[HN Gopher] Can we survive technology? (1955) [pdf]
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Can we survive technology? (1955) [pdf]
Author : georgestrakhov
Score : 155 points
Date : 2021-07-23 07:55 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (drive.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (drive.google.com)
| ArtWomb wrote:
| The one theme many of the prognosticators of the post Cold War
| boom failed to see was the democratization of tech. "A computer
| on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. Part
| of the fear wasn't just of a high priesthood that controlled
| knowledge, language and thought itself as everyday work and
| modern life became more machine-like. But of a New Religion:
| where Science becomes the last true God.
|
| One measure of the progress of a civilization is efficiency with
| which ideas can be communicated. And the crux of what von Neumann
| perceives as danger is "runaway" technology. We attempt to solve
| one problem, like controlling the weather, by introducing
| remedies according to our current state of the art capabilities.
| And accidentally introduce cataclysms that cannot be reversed.
|
| Now that capability is accelerating, the same fears arise anew.
| But it's a different world today. Tech is not developed in secret
| large scale government run labs of yore. Its too pricey. The
| culture has shifted as well. From ICBMs to private space
| enterprises. And it's that cultural feedback loop, that
| civilizing progress as ideas are shared instantly about the
| globe, that very few were able to foresee.
| titzer wrote:
| > And the crux of what von Neumann perceives as danger is
| "runaway" technology.
|
| My reading of this article is that von Neumann was talking
| about carrying capacity, and not some runaway or rogue
| technology from exploding. We are just too big for this planet.
| He says this over and over.
| nicoffeine wrote:
| > Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run
| labs of yore.
|
| Real technology (advancement of science vs software+marketing)
| is still very much developed by governments, because they are
| the only entities willing to spend billions on possible dead
| ends. Fusion reactors, CERN, nuclear technology, and those are
| the ones we know about because we're allowed to know. The US
| alone spends about 80-90 billion per year on "Special Access
| Programs." [1]
|
| > From ICBMs to private space enterprises.
|
| "China is building more than 100 new missile silos in its
| western desert, analysts say" [1]
|
| I'm also trying to be an optimist about the future, but part of
| that is understanding where we actually are. Technology is
| still firmly in the control of governments and a handful of
| corporations.
|
| [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29092/special-
| access-p...
|
| [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-
| nucle...
| blfr wrote:
| I don't think John von Neumann would be particularly
| impressed by fusion reactors that don't really work after
| decades in development or papers with thousands of authors
| out of CERN.
| nicoffeine wrote:
| "A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed
| with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation
| where nobody could possibly know in what area it would
| become useful; and there were no general indications that
| it ever would be so." -- John von Neumann
| blfr wrote:
| It's not mathematics and, unlike in the atomic era,
| they're not becoming useful.
| nicoffeine wrote:
| Are you seriously claiming that mathematics aren't being
| used to build fusion reactors and particle accelerators?
| nwah1 wrote:
| Fusion research on one hand is much like a ceremonial
| money pit where we light a mountain of cash on fire every
| year.
|
| Fusion power itself will likely not have much practical
| application anytime soon, because other power sources
| will be far more economical.
|
| But if we consider fusion power to be a backdoor way to
| get funding to research superconductors, plasma physics,
| and so on, then there is something valuable in the manner
| of that von Neumann quote, even though their proximate
| goal is probably all but useless for now.
| bumby wrote:
| > _progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas
| can be communicated_
|
| While I agree, isn't the flip side of this that _bad_ ideas can
| be much more efficiently communicated as well? I know the
| counter is that the best remedy for bad information is better
| information but at least when poor ideas are amplified by human
| cognitive biases, is transmission efficiency a good measure of
| progress?
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| > "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in
| every pocket.
|
| Running mainly a few apps/websites tightly controlled by a few
| companies strongly incentivised (by greed and their
| governments) to keep a tight leash in the type of content that
| can be consumed AND created. I think Orwell and Huxley foresaw
| many of these perfectly clear even before the term "cold war"
| existed.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Don't forget the developers who instead of hippies who were
| going to change the world sold their soul to the marketing
| industry.
