"We will eventually need to shift to a shorter work-week for the same relative pay or we'll need to find new areas for expansion in space. The alternative is to jump back to feudalism prior to the black death when labor was cheap and most people worked as serfs barely scratching out a living."
Stuff on other alternatives put together by me, starting with a "basic income":
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA "A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics" http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
See also Marshall Brain's writings and Martin Ford's.
It's called "WiFi using boxes made in China". (Or in other words, "better design").
And probably someday it willl be called "robots made in Japan". Or just 3D printed buildings...
On the broader economic issues: "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
Our indoor-oriented junk-food-promoting society is not that family friendly in those ways.
As Paul Graham writes: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html "Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
Other resources: http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm "As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations."
All the best in navigating through our family-unfriendly and child-unfriendly society. At least there are now tons of helpful resource on the internet, but it can take a lot of trouble to wade through them.
For the plants, we tried to use rules similar to what nature uses for most plants. The music one is more random and could be a lot better.
So, yes, they could make this a lot better. In general, what such a tool needs is support for a parameterizable model, where the parameters can be bred, and eventually the models themselves can be bred.
But with that said, I agree with all the hype that this is a big part of the future of 3D. We got lots of positive feedback about PlantStudio. We just ran out of money to keep developing it back then, and had to work for years at places like IBM Research on unrelated stuff to repay living expenses debt we incurred while writing it and related software (an educational garden simulator) and then got distracted with various life events and other projects.
That book was one thing that inspired us, even as my wife and I met around an Ecology and Evolution program and so were interested in these themes already.
* Also, if the Cornell group was hiring, we'd be interested in helping improve the software.:-)
Further, for someone with a lot more money or a lot more guts than we do, with the evolutionary music ideas in the EvoJazz software ( http://www.evojazz.com/ ), someone could probably use the same idea to help end RIAA's stranglehold on the musical world by crowdsourcing the recreation of all interesting musical snippet evolutionarily. I've thought about it over the last year or two, but I don't have the financial/emotional resources to do that, as the legal issues could mean years and years of litigation probably as people collaboratively claim to have reinvented every tune in the world by evolutionary methods and RIAA tries to prove it was somehow copied when you can clearly show the evolutionary tree.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
Agree. From about a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
And as Dee Hock says (a previous post of mine has the link), either one without some of the other can be problems (example, group think cooperatively going over a cliff).
AC wrote: "To be blunt: no one took your ideas seriously because they were stupid ideas that showed you had no idea what you were talking about, and they were all too nice to laugh in your face. Sorry. You're now patting yourself on the back for something completely unrelated, so it seems someone really needed to do the laugh-in-your-face part before you keep going on about it again."
http://familypastimes.com/ "Family Pastimes games are the inventions of Jim Deacove. Jim started making co-operative games for his own family, and was encouraged by friends to make more. The Deacove family was and is no different from others. Sharing toys, helping mom and dad and being kind to others are values taught in all homes. To find games which help reinforce such sharing attitudes, however, is very difficult. Thus, Jim and Ruth felt the need to create some."
But yes, alternatives to competitive games in the USA can be much harder to find.
My wife and I invested over six-person years trying to create non-violent video game alternatives in the 1990s when everyone was saying how important that was, and mostly all we got for that ourselves was having to spend many years working for others to pay off debt. http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/nsfprop.htm
Still, Minecraft is a new popular mostly cooperative game that I can recommend if you want one (although get your vitamin D from supplements if you spend a lot of time indoors playing it): http://www.minecraft.net/
I would have been very proud to have made something that good and also that popular which created a huge cooperating user community. I have immense respect for Mojang AB in that sense.
True overall, including on my misperception on the TFA, but see my other comments in this thread.
Also, on: "Well, I don't see much value in stating great goals without any concrete ideas of how to achieve them".
That kind of ignores that notion of "fundamental research" which you would think a big research organization ideally would do more of. Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_research
Also, it ignores the notion of research as a social endeavor.
Why should people, especially in a research setting, be expected to have the answer when they raise the question?
