"The fact that somebody like Trump could even get elected is a death-sentence. The problem isn't the guy in the captain's chair. The problem is all the guys who wanted him in the captain's chair"
It's not the first time something like this has happened. I hesitate to bring up the canonical German case, but it has similar economic aspects. The US has been on an upward economic slope for such a long time that it ending or flattening puts the affected people under stress.
Humans evolved strategies during the stone age to cope with such stress. The stress was always one of not enough resources for the population. The solution was to attack neighbors and appropriate their resources. The lead up to war started with the spread of xenophobic memes. Eventually, irrational leaders become attractive and led the tribe into war. Win or lose, the balance between population and resources was restored. Because the young women were booty, the genes for this behavior become universal. https://www.academia.edu/77738...
I think the problem is they can't think of anything to do with the money.
There are a few ideas that might work out and make a ton of money and get the race out of the CO2 box. StratoSolar is the small change one, power satellites are the one that could take that much investment. There is a 2016 video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... It's exactly not the current scheme, but close. Takes about nine and a half years before you see any return, but, if it works, the return is in the tens of trillions.
It's not surprising we have made "remarkably little progress." Humans are the result of millions of years of selection. From what we see in the archaeological record, there was xenophobia and violence aplenty.
What switches off the xenophobia is good times and rising prospects. What switches xenophobia on is stagnant or falling income and poor future prospects.
"as it appears that men are more likely to want the status that goes with working on a popular project."
If you look into the environment in which humans evolved, this makes sense. To become an ancestor, human males had to gain status in the tribe. A lot of males will work harder for status than they do for economic reasons. I was once lambasted by a Federal Judge for recognizing that gaining status was a huge human motivation (and being human, that it applied to me). That was amusing considering that to gain the status of a federal judge they gave up much of the income they could get as an expensive lawyer.
This is about open source software, where much of the "compenstation" for working on it comes from gaining status. It's not surprizing that most of the people who work on open source are males.
This kind of spam has been a problem with my cell phone for about a year. I get 2-3 voice mails a day with no ringing. It used to burn minutes to listen to them. Now I log in and delete them. The net value of phones is falling.
" How does one establish which is the copy, and which is the conscious original?"
I suspect you can't. Though some people, such as Robin Hanson, disagree, I think people may be legally limited to one running copy of their consciousness. There is another confusing matter. If we have the technology to read out a brain, the same technology should be up to the task of moving memory into the brain. This means reversible uploads and the ability to move between an uploaded state and a meat body state with continuity of consciousness. I described this in "The Clinic Seed." (Google for it if interested.)
I have thought about nanotechnology since before Eric Drexler's first publication on the subject. The various complications were discussed on the Extropian mailing list around 1990. Charles Stross was on that list in those days and mined it for the ideas that went into Accelerando.
Given that there is "disparity between socioeconomic status of different races" it may be worth asking why?
Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis may have an answer. It's a painful one. Some groups of people were subjected to genetic selection over 20 generations or longer that was as intense as that the Russians applied to make tame foxes over the same number of generations.
Google "genetically capitalist" to read his fascinating paper on the topic.
It's hard to say. After some 30 years of knowing about nanotech/AI/singularity, I wrote a story "The Clinic Seed." If you have 15 minutes and want to read it, it's here: http://www.terasemjournals.org...
It's an ambiguous story about the interactions of humans in a tiny African village (tata) and an extremely powerful medical AI. Wasn't saleable because it didn't have enough violence in it, though one scene has a 12 yo girl shot through the spine with a high velocity rifle.
There is a way to beat the cloudy week problem, move the collectors up to 20 km.
That's the proposal for StratoSolar.
They also get relatively cheap storage by lifting weights into the sky when there is extra energy available and lowering them at night.
Estimation (which I didn't do) is 5 cents per kWh for base load power.
Another alternative is power satellites. Those could scale to 15 TW or more and displace fossil fuels entirely. Setting up the infrastructure to manufacture them in large numbers is expensive, on the order of $100 B. www.htyp.org/DTC for more. Long term cost gets down to 2-3 cents per kWh, and synthetic oil made from off peak power would be $30-50 per bbl.
I worked this out a few years ago for David MacKay (RIP). It took about 4% of the area of the UK to bring down enough power.
