Yep. Indian salaries will rise, Indian companies will form, and eventually the entire top-notch companies will be in India. It won't pay for any company to outsource tech jobs. But will American software be at the forefront, or Indian? Or European, or Russian, or Chinese, or Japanese, or Israeli? I really have no idea.
I second getting a co-op technical job. It's incredible how much more pay you get from tech jobs than from washing dishes.
The biggest difference I found between working and the programs I wrote in college is, I wrote the programs in college. At work, I didn't write it, and 100 other people are enhancing it at the same time. That makes co-oping a useful education.
A digital camera, if they don't already have one. Take unlimited pictures, see them immediately, put them on your web pages, never pay for prints. I can take 800 pictures (in low resolution) without having to do the equivalent of changing rolls of film!
Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries, if they don't have them. Never buy AA batteries again! And if you do eventually throw them out, they're nickel and zinc, they won't be poisoning any aquifers.
A harmonica. $5.99 for a Hohner Pocket Pal. Make sure they know they can reach the A below middle C by bending the B; that makes many more melodies reachable. I find bending somewhat easier on the $25 Special-20.
Neil Stephenson has a new book out, Quicksilver. Check if they already have Cryptonomicon, get that first if they don't have it.
For the true nerd, "The Bell Curve", $6 used from Amazon. Balance that with an overview of autism and Aspberger's Syndrom. That can resolve a lot of mysteries.
One symptom of this process is an increasing fractal dimension of the districts (the ratio of district boundary to its area). You get this when a district is drawn with an amoeba-like shape to try to select for neighborhoods with certain pockets of voters.
Well there you go. The US should have a law limiting the ratio of a district's boundary length (squared) to its area. A square has b*b=16*a. Something like b*b < 50*a should be flexible enough. Don't just outlaw ugly districts biased by race or by politics, outlaw ugly district.
I've always assumed the work of designing new things and coming up with instructions for how to build them would be separate. Only the final instructions would be fed to the assembler. The assembler is only required to translate instructions into things. A ribosome can build a ribosome, but only if it's fed the DNA telling it how to construct a ribosome.
You're right, having an assembler that can build anything doesn't imply that we'd know what to build with it.
One of Drexler's big arguments is that amino acids aren't a very friendly engineering medium because it's so hard to predict how proteins will fold. So we should use something else (diamandoid) that behaves predictably. I personally think the combination of lengthy automated search and indexing of known solutions would allow reliable engineering with a more flexible medium than diamond. I'll agree with him and you, though, that proteins are too unpredictable to be the ideal engineering medium. (They're also big and weak and temperature-sensitive.)
I read the letters, and skimmed Drexler's "Nanotechnolgy:..." book.
I think Smalley's argument is that for a specific reaction between two molecules, you need something like an enzyme designed specifically for that reaction. The number of possible molecules is astronomical, and the number of pairs astronomical squared.
I hear you can treat most of molecules mechanically except for a few dozen atoms surrounding the reaction site. That limits it to, let's say, 2^^30 possible molecules, so 2^^60 reactions you need specific enzymes for. Designing any one of those 2^^60 enzymes or reaction paths is feasible. Making an index iwth 2^^60 entries is feasible, given atom-scale memory, although it isn't microscopic. Drexler suggested such an index for diamondoid struts of different sizes in "Nanotechnology:...". Nanotech is going to make heavy use of indexes like this. Storing all those enzymes, and shipping them one after another to the right place, is going to be SLOW. I suppose you could pipeline your enzyme fetches.
The real number of enzymes needed is much smaller than 2^^60. To get a self-assembling molecule, assuming you feed it the right basic building blocks, you don't need a universal assembler. DNA limits itself to 4 molecules with a single type of connecting part. Proteins limit themselves to 24 molecules (I don't know if the connecting parts are standardized but I suspect they are). Ribosomes can construct ribosomes, so we already know self-assembling machines are possible.
