>The people inside the building have a right to free speech, but not the building itself.
Philosophically, this argument is not on solid ground, as continuing in the same line of regress to individual constituents, your argument goes to:
The neurons inside the brain have a right to free thought, but not the brain itself.
The choice of the level at which you end the regress is arbitrary.
Huh? It's a matter of personal responsibility. You shouldn't be relying on the government to tell you what's good or bad for you; that's trying to absolve oneself of responsibility for their own life. That some people lack self control in resisting external influences, real or perceived, is unfortunate but it does not justify infringing others' freedoms. The government being your nanny is not a right, whereas freedom is.
ICBMs are 1) not stealth and 2) cannot be recalled once launched (an abort means destruction of the missile, which still leaves tons of shrapnel on a ballistic trajectory to the target).
I'm in the beginning of my 30s and I can still hear 18 kHz (probably due to not listening to loud music, and wearing musicians' ear plugs in loud clubs); younger folks can often hear to around 20 kHz. Calling this ultrasonic is silly. Though the high frequency sensitivity of the ear is lower and these sounds would not be loud, they can easily be annoying, in the same way the old CRT TVs had that annoying 15.7 kHz buzz you can hear when you mute the sound.
Some here may wonder why, in the day of sound cards with 96 ksamples/s they didn't use a higher output frequency. The problem is the sound card DAC's reconstruction filter starts attenuation significantly below that, and most speakers drop in sensitivity much beyond 20 kHz as well. I would imagine the recording side has similar limitations.
I think that is an important point, and it's not so much intelligence per se, but complexity itself. Single-cell organisms are the pinnacle of evolutionary success on Earth, whether measured by biomass, numbers, adaptability, and spread throughout every environmental niche. They're just complex enough to be alive, and not much more. Intracellular processes are far more optimized than the larger scale functions of multicellular organisms--in many cases, certain cellular processes are provably optimal in terms of energy use. This level of optimization on a multicellular organism probably would take longer than the lifetime of most stars.
Beyond this, once sufficient intelligence appears on some world, technology is almost inevitable if the species continues existence long enough (though I imagine some would disagree). The problem with technology is that it magnifies the fundamental asymmetry between the difficulty of creation and ease of destruction. In our own case it is clear that advanced technology enables an ever smaller group to destroy an ever larger portion of people; in the limit, eventually a single person will be able to destroy all of humanity. Reactive protections against such disaster is always at a significant disadvantage and it only has to fail once for all to be lost. The alternative, pervasive monitoring of every individual at all times without exception also brings issues (I mean beyond the ideological issues of freedom), in that it creates a much more highly integrated social system, and large complex systems are prone to catastrophic failure, as discussed, funny enough, in a slashdot article not long ago. I would be surprised if there is still civilization 500 years from now.
Keep in mind the old argument that galactic colonization is an exponential process, as each colony sends out a ship, the expansion rate grows. Even with each colony sending out ships at a fairly low constant rate, say every 500 years, it only takes a few million years to colonize the whole galaxy. Yet this clearly has not happened, even though intelligence would have to have arisen only once. With the two major factors I listed above, I don't think the first one alone is sufficient to decimate the chance of this happening as much. It's more likely than not that, given the sheer number of planets in the galaxy, intelligence has appeared before on occasion. But couple in the second factor, and the likelihood is that no one has made it far into space.
My point is, there are 7+ million tonnes of proven mineable uranium and a heck of a lot more thorium, which, coupled with breeder reactors (breeders being old tech, and thorium reactors proved in India now in commercial operation), is enough energy for a millenium even with continued population x per-capital energy use growth. Why killbirds/bats and fuck up the landscape with windmills, or destroy ecosystems with hydro?
Do you know how many people died from nuclear power accidents due to the nuclear aspect of it (that is, radiation)? Let's take the worst nuclear power disaster of all time: Chernobyl. How many people died from Chernobyl? According to the World Health Organization, "As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004." Wow! A fucking 50 people died! Oh, the horrors! Go spread your ignorance elsewhere, troll. It's well established that even close to reactors, radiation levels are barely raised above the natural background level. You have far more to worry about from radon in your basement.
> Would these locations prefer a windmill farm or coal fired plant.
