But what seems to always get lost in a discussion of Freedom, is that it's not 'free' (as in Beer). Freedom is not about having what you want, it's about choice of what you have. People who have no freedom are not those that are monitored 24x7. It's those who have no choice about their situation.
I think that I understand the free beer/ free speech distinction. I'm just questioning whether or not it's always true. You talk about freedom to chose an unpleasant option. With that logic you could say that under a Stalinist system people were free to comply with the system or free to become dissenters and get locked up in mental homes or gulags. In that trivial sense, yes, you always have a choice. I'm free to go and die on the street. The point is that given that we have a system with rules that say that there is an accumulation of wealth at the top, the freedoms/choices that I have are to work a job in an urban environment or to not work. I am not realistically getting a farm any time soon. That freedom/choice does not exist here.
Freedom is about being able to CHANGE your situation. Maybe that the only available choice is for the worse, but if it is out of the control of the oppressor, then it is to freedom.
I'm not totally sure how to parse that sentence. On the one hand it could mean, if you get out from under the control of the oppressor then you are free - I agree with that. On the other hand it could mean, because you have the choice of doing something you don't really want to do for the oppressor or not doing that thing and starvin you are free - I don't agree with that. That is accepting the rules and choices that the oppressor makes for you. Deny that those are the only choices are what starts revolutions.
Damn, I thought he was giving away free/Free farms!
then you can say No! if you can show me by these objective measures that people are better off in Colombia or Nicaragua. It is undeniable that the social aspects of the Castro government have brought these things to a higher level than anywhere else in Latin America. That's what I'm talking about and you should really make an honest effort to see if I'm telling the truth on this. As for why there are people leaving, well, apparently life is very hard for people there. There is an absence of consumer goods obtained through international trade because of the US embargo. Some people want those things. Also a lot of people have relatives in the US that they want to see. Also there are people that will always want to take the risk to try what life is like somewhere else - probably the same sort of people that in the US are hoping that things change here.
The corporate rules DO NOT impinge on anyone's freedom, BTW. We're all free to quit and take up farming, or any other profession.
Cool! I've been wanting a farm for years! Somewhere with high hills and high trees, the smell of resin and the sound of cattle blowing in on the cool morning wind over the long green pasture. Unfortunately on my salary that's not really an option. So, I'd really like one of those free farms. Where do I get it?
[...] the abuses of which we suspect governments could just as well be done by companies. Historically, where government has found itself constrained by law or public pressure, it has often enough found ways to impose its will through the corporate sector.
And also the distinction between governments and corporations while real is blurred. Because of the rules governing campaign finance in this country a succesful politician has to be acceptable to the corporations. It's true that s/he is also "hampered" by electoral accountability, but to a large extent government seems to exist to do the bidding of large corporations. This is facilitated by an attitude of public complicity which sees no other way. An illustration of this mirror relationship related to the UFC in Nicaragua example that you use is the current use of the military by oil companies in Nigeria. Here we have the government doing the bidding of a company.
We should champion democracy against its enemies in whatever form they come, undemocratic government of (oxymoron) undemocratic companies.
I think that you are correct when you suggest that Stephenson is painting a picture of a future society run by corporations. I think that's what a lot of "cyberpunk" literature is about. I have an unpleasant feeling though that many readers picture themselves solely as the lucky, plucky protagonist of these depictions of future society - a hero in an exciting time struggling against evil. They don't imagine what would happen if the hero had a bit of bad luck, or what the probability is that someone would succeed in those conditions. This is only human and to some extent it is necessary to make the story work. However it also serves to dispel anxiety and I fear that in many cases the reader/MSCE puts down the book and turns back to the BSOD feeling purged of anxiety.
But as they stay in power, one of two things happen: either they become so corrupt that they go bad,
This certainly does seem to happen. In the words of the old adage, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". It seems that it is very hard to fight against the psychological effects of having power over others. There have been interesting psychological studies where volunteers have been put into the trappings of power (guards in a mock prison with other volunteers as mock prisoners) and have developed all sorts of unpleasant characteristics that seem to be independent of prior classification of personality - in other words the situation makes the man.
or they become such zealots that in the cause of their ideals, they throw those ideals away. Look at, for example, the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution had good intentions; they truly believed in Marx's ideals. And their first leader tried to hold to them.
This may be true, but you neglect the fact that at the time there was a huge amount of debate within the socialist community as to how to acheive those ideals. The Bolsheviks implemented Marx's ideas in a particularly authoritarian way. They very early on initiated purges against socialists that seemed not to be under the control of the Party. These people included members of the party that were active in the earliest Soviets(democratically directly controlled factories that elected their own management committees which were recallable upon general ballot). Some of these Soviets were organised in the army and navy and there was a strong anti-authoritarian basis to them with many anarchists being involved. Famously this led to the massacre at Kronstadt when the "well intentioned" Bolsheviks attacked the workers and sailors who were protesting that democracy was being taken away (the Party insisted that Soviets were controlled by their bureaucracy rather than by the representatives that the workers had elected who were doing a fine, efficient job) and also the fact that party bureaucrats were getting larger food allowances than the very hungry workers and sailors. This massacre was supported by both Lenin _and_ Trotsky among many others. The moral is, if you start off with authoritarian ideals you get an authoritarian system. That is what anarchists had argued against Marxists from the very beginning. Marxism did not trust people or believe in democracy and its supporters believed that they had to impose it on people. I find it heart-wrenching to look at how close Russia came to democratic socialism at that time and the squandering of the opportunity because of an authoritarian philosophy.
