If we had this in mass use today, I believe we'd end up removing many positive attributes from the human germ line. We are very quick to limit what we consider "normal" without a full understanding of the effects beyond the individual and caregivers that a trait has.
For example, it has been shown that ADD is a success trait in more nomadic societies. Those with ADD get "treated" today because they don't fit into our education system. Most ADD disappears as a problem in adults not because it actually goes away but because they are finally free to fill the type of slot that nature chose for them. They find a career and life that benefits from dropping stability and going.
Another example is autism. Many of our geniuses have been a little off in the autism spectrum. Eliminating that variance in the germ line could dampen innovation forever.
There are many other examples of traits that fill positive roles in our society that we would probably seek to edit out because the people with them don't fit into the "norm". Until we gain the capacity to understand that the norm must be judged in relation to making sure that the larger animal is "normal" and has all of its individual "organs" intact, we aren't ready for this.
I think a single standard, even a very flexible one, at this point would slow progress.
The battery tech is on the way to allow full charges in less than 5 minutes. If the vehicle has a 100 kWH pack, delivering 100 kWH in 5 minutes requires more than 1200 kW on the feed. So, something like a 12 kW feed at 100 amps. Try to get that through your current standard connector.
Instead of standardizing the feed to the vehicle, what they should standardize is the feed to the "pump" and they should make that extreme. Build the stations with something like 20 kW per pump capacity (perhaps 100 kW for stations serving trucks). Then come up with a "pump" standard that takes multiple plugin modules that convert to the vehicle needs. There would still need to be some standardization to keep the numbers of modules that the station has to have on hand down, but the costs of change would be vastly less.
You're implying that they have advantages due to income related connections. I don't buy that.
You have to look at the whole person. You can't limit your thoughts to grades, degrees, and book smarts. Instincts and comfort in your environment are usually more important as long as you're at least average in the other stuff.
Kids whose parents have higher incomes are probably more likely to have grown up in an environment in which their parents discussed problems and used reasoning skills to solve them. They had a different education at home from day one. They may have slept with books instead of Teddy Bears. And the shows on the TV might have been very different.
Life experience in the culture you're trying to work in usually trumps what we traditionally think of as knowledge as long as the knowledge reaches a minimum threshold.
Running with that... how often do you learn about a virus because you or someone you know encountered it versus from vendor-driven press?
In over 30 years of being a computing professional, I've only encountered a couple of viruses on machines I use. Both were before '95. I haven't used an antivirus since 2005.
Your example is totally backwards from the way it is going to happen. Instead of wasting your time going to the store at all, you're going to call the milk. It will arrive in a car-like autonomous vehicle and be placed at your door. And it will often arrive in less than the travel time because vehicles already on delivery runs will be prestocked with common items.
Also vehicles for carrying people will stage themselves in anticipation of need. Your average time to go anywhere will likely go down due to things like more efficient usage of the roads and never having to find parking.
There are also many examples of lab successes in charging lithium and other batteries in times that are equivalent to supercapacitors and with cycle counts beyond 10,000 as shown by this announcement-de-jeur.
So, certainly batteries are going to be hard to beat. But I think supercapacitors will eventually win out due to weight, durability and raw material cost factors. And, I predict that the next 30 years will see as much development in the newly merged material / chemical / biological science as has happened in all of man's history. The problems will be solved.
The form of public transportation I'm guessing you see is not happening in America without many trillions of infrastructure investment to rebuild our populated areas to be friendly to it. So not happening.
What WILL happen is a transition away from private vehicle ownership to autonomous fleets. The efficiency gains in doing so will be vast, mostly due to the sudden appearance of million mile vehicles now that the car companies are selling miles instead of vehicles.
A side-effect of that will be new energy competitors. The fleets will find it economical to generate their own power using solar and wind. So, they will move into renewables more aggressively than utilities. The utilities will find themselves left behind and the fleets will buy out their remains.
Whatever. Toyota is already backing out of that approach. It was just a hedge.
The only change that hydrogen produces versus gas is that the carbon is removed at the refinery. This is because it is still much cheaper to produce hydrogen from oil than other sources. Splitting water economically is still a fantasy.
