World, Writing, Wealth discussion
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Pace of progress
I did some rough calculations, and given the restrictions on information transfer set by the speed of light, the practical upper limit of a group consciousness is about one quadrillion human minds. Electronic entities may achieve an even higher density.What such an organism can think about and achieve, of course, is beyond our imagination, and there could even be a large population of such beings interacting with each other (although in a slower-than-realtime modality).
I actually have to qualify this rate of 'progress', in that very few people on Earth in proportion to the total population can be said to be truly scientifically/technologically advanced. Yes, most people are now big users of Internet and of electronic social medias, but how many of them could repair their cell phones or computers, even if given the right tools, or could write or correct a computer program? Try to run a physics or engineering problem by your average schmuck on the street and you will get mostly blank stares. Hell, many will even flunk a basic geography quizz!
On the other hand, you have vast regions on Earth where the majority of the population lives and works in conditions reminiscent of the 19th Century or worse, once you take away the passing car traffic. India, with a population over one billion now, is a nuclear power and launches rockets into orbit, but half of its rural population doesn't even have access to a toilet in their own homes and have to go out on the streets of their villages/towns or in the nearby jungle/fields to relieve themselves. Many villagers in Africa don't have electricity in their homes and live pretty much like European medieval peasants most of the time. Yes, they know about modern technology, including modern firearms unfortunately, but could they maintain and repair modern appliances or worse, manufacture them? The answer is mostly 'no'.
My point is that, while technological progress has lately happened at a dizzying pace, the vast majority of humans are mere users and contribute little to nothing to that technological progress. Even in a country like the U.S.A., the standards of scientific and technological education achieved by the majority is disappointing and could even be said to be regressing in some cases. If anything, many would say that 18th and 19th Centuries scholars would find today's college students to be sadly lacking in many skills and in general education. Most of the students today are no 'Renaissance Men'.
On the other hand, you have vast regions on Earth where the majority of the population lives and works in conditions reminiscent of the 19th Century or worse, once you take away the passing car traffic. India, with a population over one billion now, is a nuclear power and launches rockets into orbit, but half of its rural population doesn't even have access to a toilet in their own homes and have to go out on the streets of their villages/towns or in the nearby jungle/fields to relieve themselves. Many villagers in Africa don't have electricity in their homes and live pretty much like European medieval peasants most of the time. Yes, they know about modern technology, including modern firearms unfortunately, but could they maintain and repair modern appliances or worse, manufacture them? The answer is mostly 'no'.
My point is that, while technological progress has lately happened at a dizzying pace, the vast majority of humans are mere users and contribute little to nothing to that technological progress. Even in a country like the U.S.A., the standards of scientific and technological education achieved by the majority is disappointing and could even be said to be regressing in some cases. If anything, many would say that 18th and 19th Centuries scholars would find today's college students to be sadly lacking in many skills and in general education. Most of the students today are no 'Renaissance Men'.
All true, yet still in absolute numbers we probably have millions and millions more people with high education than say - 100 years ago. For good or bad we seem to enter the era of narrow specialization and multi-disciplinary dudes are indeed pretty rare.
On the other hand - I'm not sure how good Einstein or Plato were in repairing their shoes or plowing the land -:)
One of the problems - even in the labs they usually don't repair stuff, but replace aggregates in cars, cellphones, everything it seems..
Another a little worrying tendency is that education goes after the money, so high-tech and biotech attract the brightest through stringent competition, while subjects like philosophy, physics even, mathematics and less immediate money-generating faculties are hardly in their best shape...
As long as our rate of progress is above zero, no matter how small, we will inevitably attain a point where everything permitted by the laws of physics will be within our grasp.
One interesting point in science is that since 1970 there have been more scientists active than in all the rest of history, yet with the possible exception of inflation theory in cosmology, there have been no significant generally accepted advances in theory in either physics or chemistry. Further, as we have advanced so far, we have become seriously more specialised, so most scientists in one very narrow field cannot really understand anything but generalisations in another. What the academics all do is concentrate on churning out papers that half the time nobody reads, all in order to get more funding. Generally speaking, there are extremely few reviews (if any) of a field of chemistry or physics where data is critically analysed with a view of questioning or establishing the significance of something that is generally held to be established. If you do write such a paper, nobody reads it because that is wasting time - nobody wants to overturn something their previous work relies on because that spoils future funding. So, in my view, the idea that we shall eventually attain a point where we know all of physics is wildly optimistic.