" Then Stalin came along, and in the cause of freeing the proletariat he enslaved them (if you look at the numbers, he actually killed more of his own people than Hitler did).
As you can guess from the spiel above I find Stalin an unsurprising development given the co-option of the revolution by the Bolsheviks.
In Cuba, Castro overthrew the previous government in an attempt to end his people's suffering. But decades later his people still suffer, as much as if not more than ever before, and the ideals to which he clung as a revolutionary have been cast away; he clings to his power now.
Now there, I cannot agree with you and I think that the statistics will bear me out both historically and contemporaneously: The health and well being of the population under Batista was much lower than under Castro. Further if you compare the health and education of the Cuban population to that of other Latin American countries today it is infintely higher. And all this in the face of crippling sanctions imposed by the US. The US is starving these people of food and medicine, unilaterally trying to force other countries in the world not to trade with them (good for Canada that they are starting to). What would the fate of these people be if there were no revolution? There were would be a small number of very wealthy people who staid in power by means of a US financed military which operated paramilitary death-squads to suppress union activity among the poor who produce McDonalds toys and other consumer crap for the poor in this country. While I wish that Castro had made more of the opportunity to be democratic I can only say Viva Cuba - I hope the people there are smart enough to realize that they chances are greater under socialism. Probably though a sufficient number are prey to the gambling mentality that sees Bill Gates and say "Hey that could be me! It could be anyone!" and thus they will be willing to throw over universal health care and education.
[]$ gcc dork.c dork.c:1: `#include' expects "FILENAME" or
dork.c:10: warning: return-type defaults to `int' dork.c: In function `main': dork.c:12: `return0' undeclared (first use in this function) dork.c:12: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once dork.c:12: for each function it appears in.) dork.c:13: warning: control reaches end of non-void function
The "we" who "have the means" for mass destruction right now is limited to a few countries. The "we" who may have the means for mass destruction in the future could be tomorrow's script kiddies. God help us all.
But this is not necessarily due to the introduction of any new technologies. The ability to develop biological weapons especially and to a lesser extent chemical weapons is technologically and financially within the means of even obscure religious Japanese cults.
Um, isn't it the development of science and technology that has put such weapons within the reach of such "obscure religious Japanese cults"? They didn't just pull it out of their hopping/semi-levitating asses, now did they?
So, from this you admit that the technologies that already exist, that have been generated by our broken social order have the capacity to effect mass destruction? And you would rather not try to remove the _origin_ of the impetus of the development of these tools? It's hard to know what exactly Joy thinks you can do about it. Technology and innovation march on and once there is something that is `doable' it's hard to keep it out of people's hands whether as individuals or groups. If Joy is correct that it will be as easy to manufacture these nanobots as he thinks then they will be as much of a problem as biological weapons already are.
You seem to be missing Joy's point. He worries that these technologies will enable individuals to cause unspeakable amounts of damage.
Sort of like a GM aerosol transmitted HIV targetted to a particular MHC complex? As destructive as that say? Or more? How about a resurrection of the 1918 Influenza strain that wiped out 18 million people but with a little improvement might do better? I wonder who is missing the point. We _already_ have the technology. It would seem that you believe that individuals are more likely to use these things than groups. Do none of the religious cults that have attempted these things provide me with even a small piece of evidence that people are just as capable of behaving irrationally in concert as alone? It just seems to me that the sudden brou-ha-ha over destructive technology is a little late and there's not mcuh we can do about it. I also believe that these things are more likely to be used by governments than individuals. Most of our destructive technology results from the inter-group competition fostered by...drum-roll... CAPITALISM. And we will continue developing weapons and refusing to regulate them (witness the US's failure to ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) as long as there is a social-order based on exploitation. We can all dick around making statements about how terrible these things are but they already exist and will be used because the pursuit of profit and domination drives it.
Tools that broken *individuals* might use. Social orders, even broken ones, tend to want to self-perpetuate. No such guarantees with broken individuals.
I don't know where the evidence for that is, for one thing people in broken societies often think that they are going to survive individually even if the overall logic of the society means that it will collapse, (Nazism ring any bells?). Secondly, I can think of several instance of broken social orders that would rather self-destruct than change - the Jews at Masada and the Melian aristocrats fought to the death rather than accept Athenian democracy
I'm pretty much convinced by your post that there is a difference between nuclear threats and future nanotech threats. But bear in mind that it is not just the USSR and the US that posses nuclear weapons. Britain, France, Pakistan, India, China, Israel(probably), S.Africa(probably) also have the capability and it seems that Iraq was having a good try. The failure of the U.S. to ratify the non-proliferation treaty is probably going to encourage the further spread.
It seems that to believe that there is a significant difference between the old and new weapons of destruction one has to believe that there are fewer impediments to the use of the new.....you seem to argue that there it would be cheaper and easier for someone to manufacture nanobots than to manufacture nuclear weapons. I don't really have a feeling for whether this is true. I can't help suspecting though that the design and the fabrication machinery would be incredibly complex, rare and expensive, would require the budget of a large country, would be treated as munitions and thus restricted in distribution and thus would present most of the problems that exist for the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
That said, this is totally off the top of my head, I don't really know what goes into fabricating a self-replicating nanobot.