On the other hand, the rectennas can be put over farmland (20%) or pasture (40%).
Re expensive, they are to get started, order of $100 B, but constructed for $2400/kW ($12 B for 5 GW) they make power for 3 cents a kWh, and could go down to 2 cents. The trick here is to get the cost to lift the parts out to GEO down under $200/kg and the mass down to 6.5 kg/kW. Both look to be doable. Reaction Engines in the UK is working on Skylon and its engine. At the flight rate needed, their estimate is around $100/kg to LEO. From there up, it's arcjets using power beaming at 25 GHz to get the rectenna size down. Couple of videos are linked off www.htyp.org/DTC (for design to cost).
Your point about the engineering being tough is correct. I have been looking into maintaining a few hundred people in a 6 hour orbit. It takes about 6 meters of polyethylene to get the galactic cosmic ray does down to where people could live there long term.
Why people? They are there to deal with the unknown unknowns, i.e., unjamming the automation and fixing the machines that build power satellites. If some government or group of governments decides that we have to get off fossil fuels, that one of a very few options that scaled large enough to replace fossil fuels. Takes about 3000 5 GW power satellites to equal current fossil fuel production.
There are a couple of videos linked off www.htyp.org/DTC If you want to take part, there is a google group you can join, power satellite economics.
Low birth rate and any economic growth keeps the future from looking bleak and the mechanisms off that lead to wars and related social disruptions. This is the what happened in first world for most of the second half of the 20th century.
From the standpoint of economy, the cops did the right thing. In the end, the shooter probably would have killed himself rather than be captured. You have to be suicidal to get in a fire fight with the cops.
But they didn't have to go this direction. At some degree of risk, they could have waited till he went to sleep and captured him.
Shouldn't some blame be placed on the review sites, for not purchasing cards at retail? That's SOP for reviewing products in many industries.
High end video cards are pricy enough that reviewer are understandably not going to buy them. However, they could get same effect if they swapped the review card for an off the shelf one at retail.
If someone can make a reactionless drive, then they have solved our energy problems as well. It's a simple thought experiment to see how a constant force can generate arbitrary amounts of power since the energy you can get out of a moving object is the product of the force and the velocity. Unless the power input goes up related to velocity, you can let it accelerate till it is going fast enough to tap for whatever amount of power you want. If the power input does depend on velocity, velocity with respect to what? And how would the device know how fast it is going?
Someone made a comment that EM drives could move power satellites to GEO. They didn't think it through. If they work, we can use them to create energy and not bother with power satellites.
The current cottage industry in philosophy departments of speculation about our living in a simulation stems from a conversation I had with Hans Moravec at the Artificial Life conference in 1987. (I was invited because I knew the organizer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... when he was a volunteer at the L5 Society.) Hans was rapping about the ever falling cost of computation and waving around a two inch thick paper draft of “Mind Children.” On the spur of the moment, I stopped him and said, “Hans, do you realize how unlikely it is that this is the first time we have had this conversation?” Hans gave me this really blank look, rare on one of the brightest people I have known. I explained that, given the ever falling cost of computation, we would eventually simulate history, including this conversation. And like Civil War reenactments and SCA, we would do it many times, making the chances of this being the first time virtually zero. Hans went away sandbagged. He later wrote “Pigs in Cyberspace,” references here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We also discussed the conversation and the topic on the Extropian mailing list in the early 1990s.
Thinking back, I must have had in the back of my mind a book, Simulacron-3, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that I read many years before.
Elon Musk doesn’t take this speculation seriously because he consistently works hard to make our world a more interesting place. You can’t take a chance that this is not the base reality.
On the other hand, perhaps making the world more interesting is a way to keep the simulation sysops from turning it off.:-)
Rapidly ending the use of fossil fuels *without* something to replace them would result in a world wide famine. Fusion or some large number of fission plants could replace fossil fuels, or there is this
"Root causes" are not hard to understand given a background in evolutionary psychology.
Why do chimps and prestate people fight? It's over scares resources or a pending shortages. Humans were selected in the stone age for a behavior switch and to detect conditions where it was advantageous to their genes to switch into "war mode." For background:
How do you move the behavior switch to "peace mode" or keep it there? Steady or rising income per capita seems to do the job. Remember the IRA? The model notes that the Irish women cut the number of kids they had to about replacement. Economic growth got ahead of population growth and rising income per capital shut off the population support for the IRA. Due to their one child policy and rising standard of living, China is very unlikely to start a war. Iran has reached 2 children per woman and should become a reasonably peaceful country.