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| Yes, I am old enough to remember how we were all sold the
| promise of the "information superhighway", a bright future
| of a fully open, inclusive network where people would share
| knowledge freely in an instant. Every passing year the
| Internet has become:
|
| - More censored.
|
| - More commercialized.
|
| - Less open, more walled-gardened.
|
| - More banal (For example, academics used to write long
| Usenet posts, then they started to write blogs, now they
| mostly bicker on twitter)
|
| - Less sincere and personal, now people mostly use it as
| just another PR tool.If you dont conform, you will be
| cancelled, downvoted,banned, etc.
|
| Now, before someone comes to accuse me of "Old-man-yelling-
| at-the-clouds syndrome", I fully accept that in absolute
| terms we have more good things now, but the signal/noise
| ratio is also a very important thing, or as papa Stalin
| used to say: "Quantity has a quality on its own" , for
| every thoughtful post,blog,site we are drowned in thousands
| of crappy sites and it is not always very easy to
| distinguish them, because it is the sad reality that
| quality publications will little by little become crap just
| to survive or fit-in.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in
| every pocket.
|
| That internet node not only isn't an equal peer in the global
| information network (thanks to simple things like NAT, but also
| more insidious problems like increased battery drain when P2P
| apps are active and the OS killing background apps "for your
| convenience"), but it is also a telescreen that you carry at
| all times and even pay for its upkeep.
|
| You can keep this democratisation of technology, if that's what
| it looks like.
| acituan wrote:
| > failed to see was the democratization of tech. "A computer on
| every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket.
|
| I find it harmful to equate mere proliferation with _democratic
| participation_. Sure, you have many terminals, but most of the
| information processing is still lopsided towards the
| centralized "server". When recommendation algorithms shove
| content down people's throats, only _consequential
| participation_ expected from them is to engage with the ads,
| and they can 't talk back to ads. The rest is almost as
| "democratic" as watching TV.
|
| > One measure of the progress of a civilization is efficiency
| with which ideas can be communicated.
|
| And it is a bad measure.
|
| A psychotic person's mind also communicates tons of ideas back
| and forth, in fact too "efficiently". Propaganda posters from
| an airplane also communicates very efficiently. The idea that
| mere communication makes progress is what we've been thought by
| the engagement-maximization culture.
|
| Real measure of progress is the extent those ideas converge
| towards _the truth_. How they can form a pattern of _meaning_
| that increasingly conforms to the _reality_. Current tech cares
| about none of those, and no wonder there is a crisis of meaning
| making and acceleration from departure from reality, just like
| a psychotic person.
|
| > Now that capability is accelerating, the same fears arise
| anew. But it's a different world today. Tech is not developed
| in secret large scale government run labs of yore.
|
| It is just developed in secret by large scale internet
| companies now. For most of the tech most of the people have the
| most screen time with, what content is recommended why, what
| data is processed how etc are the biggest secrets.
| metaprogram wrote:
| Prophetic words from John von Neumann in 1955:
|
| _" The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's
| burning of coal and oil---more than half of it during the last
| generation--may have changed the atmosphere's composition
| sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by
| about one degree Fahrenheit."_ (Page 512 / 666 / 9)
| tim333 wrote:
| He was also the originator of the term singularity in the sense
| of tech:
|
| "The ever 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, could not continue."
|
| which some people worry about.
| bserge wrote:
| If only he knew it would be used for growing digital tulips.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| I bet JVN would totally have a couple bitcoins if he was
| still around.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| He was such a visionary and had such a way with words. This may
| be nostalgia talking, but I've struggled to find more
| contemporary writing on the level of Neumann's imagination. If
| anyone is aware of someone today doing similar work I'd love to
| hear about it.
| spodek wrote:
| Regarding the environment and humans decreasing the Earth's
| ability to sustain life, the tech community doesn't seem to pick
| up on the pattern that technology augments the users' goals and
| values. As long as our culture values growth, extraction,
| externalizing costs, comfort, and convenience, technology that
| makes that system more efficient may decrease pollution in _one
| element_ , but it makes _the system_ more efficient. That is, we
| pollute and decrease Earth 's ability to sustain life more
| efficiently.
|
| When Watt made his steam engine, coal use went up. Uber was
| supposed to lower congestion and miles driven but they went up.
| We repeat the pattern over and over. The "father" of the Green
| Revolution, on winning the Nobel Prize said
|
| > _" The green revolution has won a temporary success in man's
| war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing
| space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide
| sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But
| the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed;
| otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral
| only._
|
| > _Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace
| of the "Population Monster". . . Since man is potentially a
| rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two
| decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers
| along the road of irresponsible population growth... "_
|
| He understood the value of technology as well as anyone in theory
| and practice. He recognized that we have to change our values
| from growth to enjoying what we have, from externalizing costs to
| responsibility, and so on or technology will keep exacerbating
| and augmenting our problems. That pattern includes nuclear,
| electric vehicles, and space travel. They may solve _local_
| problems, but they exacerbate the _systemic_ effect. Electric
| vehicles, for example, make sense as a tactic under the strategy
| of reducing vehicles. Nuclear makes sense only as a tactic under
| the strategy of lowering power consumption. But we keep valuing
| producing more cars and energy.