Oh, wow. This is the most blatant example of a false dichotomy I have seen for days. There are many other options, all of them more practical. Note, especially, the human death rate per Terrawatt-hour of energy produced here: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-sources and look at the bottom of the graph on the right (consistent with http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html which has discussion attached to the numbers). This is a rate lower than even that of wind, but there's a more important reason that this method is much better than wind: it's the only alternative to coal that can meet all of the world's energy needs as developing world per-capita usage energy use explodes to match that of the developed nations. You can't cover every square mile of the planet with wind towers.
Population is an improperly weighted metric for this comparison. It's the net money inflow into Germany that's the point. It's an artificially maintained trade surplus, resulting in hoarding cash. That's what mercantilism is. Germany's eurozone trading partners can't fight back by adjusting their currency's exchange rate, because they don't have their own currency! The only way for them, then, to cope, is to significantly boost productivity per capita--and the way the Germans gain that asymmetry is by wage suppression at home.
The bailouts will be a continued necessity, maybe for Greece now, another economically weak nation another time--but there will always be a nation or group of them in the eurozone that bears the brunt of Germany's "beggar thy neighbor" behavior. If Greece or some other economically weak country falls out of the eurozone, the eurozone's cannibalistic process will then continue with another country, as long as the monetary integration of the eurozone is not matched by fiscal and economic integration (which will never happen, as Europe is far more heterogenous than the union of American states). The eurozone will dwindle and disintegrate.
Saying Germany and France control the Euro is misleading since France's influence on the Euro was never equal to Germany's and lately has diminished further. The Eurozone troubles are a classic case of merchantilism. Germany's policies of trade surplus made possible by domestic wage suppression, combined with a single currency, is benefiting within the Eurozone only those at the top of German industry and finance. The resulting disaster was predicted decades ago by Modern Monetary Theorists.
I think it's quite easy to conceive of a plausible non-asymptotic 100% destructiveness. For example, microfluidics and computational biotechnology would likely eventually allow one to create a set of quickly mutating super-viruses that wipe everyone out, all created using portable (maybe neuro-integrated) computational technology coupled with a lab the size of a matchbox that was manufactured using what by then will be very common and advanced rapid prototyping technology.
I think expansion into space is the only long term way out, as great distances allow one to make use of the soft barrier of the speed of light limit between different inhabited regions. This shifts to an extent the offense-defense asymmetry, so that protection from a region which tries to either be a tyrant or annihilator is made somewhat easier. However, between NASA making space boring and information technology turning people ever more towards inner space at the expense of the non-virtual, I'm not holding my breath towards seeing meaningful steps being taken to ensure the long term survival of humanity in a form that is, well, human.
It's ironic that, as a computer scientist, I'm disturbed about the changes information technology is bringing into society, with ever more time spent in the virtual at the expense of the real world. This both decreases our humanness in the long run, and makes it easier for unscrupulous actors to exercise power and abuse more freely in the real world. NASA is part of this tragedy, having done the impossible of making space boring. Yet space exploration and subsequent expansion, coupled with the barrier that the speed of light limit imposes on the degree of influence the two Big dangers, tyranny and purely destructive forces, can have, are probably going to be critical to the long term survival of something that can be said is human.
Most people can be happy. But it only takes one rotten apple, which is unavoidable given billions of individuals, and monitoring "super-virus labs" is something else than what you think when that lab will be eventually trivial to create by anyone using microfluidics and/or nanotech and will be the size of a matchbox.
In case you're not trolling: humans are very complex systems but most possibilities of catastrophic failures have been weeded out by the trial and error process of natural selection though many many generations with many many individuals. In the case of a system as is discussed above, it must be gotten right the first time since there's no way you can make a detailed enough simulation that will fully match real world situations, unless you can afford the simulation to run as slow as only a few times faster than real-time and then do dozens of years worth of simulation of many parallel runs so you can have a decent sampling of the complex phase-space you need to cover to have any confidence in long-term stability. This is not practical and won't be practical in the next several decades.