"Maybe if you spent less time reading SF, and more reading TFS, you'd realize that this has no connection to any of your ideas about optical communication and/or computation. "
Maybe. But, sadly, I don't read much sci-fi these days (no time). About the only sci-fi thing I read in the past few months, and coincidentally related to Intel: http://techresearch.intel.com/newsdetail.aspx?Id=30 "The Last day of Work" by Douglas Rushkoff"
While the comments are right that for whatever reason I was not paying attention that the solar cell was not on the chip, none-the-less, what about low-power operation is not related to the idea of chips that can run on incidental light? Such projects may take multiple innovations to make happen, as is common with fundamental research. The point is that with such chips, you can build a massive system cheaply because you just drop the chips on a surface without much infrastructure (putting them into a sphere might require glue though).
In any case, documenting previous discussions can potentially serve to invalidate later patents (and I'm past the limits of my confidentiality non-disclosure agreement on that time).
"No, I think you'll find what's "hard" is actually making things that other people talk or dream about:-)"
True, but that is also hard to do when most of the social resources to do that are diverted into "me, too" redundant competition, paperwork related to that like patents, or, alternatively, military arms races.
I would have been happy to work on the details of all sorts of neat socially-useful devices. (I've ended up do mostly software because it was cheaper to do that as a small independent compared to stuff like robotic hardware or things requiring lab chemistry.)
Essentially, there is little support for fundamental or basic civilian research anymore, including at places like IBM Research. The few slots to do that are intensely fought for these days, meaning the best social infighters tend to get them (not saying some of them are not good scientists, too).
So, what is really hard is actually making things with essentially no budget while also having to do something else so you can get ration units to pay your bills and also trying to be a nice person.:-)
Also indirectly related to life in big organziations: "Smile or Die" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo "Have Fun at Work" http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/hfaw.html "It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system.... On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there."
And I'm not going to disagree that in theory nuclear energy can be done as safely as most other big industrial processes (as long as the industry is focused more on safety and less on short-term profit maximization and the corruption of regulators). But even when that is true, the systems still tend to be more centralized than renewables, which has political implications.
"The Nuclear Energy Option" by Bernard L. Cohen is a great book you'd like relate to advocating for the safety of nuclear power with many good points; from one chapter (on improved designs): http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html "By the early 1980s it became apparent that a new conceptual design of nuclear reactors was called for. The cost of electricity from coal- and oil-burning plants had escalated to the point where their competition did not require maximum efficiency from nuclear plants. Furthermore, the added efficiency achieved by pushing temperatures, pressures, and power densities to their limits was overshadowed by the efficiency lost due to shutdowns when these limits were exceeded. But above all it would be much easier to satisfy the public's demand for super-super safety by starting over with a new conceptual design than by using myriads of add-ons to a design originally targeted on rather different goals. In the mid-1980s, several reactor vendors undertook these new designs. Let us consider some of the thinking that served as their basis...."
But, back to the analysis on renewables. Thanks for agreeing that 3% works with your figures. But you have not addressed the point that you are sizing for the worst case month in a northern location. Remove your 4X worst-case assumption in sizing and you will get around the 1% figure I cited and you suggested showed I did not know what I was talking about.:-)
Solar levels are more constant near the equator, so clearly there you don't have to size at 4X there.
You say there is not "efficient" way to move heat, but as I said, you can store energy from the summer months or move it by embodying it in energy-intensive things like aluminum, liquid nitrogen, ground up rock, or you can make hydrogen -- so you can shift industrial demand from winter to summer. And most of energy use in the USA is for process heat and other similar things is by industry, not residential.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the state of the art in residential construction is not to require a furnace (with good well-insulated passive solar construction with air-to-air heat exchangers). So, energy efficiency at home is a better investment. Just passing new building codes would take care of most of that problem in thirty years with home construction turnover.
On solar PV efficency which links to land use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency "Solar cell efficiencies vary from 6% for amorphous silicon-based solar cells to 40.7% with multiple-junction research lab cells and 42.8% with multiple dies assembled into a hybrid package.[7]"
Again though, we use 50% of the land in the USA to make animal products that are mostly killing us (cancer, heart disease, etc.) and also polluting half our water supply while using up the other half (see "The Rave Diet"). So devoting 1% of our land to clean renewable energy, by contrast, does not seem impossible. It would even probably be a more profitable use of the land than agriculture.
