I started to edit the penultimate paragraph, but it messed with the flow too much. I have "mellowed" quite a bit in the intervening eight years -- I've gotten older and a bit more comfortable with my mind as it is. Being the smartest guy, or at least feeling like the smartest guy, doesn't seem quite as urgent any more. I'd love to have more selective attention, better memory, or savant skills, but not if it ruins my sleep, or makes me hot-tempered or cruel.
In more detail, I'm not sure exactly what's changed. I feel like the whole concept of "intelligence" isn't as clear to me any more as it used to be -- it still seems like certain people are smarter and certain people aren't, but I've seen so many smart people believing and doing stupid things that it's sometimes hard to put much stock in the concept. I'd hate to see performance-enhancers just enabling people to do stupid or misguided things more quickly and effectively.
They can't, which is why it won't happen. People at the top are there because they're very good at hamstringing competition. So the only legal performance enhancers will be those that are either inefficient, like coffee, or too expensive for you to afford.
And if people are willing to risk their lives and freedom to get an illegal drug that just makes them high, what makes you think laws will prevent them from getting a drug that makes them more money?
It's not just pot or meth. It's true for alcohol as well. The general phenomenon is called state-dependent memory, and it's been established science for many decades -- the Wikipedia article cites a text from 1835.
When this came up a number of years ago on another forum, someone wrote:
[...] if the scientist working on a cure for cancer is doing this um what's the problem? Even if it were to have some negative side effects, and he knowingly chooses to risk it b/c he feels it will help him.
And I wrote this (slightly edited here):
Let's walk a few years down this road. It's 2025, and ehancers are legal, or at least their use is tolerated.
Your son has just joined a law firm. The other new arrivals are using Modafinil, or its successor, to let them work 100+ billable hours per week. While his employment agreement explicitly states that he's not required to use any enhancers, it's also clear that he'll never make partner without them. Is there an element of compulsion here?
Your daughter is getting ready to take her SATs; she's smart and ambitious, and wants to get into a top-tier school, eventually going into med school. Recent anonymous surveys indicate that 20% or more of students taking the test are using enhancers. Nobody's been able to do a formal study, but there are indications that these students are seeing boosts of 200-300 points in their scores. What advice do you give your daughter?
Fast-forward another ten years. Your kids have been using enhancers for the entire time. Originally, they were just a way to get a little extra "edge" -- but, having established a performance baseline while using them, who wants to become "dumber", slower, or sleepier by giving them up?
The problem is, the drugs aren't working quite as well as they used to. It's not surprising, really, at least not to a cognitively-enhanced neurochemist; enhancers, particularly the primitive second- and third-generation varieties, lead to short-term habituation and long-term neurological adaptation. New drugs are better, and with their help, new researchers are smarter. But they still can't do much to help those who scarred their brains with the older drugs.
Your son is fairly secure in his position as a full partner, but the firm's newest hires are scary. Most of them simply don't sleep, ever; they're at the office for days at a time without rest, and when they do take "time off", they're out skydiving, or rock-climbing, or just partying. Partners have always had the power in law firms -- but how long can they maintain power when their underlings are so much smarter and more ambitious?
Your daughter... your daughter isn't doing so well. She's landed a great residency, but the early-21st-century movement to limit the length of residents' shifts faltered and died in the face of enhancement drugs. She doesn't really need sleep, but she misses it, and she misses the companionship that was once associated with it. (Who wants to be involved with a surgical resident, who's almost never home?) When she does try to sleep, her dreams are invaded by the brain-burn victims she sees at work, and she wakes up screaming.
And sometimes the dreams intrude while she's nominally "awake". It's an increasingly common syndrome in long-term gen-3 enhancement users. The neurochemists are hoping that the new gen-5 products will help reduce this symptom.
