There haven't been large-scale experiments, but recent Japanese studies estimate that they can remove a kilogram of Uranium from the sea for about $200. That's still lots more than it costs on the market, but you know that there's more than $200 worth of energy in a kilo of Uranium! Google will show you more, but here's one link:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v280/n5724/abs/280665a0.html
Hey, this was a really well thought out reply to the talk. I definitely agree that Sterling did not refute the people who predict that the Singularity is coming. The fact that he does a lot of thinking about how things might look if it does come made me think that he's open to the idea. What he's really good at is making us realize that in some first-person real ways, the technological explosions that seem significant don't always imprint themselves on how we live our lives. It's in that sense that a singularity could "blow by" and not really leave a mark; it might not be a big deal.
A more important and insightful part of your comment was about giving short shrift to remarkable effects of historical technology. In this you're probably right. Then again, I take his method to be a bit different than what you expect. His goal isn't to refute singulatarianism by making fun of one extreme version of it. The idea is more to illustrate that along with extremely exciting versions, we should consider extremely boring versions, or versions in which we start following a different ball and the thing never really happens, etc. Kurzweil is basically a traditional Marxist in that he thinks the technology is the ultimate driving force in history, and that ideology sort of tags along and suits itself to the technological "means of production" of the time. I'm not saying that this aspect of Marxism is discredited in any way. It may be exactly right. But it's worth trying to imagine what it would like for it to be wrong - for human decisions (rather than technological opportunities) to shape the future. And when you think about it, that kind of thing really does happen. Try to project, as many brilliant sci-fi authors did, the trajectory of our progress in the colonization of space, based on the first 15 post-Sputnik years. Everybody in 1972 was sure that we'd have permanent space stations by now. Instead, we just decided to say "fuck it, let's do something else, who cares about space anyway." People are like that. We might create all kinds of amazing artifical life and just not care, since American Idol is more interesting. I don't think that we will, because robotics + AI + farming will make a huge impact on how we live, but it might be sort of invisible and involve nothing like a radical reordering of our priorities. Or our priorities might be so fucking radical that we just stop caring about our stupid ancestors the human beings and their petty little concerns. That's another scenario that Sterling seriously entertained - we might become "utility fogs." We might become many different sorts of things that sort of lose contact from one another because their priorities develop in totally different directions, but none of those things are at all like human beings. So that's a "black hole" future that Kurzweil should and doesn't think about. In a way, he can't really follow through on his own projections, because he's assuming that all the radical changes he expects will not affect our priorities. Like, he wants to bring back his father! Why is he so confident that he'll even care about this sort of thing after his augmentation? This is an important point, and Sterling made it better in the talk than I could have imagined. Technology does not just serve as the means to some ends. Technology also leads us to re-evaluate ends. This makes the singularity a true event-horizon, since we really should not even assume that we have any idea of what our post-singularity incarnations will care about.
Ever since I heard this talk (ogg vorbis, mp3) by Bruce Sterling, I can no longer take this singulatarians very seriously. That talk is probably the best talk that I have ever found on the internet, and it should be a part of everyone's introduction to thinking about this singularity stuff. The title is: "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole."
Actually, seawater uranium is indefinitely sustainable, so long as the rivers keep running. Rivers add far more Uranium to the sea each year than what we would burn even if all our energy came from Uranium. Well, I haven't done the calculation, but a geologist I trust did.
I think the real problem in the post above isn't the stereotyping. The point is that France and Japan will not be saved from global warming even if they produce their own energy responsibly. So long as the barbarian nations keep burning coal to make most of their electricity, England and not France will be the place where the wine grows.
I think you're right, but still, if we dumped our really hot waste - mainly fission products like iodine and strontium - into a big hot vat and used the heat to do some work... ratios wouldn't be that decisive. I mean, there's zero chance that those things would go critical, and all those floating neutrons might actually break things down faster. Maybe we could get it to superheat a gas like helium, which can't get radioactive, so poses no danger if it leaks by accident. The hot helium could turn a turbine, run a carnot cycle heat engine, or whatever... It wouldn't be a big contribution to our grid, but it might really help people change their view of "nuclear waste" if that "waste" were supervised as it makes turbines turn.
I think the sane wing of the environmental movement (which exists, and I proudly belong to its ranks), has really come around on nuclear. I prefer to think of it as the least of all the available evils, which is to say that I like wind and solar-thermal better, but I don't suffer from the illusion that those better things can scale up at the rate that we need. Nuclear can, and needs to start to yesterday.