What about energy storage via, say, compressed air in salt caverns is not "scalable" or proven? http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/Technologi "Paul Denholm, lead analyst for DOE's National Renewable Energy Lab in Boulder, Colorado,
I suggested IBM could make chips that get power from a solar cell integrated with them, and that communicate with each other via either light or radio (so, no need for a backplane or wire harnesses, and potentially the light could even be directable to build ad-hoc networks across an open central space if the chips were on the inside of a sphere). No one took it very seriously. In college, around 1984, I suggested a desktop computer that was the desktop and was a monolithic several centimeter thick optical computer (the reaction was mostly just bemusement). A couple years earlier I'd suggested in a physics term paper how optical computer links between chips would probably be needed to do AI (the professor could not understand what that had to do with physics).
Guess it's just hard being ahead of your time.:-) The wages of reading too much sci-fi I guess -- where I first read about optical computing and communications ideas. Of course Hal 9000 had an optical computing core, and IBM helped with some ideas there, so maybe ideas can come full circle?
Glad to see people are finally making them, even if not IBM. Although maybe not so glad, as they could soon become "smart dust" and there goes the rest of our privacy (see Vernor Vinge who uses the smart dust theme in at least two stories).
Michel Bauwens wrote: > I see a big contradiction between freefall and total robotization, with > freefall, who's going to invest in total automation? > > so I would add 2 centuries to the robotic prediction, though I'm not at all > certain that this will occur, I think it's a capitalist fantasy essentially, > to remove all human contact with making and producing its own livelihood > (I'm aware of course that leftleaning people have the same vision from > another angle)
OK, I responded to this once. I'm going to respond again with a longer list of videos. Most are short (except the Nova one).
Slashdot Mirror
"We will eventually need to shift to a shorter work-week for the same relative pay or we'll need to find new areas for expansion in space. The alternative is to jump back to feudalism prior to the black death when labor was cheap and most people worked as serfs barely scratching out a living."
Stuff on other alternatives put together by me, starting with a "basic income":
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
"A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
See also Marshall Brain's writings and Martin Ford's.
It's called "WiFi using boxes made in China". (Or in other words, "better design").
And probably someday it willl be called "robots made in Japan". Or just 3D printed buildings...
On the broader economic issues:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
What a great post.
To keep thing going well, I hope you and your family are also getting the right amount of vitamin D and eating lots of vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, whole grains, and omega-3s and a multi-vitamin with iodine).
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/disease/ChildrensHealth.aspx
Our indoor-oriented junk-food-promoting society is not that family friendly in those ways.
As Paul Graham writes:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
"Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
Also related:
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Other resources:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations."
All the best in navigating through our family-unfriendly and child-unfriendly society. At least there are now tons of helpful resource on the internet, but it can take a lot of trouble to wade through them.
"Most people want leaders that act as a substitute for their own super-egos, which lead them personally."
Interesting thought, but it ignores the acceleration of addictiveness coming from technology and marketing...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
For another alternative, check out my comment here:
"PlantStudio Evolutionary 3D Software"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2443828&cid=37504222
For information about software my wife and I wrote for breeding 3D plants (about fifteen years ago):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm
https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio/blob/master/README.txt
And now breeding music:
http://www.evojazz.com/
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz
For the plants, we tried to use rules similar to what nature uses for most plants. The music one is more random and could be a lot better.
So, yes, they could make this a lot better. In general, what such a tool needs is support for a parameterizable model, where the parameters can be bred, and eventually the models themselves can be bred.
But with that said, I agree with all the hype that this is a big part of the future of 3D. We got lots of positive feedback about PlantStudio. We just ran out of money to keep developing it back then, and had to work for years at places like IBM Research on unrelated stuff to repay living expenses debt we incurred while writing it and related software (an educational garden simulator) and then got distracted with various life events and other projects.
Anyway, I wish the Cornell people the best of luck as long as the system is free and open source. And if it is not open source (I don't know) they should read this: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
I should add:
* Richard Dawkins did it first in a popular way (there were others even before) with software related to his book "The Blind Watchmaker":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker
That book was one thing that inspired us, even as my wife and I met around an Ecology and Evolution program and so were interested in these themes already.
