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether power is produced by centralized nukes, big hydro, coal plants, or solar space satellites beaming power to big rectenna farms on Earth, the power must get to the consumer. Typically that is though an electric grid. Right now, about half or so of an electric bill can be delivery cost -- the cost of maintaining the grid. So, it will make no economic sense to buy power from a grid once local solar falls below about $0.06 / killowatt-hour. This is in about 35 years w/o major breakthroughs by current trends -- faster with a breakthrough like this -- assuming energy efficiency and storage or cogeneration issues are also dealt with cost effectively. Note that even with local solar cells, it may still make sense to have some centralized production of synthetic liquid fuels for use for transportation or backup power using cogeneration especially in northern lattitudes -- solar space satellites might have a role to play in that if we otherwise already have a space industrial infrastructure.
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.
The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.
A couple issues:
0 3/ncap.html
Some computers use batteries to back up configuration data for booting. When the battery goes in seven years or so, the computer won't start.
A more serious problem applicable to any computer is capacitors. Some capacitors only have lifespans measured in ten or twenty years (especially if they are manufactured incorrectly). So again, the computer may not start in thirty years from bad capacitors. See: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb
Something like 90% of truly new drugs are supported by government research dollars. Drug companies mostly fund research on "me too" clones of existing drugs or new uses for drugs they have monopolies for. See: http://www.citizen.org/publications/release.cfm?ID =7065
And lots of people are still afraid of them such as http://www.whale.to/vaccines.html and http://www.mercola.com/2001/aug/18/vaccine_myths.h tm for what they claim are very good reasons, including claims such as conflict-of-interest with vaccine manufacturers personel on regulatory boards, using children as guinea pigs without proper informed consent, supplying misleading information about historical disease patterns and whether vaccines really had a significant impact such as for measles, other disease cropping up to take the niche of supressed disease, known and unknown vaccine contaminates or preservatives potentially leading to cancer and autism, and more. This is one of the more balanced books on the subject:
Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent's Guide: How to Make Safe, Sensible Decisions about the Risks, Benefits, and Alternatives
by Aviva Jill Romm
It includes a more complete history of Edward Jenner and early vaccination good and bad than in the typical purely pro-vaccine puff pieces on him.
My point -- if the history of vaccines is anything to judge by -- nanotech will be pushed by greed and fraud and leave people wondering if the risk are woth the rewards -- and yet citizens will be left with few legal options but to accept nanotechnology in their daily lives because of government mandates ("what your child hasn't had all 30 required nano-implants -- well no public school or day care for them, and parents -- you go off to prison for neglecting your child's welfare!")
I hope he gets well soon too. He's a remarkable person who has made a great contribution to society (whether one agrees with all his philosophy or not).
And for hundreds of thousands of years before that, people just picked fruit off the trees or killed game animals (who were not as afraid of humans then). The Hunter-Gatherer civilization -- possible when the population is low relative to what the ecology produces. With advanced technology -- like a Star Trek replicator in every home -- we may well return to those roots. See: http://www.deoxy.org/endwork.htm
A few issues: You cite household income as rising -- but you leave out that working hours have increased per worker, and, more importantly, more households now have two wage earners instead of one who supports an entire family. That is the biggest difference -- instead of one wage earner supporting someone who can stay at home and participate in local schools and local non-profits and supervise and care for children, we now have two wage earners and latch key kids and less civic participation. Granted some of this is in part because people now feel they need bigger homes, more and bigger cars, more expensive private education, and more other consumables to keep up with their neighbors or various expectations derived from watching television -- but it is a serious lifestyle choice to drop out of that competition with many consequences (good and bad). Also, many health issues such as breast cancer may be caused in part by ground water pollution from pesticides (esp. on Long Island) and other environmental factors including stress -- so overall, it is hard to say whether quality of life has improved in the USA overall. In the specific case of medical care, for those with great insurance or a lot of money, many advanced treatments are available, but for many US citizens without health insurance a trip to the doctor or hospital for routine health care has become unaffordable (unlike much cheaper vet visits for pets) -- so what good are treatments if they are never used or applied too late? Note that overall, US life expectency is something like eighteenth in the developed world, and infant mortality is up there too. What is clear is that some US citizens think they are are better off than they were before -- the devil is in the details of who and why. Just like with the Iraq war -- the "America" getting the benefits (e.g. rich defense and oil company execs) is not the same American (e.g. working poor wanting a college education, unemployed people whose states can't afford to extend unemployment insurance in an economic depression) who is paying the costs.