I think we will go down this road. There's a very good chance I'll go down this road -- I've never felt like there was any such thing as being "smart enough". I think people in general, and researchers in particular, will be able to become "more intelligent", and once they do, they'll be able to figure out ways to accelerate the process.
That camera's body is approximately a cube. The lens occupies most of one face. Now, class, what percentage of the camera's surface area is occupied by the lens?
For extra credit, describe a geometric solid of which one face has more surface area than the entire solid.
What are you basing this assertion on? It sounds believable, but it also sounds like an unproven assumption.
I'm glad you asked.
1. I assert that it will always be more expensive to make an array of individual PV cells, with circuitry to route their output to readout logic and the global power pool, than to make a conventional sensor and a conventional PV cell with larger effective area. I can't "prove" this, but I can't imagine a realistic scenario where it wouldn't be true.
2. I observe that a sensor in an optical assembly, with light only entering through a lens, can only absorb light that falls on the lens. In fact, it can't absorb all of that; the lens will reflect or absorb some light and some won't land on the sensor, unless the sensor encompasses the entire FOV of the rear of the lens. So, if your lens has one square centimeter of aperture, and your light level is one milliwatt per square centimeter (pretty bright indoor lighting), you get less than a milliwatt onto the sensor.
3. I assert that any camera will have a housing with more surface area than its lens. That's where you put the (conventional) PV cell(s) to harvest energy.
Feel free to poke holes in these assertions and observations, or to point out things that they don't cover. I'll take a crack at it myself:
a. Maybe you've got a situation where most light is coming from a single direction, and your camera faces that direction. You build your camera as a cylinder, perhaps embedded into a wall, so that light falls on no part of it except the lens. In that situation, you don't have a place to put an exterior PV cell. I think this is an unrealistic scenario; if it's built into a wall, plug it in, or surround it with a PV bezel.
b. Maybe your manufacturing is so good and so mature that microelectronics cost a flat rate per square cm, whether you're making a simple PV cell, a simple CMOS image sensor, or an integrated light-harvesting imaging array. From what I know of semiconductor manufacturing, this seems unrealistic, too -- but even if we get there, you can still collect more light with an exterior PV cell (from points 2 and 3), as long as you aren't also in contrived scenario a.
c. You're in a mature IoT scenario, where you've got smart dust everywhere, and it all needs to be self-powered. Here again, though, those dust grains will have more surface area than the lenses integrated into them. In this scenario, I'd expect something more like a fly-eye arrangement anyhow.
I recently visited an old friend, and saw that he'd installed a PV grid on his roof -- three rows, with thirteen panels in each row, and separate control/monitor circuitry for each one. It took me about two minutes to say "you know, put up a big board with a hole in the middle, and you could do imaging with that array."
It was a dumb joke, not a profound engineering insight.
Yes, I'm sure this camera can self-power. No, there's no way to make it cheaper or more effective than putting bigger, dumb panels on the outside of the camera, outside the lens, where they'll collect light over a much larger solid angle. Heck, you'd probably do better by putting a semitransparent solar cell in front of the lens, and a conventional sensor behind.
I haven't read the relevant regulations, and I hope I'll never have to -- I'm not sure I have that much time left on Earth -- but I'll bet that there's almost nothing concrete in them about usability.
EMR capture happens in a time- and attention-constrained environment. Any competent development house should be doing task analysis to ensure that their system meets the time constraints found during a doctor visit.
EMR search -- oh, I don't even want to start thinking about this. The relevant tasks could be anything from an auditor fine-toothed-combing records for an insurance claim, to an EMT trying to get a blood type or allergy info before a victim bleeds out.
I've consciously avoided jobs where my code is responsible for life-and-death decisions. The problem, I guess, is that too many other good people have made the same decision, and there aren't enough good people available to do what needs to be done. I'm not sure what to do about this.
I've had reservations about the Apple watch since I first heard about it. My reservations, though, are the sort that will keep me out of the store.