Bacteria, virii, etc. may be annoying, but they only adapt under evolutionary forces; medical science has been advancing fast enough to keep ahead of them, and I expect it to continue doing so. Because evolution is blind.
I think that focussing on the blindness of evolution in this context is ignoring a more important aspect of it - massive parallelism. The range and diversity of solutions that are found by organisms is incredible and there is no guarantee that science is able to keep ahead of it just because its fundamental method is random, blind chance.
All that said, I was missing the point that Joy was speaking about bio-weapons also...I was focussing too much on nanobots.
The "we" who "have the means" for mass destruction right now is limited to a few countries. The "we" who may have the means for mass destruction in the future could be tomorrow's script kiddies. God help us all.
But this is not necessarily due to the introduction of any new technologies. The ability to develop biological weapons especially and to a lesser extent chemical weapons is technologically and financially within the means of even obscure religious Japanese cults.
Why worry about the tools that a broken social order might use instead of trying to fix the social order? Anyway, if global warming is going to behave according to the models then we'll have lots of other things to worry about first. Wouldn't it be a shame if just as we were on the cusp of nanotechnology and quantum computing we screwed the whole thing up because we couldn't stop driving cars and switch the lights out occasionally when we weren't using them?
The distinction between "offensive and defensive" weapons seems kind of bogus to me -- there's a saying that the best defense is a strong offense, and to make an example, in terms of nuclear arms, the threat of offense has served as a defense.
Agreed, similarly take the example of a castle as being a good `defensive' weapon: suppose you create an impregnable fortress which protects you from an invading horde of some sort. You shut yourself and your vassals up in it and leave your local rivals to be destroyed on the outside. Or how about insisting on neutrality during a conflict? It doesn't seem like there's a clear distinction to be made at all.
You seem to be labouring under the opinion that we live in a rational universe
No....I think you just projected that onto me! I said that I would prefer rational, kind robot masters to the evil irrational masters we have now.
we live in a rational universe, and as products of this universe are in point of fact inherrently rational ourselves
Apart from the fact that I didn't claim the first part of this proposition, the second part would not have to follow even if I had. It is entirely possible that there would be a rational universe which contained irrational humans
I find it hard to take Bill Joy's position seriously - we are already in a position where we have the means to do achieve destruction of most of us. Yet we haven't implemented it (yet). So why worry particularly when a further total destruction method is added. Inf + 1 is still Inf.
I suppose the idea that `intelligent' machines would be as irrational as we claim ourselves to be is what is motivating his claims.
Personally I think discussion of these issues serve as a of a sort of Rorschach blot where we project our negative perceptions of `humanity' onto all intelligences. It's not very surprising that someone living in a brutal society that imprisons and executes so many of it's population and bombs and starves other nations would come to a such negative conclusion.
Myself? I'm waiting for the rational, kind robot masters to take over - which would you rather have running your life: Bush/Gore or a machine that could play 10 Kasparovs and beat them?
Seeing as your moniker is "Dead Sea" this should be appropriate:
the Dead Sea scrolls are in large part thumbnail sized fragments that are damned hard to piece together. That hasn't stopped all sorts of scholars trying to do it (mostly with selotape). Interestingly you can now sequence the mtDNA (mitochondrial D-loop mutates very fast providing fine resolution distinction between individuals) of part of each fragment. This reveals whether the skin the fragments are written on all come from the same type of organism (within certain resolution limits). They've found that some of pieces come from goats and others from a springbok-like creature, so they should definitely not be put together. They claim that they're also able to identify the "herd" that each piece came from. I'm not so sure about that but it may be possible.
Correct in some parts. However, what most people don't seem to look at is that organisms are not static. You don't derive the output of a protein solely from the perceived input of a gene sequence. There are other considerations.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this post. I actually thought that the original poster's analogy while true in some senses was slightly confusing. By talking about the genome as being like a physical object solely it ignores the fact that it is, as your post brings out, like a program that has physical parts. This way of talking about it:
manages to obscure the recipe or instructions dichotomy.
epistatic interaction
the stochastic nature of some of the "program"
the role of local molecular differences in the starting state of the "program"
It might be clearer to use the analogy of two groups of Victorians being presented with a wonderful little nanobot composed of intricate parts beyond our wildest dreams. The nanobot has been produced by several aeons of amateurish Basic programmers and kindergarten Lego-engineers who have piled fudge upon fudge to improve the thing in response to changing design specs from their PHBs. It is written in a proprietary binary-block format.
One group of scientists decides to study the program that each part of the nanobot carries around, the other group decides to study how the parts fit together and what happens when you take parts out and put them in. Now, the proprietary file format has been decoded and we can look at it as ASCII text. Yee-haww! Oh wait! this is terrible code: goto's , overloaded operators (not that that's always bad, I just hate it personally), no or little documentation. We're going to be a long time figuring out this program.