http://www.skycasters.com/
This group seems to get good reviews in newsgroups etc. They use the Hughes network but have some of their own equipment. Supposedly, they allocate bandwidth and such in a way to ensure more predictable transfer rates.
This is one of the best ideas I've heard in a long time -- especially the clock restarting part. Even a one month waiting period with clock restarts on changes might make a difference.
Also, again, even if some consumers benefit from a product, the does not mean those are the same people paying all the environmental costs related to the production, use, or disposal, nor does it mean the consumers are even aware of what other costs they are potentially paying themselves in biological terms (which they may not have been informed of).
For example, a major problem with broad pesticides like DDT is that they typically wipe out beneficial insects and other wildlife which keep pests in check -- for example, spiders. Thus, once you use such chemicals, you become dependent on them, like a drug addict, since there are no longer biological controls available. Even then, pest insects can often develop resistance to the chemicals you use in time, leaving the problem worse than when you started. Unfortunately, since the 1950s and the advent of large production of chemical insecticides etc. and the related focus of land grant agricultural university R&D programs shifting to supporting large industrial monopolies (instead of, say, organic family farms), the field of biocontrols and a search for other alternatives has been relatively defunded.
Unfortuately, those getting the benefits (e.g. chemical company stockholders & management etc.?) and those facing the risks (e.g. tap water drinkers living by a factory etc.?) are often not the same people.
Example: http://www.ewg.org/policymemo/20021113/20021213.ph p
"DuPont Hid Teflon Pollution For Decades ...
Company Kept 1984 Tap Water Tests Secret After Finding C8 Contamination in Ohio Town"
David Goodstein, Vice Provost of CalTech on the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme which drives science education in the USA and started to fail in the 1970s and, in his words:
http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm
"The problem, to reiterate, is that science education in America is designed to select a small group of elite scientists. An unintended but inevitable side effect is that everyone else is left out. As a consequence of that, 20,000 American high schools lack a single qualified physics teacher, half the math classes in American schools are taught by people who lack the qualifications to teach them, and companies will increasingly find themselves without the technical competence they need at all levels from the shop floor to the executive suite."
The free Pointrel Data Repository System I have been working on is optimized for adding data, not changing it. So it fits in somewhat with his model of primarily linear access to data. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
Treasure your time together.
> Read "Street Meat" by Harlan Ellison
> to get a picture of what the most linear
> projection of current trends are.
Do you mean "Street Meat" by Norman Spinrad? [Just from looking with Google, I haven't read it.] I like his "A World Between" novel.
By the way, no one has raised E.F. Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful" but he makes similar points -- that only 5% of work is productive, the rest is primarily moving stuff around, and maybe rather than focus on primary production efficiency, we could think about the efficiency of satisfying human spiritual and emotional needs, and so we could rethink work so that it is beneficial to the average person instead of just a few. He called this "Buddhist Economics".