All the same, I've been watching Apple and its customers long enough to know that I will be hanging on to my Apple stock. The watch doesn't have to make sense; it just has to make money.
...so that you can wire up more MSI TTL to add instructions or other features. That's the charm of the old-school PDP-8. (Okay, not the really old-school DTL version, but the version I remember in a friend's dorm room...)
Sure, that's a good point. Even if the Standard Update Magnet is a big, obvious device, you could make a Scamful Update Device that's a tiny but strong magnet designed to look like something innocuous leaning against the machine. But I still think it would be better than always-on reflashability.
If the attacker has physical access to your machine, you're pretty much hosed.
I suggest a magnetic switch because it doesn't affect the external profile of the device. Apparently everybody has decided that physical switches are ugly and horrible. Fine; hide it internally, but still make it require a physical action on the device, so remote attackers can't flip it.
This. Even if you can't stand to mar your product's sleek lines with a ghastly physical switch, would it be that hard to put a reed switch somewhere along the periphery of the device, so that nobody can flash the firmware unless you first put the Big Honking Update Magnet next to it?
I recognize that analyzing lots of data across lots of cars, drivers, and routes might yield useful knowledge. I'll bet there are even insights that no single human driver could ever gain.
But an awful lot of driving behavior comes from things that have nothing to do with anything this computer can monitor -- specifically, the driver's thought processes. If I slam on the brakes suddenly because I remember something I forgot at home, what will the computer make of that?/p?
"When a person buys an American quarter horse, they want to know that my quarter horse has the blood of these horses running through it, not copies of it."
Well, ick. Blood from horses that lived fifty or a hundred years ago must be getting seriously stinky by now.
In other news, this spokesman appears to be willfully ignorant of the most rudimentary concepts of biology. I guess "understanding" would ruin the nobility and romance of breeding...
Sure, but not at all easily. (Okay, iodine's easy if you can get hold of an iodide.) I've seen documentation of a homebrew project that successfully produced a small amount of phosphorus. It's definitely not a process I'd be willing to try, at least not in any building where I'm responsible for paying insurance.
Yeah, I had to chuckle at that one too. I mean, it looked to me like Dalton was a pretty beefy guy; something that weighed less than 900 times as much as him could still be huge...
We can no longer buy iodine, or red phosphorus, or acetyl chloride, because they can be used to make meth. If someone makes a machine that can "print" arbitrary small molecules, what makes you think that The Authorities will view these machines any more tolerantly?
...but then again, if a significant percentage of politicians read Spider Robinson (or a significant percentage of Robinson fans went into politics), the world would be a very different place.
I'm not surprised that your... enthusiasm?... led you to miss the word "if" in my post. I'm not making the case that we should drop everything and Build Things In Space; I'm simply answering the question "what can we get up there that we can't get more cheaply down here", and proposing one hypothetical situation where that would matter.
Now, as it turns out, I do think we'd be wise as a species to start spreading out, and I don't think that leaving Earth's biosphere will be an immediate death sentence in perpetuity (so yes, I suppose I've earned your contempt). But I don't see significant progress in that direction happening in my lifetime, and I've made my peace with that. Pleasant surprises are still welcome, though -- like rich folks putting their disposable income toward this, instead of building another mega-yacht or trying to corner the world market for iWatches. Is there anything that pleasantly surprises you these days, or is your attention entirely consumed by threads about 3D printers and space?
Metals and oxygen, ready to be chemically separated... already outside of Earth's gravity well, and therefore not incurring the energy costs, environmental issues, and safety concerns of launching them from Earth's sea level. That's kind of a big deal, if you want to start large-scale construction in space.
Slashdot Mirror
What if I left my body at home?
No, my argument was that anything that increases your blood pressure and/or your heart rate is bad.
Like exercise?
Thanks.