|
| This community seems over and over again to miss the systemic and
| unintended side effects. If we had clean fusion under our current
| values, we wouldn't live as we do today only cleaner. We would
| grow again until we hit more limits and had to live again under
| scarcity or natural calamity. Borlaug worked the second half his
| career to help people see the consequences of helping solve only
| part of our system but not the system.
|
| If we have to stop growing at some point, at least acknowledging
| the laws of thermodynamics, the sooner we do it, with the smaller
| number of people, the more abundance we can live with. The more
| people we have, the harder to limit ourselves. If we don't,
| nature will, as we all know.
| titzer wrote:
| > If we had clean fusion under our current values, we wouldn't
| live as we do today only cleaner. We would grow again until we
| hit more limits and had to live again under scarcity or natural
| calamity. Borlaug worked the second half his career to help
| people see the consequences of helping solve only part of our
| system but not the system.
|
| It's almost as if a population of apes that evolved to live in
| groups of 200 individuals maximum and has survived only by
| constantly spreading to new areas once resources are depleted
| can't run a sustainable planetary society.
|
| Every single trait that we need to run a sustainable planetary
| society is selected against in the local incentive system of
| both evolution, capitalism, and technological advancement.
|
| Frankly, our greed is eating this planet. And we are greedy
| because the greedy strategy worked best (evolutionarily) up
| until now, and greed was baked into our genes by all the
| selection pressures of the many systems we are a part of and
| set up ourselves.
| wfn wrote:
| Yup, very much agree.
|
| > _If we don 't, nature will, as we all know._
|
| In a way, it's already happened, it's just that there is a
| delay effect and it takes time for things to... unravel ("the
| future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed yet")
|
| I recommend this lecture
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WRojM9_uAI by Pablo Servigne
| (agricultural engineer, PhD in ethology and behaviour of
| complex systems).
|
| I'd say we've basically known since at least
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth (but in many
| ways much earlier than that) and have simply been in denial.
| Yes we adapt and leverage technology and innovation, but there
| are rather hard time limits and we've exhausted our window
| quite some time ago. The correction (to use a friendly word)
| will be very painful.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WRojM9_uAI
| narrator wrote:
| The more efficiently a resource is used, the more of it will be
| used. This is known as Jevon's Paradox:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Growth-oriented states of being naturally lead to induced
| demand.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Jevons Paradox is often misunderstood and misapplied.
|
| Improving efficiency of coal burning and extraction can
| increase use of coal, especially if no alternative exists and
| it is the bottleneck for economic development. But if you
| develop a more efficient technology that doesn't burn coal,
| it's not going to automatically mean more coal will be used.
| Natural gas, wind, and solar have all increased in absolute
| terms in the last two decades in the US while coal burning
| has halved in absolute terms, reducing overall absolute grid
| emissions in the US.
|
| Anyway, just wanted to point that out. (But I will say Jevons
| Paradox is a good argument against just relying on improved
| internal combustion engine efficiency in hybrid cars and
| buses vs using another energy source for transportation
| entirely, like renewable and nuclear electricity for trains,
| electric buses and electric cars.)
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| > it's not going to automatically mean more coal will be
| used. Natural gas, wind, and solar have all increased in
| absolute terms in the last two decades in the US while coal
| burning has halved in absolute terms, reducing overall
| absolute grid emissions in the US.
|
| In a tightly interconnected global economy it is
| disingenuous to disconnect the energy usage of one country
| or region from another.
|
| US coal usage goes down because the things we used to build
| with that energy are now built in China. Solar panels in
| the US are cheaper than ever _because_ manufacturing has
| switched to being 80% Chinese production, and guess where
| the energy to build those solar panels comes from? Coal.
|
| The only way to understand energy is at a global scale as
| you can see here: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-
| production-consumption
|
| As you can clearly see _no source_ of energy has decreased
| overtime globally.
|
| Looking at local energy production is just an accounting
| trick, but the planet doesn't really care. You can't combat
| global warming by saying "look, technically _we_ didn 't
| produce that energy on our shores!"
|
| If you forced China to decrease its use of fossil fuels you
| would immediately feel the impact on the global economy.
| Just because the power plants aren't within our borders
| doesn't mean that's not energy being consumed for our
| benefit.