Sorry, but Rand here and elsewhere is spouting apologetic nonsense, to justify the strong taking from the weak without compassion. She has no understanding of the many possible senses of self or types of selfishness (beyond a narrow conception of self as solitary body). If you had stopped paying attention in your history class :-) and instead lucked into some stuff written from other than the perspective of the current victors, you would have discovered that
the United States of America's
prosperity was built in large part on the genocide of the native peoples and theft of their land (including by use of biological warfare) [which destroyed many cultures far more egalitarian and generally pleasant than at present], the slavery of black people ripped from their native worlds and treated more cruelly and peversely than most slaves throughout the ages, the theft of patents and copyrights and trade secrets from old Europe, and the exploitation of seeds and plants and animals imported from a variety of countries by immigrants (as well as indigenous ones cultivated for millenia like corn, potatoes, and tobacco again taken without just compensation from the natives), assistance from countries like France which saw value in the US prospering to the detriment of England, as well as clever politics and global economic strategy which helped destroy Europe during two world wars and led to immense profits from the destruction and reconstruction of those countries (including by the Bush family). Yes, there was a lot of hard work involved too by some -- usually not those who got most of the riches. Try reading the book A People's History of the United States
or the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
or even the online:
Confessions of a Recovering Economist. Never forget that there are two human components to wealth (beyond a healthy natural world underlying it all) -- labor and rent (or other monopolies enforced ultimately by state violence including patents and regulatory powers). It is in the control of rent monopolies that the greatest wealth is to be had -- and usually the greatest unfairness. And the trail of control over monopolies rarely leads entirely to labor -- except perhaps of an ingratiating or militaristic sort. Much of the generally undertold and underappreciated history of the US from the Trail of Tears to the fight for the forty hour work week (now being lost again) revolves around power struggles over monopoly power to make decisions about some resource (i.e. who has the right to use a piece of land or set working conditions in some factory).
If we are very lucky, robotics may bring us back to a level of spiritual and economic prosperity enjoyed by many native peoples for thousands of years, but supporting larger populations (maybe quadrillions around the solar system with self-replicating space habitats powered by sunlight and using asteoridal ore). Most anthropologists now accept that agriculture and related work was a huge step backwards in health and living conditions for most people, and only happened because of rising populations and ever more sophisticated militaristic bureaucracies.
Note that one major thing that caused failures in the Mir space station leading to its abandonment (a historic shame!) was skin oils etc. from human inhabitants getting onto metal, glass, and plastic components and then providing food for [mutated] mold to grow which then could cause electrical failures and mechanical damage (as mold and other fungi put holes into metal, glass, etc.). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/monitoring/media_ reports/1209034.stm
http://www.space.com/news/spacestation/space_fungu s_000727.html
So -- in space, perhaps it's either roaches or mold -- take your choice. :-)
Interesting post.
Some comments:
Systems that evolve Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to solve various problems show how FPGA designs can be developed by artifical selection which unexpectedly exploit internal undocumented issues in the FPGAs for their essential functioning -- like adjacent circuits with capacitive coupling which is not supposed to be there in a digital circuit, and also evolve things like on-chip radios that pick up osciallations from nearby computers. So, who knows what the human brain has evolved to exploit in terms of undocumented aspects of the nature of reality or unexpected waves. Not saying I believe that necessarily -- just some speculation on the nature of consciousness in this universe and the great mystery that is the cosmos -- seemingly infinite in size, duration, scale, etc.
Also, there is a whole field developing related to evolutionary psychology, which while it has its weaknesses, is moving in the directions you outline. In the early 1980s I wrote a paper related to this this. I am amused by the notion that evolutionarily each ecological niche probably has a certain amount of intelligence appropriate for it given that intelligence imposes mass and power and heat penalties on survival. I met Minsky around then (we both share a common intellectual ancestor/advisor of George A. Miller) and wanted to discuss that paper with him but I made the mistake early on about saying something about neural networks and distributed representations in passing and he just went on and on about how many graduate careers had been (supposedly) destroyed by people working on such topics. A speech I saw by Minsky a couple years back talked about the need for multiple simultaneous representations for use in successful problem solving (geometric, logical, frames, etc.) where progress is made by constantly switchign back and forth between them as useful. Still no neural net stuff though IIRC.
One thing people tend to forget when discussing this topic is that the promise of AI is essentially the promise of the slavery of sentients -- although this time of intelligent machines instead of intelligent humans. Ultimately if AIs are developed the issue of the rights of intelligent systems in general will have to be addressed (by a generous culture or by self-determining struggle).