An interesting question is, given an assembler that knows how to do some fixed set of assemblies, what can be built? How big a set is needed? The smaller the set, the less work is needed to get the correct configuration for each reaction. Perhaps we need specialized factories for some building blocks with standard connectors, then just a tape-reading assembler that can connect standard connectors? Standards simplify things.
I've always thought the way to fund nonprofits is by getting rich people to leave them a pile of cash in their wills. Think of all the Xxx Memorial Buildings you've seen.
As species go, humans don't have much genetic variability. The biggest differences seem to be in Ethiopia and Australia.
A google for "virus bird extinction" suggests that many endangered bird species may go extinct due to West Nile killing off enough for them not to have a viable breeding population left. Hawaii, which was isolated from diseases until very recently, is very hard hit because all the world's bird diseases are striking it at once.
Googling for "virus mammal extinction" I got:
But it was not until 1951 that the Australian government scored its first major victory with the introduction of a virus called myxomatosis, which cut back the rabbit population by as much as 95 percent in some regions and 25 percent in others.
So, all the examples I could see, some percentage of the population has survived, although it isn't clear why.
I'm curious. When a really bad virus gets out of hand, does it kill 100% of the target population? Or only 99.99%? What are examples of species with large populations that have been 100% wiped out by disease?
Also, if there are usually some survivors, why? Is it because they weren't exposed to it, or because there's usually someone who is immune to it?
We're not a presence in space because we can only go on camping trips there, and there's not much useful you can do on a camping trip other than take pictures of yourself among the beautiful scenery.
It's not enough to do camping trips. It's not enough to have an outpost that is continually restocked from home. It's not enough to have a self-supporting village out there. What is needed is a colony out there with the ability to build more colonies. Once we have a that, we can fill the space between the planets in the solar system. The reason to do that is to have more grandchildren.
We don't have the technology to build a self-supporting village, much less a colony that can build new colonies. The moon can give us raw materials, but I doubt that its gravity is enough to prevent long-term bone loss and muscle atrophy in humans. We should look into rotating structures for how to live in space. And we need to work on closed biosystems. We've made good progress on solar cells, computers, and robots in recent decades, which definitely helps.
Back when that comet ran into Jupiter (July 16 1994), the comet wasn't all that big, but it did have quite an effect on Jupiter. Jupiter's only a few orders of magnitude smaller than the sun. A colliding object wouldn't have to be all that big to have a big effect on the sun.
That said, these flares are coming from sunspots, and the activity has been building up for awhile (not appearing all of a sudden) so it all looks like internal sun dynamics.
Yes, they'll run themselves out of business. The "winner" will probably be some free open source software. I was thinking of investing in these companies, because they're clearly the wave of the future, then thought better of it.
It still leaves the issue of how to pay for maintaining the internet.
I liked California's recent election. I think the same person won by first-past-the-post as would have won by any version of Condorcet, or by approval. There were more than two plausible candidates, and they weren't purely chosen by political parties.
The 1992 and 2000 national elections, though, would have come out rather differently if the US had used something other than first-past-the-post.
Software doesn't have to be perfect to be secure. It's quite possible for software to think that 2+2=5 and yet be unable to grant root privileges to an unauthorized user.
Way to go! These people have been the biggest group on the web for some time seriously debating the mechanics of how to vote. I know they've got the fundamentals right. Their choices and extentions have been well thought out too.
Now that we have a well-defined best known way to vote, perhaps we can get governments to adopt it for city, state, even national elections. I very much want the US to become more democratic.
My computers spend all their free cycles computing lexicodes, or generating new hash functions, or testing new random number generators. It's always RAM-resident, so the hard disks stay idle. I did have to modify my Windows settings so that the processor wouldn't shut down after 20 minutes of no mouse clicks.
The article is mistitled. The real news here is there's a new Neal Stephenson book out, Quicksilver, as of late September. Looks like the same universe as Cryptonomicon, but 3 centuries earlier.
They've just invented incredibly cheap solar cells, AND they've just invented incredibly efficient fuel cells? Yeah, right. I've heard that one before.
You're right. And it's sort of defeating the point of making something by hand if it only counts if you attach a digital signature to it.
