Economists tend to overlook the wealth value of technology because it is extremely difficult to quantify. Let's say, for example, that the distribution of wealth now compared to 100 years ago has seen a drastic increase in the concentration of wealth, i.e., fewer people hold greater percentages of the wealth. I don't know if this is true or not, but let's assume it.
A hundred years ago, if you were poor (on average), you were hungry, had no indoor plumbing (never mind electricity), and maybe owned a horse. Today, if you are poor (on average), you have a car, air conditioning, electricity, indoor plumbing, television, and you are overweight. I'm not trying to insult anyone, but that's the health statistic.
My insight about the economics of nanotechnology is that it could create an incredible concentration of wealth, while at the same time defining poor so stratospherically high (owning only two Ferraris rather than twenty because you have no place to put them) that it becomes irrelevant.
Other important points: (note, value != price)
The value of personal services will be unaffected by nanotechnology
The value of real estate will not be affected.
As Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, the unit of currency would become the kilowatt-hour.
Early on, this could make food more precious than diamond (the molecular structure of a chicken breast is vastly more complex and difficult to create than a simple carbon lattice)
But isn't the central "problem" of transportation the power plant? All the degrees of freedom motion is cool, but what's the problem that it's solving? Wouldn't it still need to be powered by ICE, hybrid or battery?
The jobs we ship to people "willing" to work cheaper do not, for the most part, improve the lives of those they go to.
Then why do they do the work? Are they acting irrationally?
I fully support raising the world-wide standard of living.
How? At least a corporation pays them a wage they can't get elsewhere (or else they would work elsewhere). Pass a minimum wage law for them, and the corporations will pull out. You see, the reason they get paid what they do is conditions of supply and demand and productivity. What people always forget in their analysis is that corporations compete against other wage-offerers; if a worker is being underpaid (according to the relative scarcity of their labor and demand for it), then another wage-offerer will offer them more out of pure greed.
I realize that this topic is long dead, but it's one of my faves: "the Economics of Star Trek"...
One thing that people fail to consider when speculating about the "end of work", is that you can have all of the vast asteriod mineral supplies, replicator technology or whatever technology you want and there are two things that you still have to pay cash for: land, and personal services. Yeah, robotic maids and cooks, blah, blah, blah, but if I want advice and counsel, artistic fulfillment, and to a great degree education, there's no substitute.
It's ironic in a way; technology, which we usually think as dehumanizing, is actually pushing us closer and closer to what makes us essentially human.
IANAEB (I am not an evolutionary biologist), but...having actually read the article, the distribution of Strouhal numbers (an indicator of the amplitude of the wing beat, the wavelength of the wingbeat, and the resulting airspeed) falls within an envelope. From the article:
Strouhal numbers for birds seem to fall on the lower end of the predicted range (closer to.2), while bat species tend to fall on the higher end (closer to.4). Similarly, Strouhal numbers for relatively large birds (amplitude larger than.5 meters) also seem to hug the lower end of the predicted range.
Here's the reckless assertion: the envelope is a function of the folllowing factors:
1. Mean air density at habitat
2. Earth's gravity
3. Biological limits of birds
So alien birds would have an envelope, but's it's slope and area would be different according to the local conditions. Below certain critical levels of low air density or high gravity, the envelope collapses because no species can maintain the energy density necessary to maintain flight.
This is true only if we end up having trillion dollar bank accounts through inflation. What you're describing to a t is Germany in the 30's. I remember hearing a story about people taking wheelbarrows of cash to the store to buy bread because inflation was so insane (probably apocryphal).
Getting back to the point: IAAE (I am an economist), and I've run through a space mining scenario similar to what you describe. Here's my scenario:
1. Using speculative technologies x, y and z, a private company mines an enormous vein of platinum from an asteriod.
2. The vein is so enormous that it constitutes a significant portion of the current supply of platinum and actually drives the price down (supply increases, demand stays the same in the short run, price decreases).
3. Things that it was desirable but too expensive to use platinum for before become practical. So we see an increase in wealth in two forms: things that used platinum before become cheaper, and things that couldn't use platinum before but can now cost the same, but work better.
4. None of this has any effect on the price of bread, unless the private individuals that funded the endeavor like bread so much that they use their enormous wealth to buy up all of the bread on the Eastern seaboard;).
5. The aggregate effect on prices was that platinum got cheaper. If the wealth was significantly large, the supply of certain luxury items might be diminished and prices may rise, but as Bill G has said, you can only drive so many Ferraris. So I propose that the effect would actually be deflationary.