If we maximize automation enough to make money obsolete, then funding isn't a problem. A researcher can tell a group of robots, "Here's a design for a huge linear accelerator, go build it." In the future, we'll be seeking permission instead of funds.
You still have to buy the robots, the land, the electricity, the designer, and pay for numerous permits :-)
Energy, robots, and material will be free and the Moon has lots of land. They won't care about building a small accelerator, they'll want one that goes around the equator.
Yes, the Moon has lots of land, but no air, which makes it pretty poor real estate. Also, the commuting costs between Earth and the Moon is kind of expensive, to say the least.
You need to think bigger. Robots can build a moonbase in a matter of weeks. Self-reproducing von Neumann machines. Or the researchers can stay on Earth, there's no real reason they need to travel. Even if they did, transport costs fall to zero as well because energy will be limitless and the manipulation of physical processes will be extremely automated.Even land on Earth will be abundant-- von Neumann machines can rapidly build arcologies housing millions of people in a small area.
Anyone that wants to build a capable and intelligent von Neumann machine should be taken out and shot on sight. I have one SF book that shows why, if anyone is interested. The good news, though, is they can't do that on the Moon because you still need materials. Have you got any idea how to produce metals, or anything else useful, out of average basalt? And that is the basic raw material. I agree it is useful for building solid walls, etc, and I used it in my SF book for building a city inside a shell at Earth-Moon L-5, but I was a little coy about what to use for cement to hold it all together, and in the book it took about 150 years to construct - and that was throwing up rock at several tonnes per second. When you put numbers to things, everything takes a lot more time :-)
If they need metal, even one asteroid should be plenty.
Most asteroids are silicaceous. There are some that are e reputed to have iron cores, but they beg the question, (a) how did they differentiate? and (b) how much basalt is over the top of it? Thus close examination of Vespa has left a bit of uncertainty over this. Still, if someone wants to sell you shares in astroid mining, don't blame me if it turns out to be a disaster :-)
150 years? That can't be right.Take modern Tokyo. It's immense, and took around 60 years. Now imagine, conservatively, only tripling that speed with robots and you're down to 20 years.
Yes, but the ground was already there. How thick of a rock shell would you like to protect you from meteor impacts, and hence evacuation? In space you have to put your ground there. The buildings are the easiest part. The settlement also needed farmland because it had to produce enough oxygen to keep a million people alive, and there also had to be some spare area for "forest" (to make oxygen) and outdoor activity. You have to throw the rock about a quarter million miles and catch it, and assemble the shell. Worse, the whole thing has to not fall apart in the early stages, and you have to get a useful rotational velocity out of the catching process, to get you artificial gravity. If you have ever actually done some practical engineering, you would probably think this was too fast an estimate.
Has anybody said it yet? Technological Singularity? I've just parsed through this discussion so far and haven't seen it jump out at me. If not, doesn't really matter since it seems to be on the tip of everybody's tongue here. Bring on the von Neumann quote!"The accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, can not continue."
Singularity? Everything ends up at a point? I hope not. That would be too depressing.
From my less scientific PoV, I'd like to hear more on when the money shall become obsolete? Gotta adjust my spending plans accordingly -:)
That's a possibility too, but one comes up with an event that prevents it or is writing about a pre-Singularity scene. In Diaspora, Greg Egan has humans transcending into software and their intelligence remaining high enough to keep the lead, and another group of people who remain normal and stay on Earth. An interesting question is, do we achieve certain things like macro engineering before we create AI smarter than us.
Money being obsolete... personally I say around 2060, for most people.
Damn, still need 43 years to weather -:) Could build half of Singapore in this time
You would need a huge economic shake-up to make money obsolete. Everyone with a bankcard? No matter how unlikely you will pay off debts and you haven't got a job? Everyone so charitable they will pay for whatever the "lazy" want to purchase? And what will purveyors of white powder require for payment?
Money is a construct, so theoretically there could be condition when it's not required anymore. It's needed in conditions of deficit, where material supplies cannot be available to everyone.First legal tender, still running with animals - force. The stronger gets what he/she wants and all the rest - get leftovers.
Then it was barter, when to get something one needed to trade something else and then - money as a universal measurement system for goods, work and services.
In the terms of abundance, where there is no deficit in material goods and they are available to anyone, money is probably not needed. Say, you want ferrari - take ferrari, lamborgini - voila, spacecraft - por favor. Can it ever happen? Well, if we(robots/whoever) learn to transform matter easily, then maybe.