I started to edit the penultimate paragraph, but it messed with the flow too much. I have "mellowed" quite a bit in the intervening eight years -- I've gotten older and a bit more comfortable with my mind as it is. Being the smartest guy, or at least feeling like the smartest guy, doesn't seem quite as urgent any more. I'd love to have more selective attention, better memory, or savant skills, but not if it ruins my sleep, or makes me hot-tempered or cruel.
In more detail, I'm not sure exactly what's changed. I feel like the whole concept of "intelligence" isn't as clear to me any more as it used to be -- it still seems like certain people are smarter and certain people aren't, but I've seen so many smart people believing and doing stupid things that it's sometimes hard to put much stock in the concept. I'd hate to see performance-enhancers just enabling people to do stupid or misguided things more quickly and effectively.
They can't, which is why it won't happen. People at the top are there because they're very good at hamstringing competition. So the only legal performance enhancers will be those that are either inefficient, like coffee, or too expensive for you to afford.
And if people are willing to risk their lives and freedom to get an illegal drug that just makes them high, what makes you think laws will prevent them from getting a drug that makes them more money?
It's not just pot or meth. It's true for alcohol as well. The general phenomenon is called state-dependent memory, and it's been established science for many decades -- the Wikipedia article cites a text from 1835.
When this came up a number of years ago on another forum, someone wrote:
[...] if the scientist working on a cure for cancer is doing this um what's the problem? Even if it were to have some negative side effects, and he knowingly chooses to risk it b/c he feels it will help him.
And I wrote this (slightly edited here):
Let's walk a few years down this road. It's 2025, and ehancers are legal, or at least their use is tolerated.
Your son has just joined a law firm. The other new arrivals are using Modafinil, or its successor, to let them work 100+ billable hours per week. While his employment agreement explicitly states that he's not required to use any enhancers, it's also clear that he'll never make partner without them. Is there an element of compulsion here?
Your daughter is getting ready to take her SATs; she's smart and ambitious, and wants to get into a top-tier school, eventually going into med school. Recent anonymous surveys indicate that 20% or more of students taking the test are using enhancers. Nobody's been able to do a formal study, but there are indications that these students are seeing boosts of 200-300 points in their scores. What advice do you give your daughter?
Fast-forward another ten years. Your kids have been using enhancers for the entire time. Originally, they were just a way to get a little extra "edge" -- but, having established a performance baseline while using them, who wants to become "dumber", slower, or sleepier by giving them up?
The problem is, the drugs aren't working quite as well as they used to. It's not surprising, really, at least not to a cognitively-enhanced neurochemist; enhancers, particularly the primitive second- and third-generation varieties, lead to short-term habituation and long-term neurological adaptation. New drugs are better, and with their help, new researchers are smarter. But they still can't do much to help those who scarred their brains with the older drugs.
Your son is fairly secure in his position as a full partner, but the firm's newest hires are scary. Most of them simply don't sleep, ever; they're at the office for days at a time without rest, and when they do take "time off", they're out skydiving, or rock-climbing, or just partying. Partners have always had the power in law firms -- but how long can they maintain power when their underlings are so much smarter and more ambitious?
Your daughter... your daughter isn't doing so well. She's landed a great residency, but the early-21st-century movement to limit the length of residents' shifts faltered and died in the face of enhancement drugs. She doesn't really need sleep, but she misses it, and she misses the companionship that was once associated with it. (Who wants to be involved with a surgical resident, who's almost never home?) When she does try to sleep, her dreams are invaded by the brain-burn victims she sees at work, and she wakes up screaming.
And sometimes the dreams intrude while she's nominally "awake". It's an increasingly common syndrome in long-term gen-3 enhancement users. The neurochemists are hoping that the new gen-5 products will help reduce this symptom.
I think we will go down this road. There's a very good chance I'll go down this road -- I've never felt like there was any such thing as being "smart enough". I think people in general, and researchers in particular, will be able to become "more intelligent", and once they do, they'll be able to figure out ways to accelerate the process.
But I think it's going to hurt. A lot.