So, a hydrogen economy is still petrochemical based. Other flow battery technologies (essentially that is what a fuel cell is) already exist that could achieve the benefits you speak of without stripping hydrogen from oil, but this approach is short-sighted.
One of the benefits of charging a car is that the storage technology doesn't have to be the same for every car. Thus, the charging approach gives us one major infrastructure change with only the details changing (what kinds of hookups are offered) after the initial build out.
This benefit is going to allow "batteries" to aggressively evolve. They will be the main competition point.
Personally, I believe the "batteries" will be capacitors within 30 years. They charge faster, will be vastly lighter (mostly air), built from plentiful substances, and will have lifetimes matching the million mile lifetime potentials of the motors.
I was thinking a lot more out of the box. Basically, throw away the idea of frames at the chip level. Also, throw away the idea of knowing the intensity of light at a point. The intensity is represented by the number of times the pixel cycles in a given time. And set the threshold for firing as low as you can (it will be limited in how low it can be set by the speed of whatever output scheme is chosen).
For example, in vision applications, an approach that might work is to feed each pixel into an input of a multilayer neural net right above it.
Or, for a more traditional recording system, perhaps every pixel that fires would cause a row and column type coordinate to be transmitted through a high-speed serial stream, combine that with a highly accurate time when it comes out and you would have all of the information necessary for playback.
We know such a system can work because this is basically the way the rod and cone sensors in our retinas work.
I suspect such a system could be highly energy efficient. With work, you might even get it to be powered by the light itself. Each pixel would fire when it built enough charge to actually perform the necessary work to get through some of the post processing.
In the past, when employers only got one application, they realized they were not offering enough compensation and increased it. This pulled the people on the sidelines (who were never really on the sidelines) into the workforce and expanded the economy. Today, we've entered this weird alternate reality where employers do things like figure out a way to work without a human in the position, kill the project, claim that their aren't enough qualified people in the country get the government to let others in, move to another locale where people will work for the compensation they are offering, etc. And the whole economy suffers for it.
In the developed world, many people now have enough to get by without working or with working far less. This is challenging the fundamentals of capitalism.
Because more people are able to drop out, cut back, and "survive", the current means of calculating unemployment is producing a number that no longer reflects all of those who would like to work. It disguises the fact that if higher quality and higher paying jobs were available, more would work.
This is hiding a very real problem. Essentially, the developed world is in the midst of a massive undeclared strike. Many of us in that gap between the 60% employed and 4.5% unemployed would love to work, but the pay being offered for our time has dropped so much that it is simply no longer worth it to justify leaving our family eight hours a day. In going on strike, we've been a huge drag on the GDP, because we've chosen to consume far less than we could in order to make it with little or no job.
Changing the way the number is reported would highlight the missing potential for growth and benefit all. More people working higher paying jobs produce more spending and higher paying jobs. We've been spiraling down invisibly with the current definition. We need to change it and try spiraling up.
The definition should be geared to show the percentage who would choose to provide more value to the economy in different work from what they are currently doing or not doing if that work were available.
Existing ICBMs are hypersonic on entry. This is being considered something new because it is hypersonic through atmosphere while still under propulsion. That requires a lot more fuel than coasting through space and letting gravity pull you in. This could not hit "anywhere" in minutes because it wouldn't have enough fuel to go through that much atmosphere. It is an advance in short to perhaps medium range missile technology in that it is fast enough to get to a plane or from a submarine to a target before a response can be made.
I built a sampler once that simply filled a big capacitor, used it to repeatedly fill and discharge a much smaller one while incrementing a counter each time until it can't. Rinse and repeat. The counts are then representative of the voltage. The only difference I see is that they measured the remainder when the big cap drops below the capacity of the small one. Right?
If so, you get an odd effect where sampling frequency is indirectly related to the amplitude of the sample.
Why not just drop the saturation point down to a single bit and count pulses?
For example, I wonder if you could design a video sensor where each pixel is a sensor that fills, fires a pulse, and resets ad infinitum with no shutter and you just record the location and point in time of every pulse. Ideal playback would involve firing a fixed voltage pulse to the desired address of a screen with the pulse density determining the eventual brightness of that location. Realistic playback on existing equipment would involve integrating the field to convert it to a frame by frame type of signal. Isn't this very similar to how our eyes work?