I agree, and I'd personally go farther: I don't have any problem with a nuke plant in my backyard - and I mean this literally. If you google the specs on Toshiba's mini municipal reactors... hell yeah, I soo want one of those under the yard! I have fantasies of buying one, buying some cheap land, and building a self-sustaining utopian commune around it. That's the kind of energy independence, local community resilience and modernity that should excite any real American!
Hmm, I think we're still waiting to tell the final story of how bad Chernobyl was. We know that about 55 people died of radiation poisoning not long after the incident. Now it's been over 20 years, but we're still waiting to see the extent, if any, by which by which the people who were exposed to lower levels of radiation are having their lives shortened. The surprising and possibly wrong preliminary data is: not at all - which should be interpreted as "maybe not yet." Many animal studies in the Ukraine also confirm what I think is a surprising result. Anyway, we're learning the body seems to be able to deal with relatively low levels of radiation exposure fairly well. I say this because it's not clear that in the way that matters, the Chernobyl catastrophe lives up to its billing. By some counts, a typical functioning coal plant kills more people than Chernobyl over its lifetime of operation, especially when you include the human cost of mining the fuel.
This may be a trite point, but yes, Google does err. Google also does a better job than most companies at going back and fixing their errors. This, being an online database, is pretty easy to correct. If by some principle the scholarship potential of this otherwise unavailable information was irredeemably corrupted, then yes, I'd worry. Instead, it sounds like a pretty amazing project which happens to be in beta.
Don't mistake lectures by The Teaching Company for real university courses. The quality of what they say is pretty good, but a full course would have 3x as many instruction hours, 6x as much time where you spend reading, and then a bunch of assignments on which you get feedback... not to mention getting to ask your own questions in class and in office hours.
I don't have anything against TTC, but if you've seen college, you'll know that you'll learn 10x more in a college class than you do from a TTC series.
To simulate a college education without college, don't look to TTC. Look to books.
The only biological function pain serves for livestock that lives its entire life in a cage slightly larger than its body is to make it suffer. Suppose that was your future: to live in a narrow six-foot cage for the rest of your life. Would you prefer to do it in constant pain or not? How would your "safety" be compromised if you couldn't feel pain in your cage?
I've been wondering about this for a while now: Since pigs and dairy cows are basically kept in a pen slightly larger than their bodies, couldn't they be surgically modified to basically be in a vegetative state and then tube-fed? Would that add significantly to the cost of meat? I know that I'd be willing to pay extra for meat from animals who verifiably did not suffer.
I think the point is this: if the choice is between livestock that lives in daily pain until it is slaughtered, and livestock that doesn't, only a sick bastard would prefer the scenario with the needless suffering. That's not saying that it's the best possible scenario, but it's not crazy to think it might be the best realistic near-term scenario in a world where the demand for meat is growing exponentially.
Yeah, that would be great, and possibly wise in a world where nobody else was capable of being evil. Legend has it that IBM tried doing this very thing: Make hardware and let others do the software. I hear that didn't work out so well for them. By the time they realized their mistake and tried to take back the control of the software on their PCs, OS2 was too little, too late. They don't make personal computers anymore.
If Google elbows in and becomes a significant and familiar part of iphone usability, it puts Apple in a much weaker negotiating position. Like MS, who periodically threatened to stop making Office for the Mac, only to watch Apple squirm, beg and deal, Google too could paint Apple into a corner. I'm pretty sure that MS had the power to basically kill the Macintosh as a mainstream product if they yanked Office. Some people would complain, but almost all would just switch to Windows. If Google got iphone users to depend on their services and then yanked them, people would complain and switch to Android. That's why Apple needs to develop their own Google-like services while keeping Google from gaining too much of a toe-hold, by hook or by crook. For now, they can get away with it.
One more player in this scheme is AT&T, who is surely putting pressure on Apple to smother VoIP in any form. They bill minutes, roaming fees, stupid international rates, etc. People want Google Voice on the iphone because it will save them money, and that money, had it not been saved, would have all gone to AT&T.
In countries with DMCA and the like, is it clear that you really can legally jailbreak the iphone? Is there any precedent to indicate that the right to circumvent iphone protections is protected by the law when the phone is "yours"?
OK, for one thing, this screen and memory are basically the two most expensive parts of a cell phone. So here is what I'm thinking: Why stick this thing in a magazine? Why not just send it to whoever wants one, except make the thing into a proper unlocked cell phone that runs ads on its screen (maybe downloads a new one each month)? If the phone is good and the ads are mostly skipable (and don't get in the way of functionality), I think this might be an interesting business model. Ditto if the thing were just a portable media player. Sure, it's adding more junk to the world, but the coup for an advertiser is to make an ad that users would actually want to keep around. This might just be the way to do it.