That camera's body is approximately a cube. The lens occupies most of one face. Now, class, what percentage of the camera's surface area is occupied by the lens?
For extra credit, describe a geometric solid of which one face has more surface area than the entire solid.
What are you basing this assertion on? It sounds believable, but it also sounds like an unproven assumption.
I'm glad you asked.
1. I assert that it will always be more expensive to make an array of individual PV cells, with circuitry to route their output to readout logic and the global power pool, than to make a conventional sensor and a conventional PV cell with larger effective area. I can't "prove" this, but I can't imagine a realistic scenario where it wouldn't be true.
2. I observe that a sensor in an optical assembly, with light only entering through a lens, can only absorb light that falls on the lens. In fact, it can't absorb all of that; the lens will reflect or absorb some light and some won't land on the sensor, unless the sensor encompasses the entire FOV of the rear of the lens. So, if your lens has one square centimeter of aperture, and your light level is one milliwatt per square centimeter (pretty bright indoor lighting), you get less than a milliwatt onto the sensor.
3. I assert that any camera will have a housing with more surface area than its lens. That's where you put the (conventional) PV cell(s) to harvest energy.
Feel free to poke holes in these assertions and observations, or to point out things that they don't cover. I'll take a crack at it myself:
a. Maybe you've got a situation where most light is coming from a single direction, and your camera faces that direction. You build your camera as a cylinder, perhaps embedded into a wall, so that light falls on no part of it except the lens. In that situation, you don't have a place to put an exterior PV cell. I think this is an unrealistic scenario; if it's built into a wall, plug it in, or surround it with a PV bezel.
b. Maybe your manufacturing is so good and so mature that microelectronics cost a flat rate per square cm, whether you're making a simple PV cell, a simple CMOS image sensor, or an integrated light-harvesting imaging array. From what I know of semiconductor manufacturing, this seems unrealistic, too -- but even if we get there, you can still collect more light with an exterior PV cell (from points 2 and 3), as long as you aren't also in contrived scenario a.
c. You're in a mature IoT scenario, where you've got smart dust everywhere, and it all needs to be self-powered. Here again, though, those dust grains will have more surface area than the lenses integrated into them. In this scenario, I'd expect something more like a fly-eye arrangement anyhow.
Any other ideas?
I recently visited an old friend, and saw that he'd installed a PV grid on his roof -- three rows, with thirteen panels in each row, and separate control/monitor circuitry for each one. It took me about two minutes to say "you know, put up a big board with a hole in the middle, and you could do imaging with that array."
It was a dumb joke, not a profound engineering insight.
Yes, I'm sure this camera can self-power. No, there's no way to make it cheaper or more effective than putting bigger, dumb panels on the outside of the camera, outside the lens, where they'll collect light over a much larger solid angle. Heck, you'd probably do better by putting a semitransparent solar cell in front of the lens, and a conventional sensor behind.
Marketing at exclusivity will inevitably fail, as common sense always eventually prevails over fads.
DeBeers would like a word.
I haven't read the relevant regulations, and I hope I'll never have to -- I'm not sure I have that much time left on Earth -- but I'll bet that there's almost nothing concrete in them about usability.
EMR capture happens in a time- and attention-constrained environment. Any competent development house should be doing task analysis to ensure that their system meets the time constraints found during a doctor visit.
EMR search -- oh, I don't even want to start thinking about this. The relevant tasks could be anything from an auditor fine-toothed-combing records for an insurance claim, to an EMT trying to get a blood type or allergy info before a victim bleeds out.
I've consciously avoided jobs where my code is responsible for life-and-death decisions. The problem, I guess, is that too many other good people have made the same decision, and there aren't enough good people available to do what needs to be done. I'm not sure what to do about this.
I've had reservations about the Apple watch since I first heard about it. My reservations, though, are the sort that will keep me out of the store.