Another deeper issue here is all the funding that has gone into AI as opposed to human augmentation (such as Engelbart's Augment and Vannevar Bush's Memex.) The most ironic and funny/sad outgrowth of the MIT AI lab is the development of the Lisp machines (never fully appreciated) and (indirectly through RMS) the GPL license -- which are both about human augmentation -- either of the individual or the group. It is sad that these are in many ways the greatest legacy of the AI lab but they are not acknowledged as such because of a certain (historical) mindset valuing the quest for the artificial slave (or pet) over the human/machine partnership or cooperative generous social community.
Here is another good essay on the topic: College May Be a Waste of Time and Money if You're Seeking a Real Education http://www.unconventionalideas.com/realeduc.html
However it is true that since 1976 the USA has become even more credential driven as there is a glut of college graduates -- even PhDs -- and employers often see the college diploma (not necessarily correctly) as proof of social class (ie. not lower class, etc.) and willingness to operate in a bureaucracy and be appropriately submissive. The book "Class - A guide through the American status systems" by Paul Fussell (while a bit dated etc.) has quite a bit to say on how different colleges fit into the US class sytem (e.g. how different colleges link with different social worlds and how people are scammed into paying lots of money for diplomas that aren't tickets to a different class). See a review of it at: http://www.wesclark.com/am/class.html
Also, see for example this testimony http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm by a Vice Provost of Caltech on the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme a couple decades back (and it has only gotten worse since). He argues the USA scientific academic system is not mainly educational -- it is more a filtering process. Art Sowers wrote about this too (Although I can;t find a current link to his "Contemporary Problems in Science Jobs" site.) But this site also discusses the problems: http://pmgg.tamu.edu/Advice/Advice4.shtml
It is also true that college is seen by some parents as an investment in their children which the child cannot easily gamble away (as opposed to a trust fund). So such a decision might be made differently when parents are deciding how to invest money in a child as opposed to when the child has to pay for college on their own.
The deeper issue you raise is that of "Voluntary Simplicity". See for example the newsgroup misc.consumers.frugal-living or the Voluntary Simplicity resources page: http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/ One big thing I learned from reading misc.frugal is that frugality is not necessarily about doing without or living on as little as possible -- it is about recognizing priorities and structuring your time and finances and purchases to reflect those priorities -- whatever they may be. The problem with most people living an unexamined suburban life in the US is that if they looked deep inside they might realize their true priorities (e.g. family, self expression, non-violence, generosity, etc.) are often at odds with their financial and infrastructure and work and food and purchasing etc. reality.
Your advice is great. It's amazing how innovative people in the US are slowed down by being stuck having to worry about health insurance and children's college funds. How many parents are stuck in stultifying jobs to ensure health care for the kids or earn enough to send them to college is hard to estimate -- but it may be a lot. And as a consequence, such parents also can't spend time with their children when it makes the most difference -- the early years. That is another silly thing about college since it involves spending all this money on kids at the end of childhood when they can't learn as fast, as opposed to spending lots of money (or parent time) in first year or two of life.
Another piece of advice might be to live in a European country or Canada (perhaps also once-upon-a-time California too) with cheap (or free) quality colleges and universal health c
See The No Electronic Theft ("NET") Act: http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/17-18red. htm
The term "financial gain" includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.