| spodek wrote:
| Unless we choose not to use it. Our culture values growth and
| extraction. Other cultures have lived far longer than the
| period from the Industrial Revolution until now, often with
| higher marks of health, longevity, abundance, and prosperity
| without lowering their environments' ability to sustain life.
| Only very recently did our lifespans pass typical ones for
| other cultures, but in the US they're already dropping again.
|
| We sometimes do so protect. We have national parks and
| protect endangered species, for example. We can do plenty
| more. Jevon's Paradox and rebound effects don't have to
| happen.
| est31 wrote:
| I wonder how long we'll go without another nuclear explosion used
| in war. I think the armageddon scenario is quite unlikely, simply
| because so few people have access to the needed amount of nukes
| to pull it off. It's only a couple of states which can do it. One
| of those states even survived a regime change without those nukes
| being triggered. However, there has been a trend of smaller
| states obtaining nuclear weapon capabilities. The more states you
| have, the more likely it is that one of them is willing to use
| the bomb.
|
| So I think rather talking about _whether_ these small states will
| use nukes, we should talk about _when_ this will happen. 30
| years? 50? 100? 500?
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Its much more complicated and dangerous than you seem to
| imagine though. There all all kinds of ways nuclear weapons
| could still be used (including accidentally), and a lot more
| instability there (Samson option from a non NPT signing Israel,
| who by the way, used a Hollywood mogul with ties to Epstein to
| steal timing devices for use in manufacture, or what about an
| inceasingly unstable Pakistan, etc)
|
| These days the threat model is broken because its preciously
| not needed to be a nation state to develops some major
| biological/chemical/drone etc attack with new technologies that
| on the battlefield would be called force multipliers.
|
| So for those of you who also care about surveillance, I try to
| explain this is part of the reason for its increases... now
| when the threat model has evolved but you havent caught up, the
| rational response is (not saying right, but it makes logical
| sense on the surface to MICCIMAC) to surveil _everything_.
|
| I have a great book on the post nuclear world I keep picking up
| to reread sections of that talks about the political
| transitions that will happen because of this that is worth a
| look: "The Shield of Achilles" tldr - corporations are going to
| take over the gaps left by increasingly ineffective government.
| fulafel wrote:
| Besides states, an intresting question is how soon it'll become
| cheap enough for underground orgs or religious fanatics to do
| it privately.
| RobertoG wrote:
| Even if you assign a low probability to an Armageddon, why you
| assume that a more "tactic" explosion will come from a small
| state instead of the states that have the vast majority of
| weapons in the planet?
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| There is a few points that make it worrying but certainly not
| guaranteed.
|
| MAD policy appears to be effectively over, or at least there is
| no longer any mention publicly, perhaps it is just assumed.
| While it can appear crazy, hence the name, it was a rather
| ingenious way to solve the problem, albeit we know now we have
| come dangerously close at times, at least we knew the risks and
| the lines that had to be crossed.
|
| The next point and somewhat related is the change in nature of
| nuclear weapons. The variable ability of tactical nukes to
| change their explosive size, has resulted in a modern range of
| weapons that aren't as destructive as their elder brethren. It
| may seem like a good idea but the issue is it also opens the
| possibility of their more active use. A state may consider it
| acceptable. This could result in the reverting to an older
| policy of nuclear weapons. The MacArthur plans to use them in
| active combat, it becomes too easy to dial the Nuke down,
| target a military base and say "sure it's ok it's a legitimate
| military target".
|
| That to me is the danger in the modern world. Attitudes, at
| least Western are still as a weapon of last resort but I can't
| predict the future and say that will always be the case or that
| other nations will share the same sentiment.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >albeit we know now we have come dangerously close at times
|
| Perhaps accidentally stepping over the line is the most
| likely use scenario.
| xamuel wrote:
| The nightmare-inducing 1984 film "Threads" portrays a nuclear
| holocaust that begins with exactly these kind of small
| tactical nukes. <Spoilers>The nuclear conflict begins with
| the USSR using a nuclear-tipped SAM missile to wipe out a US
| bomber squadron. The US retaliates with a tactical nuke to
| wipe out a Russian base. After that, things get ugly
| fast.</Spoilers>
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| > MAD policy
|
| MAD is still going strong. It's not military based, but
| economical.
|
| It's the reason why theories about intentional release of
| COVID-19 are bunk.
|
| China is worse off than it would have been without the virus.
|
| Same goes for nukes. If Xi or Putin decide to nuke the US ,
| people will assault their palaces in 3-6 months for food and
| water. Even if the US somehow fails to respond.
|
| The global economy is interconnected to a degree that makes
| it impossible for a leader to order a nuclear attack and not
| have his own people remove him violently
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > China is worse off than it would have been without the
| virus.