* Also, if the Cornell group was hiring, we'd be interested in helping improve the software. :-)
Further, for someone with a lot more money or a lot more guts than we do, with the evolutionary music ideas in the EvoJazz software ( http://www.evojazz.com/ ), someone could probably use the same idea to help end RIAA's stranglehold on the musical world by crowdsourcing the recreation of all interesting musical snippet evolutionarily. I've thought about it over the last year or two, but I don't have the financial/emotional resources to do that, as the legal issues could mean years and years of litigation probably as people collaboratively claim to have reinvented every tune in the world by evolutionary methods and RIAA tries to prove it was somehow copied when you can clearly show the evolutionary tree.
We did this 15 years ago: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
The approach and interface has a lot of similarities.
An open source version (in Python):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio/
Recent musical version: :-)
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz
Straightforward solutions to employment issues exist, like a "basic income"; see my website: http://www.pdfernhout.net/
Anyway, solutions exist if we really want them.
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
"Otherwise, if everybody can just sit around doing what they want, then they'll probably end up wanting to have a fair number of kids."
And with a seemingly empty and devoid-of-life solar system and galaxy around us, this is wrong because?
Ignoring how in practice industrial countries birth rates are falling below replacement...
You may well be right about current technical limits. But they can change with some research investment.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
http://www.davidbrin.com/transparent.htm
Which suggests much the same as you did.
And also see "The light of other days" by others as a sci-fi story with a related theme of cultural transformation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
In general, it's ironic we will put all these computer resources into surveilling people who we fear are up to no good (like stealing property or escaping from society via drugs) instead of just building robots (and other infrastructure) to make what people want along with providing a basic income so they can purchase such things. Related by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-fuhrman-md/vitamin-d-recommendations_b_800468.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx
http://grassrootshealth.net/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/
And on escaping from a "pleasure trap":
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
And on walking while using the computer:
http://www.squidoo.com/walkingwhileworking
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d/vitamin-d-supplementation/
Happened to me too from working so much. And it was made worse by me getting a treadmilll workstation setup, so I exercised, but indoors.
Agree. From about a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Yes, I can see some truth to that. Ying-Yang.
And as Dee Hock says (a previous post of mine has the link), either one without some of the other can be problems (example, group think cooperatively going over a cliff).
AC wrote: "To be blunt: no one took your ideas seriously because they were stupid ideas that showed you had no idea what you were talking about, and they were all too nice to laugh in your face. Sorry. You're now patting yourself on the back for something completely unrelated, so it seems someone really needed to do the laugh-in-your-face part before you keep going on about it again."
Thank you, AC. :-) It's good to stay humble, true.
For reference:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010405020550/http://www.cascadepolicy.org/dee_hock.htm
... so, be careful what you let it amplify.
On addiction and technology and overcoming it:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
(Technology can also be used to broadly suppress things, too, as a variation on amplification...)
"There are no games which are not violent."
http://familypastimes.com/
"Family Pastimes games are the inventions of Jim Deacove. Jim started making co-operative games for his own family, and was encouraged by friends to make more. The Deacove family was and is no different from others. Sharing toys, helping mom and dad and being kind to others are values taught in all homes. To find games which help reinforce such sharing attitudes, however, is very difficult. Thus, Jim and Ruth felt the need to create some."
Also:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1713701812/co-opoly-the-game-of-cooperatives/posts/105473
And:
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/i_cooperation.htm
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"Kohn argues that the 'sacred cow' of competition stands on four mythological legs."
But yes, alternatives to competitive games in the USA can be much harder to find.
My wife and I invested over six-person years trying to create non-violent video game alternatives in the 1990s when everyone was saying how important that was, and mostly all we got for that ourselves was having to spend many years working for others to pay off debt.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/nsfprop.htm
Still, Minecraft is a new popular mostly cooperative game that I can recommend if you want one (although get your vitamin D from supplements if you spend a lot of time indoors playing it):
http://www.minecraft.net/
I would have been very proud to have made something that good and also that popular which created a huge cooperating user community. I have immense respect for Mojang AB in that sense.
True overall, including on my misperception on the TFA, but see my other comments in this thread.
Also, on: "Well, I don't see much value in stating great goals without any concrete ideas of how to achieve them".