You just don't get it (no offense intended personally). Copyright violation has been criminalized in a big way, with a small web of recent laws, (NET, DMCA, etc.). The next step for RIAA can just be to turn over long, long lists to US law enforcement and to tell them to prosecute these people right now for misdemeanors and felonies. Then it will be your and my tax dollars spent arresting, trying, and imprisoning these people. It used to be in practice these kind of violations required a civil suit, but no more since the No Electronic Theft Act http://www.cybercrime.gov/netsum.htm where the downloader is presumed to have made financial gain by copying for their own enjoyment. So, this criminal prosecution will be another form of corporate welfare. By your logic, there shouldn't be anyone in prison for non-violent drug offenses but instead the US has about one million such people in prison right now -- a figure which has slowly increased over the last couple of decades, with the US now having more people in prison per capita (6X - 10X more per capita) than any other industrialized country in the world. http://www.lionheart.org/prison_proj/corrections.h tml
http://www.cato.org/dailys/02-23-00.html
http://www.impactpress.com/articles/febmar01/priso nind020301.html
(Personally I think this is wrong and ruining our state budgets and hurting people needlessly who should be treated and given jobs and education, but that is another story -- including how many big companies make money out of building prisons, running them, and cheap prison labor.) This RIAA prosecution will likely get really bad before it gets better. Who in the 1960s would have predicted a million drug users behind bars (mostly for marijuana, which is arguably less harmful than legal alcohol or cigarettes to society)? Answer me this -- why should RIAA stop short of a million people in jail for this? Bad press? Do you think they really care about this? Are people really going to stop listening to music from commercial artists if it gets really nasty? The US with the war on Iraq has already shown how a bit of flag waving can lead this country closer to political disaster destroying decades of international agreement building, not to mention spending hundreds of billions a year of borrowed funds to kill people and poison Iraqi streets with Depleted Uranium. When RIAA says anyone who copies or even defends copiers is also a criminal and supporting terrorists, and GW agrees, what are we going to do then? One can hope cooler heads prevail, but RIAA is gambling they will not. What does RIAA have to lose by trying? Anybody looking at the recent Iraq war can see how easily the media can mislead the US citizenry -- and who is going to have more sympathy in the mass media -- RIAA or "copyright violators"? RIAA and others have effectively purchased laws that aid them in maintaining their monopolies. It would be foolish business-wise for them to not try to profit from that investment (as immoral as I think that process may be). I can hope for the best, but very dark days ahead would not surprise me. And after all, a million college kids in prison for swapping MP3s will both decrease unemployment (prisoners aren't looking for jobs) and also increase prison building contracts and prison payrolls -- thus being a big boost for the economy and reelection campaigns in the short term (Even as long term consequences destroy our society). This issue (among many others) marks a turning point in our society -- for good or bad. Frankly, I don't know how it will come out. The recent Grokster ruling at least makes me a bit more hopeful than last week. But, just remember, that killing natives, enslaving blacks, gassing Jews, Gypsies, etc. for profit was all legal when it happened, even if it was immoral.
While I would never say such innovative effort is wasted, it would seem that launch technologies, while sexy, might really deserve somewhat lower priorities than the issue of what to do when we are in space. The fact is, we can launch people now, and relatively off-the-shelf technology (e.g. Ariane or Saturn V equivalent rockets) if manufactured in large quantities are probably Cheap-enough Access To Space for the next ten to twenty years (until nano-tech makes far better launch systems possible) especially if we are willing to accept 5% human casualties for launch (which is probably a far lower casualty rate than most human settlement travel activities historically).
There is also an issue of focus -- people focus on reusable vehicles, but the reality is that it is so costly to get things into space that there is not much point in returning either people or equipment after they have been launched. At best, Apollo era reentry capsules for people who want to come back to earth are good enough. For example, the space shuttle costs so much to launch relative to its production cost it should really be left in orbit as usable equipment (since anything in orbit is worth its weight in gold), and people returned in a small capsule if at all. Even if launch costs are greatly reduced, I think that a general outward trend of humanity will still reflect some of this economics (short of a space elevator). For example, in the USA, most people who went "West" during the 1800s probably never came back East.
So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical protypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossipped about by academics.)
Almost everything proposed as a reason to launch into space doesn't ma
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com
We have three free applications there on gardening, 3D plant design, and creating interactive choose-your-own-adventure stories, plus many educational web pages related to learning the science behind the projects (in the on-line help manual pages). There is over eight person-years of work in there.