|
| Only if you measure progress in economic terms. Nothing
| I've seen contradicts my belief that they are now
| geopolitically better off than before the pandemic.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| Xi (and every leader for that matter) chances to stay in
| power are intrinsically linked to one metric:
|
| Quality of life of the population
|
| If you leave quality of life on the table because of
| geopolitical games you are shooting yourselves in the
| foot.
|
| Even during massive state sponsored hate campaigns (such
| as the one promoted by Hitler against the Jews) the
| population spends just a bunch of minutes per day
| actually fuming and hating...the rest of the 24 hrs they
| live their lives.
|
| Quality of life is a much more potent motivator to
| support the leader/party than hatred.
|
| That's why any sane country and leader would never attack
| an economically important country intentionally.
|
| Violent wars are relegated to Africa and the economically
| unimportant areas of the Middle East such as Yemen. With
| some small outbreaks here and there in ethnically hot
| areas such as Ukraine
| rjsw wrote:
| The W54 [1] was introduced in 1961, low-yield nukes are not
| all that new.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| I should also say that nuclear weapons in dictatorships (more
| so than oligarchies like Soviet Union) is dangerous.
| Hopefully there will be those that can prevent its usage but
| dictatorships are fragile things. A dictator may consider
| their removal an existential threat.
| zingplex wrote:
| > I should also say that nuclear weapons in dictatorships
| (more so than oligarchies like Soviet Union) is dangerous.
|
| I'd argue that nuclear weapons are no less safe in
| representative democracies. The only country to use nuclear
| weapons against another nation was a representative
| democracy. The only country to use nuclear weapons against
| another nation multiple times was a representative
| democracy. The only country to use nuclear weapons against
| civilian targets was a representative democracy.
| XorNot wrote:
| This hasn't born out in practice. Dictators want to live -
| that's why they're dictators. They ubiquitously loot their
| countries widely enough to be able to retire to safer
| waters but don't.
|
| Nuclear weapons in the modern world are useful deterrants,
| and that's it: a dictator with nuclear weapons has no
| external enemies they could consider targeting without
| guaranteeing total annihilation in response.
|
| The one exception here is that using a nuclear weapon _on
| your own country and people_ might be a useful exercise of
| power...but even then, it 's abundantly clear that the most
| likely outcome is still total annihilation - the world
| won't tolerate a nation lighting off nukes against targets
| in it's own borders much either.
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| That's very true, I'm usually careful not to fall into
| the assumption of the 'mad man' since it's usually just
| an illusion to appear dangerous.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > the world won't tolerate a nation lighting off nukes
| against targets in it's own borders much either.
|
| Why do you think so? Famines seem to work just fine
| within borders.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| We said a similar proliferation sentence once on communication
| technology and biology - and here we are. Everybody can build
| and wield information-technology weapons and very soon everyone
| will be able to craft his/her own bio-weapon in a sink.
|
| Exponential tech and social peace of a basically unaltered
| species do not go well together. Atomic capabilities are
| basically just one of the thousands of facets of this problem.
|
| Imagine air-borne-electric taxis being prevalent in a future
| city. A 9/11 event might just look like a hack into traffic
| control and rerouting a thousand flying batteries to smash into
| buildings. With great power, comes great incapability for
| responsibility.
| bserge wrote:
| Everyone could craft their own bombs at home for a century,
| and have them detonated remotely for decades. Very few
| actually did it.
| vharuck wrote:
| >We said a similar proliferation sentence once on
| communication technology and biology - and here we are.
| Everybody can build and wield information-technology weapons
| and very soon everyone will be able to craft his/her own bio-
| weapon in a sink.
|
| I wonder if there isn't a massive difference of likelihood
| between remote (IT) and physically deployed terrorism. For
| example, it may be easy to mess with smart cars by tampering
| with electronic billboards or leaving devices by the road to
| "fake out" cameras. But it's always been easy to leave
| dangerous things on a hidden part of a road (over a hill,
| around a sharp turn). It doesn't happen because very few
| people want to hurt random people, and those that might do it
| impulsively have plenty of time to rethink while going to the
| location, waiting for a chance, and then placing the trap. So
| I'm not worried the future will have more location-based
| terrorism or dangerous pranks. Even biological.
|
| I'm worried about easy and remote terrorism. Where people
| don't have to see or even think about the victims, and
| there's little time for reconsideration between planning and
| acting.
|
| Needs citation: I wonder if the need to be sneaky in a
| location is itself a guard rail. It requires the would-be
| terrorist to imagine how other people might catch them and
| react, which maybe triggers the social part of our nature.