That kind of ignores that notion of "fundamental research" which you would think a big research organization ideally would do more of. Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_research
Also, it ignores the notion of research as a social endeavor.
Why should people, especially in a research setting, be expected to have the answer when they raise the question?
"Your future will be ready in 20-50 years, same as last time, and before that, and before that."
True:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson
"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed."
"Maybe if you spent less time reading SF, and more reading TFS, you'd realize that this has no connection to any of your ideas about optical communication and/or computation. "
Maybe. But, sadly, I don't read much sci-fi these days (no time). About the only sci-fi thing I read in the past few months, and coincidentally related to Intel:
http://techresearch.intel.com/newsdetail.aspx?Id=30
"The Last day of Work" by Douglas Rushkoff"
While the comments are right that for whatever reason I was not paying attention that the solar cell was not on the chip, none-the-less, what about low-power operation is not related to the idea of chips that can run on incidental light? Such projects may take multiple innovations to make happen, as is common with fundamental research. The point is that with such chips, you can build a massive system cheaply because you just drop the chips on a surface without much infrastructure (putting them into a sphere might require glue though).
In any case, documenting previous discussions can potentially serve to invalidate later patents (and I'm past the limits of my confidentiality non-disclosure agreement on that time).
"No, I think you'll find what's "hard" is actually making things that other people talk or dream about :-)"
True, but that is also hard to do when most of the social resources to do that are diverted into "me, too" redundant competition, paperwork related to that like patents, or, alternatively, military arms races.
I would have been happy to work on the details of all sorts of neat socially-useful devices. (I've ended up do mostly software because it was cheaper to do that as a small independent compared to stuff like robotic hardware or things requiring lab chemistry.)
Essentially, there is little support for fundamental or basic civilian research anymore, including at places like IBM Research. The few slots to do that are intensely fought for these days, meaning the best social infighters tend to get them (not saying some of them are not good scientists, too).
So, what is really hard is actually making things with essentially no budget while also having to do something else so you can get ration units to pay your bills and also trying to be a nice person. :-)
Still, the scale of our society is so big that fundamental stuff happens anyway here and there. But it is such a lie compared to the picture I was painted in the 1970s when I was in school. Part of the reason:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://disciplinedminds.com/
That's one reason much better fundamental science will flourish with something like a "basic income".
Here is a 12 minute YouTube video I just made that talks about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
A PDF file of the presentation is here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
Also indirectly related to life in big organziations: ... On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there."
"Smile or Die"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo
"Have Fun at Work"
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/hfaw.html
"It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system.
A video you may like on India and thorium power:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl5DiTPw3dk
And I'm not going to disagree that in theory nuclear energy can be done as safely as most other big industrial processes (as long as the industry is focused more on safety and less on short-term profit maximization and the corruption of regulators). But even when that is true, the systems still tend to be more centralized than renewables, which has political implications.
"The Nuclear Energy Option" by Bernard L. Cohen is a great book you'd like relate to advocating for the safety of nuclear power with many good points; from one chapter (on improved designs): ..."
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html
"By the early 1980s it became apparent that a new conceptual design of nuclear reactors was called for. The cost of electricity from coal- and oil-burning plants had escalated to the point where their competition did not require maximum efficiency from nuclear plants. Furthermore, the added efficiency achieved by pushing temperatures, pressures, and power densities to their limits was overshadowed by the efficiency lost due to shutdowns when these limits were exceeded. But above all it would be much easier to satisfy the public's demand for super-super safety by starting over with a new conceptual design than by using myriads of add-ons to a design originally targeted on rather different goals. In the mid-1980s, several reactor vendors undertook these new designs. Let us consider some of the thinking that served as their basis.
But, back to the analysis on renewables. Thanks for agreeing that 3% works with your figures. But you have not addressed the point that you are sizing for the worst case month in a northern location. Remove your 4X worst-case assumption in sizing and you will get around the 1% figure I cited and you suggested showed I did not know what I was talking about. :-)
Solar levels are more constant near the equator, so clearly there you don't have to size at 4X there.