True. I just believe that there is a huge difference in the behavior of corporate owners versus individual owners. Individual owners are on average more emotional and unrealistic in their pricing. There should also be a large reduction in the number of owners that need to be dealt with.
I think an imminent domain approach would also be vastly easier if we're discussing the area 1000 feet under your property. In fact, as 3D zoning and development take off over the next half century or so, I'd be surprised if there is not a massive subsurface land grab from the various governments in which several levels of entire regions are rezoned to multiply the tax generating surface area.
I rarely even see the home page anymore. The vast majority of my queries are spoken to the assistant or typed on an address bar if I happen to be on the PC. My news and stock updates generally come from the personalized feed in the assistant and have for some time.
The reason this is likely happening is that they are cutting investment in the older technology and spreading the tech from the assistant in its place. Look at it as a step in the planned obsolescense process. The feature is not new.
And if you don't give it the chance to learn, it never will understand. I've given permission to Google to use all of my data, and I regularly upgrade / downgrade news sources to further inform it. Over the past few months, the assistant has gotten quite a lot better at picking the tech news I would have normally picked and now often surprises me by finding something of interest I had missed. Eventually, it will be able to do this and even distill the articles down to the facts it knows I'd like. I'm looking forward to that day.
And may not need it, though he'd get it regardless because the government isn't ready to give up their relevance yet.
We have individual billionaires in this country whose fortunes rival many governments. I've been waiting for the day to come when some of the billionaires get together and decide to start guiding our development directions with their own funds. It is actually the ultimate way to make more money.
For example, a mere 2 billion dollars could provide a $5K incentive on 400,000 electric vehicles. More than double what Tesla has sold to date. If a small group of billionaires decided to wipe out traditional auto manufacturers in favor of electric, they could easily make it happen and likely profit from it through creation of the new infrastructure.
With government becoming increasingly non-responsive to the needs of the people, essentially abdicating its role, it is setting itself up for private takeover of its duties.
I can't speak about the country as a whole, but in the several diverse areas I've lived in, those who owned the surface land rarely owned the underground rights. They had been sold off long ago. The presence of coal, oil, gas, or any of many other resources tends to cause large corporations to go through whole states at some point in time to purchase rights. This has caused a concentration of underground rights into the hands of far fewer people than the surface rights.
Offering those organizations a little money today for nothing more than a path through something they are just holding for future value is usually enough.
Furthermore, at some point in the future as we start building down instead of out, I would fully expect the government to step in and start performing 3D zoning. There is just too much money there. Such zoning will reduce the value to the owners and encourage cheaper sales.
I guess the chip makers would love that. Finally, something to obsolete all of the existing HW that has been building up over the past few years as we've not had any new killer app using local processor cycles. Only, instead of giving us new features, it just runs less efficiently.
In my experience, I've been able to achieve 30+ times speed increases most of the time when rewriting system-level Ada code in ANSI C. I've seen new generations of avionics hardware with 100-fold speed increases that ended up having no or very few new features because the language change and the change to multiple tasking across many processors sucked up all of the new bandwidth.
I believe that we are about a decade away from a disruptive change that will obsolete all of this. The refactoring would probably take longer.
At some point, we are going to change to a system in which neural networks are the system and a swarm of traditional processors running very small, tight, calculator-like algorithms are tied within the neural network. This merging of calculators, memories and artificial minds will occur long before any intensive augmentation of biological minds - likely in the next couple of decades. Most of our computers will be grown up versions of Google's assistant, Alexa, Siri, etc.
These computers will defend themselves with intelligence, not good coding. The main danger will be from snakes with convincing arguments, not buffer overflows.
Slashdot Mirror
If we had this in mass use today, I believe we'd end up removing many positive attributes from the human germ line. We are very quick to limit what we consider "normal" without a full understanding of the effects beyond the individual and caregivers that a trait has.