| And maybe it only works if they imagine people being present
| and with faces, instead of disembodied actors on a network.
| mellavora wrote:
| Minor point, not brought up by other posters.
|
| The armageddon scenario might be much easier to trigger than
| von Neumann believed.
|
| Even 'just a few' 'small' nukes could kick up enough dust to
| the stratosphere to severely disrupt sunlight and weather,
| where 'severely disrupt' means (probable) total global social
| collapse.
| petschge wrote:
| I suggest you take a look at "Climate Impact of a Regional
| Nuclear Weapons Exchange: An Improved Assessment Based On
| Detailed Source Calculations" [1] or similar papers.
| Scientists have run nuclear bomb simulations (and these codes
| are rather good), used them as input to fire simulations
| (well validated through forest fires) and then done climate
| models and radiation (in the sense of "light") transport
| calculations of the atmosphere. The result is "fucks with the
| polar regions, but humanity is going to be fine".
|
| [1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2
| 017...
| wobbegongz wrote:
| We have detonated 2000 bombs in testing. So "just a few small
| nukes" is not enough to start any atomic winter.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing
| sgt101 wrote:
| But not over forests or cities - which burn.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Well we've done 2 over cities closely spaced with each
| other and also following a firebombing campaign that
| burned a lot more cities. If a burning city or forest was
| all that was required for a nuclear winter we'd have had
| one long ago. Forests burn without the aid of nuclear
| weapons.
|
| To get to nuclear winter levels of ash and dust you
| probably need dozens to hundreds of detonations and
| burning cities.
| wobbegongz wrote:
| We have tested that also. During 1945 we burned down 69
| cites and killed 800 000 in Japan. The two small nukes
| was only 5% of the smoke.
|
| The result was at most an cooling of the global
| temperature of 0.1-0.2 Celsius. But the "multiple
| uncertainties mean we cannot say for sure".
|
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-did-bombing-
| during-se...
|
| So we need about 5-10 times larger bombings when ww2 to
| cool the global temperature with one degree. But we have
| increased the global temperature with one degree thanks
| to global warming. So you need at least 10-20 times
| larger bombings then ww2 to get a tiny atomic winter. And
| probably a lot larger to get any catastrophic cooling.
| narrator wrote:
| Gain of function research is a lot cheaper than nuclear
| weapons. It also doesn't radiologically pollute the world, can,
| theoretically, be genetically tailored, and can even be denied.
| These factors will make it the preferred means of waging world
| war scale war in the future if it's not already being used for
| that presently.
| dsign wrote:
| I have a huge respect for this guy, but the irony of this is not
| lost on me:
|
| > Since most time scales are fixed by human re- action times,
| habits, and other physiological and psycho- logical factors, the
| effect of the increased speed of technological processes was to
| enlarge the size of units-- political, organizational, economic,
| and cultural -- affected by technological operations. That is,
| instead of performing the same operations as before in less time,
| now larger-scale operations were performed in the same time.
|
| We call von Neumann architectures to the very devices that have
| allowed to operate--by proxy, so far--in different timescales.
| And we do tons of stuff these days in less time, thanks in part
| to von Neumann.
|
| Had he lived today, I would imagine he would be still concerned
| with timescales and sizes of physical places, but from an
| entirely different perspective.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Wow, that story about doing more in the same time instead of
| the same with less time, that sounds straight out of this
| villain origin story the New Yorker wrote about Robert Mercer
| [1]:
|
| "While in college, he had worked on a military base in
| Albuquerque, and he had showed his superiors how to run certain
| computer programs a hundred times faster; instead of saving
| time and money, the bureaucrats ran a hundred times more
| equations. He concluded that the goal of government officials
| was "not so much to get answers as to consume the computer
| budget."'
|
| This as some justification for becoming a libertarian-activist
| billionaire, but it seems more likely this is a universal
| experience than Mercer plagiarizing von Neumann.
|
| [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-
| reclusive-...
| jhayward wrote:
| That sounds like motivated reasoning to me.
|
| I would think someone who goes on to found a hedge fund would
| understand that if you drastically lower the cost of
| something which produces a valuable result, the effect should
| be to increase the demand for that value, not just shrug and
| say "no, we only do 1 of those per day".