You say there is not "efficient" way to move heat, but as I said, you can store energy from the summer months or move it by embodying it in energy-intensive things like aluminum, liquid nitrogen, ground up rock, or you can make hydrogen -- so you can shift industrial demand from winter to summer. And most of energy use in the USA is for process heat and other similar things is by industry, not residential.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the state of the art in residential construction is not to require a furnace (with good well-insulated passive solar construction with air-to-air heat exchangers). So, energy efficiency at home is a better investment. Just passing new building codes would take care of most of that problem in thirty years with home construction turnover.
On solar PV efficency which links to land use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency
"Solar cell efficiencies vary from 6% for amorphous silicon-based solar cells to 40.7% with multiple-junction research lab cells and 42.8% with multiple dies assembled into a hybrid package.[7]"
Again though, we use 50% of the land in the USA to make animal products that are mostly killing us (cancer, heart disease, etc.) and also polluting half our water supply while using up the other half (see "The Rave Diet"). So devoting 1% of our land to clean renewable energy, by contrast, does not seem impossible. It would even probably be a more profitable use of the land than agriculture.
What about energy storage via, say, compressed air in salt caverns is not "scalable" or proven?
http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/Technologi
"Paul Denholm, lead analyst for DOE's National Renewable Energy Lab in Boulder, Colorado,
I suggested IBM could make chips that get power from a solar cell integrated with them, and that communicate with each other via either light or radio (so, no need for a backplane or wire harnesses, and potentially the light could even be directable to build ad-hoc networks across an open central space if the chips were on the inside of a sphere). No one took it very seriously. In college, around 1984, I suggested a desktop computer that was the desktop and was a monolithic several centimeter thick optical computer (the reaction was mostly just bemusement). A couple years earlier I'd suggested in a physics term paper how optical computer links between chips would probably be needed to do AI (the professor could not understand what that had to do with physics).
Guess it's just hard being ahead of your time. :-) The wages of reading too much sci-fi I guess -- where I first read about optical computing and communications ideas. Of course Hal 9000 had an optical computing core, and IBM helped with some ideas there, so maybe ideas can come full circle?
Glad to see people are finally making them, even if not IBM. Although maybe not so glad, as they could soon become "smart dust" and there goes the rest of our privacy (see Vernor Vinge who uses the smart dust theme in at least two stories).
"That's cool. You can have that and I'll have a giant robot army and we'll see which works out better."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDiDK_yBCw0
Looks like you win. :-) Sort of. :-)
As I posted here (the related p2presearch archive at listcultures.org has died, sadly, though is available elsewhere):
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mf6UxV35GCQJ:listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html+p2p+implications+robot+videos
=======
Michel Bauwens wrote:
> I see a big contradiction between freefall and total robotization, with
> freefall, who's going to invest in total automation?
>
> so I would add 2 centuries to the robotic prediction, though I'm not at all
> certain that this will occur, I think it's a capitalist fantasy essentially,
> to remove all human contact with making and producing its own livelihood
> (I'm aware of course that leftleaning people have the same vision from
> another angle)
OK, I responded to this once. I'm going to respond again with a longer list of videos. Most are short (except the Nova one).
"High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation"
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
"Nova: The Great Robot Race"
http://www.hulu.com/watch/23347/nova-the-great-robot-race
"DARPA Urban Challenge 2007"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQFEmR50HAk
"Home Assistance Robot"
http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/home-assistance-robot/295707
"ASIMO avoids moving obstacles"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPoANTKo5kA
"ASIMOs new artificial intelligence. (ASIMO is learning!)"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ByGQGiVMg
"Roomba"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqhIMFQNGCg
"IRobot Packbot action!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaP0waiz43w
"South Korea's Machine Gun Sentry Robot"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ
"Sentry Robot to Patrol Maine School"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUNikzYgIf4
"Predator Drones"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMh8Cjnzen8
"Merseyside Police helicopter remote control drone"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s79QlJGQKks
"BigDog Overview"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-AGWq0k_Mo
"The Autonomous Grape-Vine Pruner"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GaGO9LIDEA
"Robots in warehouse"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdd6sQ8Cbe0
"VMS robotic milking"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPqWpOxQmIs
"Lely Robotic Barn Cleaner"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bphBIwv5Vp8
"Da Vinci Surgical Robot"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C17-bGquIjI
"CTC UT-1 ROV Ultra Trencher - Animation"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U72_B7B3Wk
"Mars Rover Vid