I have a question for you, which may or may not be one from a devil's advocate standpoint (frankly, I haven't made up my mind yet). It's based on two trivial observations: 1) science and engineering are enablers of increasing reach of influence with decreasing effort, and 2) destruction is generally easier than creation and restraint. Having spelled them out explicitly, I think you know what I'm about to say is the obvious implication: technological progress over time allows an ever smaller group the ability to cause bigger death and destruction upon increasing areas and populations, with countermeasures and constraints lagging behind this ability (human history has been following this trend, where we went from massacring competing tribes to the ability to cause nuclear winter and kill most of the population). Taken to its logical limit, we are going towards the point where an individual will be able to destroy all of humanity (the specific method, be it "grey goo" or bioweapons or nuclear weapons or computer virus when we're all wired or have uploaded our minds into machines are details that don't affect this argument). The fundamental asymmetry of destructive power versus reactive protection schemes mean that even if many attempts are thwarted, eventually one is bound to succeed as time goes on. It seems to me that the ONLY way to deal with it is the most distasteful one--proactive countermeasures--constantly monitoring, privacy and anonymity nullifying pervasive surveillance (be it by people or machines, all the same) that know what everyone is doing at any time. I'm still waiting for a good counterargument, since I would LOVE it if there was a nicer alternative that would satisfy my warm feelings about freedom etc.
So in other words "Evolution's Darling" totally rips off the fundamental idea of Asimov's 1955 "The End of Eternity", except you're replacing the time-traveling nannies with AI nannies. *rolleyes*
Funny to see this posted barely a month after http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/03/20/1410215/the-risk-of-a-meltdown-in-the-cloud given that a similar reasoning as in the former article can be applied here, and catastrophic failures in both sorts of systems are likely inevitable. The difference is that a failure in the cloud won't have the disastrous consequences of a failure of a fully automated and integrated, largely autonomous City Management System. Having humans in the mix adds human error, but it likely decreases the likelihood of some types of massive system-wide failures that common sense would otherwise avert; more importantly, the high level of integration implied by such a system is the biggest problem, just as much as it's the biggest contributor to the expected increased efficiency.
I'd rather live in a poorly run city than in one where large-scale non-natural disaster strikes and potentially causes significant death and destruction, or worse (imagination is the limit).
"independent of whether they can be mapped to real-world entities (many things cannot)"
Absolutely false. Mathematics is directly mapped to the physical world by the neural correlates of mathematical thought. The antiquated concept of a platonic mathematical world that is beyond the physical universe is a religious proposition.
Slashdot Mirror
Vaccines still win in a cost-benefit analysis by a wide margin.
>The people inside the building have a right to free speech, but not the building itself.
Philosophically, this argument is not on solid ground, as continuing in the same line of regress to individual constituents, your argument goes to:
The neurons inside the brain have a right to free thought, but not the brain itself. The choice of the level at which you end the regress is arbitrary.
Huh? It's a matter of personal responsibility. You shouldn't be relying on the government to tell you what's good or bad for you; that's trying to absolve oneself of responsibility for their own life. That some people lack self control in resisting external influences, real or perceived, is unfortunate but it does not justify infringing others' freedoms. The government being your nanny is not a right, whereas freedom is.
ICBMs are 1) not stealth and 2) cannot be recalled once launched (an abort means destruction of the missile, which still leaves tons of shrapnel on a ballistic trajectory to the target).
WTF are you smoking? Mission critical components are manufactured within the US: http://www.trustedfoundryprogram.org/
Heh.
The above estimation assumes maximum travel speed at a fraction of c. So your comment is largely pointless.
I'm in the beginning of my 30s and I can still hear 18 kHz (probably due to not listening to loud music, and wearing musicians' ear plugs in loud clubs); younger folks can often hear to around 20 kHz. Calling this ultrasonic is silly. Though the high frequency sensitivity of the ear is lower and these sounds would not be loud, they can easily be annoying, in the same way the old CRT TVs had that annoying 15.7 kHz buzz you can hear when you mute the sound.
Some here may wonder why, in the day of sound cards with 96 ksamples/s they didn't use a higher output frequency. The problem is the sound card DAC's reconstruction filter starts attenuation significantly below that, and most speakers drop in sensitivity much beyond 20 kHz as well. I would imagine the recording side has similar limitations.
I think that is an important point, and it's not so much intelligence per se, but complexity itself. Single-cell organisms are the pinnacle of evolutionary success on Earth, whether measured by biomass, numbers, adaptability, and spread throughout every environmental niche. They're just complex enough to be alive, and not much more. Intracellular processes are far more optimized than the larger scale functions of multicellular organisms--in many cases, certain cellular processes are provably optimal in terms of energy use. This level of optimization on a multicellular organism probably would take longer than the lifetime of most stars.