One way to enforce scarcity is to have something new. Fashions. Especially if producing an unauthorized copy is slow. I bet that will be the case for things designed atom-by-atom -- you'll have a few days of scarcity after something is first released to the public. Of course, people aren't going to design large new things atom-by-atom every day or two. That playing field will be open to machine intelligences only.
One thing humans can do that might be of value is act human. Sort of the way we make parks and let birds and squirrels and ants run around in them, just so we can watch them. We might be given the earth as a zoo all for ourselves, just so machines can watch what we do with ourselves.
(I've heard "uploading" discussed -- turning ourselves into machine intelligences. That would avoid this problem. But I don't buy it. The habits we've developed to deal with our limited selves would probably be counterproductive in a more capable being. It's easier for AI to be done well from scratch. Which would leave us being us.)
(The original article, which claims we're already running out of things for people to do, I don't buy either. Right now we've got far more to do than there are people to do it. Software, housing, nursing, teaching, cooking, sweeping floors, filing torts, tons of stuff.)
Hum. What if humans sign their works with unbreakable digital signatures based on their public key? I'm willing to believe that there will always be unbreakable digital signatures.
Here's the future. Nanotech makes nothing valuable except designs. AI makes computers 1000x more capable at designing than any humans. AI accumulate all things of value, humans are left with nothing. The only way around that I see is for humans to value things made by humans, and local humans at that. For example:
Treat original art as more valuable than copies, and art made locally (all other things being equal) is more valuable than art made elsewhere.
Treat handmade furniture, ornate building decorations, one-of-a-kind tilings as valuable. The property of being made by a human and having no other copies makes things valuable.
The government should not be in charge of the safety net for the poor and children. The local community should be. It should employ people in the local community, be managed by people in the local community, and be funded by people in the local community. What the government CAN do is give a hefty tax incentive to funding local community efforts.
This is circular reasoning. It keeps humans busy doing things that will be appreciated by other humans, true. But the machines would still have a monopoly on progress. I don't see any way around that at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Indian salaries will rise, Indian companies will form, and eventually the entire top-notch companies will be in India. It won't pay for any company to outsource tech jobs. But will American software be at the forefront, or Indian? Or European, or Russian, or Chinese, or Japanese, or Israeli? I really have no idea.
I second getting a co-op technical job. It's incredible how much more pay you get from tech jobs than from washing dishes.
The biggest difference I found between working and the programs I wrote in college is, I wrote the programs in college. At work, I didn't write it, and 100 other people are enhancing it at the same time. That makes co-oping a useful education.
If you watch 90 minutes of advertising a month they'll give you a free PC?
Reminds me of CMU's floppy day, where they'd give you a free floppy disk if you came to watch the football team play. Not many people showed up.
A digital camera, if they don't already have one. Take unlimited pictures, see them immediately, put them on your web pages, never pay for prints. I can take 800 pictures (in low resolution) without having to do the equivalent of changing rolls of film!
Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries, if they don't have them. Never buy AA batteries again! And if you do eventually throw them out, they're nickel and zinc, they won't be poisoning any aquifers.
A harmonica. $5.99 for a Hohner Pocket Pal. Make sure they know they can reach the A below middle C by bending the B; that makes many more melodies reachable. I find bending somewhat easier on the $25 Special-20.
Neil Stephenson has a new book out, Quicksilver. Check if they already have Cryptonomicon, get that first if they don't have it.
For the true nerd, "The Bell Curve", $6 used from Amazon. Balance that with an overview of autism and Aspberger's Syndrom. That can resolve a lot of mysteries.
Well there you go. The US should have a law limiting the ratio of a district's boundary length (squared) to its area. A square has b*b=16*a. Something like b*b < 50*a should be flexible enough. Don't just outlaw ugly districts biased by race or by politics, outlaw ugly district.
I've always assumed the work of designing new things and coming up with instructions for how to build them would be separate. Only the final instructions would be fed to the assembler. The assembler is only required to translate instructions into things. A ribosome can build a ribosome, but only if it's fed the DNA telling it how to construct a ribosome.