Calling it the "rosetta stone" similarly is a confusing way of putting it - the rosetta stone had the same text in different languages. This is different texts in the same language. The "words" may be the same in the different "essays", may even have similar patterns of usage in "sentences", but the meaning is damn different of each essay.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is an essential first step (as long as they finish the hard bits...90% only?) but there's a lot of work yet. I'd also like to draw people's attention to the skepticism of some scientists about the assumptions of determinism that are built into this work - you bring this out very nicely in your discussion of the 3D string folding problem of synthesized peptides.[ References:
Not in Our Genes:Steven Rose and Leon Kamin Biology as Ideology:The Doctrine of DNA Richard Lewontin]
He he....great movie. Maybe he'd even get to meet a bear this time. I nearly died laughing when it turned out the finished product was so heavy that they had to bring him in by helicopter to where the bears were thought to be because he couldn't walk more than ten yards in the suit.
I remember seeing another cool exoskeleton idea from someone at NASA. He was working on the idea that kangaroos are extraordinarily efficient at bouncing around because they have large tendons in their legs that store the kinetic energy instead of dissipating it. So he built a lightweight exoskeleton framework containing a lot of springs to mimic the action of the tendons. Apparently human could operate (with a good deal of training) and get up to speeds of c. 30 m.p.h. Never heard anything else about it though......maybe he died, it looked frightening. You ended up being twice as tall as normal, strapped into a cage with a crash helmet on. I've always wanted to go sprinting down the freeway in one though.
If the purpose of the exo is to do heavy-lifting and/or other tough/dangerous stuffs, putting a human inside still mean if accident happens, someone will get hurt, or may even die[...]Instead of putting a LIFE human being at the place of work, why not use the virtual reality technology
Cynical answer: so then the operator will be much more motivated to do the job properly and save the expensive equipment?
The problem in environmental pollution is scale. Some things that are innocuous or beneficial on a small scale are bad on a large scale
I totally agree with what you've said here. But it can be slightly confusing to put it just in terms of scale. It's hard to know where to draw the boundaries of the "things" that are being called large or small. Sometimes this is manifested in making the assumption that small always equals good - some strange results could stem from that. Take for example transport: the efficiency of mass-transit for city environments means that a large-scale infrastructure is far better than the small scale use of private automobiles, but implementing a transit system like this in a small rural village would probably be wasteful and counter-productive. Similarly using the converse of your sewage example, it probably would be wrong to try and build conventional tertiary treatment plants (sewerage) in every small community.
because concentrated pollution is easier to control and manage than dispersed pollution[...] the benefits of the consumption accrue to many neighborhoods, but only one actually gets the pollution
But I don't agree with it. There are dose-dependent/critical concentrations of pollutants. If those are not exceeded then there may be no statistically measurable impact on organisms exposed to lower concentrations. So for some things it is better to disperse them if the environment can cope with it. The nuclear waste example is one in which we would suspect that the environment may not be able to cope with it. But if you were to consider for example CO2, a localized concentration above certain levels would be lethal, but if we blow it off into the atmosphere, allow it to disperse and be dealt with by plants it would be fine.
Also consider the nearly intractable problems of trying to get that "one neighbourhood" to agree to be chosen.
Not polluting in the first place just isn't an option.
I assume that you're not making the trivial point that absolutely no pollution is not possible. Working on this assumption I'll assume that you're saying that the vast majority of our current pollution is unavoidable. I don't believe this to be true. We waste huge amounts of energy and produce their concommitant pollutants needlessly. It should be possible to reduce our pollution footprint drastically.
To use your analogy of the cottager and the stove, due to the efficiency of the wood-burning stove and his double-glazed windows he produces far fewer pollutants than his neighbour with the old stone fireplace and the open windows.
Technology and the environment are not at odds with each other, we just have to adjust technology so that we get an acceptable environment and lifestyle
Pretty interesting work. I have a couple of questions though:
1. How deep do the root of A.thaliana grow into the soil? I've only seen them with shallow root-balls in potting trays.
2.If their roots are shallow then doesn't it just clean up the surface? Does one then have to take contaminated soil and spread it out in thin layers?
3.If one is doing this (excavating and trucking huge masses of contaminated soil) then how does using plants compare to using a chemical engineering approach or a bio-reactor?
4.Does the promise of miraculous clean up technology lull the public about current pollution and detract from alleviating the core problem of production of pollutants?
Basically, you can't rely on human beings to act in their own self interest in anything but the short term.
Agreed, which is why you have to adjust the rules of the game so that their short term interests coincide with long-term strategies. Skew the cost-benefit ration of pollution so that it negatively affects the "greed" and "economic self-interest" of the individual asshole that is the typical human and they will go along with it.
The big hassle is getting everyone to agree to these new rules initially, but given that we are all competing relative to each other it won't affect how we do individually in the game if we're competitive and smart - we can see the new rules and play them better than others. An example of this is curb-side recycling in Germany as compared to Ireland. Both were introduced by government programs in major cities. It was a success in Germany but not in Ireland. Why? Initially Irish commentators decried their personalities for being too disorganized as compared to the methodical Germans. However, another analysis is more compelling - in Germany there were economic incentives to recycle: free recycling and charges for pick-up of non-recycling, whereas in Ireland everyone paid a flat distributed fee to the local government and voluntarily recyled "for the environment".
I thought that the interviewer and interviewee discussed a straw-man when they talked about extreme environmentalists that want to "punish" polluters because they're "evil". That may be how owners of polluting corporations feel about having economic disincentives imposed on them, and it may even be how some people feel when they realize that their health is suffering because those companies find it economically self-interested to poison them, but the thinking behind the system of fines has always been that it will encourage a shift in behaviour through short-term mechanisms to acheive long term goals.