Whens the last time you can think advertisters have footed the bill?
How about my email hosting, internet search and many other such services that I would definitely pay for if they weren't free. I certainly don't get billed by Google.
I totally agree. The Greens in the US and Germany have the same sort of myopia. This is very difficult for me, because on most issues, I tend to agree with the Greens more than just about any other political party. But on this one issue, they are so obviously irrational that I understand why many of my friends can't take them seriously. I love the Greens but I just can't defend their anti-nuclear kneejerk position. Maybe when the 60's hippie wing of the party dies out, they'll rethink this.
That 90% figure is complete crap. Kennedy's administration did this sort of thing and not many people died from it. Estimates vary between zero and double digits of individuals. (They were testing how nuke explosions in space interfere with radio communication. Answer: A lot.)
As far as accelerating the Earth, that's not gonna happen. Why not instead place a big spinning net at the liberation point and vary the thickness of the weave so that in its shade, we're always getting the optimal amount of solar energy? A fringe benefit of this: It would be a great place to attach photovoltaic cells!
No, it should be obvious to anyone with a century's experience of orbit-based astronomy that the Earth has life. You could not possibly get an atmosphere with this much oxygen without a biological process. Gathering spectra from planets like ours should be a piece of cake for aliens. Even we might be able to do such a thing soon!
This is a good point. I don't think there is much of a role for UV light once evolution gets started. As far as the start of life itself, I think we just don't have a good model for how it happened. I don't doubt that UV light had a role to play on Earth, but maybe it's not necessary - who knows!
But one interesting thing from the article that made me think: Life on Earth basically got going right away - as soon as the oceans formed. But then it took evolution 4 billion years to produce a civilization, on a planet that's set to self-sterilize 4.5 billion years after its formation. That means we made it "just in time" - which is especially impressive since for most of life's history, the most complex organisms on Earth were single cells. By the time multi-cellular lifeforms like sponges formed, the habitable era of our planet was already three-quarters done. That really makes me think that complex life may be quite rare after all.
You seriously believe we draw motivation from some gradual environmental worstening that will begin in half a billion years? Did you notice that our planet might get pretty crappy within half a century, and yet the share of US power from coal is set to grow over that time? Have you seen our national debt? How could anyone think of us as a civilization that knows how to plan for our future?
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There haven't been large-scale experiments, but recent Japanese studies estimate that they can remove a kilogram of Uranium from the sea for about $200. That's still lots more than it costs on the market, but you know that there's more than $200 worth of energy in a kilo of Uranium! Google will show you more, but here's one link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v280/n5724/abs/280665a0.html
A more important and insightful part of your comment was about giving short shrift to remarkable effects of historical technology. In this you're probably right. Then again, I take his method to be a bit different than what you expect. His goal isn't to refute singulatarianism by making fun of one extreme version of it. The idea is more to illustrate that along with extremely exciting versions, we should consider extremely boring versions, or versions in which we start following a different ball and the thing never really happens, etc. Kurzweil is basically a traditional Marxist in that he thinks the technology is the ultimate driving force in history, and that ideology sort of tags along and suits itself to the technological "means of production" of the time. I'm not saying that this aspect of Marxism is discredited in any way. It may be exactly right. But it's worth trying to imagine what it would like for it to be wrong - for human decisions (rather than technological opportunities) to shape the future. And when you think about it, that kind of thing really does happen. Try to project, as many brilliant sci-fi authors did, the trajectory of our progress in the colonization of space, based on the first 15 post-Sputnik years. Everybody in 1972 was sure that we'd have permanent space stations by now. Instead, we just decided to say "fuck it, let's do something else, who cares about space anyway." People are like that. We might create all kinds of amazing artifical life and just not care, since American Idol is more interesting. I don't think that we will, because robotics + AI + farming will make a huge impact on how we live, but it might be sort of invisible and involve nothing like a radical reordering of our priorities. Or our priorities might be so fucking radical that we just stop caring about our stupid ancestors the human beings and their petty little concerns. That's another scenario that Sterling seriously entertained - we might become "utility fogs." We might become many different sorts of things that sort of lose contact from one another because their priorities develop in totally different directions, but none of those things are at all like human beings. So that's a "black hole" future that Kurzweil should and doesn't think about. In a way, he can't really follow through on his own projections, because he's assuming that all the radical changes he expects will not affect our priorities. Like, he wants to bring back his father! Why is he so confident that he'll even care about this sort of thing after his augmentation? This is an important point, and Sterling made it better in the talk than I could have imagined. Technology does not just serve as the means to some ends. Technology also leads us to re-evaluate ends. This makes the singularity a true event-horizon, since we really should not even assume that we have any idea of what our post-singularity incarnations will care about.