Beyond this, once sufficient intelligence appears on some world, technology is almost inevitable if the species continues existence long enough (though I imagine some would disagree). The problem with technology is that it magnifies the fundamental asymmetry between the difficulty of creation and ease of destruction. In our own case it is clear that advanced technology enables an ever smaller group to destroy an ever larger portion of people; in the limit, eventually a single person will be able to destroy all of humanity. Reactive protections against such disaster is always at a significant disadvantage and it only has to fail once for all to be lost. The alternative, pervasive monitoring of every individual at all times without exception also brings issues (I mean beyond the ideological issues of freedom), in that it creates a much more highly integrated social system, and large complex systems are prone to catastrophic failure, as discussed, funny enough, in a slashdot article not long ago. I would be surprised if there is still civilization 500 years from now.
Keep in mind the old argument that galactic colonization is an exponential process, as each colony sends out a ship, the expansion rate grows. Even with each colony sending out ships at a fairly low constant rate, say every 500 years, it only takes a few million years to colonize the whole galaxy. Yet this clearly has not happened, even though intelligence would have to have arisen only once. With the two major factors I listed above, I don't think the first one alone is sufficient to decimate the chance of this happening as much. It's more likely than not that, given the sheer number of planets in the galaxy, intelligence has appeared before on occasion. But couple in the second factor, and the likelihood is that no one has made it far into space.
You mean the students of Quebec rioting due to minor tuition increase when they already have, by far, the lowest tuition in the country?
My point is, there are 7+ million tonnes of proven mineable uranium and a heck of a lot more thorium, which, coupled with breeder reactors (breeders being old tech, and thorium reactors proved in India now in commercial operation), is enough energy for a millenium even with continued population x per-capital energy use growth. Why killbirds/bats and fuck up the landscape with windmills, or destroy ecosystems with hydro?
Do you know how many people died from nuclear power accidents due to the nuclear aspect of it (that is, radiation)? Let's take the worst nuclear power disaster of all time: Chernobyl. How many people died from Chernobyl? According to the World Health Organization, "As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004." Wow! A fucking 50 people died! Oh, the horrors! Go spread your ignorance elsewhere, troll. It's well established that even close to reactors, radiation levels are barely raised above the natural background level. You have far more to worry about from radon in your basement.
> Would these locations prefer a windmill farm or coal fired plant.
Oh, wow. This is the most blatant example of a false dichotomy I have seen for days. There are many other options, all of them more practical. Note, especially, the human death rate per Terrawatt-hour of energy produced here: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-sources and look at the bottom of the graph on the right (consistent with http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html which has discussion attached to the numbers). This is a rate lower than even that of wind, but there's a more important reason that this method is much better than wind: it's the only alternative to coal that can meet all of the world's energy needs as developing world per-capita usage energy use explodes to match that of the developed nations. You can't cover every square mile of the planet with wind towers.
Population is an improperly weighted metric for this comparison. It's the net money inflow into Germany that's the point. It's an artificially maintained trade surplus, resulting in hoarding cash. That's what mercantilism is. Germany's eurozone trading partners can't fight back by adjusting their currency's exchange rate, because they don't have their own currency! The only way for them, then, to cope, is to significantly boost productivity per capita--and the way the Germans gain that asymmetry is by wage suppression at home.
The bailouts will be a continued necessity, maybe for Greece now, another economically weak nation another time--but there will always be a nation or group of them in the eurozone that bears the brunt of Germany's "beggar thy neighbor" behavior. If Greece or some other economically weak country falls out of the eurozone, the eurozone's cannibalistic process will then continue with another country, as long as the monetary integration of the eurozone is not matched by fiscal and economic integration (which will never happen, as Europe is far more heterogenous than the union of American states). The eurozone will dwindle and disintegrate.
Saying Germany and France control the Euro is misleading since France's influence on the Euro was never equal to Germany's and lately has diminished further. The Eurozone troubles are a classic case of merchantilism. Germany's policies of trade surplus made possible by domestic wage suppression, combined with a single currency, is benefiting within the Eurozone only those at the top of German industry and finance. The resulting disaster was predicted decades ago by Modern Monetary Theorists.
I think it's quite easy to conceive of a plausible non-asymptotic 100% destructiveness. For example, microfluidics and computational biotechnology would likely eventually allow one to create a set of quickly mutating super-viruses that wipe everyone out, all created using portable (maybe neuro-integrated) computational technology coupled with a lab the size of a matchbox that was manufactured using what by then will be very common and advanced rapid prototyping technology.