Lastly, we've had enormous increases in the wealth over the last two centuries, and the price of bread in proportion to income has steadily fallen.
Outstanding post. Let me make a few points, parallel, and perhaps a little bit off parallel...
How much more of their GDP would have gone into the armed forces if the US had pulled out of NATO when the Russians had 5,000 tanks and 3,000,000 troops in Eastern Europe?
Given Europe's (Britain most honorably excluded) performance in WWII, I think none would have, and then there would have been a series of Soviet satellite states.
We don't need a welfare state.
causes the poverty it's intended to prevent.
And yet with our "crumbling school system" we still lead the World with advances in all sorts of Sciences.
Have to disagree here. Our secondary system is the envy of the world, but our primary system is a disaster. We in America agree that children going without food is intolerable, but that doesn't prescribe an imperative for the government to run supermarkets. The same should be true for schools.
Personally I was hoping the Chinese rocket would blow up on the launchpad.
I think perhaps you don't really mean that. I guess that I would have preferred a failure that resulted in no loss of life. But it is important to remember that China still throws people in jail and tortures them for writing newspaper articles.
Absolutely right. Lord of the Rings is a very special piece of literature because it is the capstone to 2000 years of Anglo-Saxon mythos. It is the best distillation of it, and completely captures the "undermind" that drove all of the myths that came out of Western Europe. It is special because it is true, not in the sense that it is factually true, but because it conveys truths about the human spirit.
I think the Wachowskis (sp?) set out to create a cool live action anime flick. They needed a conceit to justify the unreality of anime, so over a beer and a weekend, they tossed out the whole Matrix thing. I really think that's all they had in mind. Then it came out, and everybody went nuts, focusing on the conceit, not the things it was created to enable, i.e., a lot of kick-ass fanboy action. So rather than being able to go on and create a good forward moving story, they were heavily obligated to try to carry forth the Matrix "philosophy", which was really just a story device anyway. It's as if Superman comes out, and everybody focuses on the fact that his power come from the sun: what does that mean? Is it an allegory? No, dude, it's just to make him able to do cool stuff!
I was really disappointed in the second, and I think I'll wait on the third for DVD. Everyone seems to be saying "they never explained anything!" It sounds to me like they threw up their hands and made the movie they wanted to.
So, to sum up: Lord of the Rings is an important piece of work to humanity; it goes in the next deep space probe we send out along with the Bible, Shakespeare's Collected Works, etc. The Matrix? It's a very good popcorn movie. If you saw some deep philosophy, you saw something that just wasn't there.
The inverse of "anything is okay in moderation" is "anything is unhealthy in excess". Thus, we must cling desperately to the idea of individual responsibility, lest EVERYTHING be subject to the whims of government.
The key with the idea of "attractive nuisances" is that we're dealing with children. If an adult breaks his shoulder playing on my rubble pile, then too bad. He assumed the risk when he chose to climb on it, especially without my permission.
Much better to have a dangerous, free world than a safe world in chains. In the end, the second world doesn't exist anyway.
The problem with gun control is that by trying to restrict the amount of reactant, you are shifting the reactant that has a generally positive effect (private, legal gun ownership) away from the negative reactant (illegal, criminal ownership). These two factors work against each other; it's as if you had a reactant that served as its own regulator.
Of course, we're both grossly oversimplifying the reality of gun control here.
Careful thought and consideration is an important aspect of learning critical thinking
I agree completely with this, but I'm not sure that the lecture period is the right time for it. Even at x1 speed, there's just not enough time. As you start to consider the ramifications of a point, your attention wanders, and you miss the next one. This factor may indeed be part of why the increased speed works so well.
To look at it another way, you watch the lecture at 1.5 speed in 45 minutes, and use the remaining 15 minutes to record your thoughts on what you've learned, or (gasp!), pursue some elementary practical application.
I think that this technique actually holds the potential to slow down society, in that if we can do in two hours what formerly took four, the benefits are manifest. Of course, it remains to be seen what you do with the two newly found hours. Furthermore, this kind of stuff can only apply to lectures. You can't practice Claire De Lune at double speed (trust me, you can't) or paint a picture at twice the speed. But if we can reduce the time spent listening to a lecture (and at the same time move the content window closer to our American, ferret-like attention spans) then I think it's a good thing.