I also had another question about the article: what happens to a low-income neighbour-hood that is burning benzene and heavy metal enriched trees? Do you get a lot of carcinogens in the air?
Slashdot Mirror
But what seems to always get lost in a discussion of Freedom, is that it's not 'free' (as in Beer). Freedom is not about having what you want, it's about choice of what you have. People who have no freedom are not those that are monitored 24x7. It's those who have no choice about their situation.
I think that I understand the free beer/ free speech distinction. I'm just questioning whether or not it's always true. You talk about freedom to chose an unpleasant option. With that logic you could say that under a Stalinist system people were free to comply with the system or free to become dissenters and get locked up in mental homes or gulags. In that trivial sense, yes, you always have a choice. I'm free to go and die on the street. The point is that given that we have a system with rules that say that there is an accumulation of wealth at the top, the freedoms/choices that I have are to work a job in an urban environment or to not work. I am not realistically getting a farm any time soon. That freedom/choice does not exist here.
Freedom is about being able to CHANGE your situation. Maybe that the only available choice is for the worse, but if it is out of the control of the oppressor, then it is to freedom.
I'm not totally sure how to parse that sentence. On the one hand it could mean, if you get out from under the control of the oppressor then you are free - I agree with that. On the other hand it could mean, because you have the choice of doing something you don't really want to do for the oppressor or not doing that thing and starvin you are free - I don't agree with that. That is accepting the rules and choices that the oppressor makes for you. Deny that those are the only choices are what starts revolutions.Damn, I thought he was giving away free/Free farms!
then you can say No! if you can show me by these objective measures that people are better off in Colombia or Nicaragua. It is undeniable that the social aspects of the Castro government have brought these things to a higher level than anywhere else in Latin America. That's what I'm talking about and you should really make an honest effort to see if I'm telling the truth on this. As for why there are people leaving, well, apparently life is very hard for people there. There is an absence of consumer goods obtained through international trade because of the US embargo. Some people want those things. Also a lot of people have relatives in the US that they want to see. Also there are people that will always want to take the risk to try what life is like somewhere else - probably the same sort of people that in the US are hoping that things change here.
The corporate rules DO NOT impinge on anyone's freedom, BTW. We're all free to quit and take up farming, or any other profession.
Cool! I've been wanting a farm for years! Somewhere with high hills and high trees, the smell of resin and the sound of cattle blowing in on the cool morning wind over the long green pasture. Unfortunately on my salary that's not really an option. So, I'd really like one of those free farms. Where do I get it?
[...] the abuses of which we suspect governments could just as well be done by companies. Historically, where government has found itself constrained by law or public pressure, it has often enough found ways to impose its will through the corporate sector.
And also the distinction between governments and corporations while real is blurred. Because of the rules governing campaign finance in this country a succesful politician has to be acceptable to the corporations. It's true that s/he is also "hampered" by electoral accountability, but to a large extent government seems to exist to do the bidding of large corporations. This is facilitated by an attitude of public complicity which sees no other way. An illustration of this mirror relationship related to the UFC in Nicaragua example that you use is the current use of the military by oil companies in Nigeria. Here we have the government doing the bidding of a company.
We should champion democracy against its enemies in whatever form they come, undemocratic government of (oxymoron) undemocratic companies.
I think that you are correct when you suggest that Stephenson is painting a picture of a future society run by corporations. I think that's what a lot of "cyberpunk" literature is about. I have an unpleasant feeling though that many readers picture themselves solely as the lucky, plucky protagonist of these depictions of future society - a hero in an exciting time struggling against evil. They don't imagine what would happen if the hero had a bit of bad luck, or what the probability is that someone would succeed in those conditions. This is only human and to some extent it is necessary to make the story work. However it also serves to dispel anxiety and I fear that in many cases the reader/MSCE puts down the book and turns back to the BSOD feeling purged of anxiety.
But as they stay in power, one of two things happen: either they become so corrupt that they go bad,
This certainly does seem to happen. In the words of the old adage, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". It seems that it is very hard to fight against the psychological effects of having power over others. There have been interesting psychological studies where volunteers have been put into the trappings of power (guards in a mock prison with other volunteers as mock prisoners) and have developed all sorts of unpleasant characteristics that seem to be independent of prior classification of personality - in other words the situation makes the man.
or they become such zealots that in the cause of their ideals, they throw those ideals away. Look at, for example, the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution had good intentions; they truly believed in Marx's ideals. And their first leader tried to hold to them.
This may be true, but you neglect the fact that at the time there was a huge amount of debate within the socialist community as to how to acheive those ideals. The Bolsheviks implemented Marx's ideas in a particularly authoritarian way. They very early on initiated purges against socialists that seemed not to be under the control of the Party. These people included members of the party that were active in the earliest Soviets(democratically directly controlled factories that elected their own management committees which were recallable upon general ballot). Some of these Soviets were organised in the army and navy and there was a strong anti-authoritarian basis to them with many anarchists being involved. Famously this led to the massacre at Kronstadt when the "well intentioned" Bolsheviks attacked the workers and sailors who were protesting that democracy was being taken away (the Party insisted that Soviets were controlled by their bureaucracy rather than by the representatives that the workers had elected who were doing a fine, efficient job) and also the fact that party bureaucrats were getting larger food allowances than the very hungry workers and sailors. This massacre was supported by both Lenin _and_ Trotsky among many others. The moral is, if you start off with authoritarian ideals you get an authoritarian system. That is what anarchists had argued against Marxists from the very beginning. Marxism did not trust people or believe in democracy and its supporters believed that they had to impose it on people. I find it heart-wrenching to look at how close Russia came to democratic socialism at that time and the squandering of the opportunity because of an authoritarian philosophy." Then Stalin came along, and in the cause of freeing the proletariat he enslaved them (if you look at the numbers, he actually killed more of his own people than Hitler did).