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I would say once multi core processors became the norm we moved
| away from what can be strictly considered 'von Neumann
| architecture'.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| In the general case, how is multi core different than saying
| "complicated CPU", you still have computation in a separate
| box from data and move bits back and forth.
|
| And if we're being precise, aren't we all on modified Harvard
| systems these days? :P (I am not a computer scientist)
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Well there's the logical difference, wherein a multi core
| system could compute in a sequence other than the
| straightforward logical sequence A -> B -> C -> D.
| amelius wrote:
| If you put a bunch of von Neumann machines in a room and
| connect them via a network cable, wouldn't that be a
| trivial extension of a von Neumann architecture? And
| isn't that sort of what a multicore system is,
| considering also that access to the same memory goes
| through a bottleneck?
| huachimingo wrote:
| He would be a fixed point arithmetic advocate.
| solarist wrote:
| That's the essence of both Parkinson's and Gustafson's laws,
| but apparently even earlier than both.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
| agumonkey wrote:
| Man I didn't know about Parkinson's law even though Ive been
| obsessed by that topic
| eternalban wrote:
| The actual question is can we survive technologists and their
| paymasters.
|
| It is interesting the JvN starts off on a political-economy note
| and proceeds to geopolitics considerations, yet doesn't really
| address the drivers of "industrial revolution" or "empire". He
| opines that "[a] much more satisfactory solution than
| technological prohibition would be eliminating war as "a means of
| national policy.""
|
| There are alternatives, John. Maybe we should work on technology
| to temper the desire -- construed as "divine right" -- of the few
| to lord it over the many. That's one alternative. War is rarely a
| "national" concern. Historically it is the means employed by
| "princes" and "kings" and "queens" to assert dominance over other
| egomaniacs. "Technology" of course is used to whip up the masses
| to serve as canon fodder.
|
| Another alternative is developing robust ethical systems that
| drill into the heads of budding technologists that their humanity
| is not worth a paycheck.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| A very interesting conundrum, as human reaction times, and the
| size of the Earth, are unchanged, and are very likely to remain
| fixed, human polities can only progress towards further
| destabilization as population and destructive power grows.
|
| The implication then is of progression from countries to blocs,
| from blocs to super-blocs, from super-blocs to an inevitable
| world state when the use, and potential use, of weapons becomes
| too great for even a continent size union to bear or credibly
| defend against.
| c9fee10d-96de wrote:
| Which breaks down the second there are civilians in space.
| Everyone who has control over a rocket engine has to a very
| good approximation a nuclear weapon.
|
| I imagine that a future with a substantial space population
| will look very much like the past when the Steppe nomads could
| destroy more advanced civilization by just deciding they
| should.
|
| The difference is that repopulating 10 billion people takes
| rather longer than the tens of millions that were usually
| killed in the past.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I imagine for that reason all space activities involving any
| significant amount of mass will be conducted under the strict
| control of a military, or pseudo-military hierarchy. And also
| as part of a world polity as such control proliferates since
| even one crazed defector out of say a 1000 such 'rocket
| engine controllers' could destroy civilization on Earth,
| preventing any possibility of defection would override all
| other goals.
|
| A future where the equivalents of 'Steppe nomads' could throw
| around significant of mass would be a future where every
| habitable planet and fixed space facility would be slagged in
| short order, i.e. even more unstable and untenable.
| miltondts wrote:
| "Can we produce the required adjustments with the necessary
| speed? The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been
| subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital
| ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble. To ask
| in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can
| specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility,
| intelligence."
|
| If you want to read a better exploration of the larger issues and
| possible answers to this question I recommend:
| http://gator.uhd.edu/~williams/downloads/skinner82.pdf
|
| "Most thoughtful people agree that the world is in serious
| trouble. A nuclear war could mean a nuclear winter that would
| destroy all living things; fossil fuels will not last forever,
| and many other critical resources are nearing exhaustion; the
| earth grows steadily less habitable; and all this is exacerbated
| by a burgeoning population that resists control. The timetable
| may not be clear, but the threat is real. That many people have
| begun to find a recital of these dangers tiresome is perhaps an
| even greater threat.
|
| Why is more not being done? Within a single generation, we have
| made extraordinary progress in the exploration of space, genetic
| engineering, electronic technology, and many other fields, but
| little has been done to solve what are certainly more serious
| problems. We know what could be done: We could destroy all
| nuclear weapons, limit family size, and adopt a much less
| polluting and less wasteful style of life. The mere listing of
| these steps is enough to show how far we are from taking them."
| toolz wrote:
| Progress has solved every problem the human race has ever had.
| I see no reason to believe regression is the way to ensure a
| better future. I trust precedent far more than models by
| academics who know very well just how unreliable predictive
| modeling can be.
| miltondts wrote:
| Did you read the paper I linked to? That is precisely the
| entire point of "Why are we not acting to save the world?".