You're right, having an assembler that can build anything doesn't imply that we'd know what to build with it.
One of Drexler's big arguments is that amino acids aren't a very friendly engineering medium because it's so hard to predict how proteins will fold. So we should use something else (diamandoid) that behaves predictably. I personally think the combination of lengthy automated search and indexing of known solutions would allow reliable engineering with a more flexible medium than diamond. I'll agree with him and you, though, that proteins are too unpredictable to be the ideal engineering medium. (They're also big and weak and temperature-sensitive.)
I read the letters, and skimmed Drexler's "Nanotechnolgy: ..." book.
...". Nanotech is going to make heavy use of indexes like this. Storing all those enzymes, and shipping them one after another to the right place, is going to be SLOW. I suppose you could pipeline your enzyme fetches.
I think Smalley's argument is that for a specific reaction between two molecules, you need something like an enzyme designed specifically for that reaction. The number of possible molecules is astronomical, and the number of pairs astronomical squared.
I hear you can treat most of molecules mechanically except for a few dozen atoms surrounding the reaction site. That limits it to, let's say, 2^^30 possible molecules, so 2^^60 reactions you need specific enzymes for. Designing any one of those 2^^60 enzymes or reaction paths is feasible. Making an index iwth 2^^60 entries is feasible, given atom-scale memory, although it isn't microscopic. Drexler suggested such an index for diamondoid struts of different sizes in "Nanotechnology:
The real number of enzymes needed is much smaller than 2^^60. To get a self-assembling molecule, assuming you feed it the right basic building blocks, you don't need a universal assembler. DNA limits itself to 4 molecules with a single type of connecting part. Proteins limit themselves to 24 molecules (I don't know if the connecting parts are standardized but I suspect they are). Ribosomes can construct ribosomes, so we already know self-assembling machines are possible.
An interesting question is, given an assembler that knows how to do some fixed set of assemblies, what can be built? How big a set is needed? The smaller the set, the less work is needed to get the correct configuration for each reaction. Perhaps we need specialized factories for some building blocks with standard connectors, then just a tape-reading assembler that can connect standard connectors? Standards simplify things.
I've always thought the way to fund nonprofits is by getting rich people to leave them a pile of cash in their wills. Think of all the Xxx Memorial Buildings you've seen.
A google for "virus bird extinction" suggests that many endangered bird species may go extinct due to West Nile killing off enough for them not to have a viable breeding population left. Hawaii, which was isolated from diseases until very recently, is very hard hit because all the world's bird diseases are striking it at once.
Googling for "virus mammal extinction" I got:
So, all the examples I could see, some percentage of the population has survived, although it isn't clear why.
I'm curious. When a really bad virus gets out of hand, does it kill 100% of the target population? Or only 99.99%? What are examples of species with large populations that have been 100% wiped out by disease?
Also, if there are usually some survivors, why? Is it because they weren't exposed to it, or because there's usually someone who is immune to it?
We're not a presence in space because we can only go on camping trips there, and there's not much useful you can do on a camping trip other than take pictures of yourself among the beautiful scenery.
It's not enough to do camping trips. It's not enough to have an outpost that is continually restocked from home. It's not enough to have a self-supporting village out there. What is needed is a colony out there with the ability to build more colonies. Once we have a that, we can fill the space between the planets in the solar system. The reason to do that is to have more grandchildren.
We don't have the technology to build a self-supporting village, much less a colony that can build new colonies. The moon can give us raw materials, but I doubt that its gravity is enough to prevent long-term bone loss and muscle atrophy in humans. We should look into rotating structures for how to live in space. And we need to work on closed biosystems. We've made good progress on solar cells, computers, and robots in recent decades, which definitely helps.
Back when that comet ran into Jupiter (July 16 1994), the comet wasn't all that big, but it did have quite an effect on Jupiter. Jupiter's only a few orders of magnitude smaller than the sun. A colliding object wouldn't have to be all that big to have a big effect on the sun.