Ever since I heard this talk (ogg vorbis, mp3) by Bruce Sterling, I can no longer take this singulatarians very seriously. That talk is probably the best talk that I have ever found on the internet, and it should be a part of everyone's introduction to thinking about this singularity stuff. The title is: "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole."
Actually, seawater uranium is indefinitely sustainable, so long as the rivers keep running. Rivers add far more Uranium to the sea each year than what we would burn even if all our energy came from Uranium. Well, I haven't done the calculation, but a geologist I trust did.
I think the real problem in the post above isn't the stereotyping. The point is that France and Japan will not be saved from global warming even if they produce their own energy responsibly. So long as the barbarian nations keep burning coal to make most of their electricity, England and not France will be the place where the wine grows.
I think you're right, but still, if we dumped our really hot waste - mainly fission products like iodine and strontium - into a big hot vat and used the heat to do some work... ratios wouldn't be that decisive. I mean, there's zero chance that those things would go critical, and all those floating neutrons might actually break things down faster. Maybe we could get it to superheat a gas like helium, which can't get radioactive, so poses no danger if it leaks by accident. The hot helium could turn a turbine, run a carnot cycle heat engine, or whatever... It wouldn't be a big contribution to our grid, but it might really help people change their view of "nuclear waste" if that "waste" were supervised as it makes turbines turn.
I think the sane wing of the environmental movement (which exists, and I proudly belong to its ranks), has really come around on nuclear. I prefer to think of it as the least of all the available evils, which is to say that I like wind and solar-thermal better, but I don't suffer from the illusion that those better things can scale up at the rate that we need. Nuclear can, and needs to start to yesterday.
I agree, and I'd personally go farther: I don't have any problem with a nuke plant in my backyard - and I mean this literally. If you google the specs on Toshiba's mini municipal reactors... hell yeah, I soo want one of those under the yard! I have fantasies of buying one, buying some cheap land, and building a self-sustaining utopian commune around it. That's the kind of energy independence, local community resilience and modernity that should excite any real American!
Hmm, I think we're still waiting to tell the final story of how bad Chernobyl was. We know that about 55 people died of radiation poisoning not long after the incident. Now it's been over 20 years, but we're still waiting to see the extent, if any, by which by which the people who were exposed to lower levels of radiation are having their lives shortened. The surprising and possibly wrong preliminary data is: not at all - which should be interpreted as "maybe not yet." Many animal studies in the Ukraine also confirm what I think is a surprising result. Anyway, we're learning the body seems to be able to deal with relatively low levels of radiation exposure fairly well. I say this because it's not clear that in the way that matters, the Chernobyl catastrophe lives up to its billing. By some counts, a typical functioning coal plant kills more people than Chernobyl over its lifetime of operation, especially when you include the human cost of mining the fuel.
This may be a trite point, but yes, Google does err. Google also does a better job than most companies at going back and fixing their errors. This, being an online database, is pretty easy to correct. If by some principle the scholarship potential of this otherwise unavailable information was irredeemably corrupted, then yes, I'd worry. Instead, it sounds like a pretty amazing project which happens to be in beta.
Don't mistake lectures by The Teaching Company for real university courses. The quality of what they say is pretty good, but a full course would have 3x as many instruction hours, 6x as much time where you spend reading, and then a bunch of assignments on which you get feedback... not to mention getting to ask your own questions in class and in office hours.
I don't have anything against TTC, but if you've seen college, you'll know that you'll learn 10x more in a college class than you do from a TTC series.
To simulate a college education without college, don't look to TTC. Look to books.
The only biological function pain serves for livestock that lives its entire life in a cage slightly larger than its body is to make it suffer. Suppose that was your future: to live in a narrow six-foot cage for the rest of your life. Would you prefer to do it in constant pain or not? How would your "safety" be compromised if you couldn't feel pain in your cage?
I've been wondering about this for a while now: Since pigs and dairy cows are basically kept in a pen slightly larger than their bodies, couldn't they be surgically modified to basically be in a vegetative state and then tube-fed? Would that add significantly to the cost of meat? I know that I'd be willing to pay extra for meat from animals who verifiably did not suffer.