For example, it has been shown that ADD is a success trait in more nomadic societies. Those with ADD get "treated" today because they don't fit into our education system. Most ADD disappears as a problem in adults not because it actually goes away but because they are finally free to fill the type of slot that nature chose for them. They find a career and life that benefits from dropping stability and going.
Another example is autism. Many of our geniuses have been a little off in the autism spectrum. Eliminating that variance in the germ line could dampen innovation forever.
There are many other examples of traits that fill positive roles in our society that we would probably seek to edit out because the people with them don't fit into the "norm". Until we gain the capacity to understand that the norm must be judged in relation to making sure that the larger animal is "normal" and has all of its individual "organs" intact, we aren't ready for this.
I think a single standard, even a very flexible one, at this point would slow progress.
The battery tech is on the way to allow full charges in less than 5 minutes. If the vehicle has a 100 kWH pack, delivering 100 kWH in 5 minutes requires more than 1200 kW on the feed. So, something like a 12 kW feed at 100 amps. Try to get that through your current standard connector.
Instead of standardizing the feed to the vehicle, what they should standardize is the feed to the "pump" and they should make that extreme. Build the stations with something like 20 kW per pump capacity (perhaps 100 kW for stations serving trucks). Then come up with a "pump" standard that takes multiple plugin modules that convert to the vehicle needs. There would still need to be some standardization to keep the numbers of modules that the station has to have on hand down, but the costs of change would be vastly less.
You're implying that they have advantages due to income related connections. I don't buy that.
You have to look at the whole person. You can't limit your thoughts to grades, degrees, and book smarts. Instincts and comfort in your environment are usually more important as long as you're at least average in the other stuff.
Kids whose parents have higher incomes are probably more likely to have grown up in an environment in which their parents discussed problems and used reasoning skills to solve them. They had a different education at home from day one. They may have slept with books instead of Teddy Bears. And the shows on the TV might have been very different.
Life experience in the culture you're trying to work in usually trumps what we traditionally think of as knowledge as long as the knowledge reaches a minimum threshold.
Running with that... how often do you learn about a virus because you or someone you know encountered it versus from vendor-driven press?
In over 30 years of being a computing professional, I've only encountered a couple of viruses on machines I use. Both were before '95. I haven't used an antivirus since 2005.
Your example is totally backwards from the way it is going to happen. Instead of wasting your time going to the store at all, you're going to call the milk. It will arrive in a car-like autonomous vehicle and be placed at your door. And it will often arrive in less than the travel time because vehicles already on delivery runs will be prestocked with common items.
Also vehicles for carrying people will stage themselves in anticipation of need. Your average time to go anywhere will likely go down due to things like more efficient usage of the roads and never having to find parking.
They do dribble out periodically. For example:
There are also many examples of lab successes in charging lithium and other batteries in times that are equivalent to supercapacitors and with cycle counts beyond 10,000 as shown by this announcement-de-jeur.
So, certainly batteries are going to be hard to beat. But I think supercapacitors will eventually win out due to weight, durability and raw material cost factors. And, I predict that the next 30 years will see as much development in the newly merged material / chemical / biological science as has happened in all of man's history. The problems will be solved.
The form of public transportation I'm guessing you see is not happening in America without many trillions of infrastructure investment to rebuild our populated areas to be friendly to it. So not happening.
What WILL happen is a transition away from private vehicle ownership to autonomous fleets. The efficiency gains in doing so will be vast, mostly due to the sudden appearance of million mile vehicles now that the car companies are selling miles instead of vehicles.
A side-effect of that will be new energy competitors. The fleets will find it economical to generate their own power using solar and wind. So, they will move into renewables more aggressively than utilities. The utilities will find themselves left behind and the fleets will buy out their remains.
Whatever. Toyota is already backing out of that approach. It was just a hedge.
The only change that hydrogen produces versus gas is that the carbon is removed at the refinery. This is because it is still much cheaper to produce hydrogen from oil than other sources. Splitting water economically is still a fantasy.
So, a hydrogen economy is still petrochemical based. Other flow battery technologies (essentially that is what a fuel cell is) already exist that could achieve the benefits you speak of without stripping hydrogen from oil, but this approach is short-sighted.