Prospects are not good for the rest of the Arab world. It's not just the high birth rates and low economic growth, it's the difficulty in changing either one either from inside Arab culture or outside it.
If you have any ideas, please email me. hkeithhenson at gmail dot com
The particular problem they identify is one I was concerned with more than 40 years ago.
You can't see an open phase by voltage in a power network with electric motors on it because they will generate the missing phase voltage.
What you need to do is look at the currents flowing in the line to see an open circuit. "Single phasing" electric motors will eventually burn them out. They are usually protected from this with heaters that detect high current on two of the remaing motor connections. They don't work very well since for a lightly loaded motor the currents are not high enough to trip, but the motor, especially the rotor will get seriously hot.
Back in the days of analog controls, I used a circuit that added the currents in A+B-2C. Simple integrator circuit with different capacitors for positive and negative directions so the phase failure relay would take about the same time for any open phase to trip. As I recall (it's been a long time) the circuits took 4 opamps, 3 to do the precision rectification for the three currents and one to do the summation and integration. I can't remember exactly how we got the signal to the relay, but it used a reed relay with two 9000 turn coils on it, one closed the relay and the other coil opposed the first and opened the relay.
Slashdot Mirror
"The fact that somebody like Trump could even get elected is a death-sentence. The problem isn't the guy in the captain's chair. The problem is all the guys who wanted him in the captain's chair"
It's not the first time something like this has happened. I hesitate to bring up the canonical German case, but it has similar economic aspects. The US has been on an upward economic slope for such a long time that it ending or flattening puts the affected people under stress.
Humans evolved strategies during the stone age to cope with such stress. The stress was always one of not enough resources for the population. The solution was to attack neighbors and appropriate their resources. The lead up to war started with the spread of xenophobic memes. Eventually, irrational leaders become attractive and led the tribe into war. Win or lose, the balance between population and resources was restored. Because the young women were booty, the genes for this behavior become universal. https://www.academia.edu/77738...
I think the problem is they can't think of anything to do with the money.
There are a few ideas that might work out and make a ton of money and get the race out of the CO2 box. StratoSolar is the small change one, power satellites are the one that could take that much investment. There is a 2016 video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... It's exactly not the current scheme, but close. Takes about nine and a half years before you see any return, but, if it works, the return is in the tens of trillions.
It's not surprising we have made "remarkably little progress." Humans are the result of millions of years of selection. From what we see in the archaeological record, there was xenophobia and violence aplenty.
What switches off the xenophobia is good times and rising prospects. What switches xenophobia on is stagnant or falling income and poor future prospects.
If you want the long version, try here: https://www.academia.edu/77738...
"as it appears that men are more likely to want the status that goes with working on a popular project."
If you look into the environment in which humans evolved, this makes sense. To become an ancestor, human males had to gain status in the tribe. A lot of males will work harder for status than they do for economic reasons. I was once lambasted by a Federal Judge for recognizing that gaining status was a huge human motivation (and being human, that it applied to me). That was amusing considering that to gain the status of a federal judge they gave up much of the income they could get as an expensive lawyer.
This is about open source software, where much of the "compenstation" for working on it comes from gaining status. It's not surprizing that most of the people who work on open source are males.
This kind of spam has been a problem with my cell phone for about a year. I get 2-3 voice mails a day with no ringing. It used to burn minutes to listen to them. Now I log in and delete them. The net value of phones is falling.
" How does one establish which is the copy, and which is the conscious original?"
I suspect you can't. Though some people, such as Robin Hanson, disagree, I think people may be legally limited to one running copy of their consciousness. There is another confusing matter. If we have the technology to read out a brain, the same technology should be up to the task of moving memory into the brain. This means reversible uploads and the ability to move between an uploaded state and a meat body state with continuity of consciousness. I described this in "The Clinic Seed." (Google for it if interested.)
I have thought about nanotechnology since before Eric Drexler's first publication on the subject. The various complications were discussed on the Extropian mailing list around 1990. Charles Stross was on that list in those days and mined it for the ideas that went into Accelerando.