All the same, I've been watching Apple and its customers long enough to know that I will be hanging on to my Apple stock. The watch doesn't have to make sense; it just has to make money.
...so that you can wire up more MSI TTL to add instructions or other features. That's the charm of the old-school PDP-8. (Okay, not the really old-school DTL version, but the version I remember in a friend's dorm room...)
Sure, that's a good point. Even if the Standard Update Magnet is a big, obvious device, you could make a Scamful Update Device that's a tiny but strong magnet designed to look like something innocuous leaning against the machine. But I still think it would be better than always-on reflashability.
If the attacker has physical access to your machine, you're pretty much hosed.
I suggest a magnetic switch because it doesn't affect the external profile of the device. Apparently everybody has decided that physical switches are ugly and horrible. Fine; hide it internally, but still make it require a physical action on the device, so remote attackers can't flip it.
This. Even if you can't stand to mar your product's sleek lines with a ghastly physical switch, would it be that hard to put a reed switch somewhere along the periphery of the device, so that nobody can flash the firmware unless you first put the Big Honking Update Magnet next to it?
I recognize that analyzing lots of data across lots of cars, drivers, and routes might yield useful knowledge. I'll bet there are even insights that no single human driver could ever gain.
But an awful lot of driving behavior comes from things that have nothing to do with anything this computer can monitor -- specifically, the driver's thought processes. If I slam on the brakes suddenly because I remember something I forgot at home, what will the computer make of that?/p?
"When a person buys an American quarter horse, they want to know that my quarter horse has the blood of these horses running through it, not copies of it."
Well, ick. Blood from horses that lived fifty or a hundred years ago must be getting seriously stinky by now.
In other news, this spokesman appears to be willfully ignorant of the most rudimentary concepts of biology. I guess "understanding" would ruin the nobility and romance of breeding...
Someone needs to start a campaign against the war on chemistry while we can still buy glassware.
Know how I can tell you don't live in Texas?
Sure, but not at all easily. (Okay, iodine's easy if you can get hold of an iodide.) I've seen documentation of a homebrew project that successfully produced a small amount of phosphorus. It's definitely not a process I'd be willing to try, at least not in any building where I'm responsible for paying insurance.
Yeah, I had to chuckle at that one too. I mean, it looked to me like Dalton was a pretty beefy guy; something that weighed less than 900 times as much as him could still be huge...
We can no longer buy iodine, or red phosphorus, or acetyl chloride, because they can be used to make meth. If someone makes a machine that can "print" arbitrary small molecules, what makes you think that The Authorities will view these machines any more tolerantly?
Here's a story that I wish had served SF's goal "not to predict the future, but to prevent it":
Melancholy Elephants, by Spider Robinson
...but then again, if a significant percentage of politicians read Spider Robinson (or a significant percentage of Robinson fans went into politics), the world would be a very different place.
Ah, QA. How we miss you back over at Fark.
I'm not surprised that your... enthusiasm?... led you to miss the word "if" in my post. I'm not making the case that we should drop everything and Build Things In Space; I'm simply answering the question "what can we get up there that we can't get more cheaply down here", and proposing one hypothetical situation where that would matter.
Now, as it turns out, I do think we'd be wise as a species to start spreading out, and I don't think that leaving Earth's biosphere will be an immediate death sentence in perpetuity (so yes, I suppose I've earned your contempt). But I don't see significant progress in that direction happening in my lifetime, and I've made my peace with that. Pleasant surprises are still welcome, though -- like rich folks putting their disposable income toward this, instead of building another mega-yacht or trying to corner the world market for iWatches. Is there anything that pleasantly surprises you these days, or is your attention entirely consumed by threads about 3D printers and space?
Metals and oxygen, ready to be chemically separated... already outside of Earth's gravity well, and therefore not incurring the energy costs, environmental issues, and safety concerns of launching them from Earth's sea level. That's kind of a big deal, if you want to start large-scale construction in space.