One of the benefits of charging a car is that the storage technology doesn't have to be the same for every car. Thus, the charging approach gives us one major infrastructure change with only the details changing (what kinds of hookups are offered) after the initial build out.
This benefit is going to allow "batteries" to aggressively evolve. They will be the main competition point.
Personally, I believe the "batteries" will be capacitors within 30 years. They charge faster, will be vastly lighter (mostly air), built from plentiful substances, and will have lifetimes matching the million mile lifetime potentials of the motors.
And they will be charged, not fueled.
No TV since 2003! Yet, I still watch many shows - when I want to and without ads.
I was thinking a lot more out of the box. Basically, throw away the idea of frames at the chip level. Also, throw away the idea of knowing the intensity of light at a point. The intensity is represented by the number of times the pixel cycles in a given time. And set the threshold for firing as low as you can (it will be limited in how low it can be set by the speed of whatever output scheme is chosen).
For example, in vision applications, an approach that might work is to feed each pixel into an input of a multilayer neural net right above it.
Or, for a more traditional recording system, perhaps every pixel that fires would cause a row and column type coordinate to be transmitted through a high-speed serial stream, combine that with a highly accurate time when it comes out and you would have all of the information necessary for playback.
We know such a system can work because this is basically the way the rod and cone sensors in our retinas work.
I suspect such a system could be highly energy efficient. With work, you might even get it to be powered by the light itself. Each pixel would fire when it built enough charge to actually perform the necessary work to get through some of the post processing.
In the past, when employers only got one application, they realized they were not offering enough compensation and increased it. This pulled the people on the sidelines (who were never really on the sidelines) into the workforce and expanded the economy. Today, we've entered this weird alternate reality where employers do things like figure out a way to work without a human in the position, kill the project, claim that their aren't enough qualified people in the country get the government to let others in, move to another locale where people will work for the compensation they are offering, etc. And the whole economy suffers for it.
In the developed world, many people now have enough to get by without working or with working far less. This is challenging the fundamentals of capitalism.
Because more people are able to drop out, cut back, and "survive", the current means of calculating unemployment is producing a number that no longer reflects all of those who would like to work. It disguises the fact that if higher quality and higher paying jobs were available, more would work.
This is hiding a very real problem. Essentially, the developed world is in the midst of a massive undeclared strike. Many of us in that gap between the 60% employed and 4.5% unemployed would love to work, but the pay being offered for our time has dropped so much that it is simply no longer worth it to justify leaving our family eight hours a day. In going on strike, we've been a huge drag on the GDP, because we've chosen to consume far less than we could in order to make it with little or no job.
Changing the way the number is reported would highlight the missing potential for growth and benefit all. More people working higher paying jobs produce more spending and higher paying jobs. We've been spiraling down invisibly with the current definition. We need to change it and try spiraling up.
The definition should be geared to show the percentage who would choose to provide more value to the economy in different work from what they are currently doing or not doing if that work were available.
The most valuable weapon will be the soldiers that still know how to fight without all of their gadgets.
The question is whose soldiers will that be?
Existing ICBMs are hypersonic on entry. This is being considered something new because it is hypersonic through atmosphere while still under propulsion. That requires a lot more fuel than coasting through space and letting gravity pull you in. This could not hit "anywhere" in minutes because it wouldn't have enough fuel to go through that much atmosphere. It is an advance in short to perhaps medium range missile technology in that it is fast enough to get to a plane or from a submarine to a target before a response can be made.
I think you meant to be funny, but it is possible to come full circle on this one.
NASA's Vacuum Tube Transistor
I built a sampler once that simply filled a big capacitor, used it to repeatedly fill and discharge a much smaller one while incrementing a counter each time until it can't. Rinse and repeat. The counts are then representative of the voltage. The only difference I see is that they measured the remainder when the big cap drops below the capacity of the small one. Right?
If so, you get an odd effect where sampling frequency is indirectly related to the amplitude of the sample.
Why not just drop the saturation point down to a single bit and count pulses?
