[HN Gopher] Ephemeralization
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Ephemeralization
Author : dearwell
Score : 92 points
Date : 2021-10-25 18:13 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| ElectronShak wrote:
| > is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and
| more with less and less until eventually you can do everything
| with nothing,"
|
| Curious, are No-Code tools an example of this?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Smartphones are an example of this, I'd say.
|
| Low/No code usually allows you to do some things, but not
| everything... IMO.
| [deleted]
| andrewtbham wrote:
| Smartphones... yes. tvs are also an example. I have a flat
| screen from 2005 and one from this year. the weight
| difference is hard to believe.
| missedthecue wrote:
| This is what I always point to when people say capitalism is
| unsustainable because it supposedly "requires infinite growth in
| a closed system."
|
| It doesn't require that, it only requires endless incremental
| improvements in efficiency, which is perfectly possible, given
| that even just the tiniest incremental improvement on a massive
| problem can result in huge productivity gains. A great example is
| farming. We produce more crop output than ever before all while
| using less land, labor, and energy.
| sfink wrote:
| Right, the outputs are higher than ever with the least
| conventionally measured inputs. Which was great for a while,
| but we're well into the tail portion of the curve where the
| advances are all accompanied with ever greater shifts of cost
| to the unmeasured externalities. Modern farming is a hyper-
| efficient process of converting fossil fuels -> fertilizer ->
| corn & soy -> food and its many imitations, along with massive
| environmental costs (CO2, runoff, freshwater usage and
| groundwater depletion, ...)
| xcambar wrote:
| An interesting thought experiment, really.
|
| But when I read:
|
| > the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more
| with less and less until eventually you can do everything with
| nothing"
|
| I add the footnote: "Terms and Conditions may apply" :)
|
| The blind spot of the idea is: limits. Should it be rephrased
| "eventually you can do almost everything with almost nothing",
| I'd have dropped the "thought experiment" label.
| oh-4-fucks-sake wrote:
| Agree 100%.
|
| Stated another way: asymptotic functions convincingly appear
| that they'll hit zero--though obviously never do.
|
| Same reason I'd be shocked if physicists ever achieve absolute
| zero Kelvins in a lab.
| Nition wrote:
| > Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller in
| 1938, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and
| more with less and less until eventually you can do everything
| with nothing."
|
| Somewhat similarly - usually attributed to Konstantin Jirecek
| (1954-1918) but really with unknown origins - this famous quote:
|
| "We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the
| impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long,
| with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with
| nothing."
| rektide wrote:
| such a nice fancy sounding word for something that is so great &
| powerful but which also is a vast anti-Enlightenment force. we
| used to see the world about us, could monkey with things about
| us. butnhugh tech goods are deeply resistant to observation &
| understanding. what used to be apparent & ooen for interaction
| has become like magic to us, and we, humans, thr toolmakers,
| understand & see less of our ephemeralizing infrastructure &
| tools.
|
| also ephemeralizes systems are often high capable, valuable
| resources that only big powers in the world can afford or operate
| well, much less build or develop. this lends to empheralized
| technology being more prescriptive, typically. it is general &
| adaptive & highly capable but rarely do we see examples of that
| power being opened & expressed to random people coming into a
| shop off the street, or to random consumers: consumers are given
| a crafted experience, a set of flows carved out of the more
| capable generalized ephemeralizes systems.
| Geekette wrote:
| Etymologically speaking, I find the adapted meaning of this term
| irksome. Given that _ephemera_ is a 16th century word[1] that
| refers to "transitory written and printed matter" and
| _ephemerality_ "the quality of existing only briefly"[2], one
| would expect the standard definition for _ephemeralization_ to be
| "the process of creating ephemera" or similar, as opposed to
| "ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with
| less and less until eventually you can do everything with
| nothing" ".
|
| [1] https://www.lexico.com/definition/ephemera [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemera_(disambiguation)
| sfink wrote:
| Now tell me how you feel about the common phrase "I'll be there
| momentarily."
|
| (I may logically accept that language follows usage, but I just
| can't not be bothered by that one. Also, people don't seem to
| like it when I reply "I hope you're right.")
| Geekette wrote:
| Interestingly enough, I'm less bothered by that. It could've
| been worse, e.g. "I'll be there momentishly".
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Is it so hard to accept that "momentarily" refers to the
| period of time before arriving, rather than after arriving?
|
| Time is a subject that is hard to avoid using idioms to
| convey, like when people ask "What time is it?" without
| specifying what "it" refers to.
| [deleted]
| sfink wrote:
| This is the sneaky, flawed premise behind many instances of what
| we call optimization. I have a Law of Optimization: the closer
| you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is
| shifted to unmeasured externalities. (I imagine someone has named
| this.) A stronger version would be to say that the distance to
| optimal is inversely proportional to the externalized cost, so
| that the total externalized cost goes to infinity as you squeeze
| out ever-smaller increments of gain with respect to your chosen
| metrics.
|
| The important corollary is that you can get 80% of the way there
| with very little externalized cost, and that going too far will
| eventually reveal the oversimplification in your cost model.
|
| You can move an object with near-zero energy, but it'll take 1000
| years. You can get to net zero carbon emission by shifting it to
| someone else or dumping it somewhere it isn't measured or is a
| temporary sink that will eventually re-release. In my own area,
| you can reduce garbage collection overhead to zero by either
| never freeing anything (so the externalized cost is memory) or
| shifting the GCs to happen in between the timed portions of a
| benchmark (and this often happens accidentally, especially with a
| "no regressions" policy!)
| triska wrote:
| A consultant I worked with compared the organization we wanted
| to measure to an _air mattress_ : If you press it somewhere,
| i.e., measure a specific point, the air goes elsewhere, and
| another part is inflated. He used this analogy to explain the
| importance of taking the entire situation into account, by
| applying full cost accounting.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| If you don't want to take the credit for it, you could call it
| the Pareto-Goodhart Law of Optimization, and state it something
| like this:
|
| "The closer a system gets to an optimal state, the greater the
| propensity for the agents attempting to further optimize it to
| externalize the costs of the system."