So far, folks seem to be concentrated on accumulation of more and more money, but when they have it all, I'm not sure they'd want it abolished..
I do not believe we shall live in a land of plenty of everything, unless the [population is drastically reduced. The problem is there is a limit to the easily available resources, and we are progressively working through them. Now, elements don't disappear, but they do get dispersed, and the more disposed/dilute they are, the more energy is required to recover them. I do not believe in Utopia, so there will always be limits, and because the limits will vary depending on what you want, some things have to have a bigger price than others, and for some, they have to be out of reach of most. Like caviar - there is a limit to the number of sturgeon. You can't have everyone eating it. There has to be some means of balancing the act, and money does that quite well. In principle, money can be nothing more than electronic transfers, but if it is, that makes theft somewhat interesting, at least for stories.
In another group I mentioned that money may gradually disappear as productivity rises so high that some goods and services become effectively free. It won't happen overnight, and won't affect all industries at first, but it will start small and then grow. Eventually many people will find that if they live modest lives, they don't need to pay for anything. I think solar energy will become too cheap to meter first, and then electrical public transport.
To have a 'survival kit' free in some places there will be a need for a a revolution of consciousness. Some countries are pretty close to that.
I hope cash money doesn't go away. It's untraceable for the most part, and I like that. Not for nefarious reasons, but just because it's one of the few ways to stay below the government's radar. I think that's important.
Ian wrote: "Singularity? Everything ends up at a point? I hope not. That would be too depressing."No, the Technological Singularity refers to a point in time when the pace of progress reaches a point of inflection. Or, in English, that advances in robotics, computation, nanotechnology and biotechnology would eventually create an explosion in learning, research and development, such that the rate at which things change would speed up exponentially.
It's called a singularity because beyond this point, the future would become impossible to predict. Much like a quantum singularity (i.e. what lies at the center of a black hole) it's impossible to know what's beyond it because our entire frame of reference breaks down.
Actually, I suspect things are already developing exponentially. When I look back at what was going on when I was a child (biplanes and DC 3s, crank-handle telephones, no TV for us, etc) the present is almost unrecognisable as coming from there. Even as a student, I did computer programming for an IBM 1620 (I suspect the number refers to the number of bytes) which took up a whole air-conditioned room and took 30 minutes to do a calculation that my current computer would do almost instantaneously (i.e. my reflexes are the slow point.)
Ian wrote: "Actually, I suspect things are already developing exponentially. When I look back at what was going on when I was a child (biplanes and DC 3s, crank-handle telephones, no TV for us, etc) the presen..."Oh absolutely! Right now, the smart money seems to be on the "Singularity" happening sometime by mid-century - that's what Ray Kurzweil and other big-time futurists seem to think. But others, like Vernor Vinge, suspect that it could happen as early as the 2030s.
The best example is the 20th century, isn't it? Since 1900, the world has gone through multiple technological revolutions, and the population has exploded from 2 to 7 billion. I'm often jealous of people who actually lived through the latter half of the 20th century and got to see these things happening.
Matthew wrote: "I'm often jealous of people who actually lived through the latter half of the 20th century and got to see these things happening...."First color TVs, pagers and then cell-phones were small wonders -:)
This does tie into another discussion, which was about money becoming obsolete. When that would happen is anybody's guess, but it is likely that in the coming decades, money will become decentralized as all aspects of the economy begin to enter into what's called "collaborative consumption" (or the "Sharing Economy").But what about when we develop things like nanotechnology, fusion power, space-based solar power, and really begin to understand quantum physics. Once we are able to provide abundant renewable energy and synthesize things like precious metals, the entire basis of value (i.e. scarcity) will become meaningless.
There will be other scarce things, such as attention, love, time, authority, etc.An interesting side effect of the loss of money will be that one will finally know who likes them for real.
"Sigh... the day that UBI went into effect, she left me. But after some reflection, maybe that was a good thing."
Nik wrote: "Matthew wrote: "I'm often jealous of people who actually lived through the latter half of the 20th century and got to see these things happening...."First color TVs, pagers and then cell-phones w..."
Hell, Nik, I can recall when black and white TV, and a radio that did not need to be plugged in were wonders :-) I can even remember when there were hardly any cars on the road (because you couldn't get rubber, and the military had consumed most of the synthetic rubber, and what they didn't take never got to NZ).