This guy broke the law. Maybe in a way that entertains and interests us, sure, but he broke the law. So the FBI wants to subpoena documents related to the case. From journalists. And?
Imagine this was an investigation about an Enron exec; would all you Slashdotters be gladhanding each other like this? Or, heaven forbid, the Microsoft anti-trust proceedings?
But back to my main point, this looks like a prosecutor playing hard ball. Paper the world with subpoenas, expect the judge to throw some of them out. That happens all the time. In any event, I don't have a problem with reporters' notes being used in criminal proceedings. Gag rule, sure, maybe even kept in chambers.
There is no greater insult to one's religion, than to use it to justify violence.
I would argue, however, that it refer less inclusively to Christianity and Buddhism. Hinduism, perhaps also, but Islam has no claim on non-violence. Muhammamed didn't use persuasive rhetoric to change the hearts of his enemies.
I do understand, however, that you're probably being charitable and preferring not to provoke a confrontation with the sig as it is. Probably a wiser course.
Amen. I really, really agree with this point, and now that you've pointed it out, I wish that I'd included it in my original post. Comic books are analogous to the folk legends that evolved into mythology.
People dismiss them because, well, those reasons have been discussed into the ground, but comics persist, like mythologies persist, because they address universal human truths.
Anyhow, another note in the simultaneous attack / defense of American culture.
Please, please, please listen to Gershwin and form your own opinion independently of what some computer nerds think about a totally unrelated law. Listening to Gershwin will make you a better human being. I mean it.
I think that what this kind of stuff is leading to is a lot of really clever things being done with portables. The AutoPC failed, for example, but unleash thousands of hackers who will try a thousand different ways of making it useful for themselves, and something useful will come out of it. Maybe even a business model.
With something this small, I'd be tempted to wire together thermometers, maybe a cheapo sonograph (is there such a thing?), and whatever else I could fit into a small box and build My Very First Tricorder.
Slashdot Mirror
With no more mountains to conquer, we grow fat on the plains.
A hundred years ago, if you were poor (on average), you were hungry, had no indoor plumbing (never mind electricity), and maybe owned a horse. Today, if you are poor (on average), you have a car, air conditioning, electricity, indoor plumbing, television, and you are overweight. I'm not trying to insult anyone, but that's the health statistic.
My insight about the economics of nanotechnology is that it could create an incredible concentration of wealth, while at the same time defining poor so stratospherically high (owning only two Ferraris rather than twenty because you have no place to put them) that it becomes irrelevant.
Other important points: (note, value != price)
But isn't the central "problem" of transportation the power plant? All the degrees of freedom motion is cool, but what's the problem that it's solving? Wouldn't it still need to be powered by ICE, hybrid or battery?
That was the plot of Highlander 2, wasn't it?
The jobs we ship to people "willing" to work cheaper do not, for the most part, improve the lives of those they go to.
Then why do they do the work? Are they acting irrationally?
I fully support raising the world-wide standard of living.
How? At least a corporation pays them a wage they can't get elsewhere (or else they would work elsewhere). Pass a minimum wage law for them, and the corporations will pull out. You see, the reason they get paid what they do is conditions of supply and demand and productivity. What people always forget in their analysis is that corporations compete against other wage-offerers; if a worker is being underpaid (according to the relative scarcity of their labor and demand for it), then another wage-offerer will offer them more out of pure greed.
I realize that this topic is long dead, but it's one of my faves: "the Economics of Star Trek"...
One thing that people fail to consider when speculating about the "end of work", is that you can have all of the vast asteriod mineral supplies, replicator technology or whatever technology you want and there are two things that you still have to pay cash for: land, and personal services. Yeah, robotic maids and cooks, blah, blah, blah, but if I want advice and counsel, artistic fulfillment, and to a great degree education, there's no substitute.
It's ironic in a way; technology, which we usually think as dehumanizing, is actually pushing us closer and closer to what makes us essentially human.
IANAEB (I am not an evolutionary biologist), but...having actually read the article, the distribution of Strouhal numbers (an indicator of the amplitude of the wing beat, the wavelength of the wingbeat, and the resulting airspeed) falls within an envelope. From the article:
.2), while bat species tend to fall on the higher end (closer to .4). Similarly, Strouhal numbers for relatively large birds (amplitude larger than .5 meters) also seem to hug the lower end of the predicted range.