I think expansion into space is the only long term way out, as great distances allow one to make use of the soft barrier of the speed of light limit between different inhabited regions. This shifts to an extent the offense-defense asymmetry, so that protection from a region which tries to either be a tyrant or annihilator is made somewhat easier. However, between NASA making space boring and information technology turning people ever more towards inner space at the expense of the non-virtual, I'm not holding my breath towards seeing meaningful steps being taken to ensure the long term survival of humanity in a form that is, well, human.
It's ironic that, as a computer scientist, I'm disturbed about the changes information technology is bringing into society, with ever more time spent in the virtual at the expense of the real world. This both decreases our humanness in the long run, and makes it easier for unscrupulous actors to exercise power and abuse more freely in the real world. NASA is part of this tragedy, having done the impossible of making space boring. Yet space exploration and subsequent expansion, coupled with the barrier that the speed of light limit imposes on the degree of influence the two Big dangers, tyranny and purely destructive forces, can have, are probably going to be critical to the long term survival of something that can be said is human.
Most people can be happy. But it only takes one rotten apple, which is unavoidable given billions of individuals, and monitoring "super-virus labs" is something else than what you think when that lab will be eventually trivial to create by anyone using microfluidics and/or nanotech and will be the size of a matchbox.
In case you're not trolling: humans are very complex systems but most possibilities of catastrophic failures have been weeded out by the trial and error process of natural selection though many many generations with many many individuals. In the case of a system as is discussed above, it must be gotten right the first time since there's no way you can make a detailed enough simulation that will fully match real world situations, unless you can afford the simulation to run as slow as only a few times faster than real-time and then do dozens of years worth of simulation of many parallel runs so you can have a decent sampling of the complex phase-space you need to cover to have any confidence in long-term stability. This is not practical and won't be practical in the next several decades.
Wish I had mod points.
I have a question for you, which may or may not be one from a devil's advocate standpoint (frankly, I haven't made up my mind yet). It's based on two trivial observations: 1) science and engineering are enablers of increasing reach of influence with decreasing effort, and 2) destruction is generally easier than creation and restraint. Having spelled them out explicitly, I think you know what I'm about to say is the obvious implication: technological progress over time allows an ever smaller group the ability to cause bigger death and destruction upon increasing areas and populations, with countermeasures and constraints lagging behind this ability (human history has been following this trend, where we went from massacring competing tribes to the ability to cause nuclear winter and kill most of the population). Taken to its logical limit, we are going towards the point where an individual will be able to destroy all of humanity (the specific method, be it "grey goo" or bioweapons or nuclear weapons or computer virus when we're all wired or have uploaded our minds into machines are details that don't affect this argument). The fundamental asymmetry of destructive power versus reactive protection schemes mean that even if many attempts are thwarted, eventually one is bound to succeed as time goes on. It seems to me that the ONLY way to deal with it is the most distasteful one--proactive countermeasures--constantly monitoring, privacy and anonymity nullifying pervasive surveillance (be it by people or machines, all the same) that know what everyone is doing at any time. I'm still waiting for a good counterargument, since I would LOVE it if there was a nicer alternative that would satisfy my warm feelings about freedom etc.
So in other words "Evolution's Darling" totally rips off the fundamental idea of Asimov's 1955 "The End of Eternity", except you're replacing the time-traveling nannies with AI nannies. *rolleyes*
Funny to see this posted barely a month after http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/03/20/1410215/the-risk-of-a-meltdown-in-the-cloud given that a similar reasoning as in the former article can be applied here, and catastrophic failures in both sorts of systems are likely inevitable. The difference is that a failure in the cloud won't have the disastrous consequences of a failure of a fully automated and integrated, largely autonomous City Management System. Having humans in the mix adds human error, but it likely decreases the likelihood of some types of massive system-wide failures that common sense would otherwise avert; more importantly, the high level of integration implied by such a system is the biggest problem, just as much as it's the biggest contributor to the expected increased efficiency.
I'd rather live in a poorly run city than in one where large-scale non-natural disaster strikes and potentially causes significant death and destruction, or worse (imagination is the limit).
"independent of whether they can be mapped to real-world entities (many things cannot)"
Absolutely false. Mathematics is directly mapped to the physical world by the neural correlates of mathematical thought. The antiquated concept of a platonic mathematical world that is beyond the physical universe is a religious proposition.