As you can guess from the spiel above I find Stalin an unsurprising development given the co-option of the revolution by the Bolsheviks.
In Cuba, Castro overthrew the previous government in an attempt to end his people's suffering. But decades later his people still suffer, as much as if not more than ever before, and the ideals to which he clung as a revolutionary have been cast away; he clings to his power now.
Now there, I cannot agree with you and I think that the statistics will bear me out both historically and contemporaneously: The health and well being of the population under Batista was much lower than under Castro. Further if you compare the health and education of the Cuban population to that of other Latin American countries today it is infintely higher. And all this in the face of crippling sanctions imposed by the US. The US is starving these people of food and medicine, unilaterally trying to force other countries in the world not to trade with them (good for Canada that they are starting to). What would the fate of these people be if there were no revolution? There were would be a small number of very wealthy people who staid in power by means of a US financed military which operated paramilitary death-squads to suppress union activity among the poor who produce McDonalds toys and other consumer crap for the poor in this country. While I wish that Castro had made more of the opportunity to be democratic I can only say Viva Cuba - I hope the people there are smart enough to realize that they chances are greater under socialism. Probably though a sufficient number are prey to the gambling mentality that sees Bill Gates and say "Hey that could be me! It could be anyone!" and thus they will be willing to throw over universal health care and education.
[]$ gcc dork.c dork.c:1: `#include' expects "FILENAME" or
dork.c:10: warning: return-type defaults to `int' dork.c: In function `main': dork.c:12: `return0' undeclared (first use in this function) dork.c:12: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once dork.c:12: for each function it appears in.) dork.c:13: warning: control reaches end of non-void function
etc....
The "we" who "have the means" for mass destruction right now is limited to a few countries. The "we" who may have the means for mass destruction in the future could be tomorrow's script kiddies. God help us all.
But this is not necessarily due to the introduction of any new technologies. The ability to develop biological weapons especially and to a lesser extent chemical weapons is technologically and financially within the means of even obscure religious Japanese cults.
Um, isn't it the development of science and technology that has put such weapons within the reach of such "obscure religious Japanese cults"? They didn't just pull it out of their hopping/semi-levitating asses, now did they?
So, from this you admit that the technologies that already exist, that have been generated by our broken social order have the capacity to effect mass destruction? And you would rather not try to remove the _origin_ of the impetus of the development of these tools? It's hard to know what exactly Joy thinks you can do about it. Technology and innovation march on and once there is something that is `doable' it's hard to keep it out of people's hands whether as individuals or groups. If Joy is correct that it will be as easy to manufacture these nanobots as he thinks then they will be as much of a problem as biological weapons already are.
You seem to be missing Joy's point. He worries that these technologies will enable individuals to cause unspeakable amounts of damage.
Sort of like a GM aerosol transmitted HIV targetted to a particular MHC complex? As destructive as that say? Or more? How about a resurrection of the 1918 Influenza strain that wiped out 18 million people but with a little improvement might do better? I wonder who is missing the point. We _already_ have the technology. It would seem that you believe that individuals are more likely to use these things than groups. Do none of the religious cults that have attempted these things provide me with even a small piece of evidence that people are just as capable of behaving irrationally in concert as alone? It just seems to me that the sudden brou-ha-ha over destructive technology is a little late and there's not mcuh we can do about it. I also believe that these things are more likely to be used by governments than individuals. Most of our destructive technology results from the inter-group competition fostered by ...drum-roll... CAPITALISM. And we will continue developing weapons and refusing to regulate them (witness the US's failure to ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) as long as there is a social-order based on exploitation. We can all dick around making statements about how terrible these things are but they already exist and will be used because the pursuit of profit and domination drives it.
Tools that broken *individuals* might use. Social orders, even broken ones, tend to want to self-perpetuate. No such guarantees with broken individuals.
I don't know where the evidence for that is, for one thing people in broken societies often think that they are going to survive individually even if the overall logic of the society means that it will collapse, (Nazism ring any bells?). Secondly, I can think of several instance of broken social orders that would rather self-destruct than change - the Jews at Masada and the Melian aristocrats fought to the death rather than accept Athenian democracy
I'm pretty much convinced by your post that there is a difference between nuclear threats and future nanotech threats. But bear in mind that it is not just the USSR and the US that posses nuclear weapons. Britain, France, Pakistan, India, China, Israel(probably), S.Africa(probably) also have the capability and it seems that Iraq was having a good try. The failure of the U.S. to ratify the non-proliferation treaty is probably going to encourage the further spread.