Given that there is "disparity between socioeconomic status of different races" it may be worth asking why?
Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis may have an answer. It's a painful one. Some groups of people were subjected to genetic selection over 20 generations or longer that was as intense as that the Russians applied to make tame foxes over the same number of generations.
Google "genetically capitalist" to read his fascinating paper on the topic.
If they want to influence the politicians, then they should include all their family and friends browsing history.
The real question to me is how a customs guy knew enough to make any sense of the answers.
And if he did, what is he doing working for customs?
It's hard to say. After some 30 years of knowing about nanotech/AI/singularity, I wrote a story "The Clinic Seed." If you have 15 minutes and want to read it, it's here: http://www.terasemjournals.org...
It's an ambiguous story about the interactions of humans in a tiny African village (tata) and an extremely powerful medical AI. Wasn't saleable because it didn't have enough violence in it, though one scene has a 12 yo girl shot through the spine with a high velocity rifle.
There is a way to beat the cloudy week problem, move the collectors up to 20 km.
That's the proposal for StratoSolar.
They also get relatively cheap storage by lifting weights into the sky when there is extra energy available and lowering them at night.
Estimation (which I didn't do) is 5 cents per kWh for base load power.
Another alternative is power satellites. Those could scale to 15 TW or more and displace fossil fuels entirely. Setting up the infrastructure to manufacture them in large numbers is expensive, on the order of $100 B. www.htyp.org/DTC for more. Long term cost gets down to 2-3 cents per kWh, and synthetic oil made from off peak power would be $30-50 per bbl.
I worked this out a few years ago for David MacKay (RIP). It took about 4% of the area of the UK to bring down enough power.
On the other hand, the rectennas can be put over farmland (20%) or pasture (40%).
Re expensive, they are to get started, order of $100 B, but constructed for $2400/kW ($12 B for 5 GW) they make power for 3 cents a kWh, and could go down to 2 cents. The trick here is to get the cost to lift the parts out to GEO down under $200/kg and the mass down to 6.5 kg/kW. Both look to be doable. Reaction Engines in the UK is working on Skylon and its engine. At the flight rate needed, their estimate is around $100/kg to LEO. From there up, it's arcjets using power beaming at 25 GHz to get the rectenna size down. Couple of videos are linked off www.htyp.org/DTC (for design to cost).
Your point about the engineering being tough is correct. I have been looking into maintaining a few hundred people in a 6 hour orbit. It takes about 6 meters of polyethylene to get the galactic cosmic ray does down to where people could live there long term.
Why people? They are there to deal with the unknown unknowns, i.e., unjamming the automation and fixing the machines that build power satellites. If some government or group of governments decides that we have to get off fossil fuels, that one of a very few options that scaled large enough to replace fossil fuels. Takes about 3000 5 GW power satellites to equal current fossil fuel production.
There are a couple of videos linked off www.htyp.org/DTC If you want to take part, there is a google group you can join, power satellite economics.
"We have gone 70 years without a major war."
Why did people fight in the stone age?
Over resources (mostly food).
When did they fight?
When things looked so bleak that fighting was better (on average) for their genes.
https://www.academia.edu/77738...
Low birth rate and any economic growth keeps the future from looking bleak and the mechanisms off that lead to wars and related social disruptions. This is the what happened in first world for most of the second half of the 20th century.
Most depressing science subject I know.
From the standpoint of economy, the cops did the right thing. In the end, the shooter probably would have killed himself rather than be captured. You have to be suicidal to get in a fire fight with the cops.
But they didn't have to go this direction. At some degree of risk, they could have waited till he went to sleep and captured him.
Shouldn't some blame be placed on the review sites, for not purchasing cards at retail? That's SOP for reviewing products in many industries.
High end video cards are pricy enough that reviewer are understandably not going to buy them. However, they could get same effect if they swapped the review card for an off the shelf one at retail.
Most of the time you can't do anything to counter such behavior in governments. But when it is companies . . . .
I had been an AT&T customer for decades, but when this happened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I dropped them forever and told them why.
Looks like Citi will go into the same bin, though it's just stupid and not the kind of pain they caused Len Rose, his wife and kids.