I think the point is this: if the choice is between livestock that lives in daily pain until it is slaughtered, and livestock that doesn't, only a sick bastard would prefer the scenario with the needless suffering. That's not saying that it's the best possible scenario, but it's not crazy to think it might be the best realistic near-term scenario in a world where the demand for meat is growing exponentially.
One problem with unobtainium is that it's really hard to get.
Yeah, that would be great, and possibly wise in a world where nobody else was capable of being evil. Legend has it that IBM tried doing this very thing: Make hardware and let others do the software. I hear that didn't work out so well for them. By the time they realized their mistake and tried to take back the control of the software on their PCs, OS2 was too little, too late. They don't make personal computers anymore.
If Google elbows in and becomes a significant and familiar part of iphone usability, it puts Apple in a much weaker negotiating position. Like MS, who periodically threatened to stop making Office for the Mac, only to watch Apple squirm, beg and deal, Google too could paint Apple into a corner. I'm pretty sure that MS had the power to basically kill the Macintosh as a mainstream product if they yanked Office. Some people would complain, but almost all would just switch to Windows. If Google got iphone users to depend on their services and then yanked them, people would complain and switch to Android. That's why Apple needs to develop their own Google-like services while keeping Google from gaining too much of a toe-hold, by hook or by crook. For now, they can get away with it.
One more player in this scheme is AT&T, who is surely putting pressure on Apple to smother VoIP in any form. They bill minutes, roaming fees, stupid international rates, etc. People want Google Voice on the iphone because it will save them money, and that money, had it not been saved, would have all gone to AT&T.
In countries with DMCA and the like, is it clear that you really can legally jailbreak the iphone? Is there any precedent to indicate that the right to circumvent iphone protections is protected by the law when the phone is "yours"?
OK, for one thing, this screen and memory are basically the two most expensive parts of a cell phone. So here is what I'm thinking: Why stick this thing in a magazine? Why not just send it to whoever wants one, except make the thing into a proper unlocked cell phone that runs ads on its screen (maybe downloads a new one each month)? If the phone is good and the ads are mostly skipable (and don't get in the way of functionality), I think this might be an interesting business model. Ditto if the thing were just a portable media player. Sure, it's adding more junk to the world, but the coup for an advertiser is to make an ad that users would actually want to keep around. This might just be the way to do it.
Whens the last time you can think advertisters have footed the bill?
How about my email hosting, internet search and many other such services that I would definitely pay for if they weren't free. I certainly don't get billed by Google.
It's not that hard to be big in Japan.
I totally agree. The Greens in the US and Germany have the same sort of myopia. This is very difficult for me, because on most issues, I tend to agree with the Greens more than just about any other political party. But on this one issue, they are so obviously irrational that I understand why many of my friends can't take them seriously. I love the Greens but I just can't defend their anti-nuclear kneejerk position. Maybe when the 60's hippie wing of the party dies out, they'll rethink this.
That 90% figure is complete crap. Kennedy's administration did this sort of thing and not many people died from it. Estimates vary between zero and double digits of individuals. (They were testing how nuke explosions in space interfere with radio communication. Answer: A lot.)
As far as accelerating the Earth, that's not gonna happen. Why not instead place a big spinning net at the liberation point and vary the thickness of the weave so that in its shade, we're always getting the optimal amount of solar energy? A fringe benefit of this: It would be a great place to attach photovoltaic cells!
No, it should be obvious to anyone with a century's experience of orbit-based astronomy that the Earth has life. You could not possibly get an atmosphere with this much oxygen without a biological process. Gathering spectra from planets like ours should be a piece of cake for aliens. Even we might be able to do such a thing soon!
But one interesting thing from the article that made me think: Life on Earth basically got going right away - as soon as the oceans formed. But then it took evolution 4 billion years to produce a civilization, on a planet that's set to self-sterilize 4.5 billion years after its formation. That means we made it "just in time" - which is especially impressive since for most of life's history, the most complex organisms on Earth were single cells. By the time multi-cellular lifeforms like sponges formed, the habitable era of our planet was already three-quarters done. That really makes me think that complex life may be quite rare after all.
You seriously believe we draw motivation from some gradual environmental worstening that will begin in half a billion years? Did you notice that our planet might get pretty crappy within half a century, and yet the share of US power from coal is set to grow over that time? Have you seen our national debt? How could anyone think of us as a civilization that knows how to plan for our future?