Matthew wrote: "Once we are able to provide abundant renewable energy and synthesize things like precious metals, the entire basis of value (i.e. scarcity) will become meaningless...."If this happens, it should change drastically a life as we know it, since for many much of it is dedicated to procurement and for many more - to survival...
Ian wrote: "Hell, Nik, I can recall when black and white TV, and a radio that did not need to be plugged in were wonders :-) I can even remember when there were hardly any cars on the road..."Well, I was born a little after the dinosaurs got extinct -:)
True, I sometimes think of myself as a dinosaur - should be extinct. Helped in my novel writing about them, though :-)
Nik wrote: "Matthew wrote: "Once we are able to provide abundant renewable energy and synthesize things like precious metals, the entire basis of value (i.e. scarcity) will become meaningless...."If this hap..."
Precisely. The Technological Singularity is called that because it is just like a quantum singularity - i.e. a black hole. The rules as we know them break down inside it, and beyond it, nothing can be seen. Or in other words, the pace of change will increase so much and so many things will be possible that it will be impossible to predict where things will go from there.
Is a monetizing possibility the prime driver of progress? If so, do the fields of inventions tilted towards more lucrative and practical fields, while general science develops unevenly?
I think I can say with confidence that science develops unevenly because it works in two ways. The great bulk of it builds on what we know, and a little is added, bit by bit, and that does grow evenly, but it is not very spectacular. Major advances occur either by sheer luck, when an experiment designed to do something goes and does something else (one of the most profitable chemical advances of last century fell into that category when a synthesis of something was actually done in a dirty flask, and that contaminant was a a catalyst for the new advance) or someone gets a brilliant new idea. Since really brilliant new ideas are rare, statistics shows that the distribution of them in time will be erratic. I believe money is the driver of commercial developments, though.
If a large portion of breakthroughs is accidental or unintentional, then believers among us may see a god's hand in them
Ha! Nik believes God is a statistician! Statistics shows there is always a probability of someone doing something accidentally, as the definition of an accident is something not intended, and we may note that accidents happen. (If you do not believe, look at the road carnage.)
The old debate. Maybe an "accidental" mutation leads to a species better adapted to the environment. One could see this as part of a divine plan. A scientist will say that you can't prove that, but can a scientist disprove it? Not sure if the accident that created the stickiness of Post-It notes was divinely inspired, but I'm glad it occurred. They keep me organized :-)
Yeah, and all of it is a part of a bigger question whether accidents are accidents or they, together with an (yet) unexplainable stuff, are part of a pattern/design of whatever spiritual or mundane origin -:)
Well, I'll leave it to Einstein, who said, ". . . everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive."
Ha! I haven't read that Einstein quote, but it is so obviously him! I prefer Stephen Hawking, who frames the existence or non-existence of a divine as inconsequential to our work. My research involves a lot of stochastic events, but that doesn't mean I don't think it couldn't be encapsulated by fractal geometry -- by which I mean, there are many random events, but there is an overarching pattern explained by chaos theory.
Late to this discussion but had some interesting facts last week50 million users for:
- telephone - 75 years
- Internet - 3 years
- Facebook - 1 year
- Pokemon Go - 19 Days
- Viral You Tube - hours
An example from engines:
Or how about Smartphone sales
https://www.fool.com/investing/genera...
Interesting stuff. Don't know how accurate, but perfectly exemplifies pace!
What is the motivation for new tech and theories? I think in my father's time (born 1925) it was war that pushed things forward. In my time (born 1959) it was money. In the generations since, I think it has been the challenge of how can I make this do that. Eventually, yes, the Steve Jobs tune into the money, but initially it is just a means to get what they need to create or improve upon something. Currently, my daughter is a high school science teacher and the education levels and abilities she deals with for her students do not predict a bright future in creative thinking, or abilities in the sciences and technology.Eventually, I would like to believe that a Star Trek kind of world will exist. In reality, as I get older, I have difficulty believing that there will ever be a society in which everyone has their needs met. But, even it we reach the point of the basics being there for all, there will still be those who have more and who believe they are entitled. Money is a form of wealth. Wealth has been part of determining status for centuries.
For a comparison: how long did it take to switch from bronze to iron?
Yeah, the population grew considerably, literacy and education became widespread - all these contributed considerably to the pace and abundance.
Yet, there many fields, even basic, that are still largely an unknown, for example: human brain, sleep, aging, telepathy.
Will the tempo remain the same and the next 200 years (if some major catastrophe doesn't wipe us out) will be as or more prolific or are we nearing the limit of our current capabilities until the next cycle? What do you think?