It seems that to believe that there is a significant difference between the old and new weapons of destruction one has to believe that there are fewer impediments to the use of the new.....you seem to argue that there it would be cheaper and easier for someone to manufacture nanobots than to manufacture nuclear weapons. I don't really have a feeling for whether this is true. I can't help suspecting though that the design and the fabrication machinery would be incredibly complex, rare and expensive, would require the budget of a large country, would be treated as munitions and thus restricted in distribution and thus would present most of the problems that exist for the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
That said, this is totally off the top of my head, I don't really know what goes into fabricating a self-replicating nanobot.
Bacteria, virii, etc. may be annoying, but they only adapt under evolutionary forces; medical science has been advancing fast enough to keep ahead of them, and I expect it to continue doing so. Because evolution is blind.
I think that focussing on the blindness of evolution in this context is ignoring a more important aspect of it - massive parallelism. The range and diversity of solutions that are found by organisms is incredible and there is no guarantee that science is able to keep ahead of it just because its fundamental method is random, blind chance.
All that said, I was missing the point that Joy was speaking about bio-weapons also...I was focussing too much on nanobots.
Having read the response above this, I think I'd have to agree with you. I was missing Joy's point.
The "we" who "have the means" for mass destruction right now is limited to a few countries. The "we" who may have the means for mass destruction in the future could be tomorrow's script kiddies. God help us all.
But this is not necessarily due to the introduction of any new technologies. The ability to develop biological weapons especially and to a lesser extent chemical weapons is technologically and financially within the means of even obscure religious Japanese cults.
Why worry about the tools that a broken social order might use instead of trying to fix the social order? Anyway, if global warming is going to behave according to the models then we'll have lots of other things to worry about first. Wouldn't it be a shame if just as we were on the cusp of nanotechnology and quantum computing we screwed the whole thing up because we couldn't stop driving cars and switch the lights out occasionally when we weren't using them?
Definitely Stallman, he'd use his "viral" GPL to infect Joy.
The distinction between "offensive and defensive" weapons seems kind of bogus to me -- there's a saying that the best defense is a strong offense, and to make an example, in terms of nuclear arms, the threat of offense has served as a defense.
Agreed, similarly take the example of a castle as being a good `defensive' weapon: suppose you create an impregnable fortress which protects you from an invading horde of some sort. You shut yourself and your vassals up in it and leave your local rivals to be destroyed on the outside. Or how about insisting on neutrality during a conflict? It doesn't seem like there's a clear distinction to be made at all.
You seem to be labouring under the opinion that we live in a rational universe
No....I think you just projected that onto me! I said that I would prefer rational, kind robot masters to the evil irrational masters we have now.
we live in a rational universe, and as products of this universe are in point of fact inherrently rational ourselves
Apart from the fact that I didn't claim the first part of this proposition, the second part would not have to follow even if I had. It is entirely possible that there would be a rational universe which contained irrational humans
Can you support that assumption?
No, and I'm not interested in doing that
I find it hard to take Bill Joy's position seriously - we are already in a position where we have the means to do achieve destruction of most of us. Yet we haven't implemented it (yet). So why worry particularly when a further total destruction method is added. Inf + 1 is still Inf.
I suppose the idea that `intelligent' machines would be as irrational as we claim ourselves to be is what is motivating his claims.
Personally I think discussion of these issues serve as a of a sort of Rorschach blot where we project our negative perceptions of `humanity' onto all intelligences. It's not very surprising that someone living in a brutal society that imprisons and executes so many of it's population and bombs and starves other nations would come to a such negative conclusion.
Myself? I'm waiting for the rational, kind robot masters to take over - which would you rather have running your life: Bush/Gore or a machine that could play 10 Kasparovs and beat them?
I like those too!
The Wired article talks about using a spectromotor is this just a dumb typo for spectrometer and if not what is a spectromotor?
the Dead Sea scrolls are in large part thumbnail sized fragments that are damned hard to piece together. That hasn't stopped all sorts of scholars trying to do it (mostly with selotape). Interestingly you can now sequence the mtDNA (mitochondrial D-loop mutates very fast providing fine resolution distinction between individuals) of part of each fragment. This reveals whether the skin the fragments are written on all come from the same type of organism (within certain resolution limits). They've found that some of pieces come from goats and others from a springbok-like creature, so they should definitely not be put together. They claim that they're also able to identify the "herd" that each piece came from. I'm not so sure about that but it may be possible.
Correct in some parts. However, what most people don't seem to look at is that organisms are not static. You don't derive the output of a protein solely from the perceived input of a gene sequence. There are other considerations.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this post. I actually thought that the original poster's analogy while true in some senses was slightly confusing. By talking about the genome as being like a physical object solely it ignores the fact that it is, as your post brings out, like a program that has physical parts. This way of talking about it:
It might be clearer to use the analogy of two groups of Victorians being presented with a wonderful little nanobot composed of intricate parts beyond our wildest dreams. The nanobot has been produced by several aeons of amateurish Basic programmers and kindergarten Lego-engineers who have piled fudge upon fudge to improve the thing in response to changing design specs from their PHBs. It is written in a proprietary binary-block format.
One group of scientists decides to study the program that each part of the nanobot carries around, the other group decides to study how the parts fit together and what happens when you take parts out and put them in. Now, the proprietary file format has been decoded and we can look at it as ASCII text. Yee-haww! Oh wait! this is terrible code: goto's , overloaded operators (not that that's always bad, I just hate it personally), no or little documentation. We're going to be a long time figuring out this program.