Strouhal numbers for birds seem to fall on the lower end of the predicted range (closer to
Here's the reckless assertion: the envelope is a function of the folllowing factors:
1. Mean air density at habitat
2. Earth's gravity
3. Biological limits of birds
So alien birds would have an envelope, but's it's slope and area would be different according to the local conditions. Below certain critical levels of low air density or high gravity, the envelope collapses because no species can maintain the energy density necessary to maintain flight.
This is true only if we end up having trillion dollar bank accounts through inflation. What you're describing to a t is Germany in the 30's. I remember hearing a story about people taking wheelbarrows of cash to the store to buy bread because inflation was so insane (probably apocryphal).
;).
Getting back to the point: IAAE (I am an economist), and I've run through a space mining scenario similar to what you describe. Here's my scenario:
1. Using speculative technologies x, y and z, a private company mines an enormous vein of platinum from an asteriod.
2. The vein is so enormous that it constitutes a significant portion of the current supply of platinum and actually drives the price down (supply increases, demand stays the same in the short run, price decreases). 3. Things that it was desirable but too expensive to use platinum for before become practical. So we see an increase in wealth in two forms: things that used platinum before become cheaper, and things that couldn't use platinum before but can now cost the same, but work better.
4. None of this has any effect on the price of bread, unless the private individuals that funded the endeavor like bread so much that they use their enormous wealth to buy up all of the bread on the Eastern seaboard
5. The aggregate effect on prices was that platinum got cheaper. If the wealth was significantly large, the supply of certain luxury items might be diminished and prices may rise, but as Bill G has said, you can only drive so many Ferraris. So I propose that the effect would actually be deflationary.
Lastly, we've had enormous increases in the wealth over the last two centuries, and the price of bread in proportion to income has steadily fallen.
Seconded on the solar power satellites.
Outstanding post. Let me make a few points, parallel, and perhaps a little bit off parallel...
How much more of their GDP would have gone into the armed forces if the US had pulled out of NATO when the Russians had 5,000 tanks and 3,000,000 troops in Eastern Europe?
Given Europe's (Britain most honorably excluded) performance in WWII, I think none would have, and then there would have been a series of Soviet satellite states.
We don't need a welfare state.
causes the poverty it's intended to prevent.
And yet with our "crumbling school system" we still lead the World with advances in all sorts of Sciences.
Have to disagree here. Our secondary system is the envy of the world, but our primary system is a disaster. We in America agree that children going without food is intolerable, but that doesn't prescribe an imperative for the government to run supermarkets. The same should be true for schools.
Personally I was hoping the Chinese rocket would blow up on the launchpad.
I think perhaps you don't really mean that. I guess that I would have preferred a failure that resulted in no loss of life. But it is important to remember that China still throws people in jail and tortures them for writing newspaper articles.
Absolutely right. Lord of the Rings is a very special piece of literature because it is the capstone to 2000 years of Anglo-Saxon mythos. It is the best distillation of it, and completely captures the "undermind" that drove all of the myths that came out of Western Europe. It is special because it is true, not in the sense that it is factually true, but because it conveys truths about the human spirit.
I think the Wachowskis (sp?) set out to create a cool live action anime flick. They needed a conceit to justify the unreality of anime, so over a beer and a weekend, they tossed out the whole Matrix thing. I really think that's all they had in mind. Then it came out, and everybody went nuts, focusing on the conceit, not the things it was created to enable, i.e., a lot of kick-ass fanboy action. So rather than being able to go on and create a good forward moving story, they were heavily obligated to try to carry forth the Matrix "philosophy", which was really just a story device anyway. It's as if Superman comes out, and everybody focuses on the fact that his power come from the sun: what does that mean? Is it an allegory? No, dude, it's just to make him able to do cool stuff!
I was really disappointed in the second, and I think I'll wait on the third for DVD. Everyone seems to be saying "they never explained anything!" It sounds to me like they threw up their hands and made the movie they wanted to.
So, to sum up: Lord of the Rings is an important piece of work to humanity; it goes in the next deep space probe we send out along with the Bible, Shakespeare's Collected Works, etc. The Matrix? It's a very good popcorn movie. If you saw some deep philosophy, you saw something that just wasn't there.
No kidding. Cuba Gooding, Jr. sucks ass.
The inverse of "anything is okay in moderation" is "anything is unhealthy in excess". Thus, we must cling desperately to the idea of individual responsibility, lest EVERYTHING be subject to the whims of government.
The key with the idea of "attractive nuisances" is that we're dealing with children. If an adult breaks his shoulder playing on my rubble pile, then too bad. He assumed the risk when he chose to climb on it, especially without my permission.