That said, these flares are coming from sunspots, and the activity has been building up for awhile (not appearing all of a sudden) so it all looks like internal sun dynamics.
Yes, they'll run themselves out of business. The "winner" will probably be some free open source software. I was thinking of investing in these companies, because they're clearly the wave of the future, then thought better of it.
It still leaves the issue of how to pay for maintaining the internet.
I liked California's recent election. I think the same person won by first-past-the-post as would have won by any version of Condorcet, or by approval. There were more than two plausible candidates, and they weren't purely chosen by political parties.
The 1992 and 2000 national elections, though, would have come out rather differently if the US had used something other than first-past-the-post.
Software doesn't have to be perfect to be secure. It's quite possible for software to think that 2+2=5 and yet be unable to grant root privileges to an unauthorized user.
Way to go! These people have been the biggest group on the web for some time seriously debating the mechanics of how to vote. I know they've got the fundamentals right. Their choices and extentions have been well thought out too.
Now that we have a well-defined best known way to vote, perhaps we can get governments to adopt it for city, state, even national elections. I very much want the US to become more democratic.
I might even use it. But it wouldn't take much for me to decide to ignore it. .
. x
. . x
x x x
I didn't have time to read the article or any of the comments but I felt I'd post something anyways.
It's just like a national ID card, except we have to pay for them!
My computers spend all their free cycles computing lexicodes, or generating new hash functions, or testing new random number generators. It's always RAM-resident, so the hard disks stay idle. I did have to modify my Windows settings so that the processor wouldn't shut down after 20 minutes of no mouse clicks.
The article is mistitled. The real news here is there's a new Neal Stephenson book out, Quicksilver, as of late September. Looks like the same universe as Cryptonomicon, but 3 centuries earlier.
They've just invented incredibly cheap solar cells, AND they've just invented incredibly efficient fuel cells? Yeah, right. I've heard that one before.
You're right. And it's sort of defeating the point of making something by hand if it only counts if you attach a digital signature to it.
One way to enforce scarcity is to have something new. Fashions. Especially if producing an unauthorized copy is slow. I bet that will be the case for things designed atom-by-atom -- you'll have a few days of scarcity after something is first released to the public. Of course, people aren't going to design large new things atom-by-atom every day or two. That playing field will be open to machine intelligences only.
One thing humans can do that might be of value is act human. Sort of the way we make parks and let birds and squirrels and ants run around in them, just so we can watch them. We might be given the earth as a zoo all for ourselves, just so machines can watch what we do with ourselves.
(I've heard "uploading" discussed -- turning ourselves into machine intelligences. That would avoid this problem. But I don't buy it. The habits we've developed to deal with our limited selves would probably be counterproductive in a more capable being. It's easier for AI to be done well from scratch. Which would leave us being us.)
(The original article, which claims we're already running out of things for people to do, I don't buy either. Right now we've got far more to do than there are people to do it. Software, housing, nursing, teaching, cooking, sweeping floors, filing torts, tons of stuff.)
Hum. What if humans sign their works with unbreakable digital signatures based on their public key? I'm willing to believe that there will always be unbreakable digital signatures.
Here's the future. Nanotech makes nothing valuable except designs. AI makes computers 1000x more capable at designing than any humans. AI accumulate all things of value, humans are left with nothing. The only way around that I see is for humans to value things made by humans, and local humans at that. For example:
Treat original art as more valuable than copies, and art made locally (all other things being equal) is more valuable than art made elsewhere.
Treat handmade furniture, ornate building decorations, one-of-a-kind tilings as valuable. The property of being made by a human and having no other copies makes things valuable.
The government should not be in charge of the safety net for the poor and children. The local community should be. It should employ people in the local community, be managed by people in the local community, and be funded by people in the local community. What the government CAN do is give a hefty tax incentive to funding local community efforts.
This is circular reasoning. It keeps humans busy doing things that will be appreciated by other humans, true. But the machines would still have a monopoly on progress. I don't see any way around that at all.