If someone can make a reactionless drive, then they have solved our energy problems as well. It's a simple thought experiment to see how a constant force can generate arbitrary amounts of power since the energy you can get out of a moving object is the product of the force and the velocity. Unless the power input goes up related to velocity, you can let it accelerate till it is going fast enough to tap for whatever amount of power you want. If the power input does depend on velocity, velocity with respect to what? And how would the device know how fast it is going?
Someone made a comment that EM drives could move power satellites to GEO. They didn't think it through. If they work, we can use them to create energy and not bother with power satellites.
The current cottage industry in philosophy departments of speculation about our living in a simulation stems from a conversation I had with Hans Moravec at the Artificial Life conference in 1987. (I was invited because I knew the organizer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... when he was a volunteer at the L5 Society.) Hans was rapping about the ever falling cost of computation and waving around a two inch thick paper draft of “Mind Children.” On the spur of the moment, I stopped him and said, “Hans, do you realize how unlikely it is that this is the first time we have had this conversation?” Hans gave me this really blank look, rare on one of the brightest people I have known. I explained that, given the ever falling cost of computation, we would eventually simulate history, including this conversation. And like Civil War reenactments and SCA, we would do it many times, making the chances of this being the first time virtually zero. Hans went away sandbagged. He later wrote “Pigs in Cyberspace,” references here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We also discussed the conversation and the topic on the Extropian mailing list in the early 1990s.
Thinking back, I must have had in the back of my mind a book, Simulacron-3, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that I read many years before.
Elon Musk doesn’t take this speculation seriously because he consistently works hard to make our world a more interesting place. You can’t take a chance that this is not the base reality.
On the other hand, perhaps making the world more interesting is a way to keep the simulation sysops from turning it off. :-)
Keith
PS Speaking of making things more interesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Shorter version that was shown at the White House recently
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Rapidly ending the use of fossil fuels *without* something to replace them would result in a world wide famine. Fusion or some large number of fission plants could replace fossil fuels, or there is this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Shorter version that was shown a the White House recently
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's about power satellites as a solution for CO2
Keith
"Root causes" are not hard to understand given a background in evolutionary psychology.
Why do chimps and prestate people fight? It's over scares resources or a pending shortages. Humans were selected in the stone age for a behavior switch and to detect conditions where it was advantageous to their genes to switch into "war mode." For background:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/... (Peer reviewed version behind a paywall)
How do you move the behavior switch to "peace mode" or keep it there? Steady or rising income per capita seems to do the job. Remember the IRA? The model notes that the Irish women cut the number of kids they had to about replacement. Economic growth got ahead of population growth and rising income per capital shut off the population support for the IRA. Due to their one child policy and rising standard of living, China is very unlikely to start a war. Iran has reached 2 children per woman and should become a reasonably peaceful country.
Prospects are not good for the rest of the Arab world. It's not just the high birth rates and low economic growth, it's the difficulty in changing either one either from inside Arab culture or outside it.
If you have any ideas, please email me. hkeithhenson at gmail dot com
The particular problem they identify is one I was concerned with more than 40 years ago.
You can't see an open phase by voltage in a power network with electric motors on it because they will generate the missing phase voltage.
What you need to do is look at the currents flowing in the line to see an open circuit. "Single phasing" electric motors will eventually burn them out. They are usually protected from this with heaters that detect high current on two of the remaing motor connections. They don't work very well since for a lightly loaded motor the currents are not high enough to trip, but the motor, especially the rotor will get seriously hot.
Back in the days of analog controls, I used a circuit that added the currents in A+B-2C. Simple integrator circuit with different capacitors for positive and negative directions so the phase failure relay would take about the same time for any open phase to trip. As I recall (it's been a long time) the circuits took 4 opamps, 3 to do the precision rectification for the three currents and one to do the summation and integration. I can't remember exactly how we got the signal to the relay, but it used a reed relay with two 9000 turn coils on it, one closed the relay and the other coil opposed the first and opened the relay.
So if a mugger takes your iPhone, they need to cut off yer finger to go with it. Ick.
If we are looking at a giant alien version of the James Webb telescope, we would not see excess IR.
There is at least one other option that could scale up to take over not only the electrical load, but the whole fossil energy use of the human race.
It's power satellites. In the last couple of years we got the cost down to where they can undercut coal. This is a little out of date
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The updated version of it put the beamed power plants in space.