Calling it the "rosetta stone" similarly is a confusing way of putting it - the rosetta stone had the same text in different languages. This is different texts in the same language. The "words" may be the same in the different "essays", may even have similar patterns of usage in "sentences", but the meaning is damn different of each essay.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is an essential first step (as long as they finish the hard bits...90% only?) but there's a lot of work yet. I'd also like to draw people's attention to the skepticism of some scientists about the assumptions of determinism that are built into this work - you bring this out very nicely in your discussion of the 3D string folding problem of synthesized peptides.[ References:
Not in Our Genes:Steven Rose and Leon Kamin Biology as Ideology:The Doctrine of DNA Richard Lewontin]
He he....great movie. Maybe he'd even get to meet a bear this time. I nearly died laughing when it turned out the finished product was so heavy that they had to bring him in by helicopter to where the bears were thought to be because he couldn't walk more than ten yards in the suit.
I remember seeing another cool exoskeleton idea from someone at NASA. He was working on the idea that kangaroos are extraordinarily efficient at bouncing around because they have large tendons in their legs that store the kinetic energy instead of dissipating it. So he built a lightweight exoskeleton framework containing a lot of springs to mimic the action of the tendons. Apparently human could operate (with a good deal of training) and get up to speeds of c. 30 m.p.h. Never heard anything else about it though......maybe he died, it looked frightening. You ended up being twice as tall as normal, strapped into a cage with a crash helmet on. I've always wanted to go sprinting down the freeway in one though.
If the purpose of the exo is to do heavy-lifting and/or other tough/dangerous stuffs, putting a human inside still mean if accident happens, someone will get hurt, or may even die[...]Instead of putting a LIFE human being at the place of work, why not use the virtual reality technology
Cynical answer: so then the operator will be much more motivated to do the job properly and save the expensive equipment?
The problem in environmental pollution is scale. Some things that are innocuous or beneficial on a small scale are bad on a large scale
I totally agree with what you've said here. But it can be slightly confusing to put it just in terms of scale. It's hard to know where to draw the boundaries of the "things" that are being called large or small. Sometimes this is manifested in making the assumption that small always equals good - some strange results could stem from that. Take for example transport: the efficiency of mass-transit for city environments means that a large-scale infrastructure is far better than the small scale use of private automobiles, but implementing a transit system like this in a small rural village would probably be wasteful and counter-productive. Similarly using the converse of your sewage example, it probably would be wrong to try and build conventional tertiary treatment plants (sewerage) in every small community.
--Crush
because concentrated pollution is easier to control and manage than dispersed pollution[...] the benefits of the consumption accrue to many neighborhoods, but only one actually gets the pollution
But I don't agree with it. There are dose-dependent/critical concentrations of pollutants. If those are not exceeded then there may be no statistically measurable impact on organisms exposed to lower concentrations. So for some things it is better to disperse them if the environment can cope with it. The nuclear waste example is one in which we would suspect that the environment may not be able to cope with it. But if you were to consider for example CO2, a localized concentration above certain levels would be lethal, but if we blow it off into the atmosphere, allow it to disperse and be dealt with by plants it would be fine.
Also consider the nearly intractable problems of trying to get that "one neighbourhood" to agree to be chosen.
--Crush
Not polluting in the first place just isn't an option.
I assume that you're not making the trivial point that absolutely no pollution is not possible. Working on this assumption I'll assume that you're saying that the vast majority of our current pollution is unavoidable. I don't believe this to be true. We waste huge amounts of energy and produce their concommitant pollutants needlessly. It should be possible to reduce our pollution footprint drastically.
To use your analogy of the cottager and the stove, due to the efficiency of the wood-burning stove and his double-glazed windows he produces far fewer pollutants than his neighbour with the old stone fireplace and the open windows.
Technology and the environment are not at odds with each other, we just have to adjust technology so that we get an acceptable environment and lifestyle
--Crush
--Crush
Basically, you can't rely on human beings to act in their own self interest in anything but the short term.
Agreed, which is why you have to adjust the rules of the game so that their short term interests coincide with long-term strategies. Skew the cost-benefit ration of pollution so that it negatively affects the "greed" and "economic self-interest" of the individual asshole that is the typical human and they will go along with it.
The big hassle is getting everyone to agree to these new rules initially, but given that we are all competing relative to each other it won't affect how we do individually in the game if we're competitive and smart - we can see the new rules and play them better than others. An example of this is curb-side recycling in Germany as compared to Ireland. Both were introduced by government programs in major cities. It was a success in Germany but not in Ireland. Why? Initially Irish commentators decried their personalities for being too disorganized as compared to the methodical Germans. However, another analysis is more compelling - in Germany there were economic incentives to recycle: free recycling and charges for pick-up of non-recycling, whereas in Ireland everyone paid a flat distributed fee to the local government and voluntarily recyled "for the environment".
I thought that the interviewer and interviewee discussed a straw-man when they talked about extreme environmentalists that want to "punish" polluters because they're "evil". That may be how owners of polluting corporations feel about having economic disincentives imposed on them, and it may even be how some people feel when they realize that their health is suffering because those companies find it economically self-interested to poison them, but the thinking behind the system of fines has always been that it will encourage a shift in behaviour through short-term mechanisms to acheive long term goals.
I also had another question about the article: what happens to a low-income neighbour-hood that is burning benzene and heavy metal enriched trees? Do you get a lot of carcinogens in the air?
--Crush