For example, I wonder if you could design a video sensor where each pixel is a sensor that fills, fires a pulse, and resets ad infinitum with no shutter and you just record the location and point in time of every pulse. Ideal playback would involve firing a fixed voltage pulse to the desired address of a screen with the pulse density determining the eventual brightness of that location. Realistic playback on existing equipment would involve integrating the field to convert it to a frame by frame type of signal. Isn't this very similar to how our eyes work?
Surely this has been done? Is this at all new?
True. I just believe that there is a huge difference in the behavior of corporate owners versus individual owners. Individual owners are on average more emotional and unrealistic in their pricing. There should also be a large reduction in the number of owners that need to be dealt with.
I think an imminent domain approach would also be vastly easier if we're discussing the area 1000 feet under your property. In fact, as 3D zoning and development take off over the next half century or so, I'd be surprised if there is not a massive subsurface land grab from the various governments in which several levels of entire regions are rezoned to multiply the tax generating surface area.
I rarely even see the home page anymore. The vast majority of my queries are spoken to the assistant or typed on an address bar if I happen to be on the PC. My news and stock updates generally come from the personalized feed in the assistant and have for some time.
The reason this is likely happening is that they are cutting investment in the older technology and spreading the tech from the assistant in its place. Look at it as a step in the planned obsolescense process. The feature is not new.
And if you don't give it the chance to learn, it never will understand. I've given permission to Google to use all of my data, and I regularly upgrade / downgrade news sources to further inform it. Over the past few months, the assistant has gotten quite a lot better at picking the tech news I would have normally picked and now often surprises me by finding something of interest I had missed. Eventually, it will be able to do this and even distill the articles down to the facts it knows I'd like. I'm looking forward to that day.
It's not like there is a very limited resource here. 1000s of tunnels could fit. Why would we have just one?
And may not need it, though he'd get it regardless because the government isn't ready to give up their relevance yet.
We have individual billionaires in this country whose fortunes rival many governments. I've been waiting for the day to come when some of the billionaires get together and decide to start guiding our development directions with their own funds. It is actually the ultimate way to make more money.
For example, a mere 2 billion dollars could provide a $5K incentive on 400,000 electric vehicles. More than double what Tesla has sold to date. If a small group of billionaires decided to wipe out traditional auto manufacturers in favor of electric, they could easily make it happen and likely profit from it through creation of the new infrastructure.
With government becoming increasingly non-responsive to the needs of the people, essentially abdicating its role, it is setting itself up for private takeover of its duties.
I've rarely seen a double negative so aptly placed !!!!
I can't speak about the country as a whole, but in the several diverse areas I've lived in, those who owned the surface land rarely owned the underground rights. They had been sold off long ago. The presence of coal, oil, gas, or any of many other resources tends to cause large corporations to go through whole states at some point in time to purchase rights. This has caused a concentration of underground rights into the hands of far fewer people than the surface rights.
Offering those organizations a little money today for nothing more than a path through something they are just holding for future value is usually enough.
Furthermore, at some point in the future as we start building down instead of out, I would fully expect the government to step in and start performing 3D zoning. There is just too much money there. Such zoning will reduce the value to the owners and encourage cheaper sales.
I guess the chip makers would love that. Finally, something to obsolete all of the existing HW that has been building up over the past few years as we've not had any new killer app using local processor cycles. Only, instead of giving us new features, it just runs less efficiently.
In my experience, I've been able to achieve 30+ times speed increases most of the time when rewriting system-level Ada code in ANSI C. I've seen new generations of avionics hardware with 100-fold speed increases that ended up having no or very few new features because the language change and the change to multiple tasking across many processors sucked up all of the new bandwidth.
Put the kool-aid down.
I believe that we are about a decade away from a disruptive change that will obsolete all of this. The refactoring would probably take longer.
At some point, we are going to change to a system in which neural networks are the system and a swarm of traditional processors running very small, tight, calculator-like algorithms are tied within the neural network. This merging of calculators, memories and artificial minds will occur long before any intensive augmentation of biological minds - likely in the next couple of decades. Most of our computers will be grown up versions of Google's assistant, Alexa, Siri, etc.
These computers will defend themselves with intelligence, not good coding. The main danger will be from snakes with convincing arguments, not buffer overflows.