Much better to have a dangerous, free world than a safe world in chains. In the end, the second world doesn't exist anyway.
I think everybody understands it, more or less, and people simply have different values. That's the price of freedom.
The problem with gun control is that by trying to restrict the amount of reactant, you are shifting the reactant that has a generally positive effect (private, legal gun ownership) away from the negative reactant (illegal, criminal ownership). These two factors work against each other; it's as if you had a reactant that served as its own regulator.
Of course, we're both grossly oversimplifying the reality of gun control here.
History is full of inevitable things that didn't happen, and full of improbable things that did..
I'm afraid I must expropriate that for my sig, my friend.
You are ants to our god- oh, hang on, I'm late for the swing shift at Arby's. I'll finish with you later, insignificant insects!
Seems like we need to get these guys together with these guys.
Careful thought and consideration is an important aspect of learning critical thinking
I agree completely with this, but I'm not sure that the lecture period is the right time for it. Even at x1 speed, there's just not enough time. As you start to consider the ramifications of a point, your attention wanders, and you miss the next one. This factor may indeed be part of why the increased speed works so well.
To look at it another way, you watch the lecture at 1.5 speed in 45 minutes, and use the remaining 15 minutes to record your thoughts on what you've learned, or (gasp!), pursue some elementary practical application.
I think that this technique actually holds the potential to slow down society, in that if we can do in two hours what formerly took four, the benefits are manifest. Of course, it remains to be seen what you do with the two newly found hours. Furthermore, this kind of stuff can only apply to lectures. You can't practice Claire De Lune at double speed (trust me, you can't) or paint a picture at twice the speed. But if we can reduce the time spent listening to a lecture (and at the same time move the content window closer to our American, ferret-like attention spans) then I think it's a good thing.
Oblig Simps ref. But seriously...
This guy broke the law. Maybe in a way that entertains and interests us, sure, but he broke the law. So the FBI wants to subpoena documents related to the case. From journalists. And?
Imagine this was an investigation about an Enron exec; would all you Slashdotters be gladhanding each other like this? Or, heaven forbid, the Microsoft anti-trust proceedings?
But back to my main point, this looks like a prosecutor playing hard ball. Paper the world with subpoenas, expect the judge to throw some of them out. That happens all the time. In any event, I don't have a problem with reporters' notes being used in criminal proceedings. Gag rule, sure, maybe even kept in chambers.
Begun, this flame war has.
Yet another cry out that changes in technology are going to "historically" destroy jobs.
I'm too bored with this line of thinking to even trot out the buggy whip analogy. Please save me the effort and just read this:
Creative Destruction, again
This has happened a thousand times before, but somehow, this time is different. Whatever.
Actually, Ion propulsion is faster. It just has much less tork, if I may use the analogy.
Maybe so, but it's nothing required to the amount of Tork required to drive the last train to Clarksville.
Interesting sig:
There is no greater insult to one's religion, than to use it to justify violence.
I would argue, however, that it refer less inclusively to Christianity and Buddhism. Hinduism, perhaps also, but Islam has no claim on non-violence. Muhammamed didn't use persuasive rhetoric to change the hearts of his enemies.
I do understand, however, that you're probably being charitable and preferring not to provoke a confrontation with the sig as it is. Probably a wiser course.
Amen. I really, really agree with this point, and now that you've pointed it out, I wish that I'd included it in my original post. Comic books are analogous to the folk legends that evolved into mythology.
People dismiss them because, well, those reasons have been discussed into the ground, but comics persist, like mythologies persist, because they address universal human truths.
Anyhow, another note in the simultaneous attack / defense of American culture.
Standby...keyword "Gershwin" search in progress...Completed.
Results>>>
1. Gershwin estate - Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act
Sonny Bono Copyright Extension == BAD
Post to Slashdot to kiss Slashdotter Ass == TRUE
Please, please, please listen to Gershwin and form your own opinion independently of what some computer nerds think about a totally unrelated law. Listening to Gershwin will make you a better human being. I mean it.
I think that what this kind of stuff is leading to is a lot of really clever things being done with portables. The AutoPC failed, for example, but unleash thousands of hackers who will try a thousand different ways of making it useful for themselves, and something useful will come out of it. Maybe even a business model.
With something this small, I'd be tempted to wire together thermometers, maybe a cheapo sonograph (is there such a thing?), and whatever else I could fit into a small box and build My Very First Tricorder.