| We need to apply more science and technology in the right
| places.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I read it. It's clearly decades out of date. The specter of
| species-ending nuclear war was not ended by utopian visions
| of cooperation... it was the triumph of capitalism, not the
| ending of capitalism, that arguably coincided with the
| massive reduction in risk of nuclear war. We aren't nearing
| depletion of fossil fuels (unfortunately!) but have much
| larger reserves than when that was written. Overpopulation
| is no longer a threat in most of the world and indeed under
| population and an aging population is rapidly becoming a
| much larger threat in much of the West and Far East.
|
| Overpopulation wasn't solved by intelligently overcoming
| evolutionary sexual urges but by invention and distribution
| of contraceptives combined with personal entertainment
| technology ("electricity is the most powerful
| contraception"), etc.
|
| I find documents like that still highly influential but in
| many ways orthogonal to how we need to solve our current
| problems. Some lessons still apply but other points proved
| painfully wrong and sometimes backwards or at least
| irrelevant.
|
| People need to update their thinking from 70s era ideas
| like those of Limits to Growth. Degrowther mindset in many
| ways is a rebirth of those 70s era ideas, and I think
| Degrowth as a movement is largely counterproductive for
| addressing climate change (although the sense of urgency is
| important!).
| miltondts wrote:
| > I read it. It's clearly decades out of date. The
| specter of species-ending nuclear war was not ended by
| utopian visions of cooperation... it was the triumph of
| capitalism, not the ending of capitalism, that arguably
| coincided with the massive reduction in risk of nuclear
| war.
|
| Last I checked, the threat of nuclear war is not over.
| Sure it doesn't seem as likely today, but the bombs still
| exist and if our current prosperity was to halt, it seems
| their use would become more and more probable. By
| capitalism do you mean globalization? I agree governments
| have lost much of their power due to how powerful current
| corporations are, which was enabled by technology that
| allowed globalization. So there is less incentive for war
| nowadays. However when things get though.. cue all the
| impending changes that climate change will bring... I'm
| not so sure the threat won't reemerge.
|
| > Overpopulation is no longer a threat in most of the
| world.
|
| It seems overpopulation is as much of a problem today, as
| it was back then. It is not mentioned directly, but every
| time you hear about global warming, water scarcity, over-
| fishing, the great pacific garbage patch, etc. All of
| these things are problems of scale. Or do you believe
| that with 100 thousand humans we would have these
| problems?
|
| I agree with the oil, but also notice your omission of
| pollution. As for the larger point of resource depletion,
| I'm not so sure we are any better than we were in 1980.
|
| Overall I think you are missing the forest for the trees.
| The purpose of the paper is to highlight how our
| behaviors are selected for a past when they were
| beneficial, but currently we are changing our environment
| at an increasingly faster rate due to technology (and
| this is the point of the von Neumann paper also). Our
| methods for dealing with the problems that arise are not
| good enough.
| nescioquid wrote:
| > Progress has solved every problem the human race has ever
| had.
|
| Taken literally, then the human race does not currently have
| any problems, otherwise there would be at least one of the
| problems we have ever had which is not solved.
|
| But what I think you are actually arguing sounds tautological
| to me: for every problem that has been solved, it has been
| solved by "progress". I don't know if you mean technological
| advancement or social change or something else, but it
| appears as if progress is defined in terms of solving a
| problem.
|
| All that is left is for you to show that every problem has an
| achievable solution to warrant the optimism in "progress".
| Otherwise, it just seems like your optimism is based in the
| premise that the human race has solved problems in the past;
| persistent, long-standing, and current human problems
| notwithstanding.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| That solution already contains one glaring fallacy. I wonder
| how badly the other points would turn out if implemented.
| There's something to be said about human intuition or even just
| revulsion when faced with such boldly insensitive proposals,
| it's more often than not correct.
| cammil wrote:
| It seems the subjects here are grand and nebulous so there are
| no easy answers. At this level I think the most we can say for
| sure is that there are causes and consequences, and that
| certainly at some point everything will end.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Further discussion:
|
| _2 years ago_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724363
| dang wrote:
| One past thread:
|
| _Can we survive technology? (1955) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724363 - Aug 2019 (48
| comments)
| beckingz wrote:
| "Nothing human makes it out of the near-future" - Nick Land
| mudlus wrote:
| Trash that will age as poorly, as long as people keep solving
| problems. There is no perpetual motion machine, so the answer to
| this shitty rhetorical question is: We die when we stop making
| new technology. Welcome to the beginning of Infinity.
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