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Your Law of Optimization reminds me of the (often popularly
| ignored) denominator in the famous e = m c^2 equation.
|
| I believe the full version has a (1 - (v/c)^2) denominator on
| the right side; I think the Lorentz transformations motivate
| this.
|
| The upshot matches your observation in spirit: the closer you
| get to the optimum (the celeritas/speed of light) the more
| energy you require.
| breck wrote:
| Ironic the man who wrote `make the irreducible basic elements
| as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender
| the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.`
| is most tagged with `e = mc^2`.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Your Law of Optimization reminds me of the (often popularly
| ignored) denominator in the famous e = m c^2 equation.
|
| > I believe the full version has a (1 - (v/c)^2) denominator
| on the right side ....
|
| I think the question is what you mean by `m`. If it's
| inertial mass, then I believe no correction is necessary. The
| point is that the inertial mass `m` is the rest mass `m_0`
| divided by `\sqrt{1 - (v/c)^2}`, as you say.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| yes!
| alexpetralia wrote:
| Great comment. This is something I've thought for a long while,
| especially as we see the suppressed costs of "optimized
| systems" rear their ugly head against unplanned contingencies.
| Nekhrimah wrote:
| > You can get to net zero carbon emission by shifting it to
| someone else or dumping it somewhere it isn't measured or is a
| temporary sink that will eventually re-release.
|
| Often referred to as tragedy of the commons.
| colordrops wrote:
| Realizing that you don't exist, as expressed by nondualist
| spiritual traditions, would be the ultimate endpoint of this.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Most of the technology I work on wouldn't be worth doing if the
| global population hadn't grown 10x in the last century or so. You
| need a large mass of people willing to pitch in a penny for an
| improvement to their lives with expensive technology than a
| smaller number of enthusiasts.
|
| This brings economies of scale and suddenly 1000 things that
| wouldn't be worth doing make a new thing that wasn't predicted.
| The neo-malthusians didn't predict this happening with innovation
| and markets (reminds me that the US patent office almost closed
| 100 years ago saying 'everything has already been invented').
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| CDs and DVDs are a good example of this. I used to have a wall of
| my apartment dedicated to media, all completely immaterial now.
| echelon wrote:
| The metaverse, NFTs, crypto, and digital goods are pointed to
| as the next wave.
|
| Staunch proponents will tell you that we'll be living in VR
| metaverses, doing work remotely, earning crypto, buying virtual
| properties, etc.
|
| I'm personally bearish on crypto/NFTs, but kids like buying
| digital goods in games. And VRChat is blowing up and looking
| more and more like a threat to Facebook.
| [deleted]
| robomc wrote:
| that's also a good example of how it's often mostly or partly
| faked through displacement as well though. your CD and DVD
| collection has been replaced by round the clock maintenance of
| the storage and transmission of that data, from the record
| label or movie studio through various data centers, via a
| number of middle-men companies all requiring their own ever-
| changing and complex infrastructures, through a system of
| caching and routing and cabling to your house, which needs to
| take place over and over, forever. The only dependencies for
| your old collection was shelving and the electricity grid,
| otherwise they were stamped out of plastic once and good for at
| least a few decades.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| There was a lot of plastic stamped out, and there was a
| round-the-clock distribution system for shipping those pieces
| of plastic to middle men distributors and stores before they
| got to you. There's a huge maintenance cost to these cloud
| services, but there's plenty of evidence that the
| environmental cost of that maintenance is much lower than the
| cost of those DVDs.
|
| Is it perfect? No, I'd much rather that a county-or-state
| library system run the media library and have set of servers
| and data that were shared and archived and synced with the
| library of congress. It is by no means more expensive, in
| terms of cash, middlemen or natural resources, for digital
| delivery the way that's currently going on over buying DVDs.
| chaps wrote:
| I worked on a team that built an "ephemeral" system. Part of that
| was to ensure that no state was logged. They were so proud of it
| being built that way.
|
| Problem was, the system failed constantly and we had no way of
| knowing what the issue was without ssh'ing directly into a
| machine and retrying the steps by hand.
|
| I get what they were going for, but at the end of the day, their
| opinions on how ideal systems "should be" ended up destroying
| their project and ignored fundamentals.
|
| Example: one of the main deployment hosts was constantly crashing
| from disk space issues for over a year. Turns out when they
| provisioned the host with 4GB of storage and 64GB of RAM. They
| never troubleshot the host and just restarted its services
| whenever it crashed!
| spuz wrote:
| That seems like a different kind of Ephemeralization than that
| described in the article but interesting none the less.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Well you can only physically move an object so efficiently.
|
| Unless everything we know about physics is wrong - you'll never
| be able to move an object w/o any energy. For that reason - it's
| hard to imagine a world with 7Bn people flying around at mach-2.
|
| Our productivity gains are likely on an S-curve. It's hard to say
| where we are in the curve.
| londons_explore wrote:
| That's a poor example... The theoretical energy expended to
| move an object is zero.
|
| All energy losses in moving things are due to inefficiencies
| that we could theoretically engineer away. For example air
| resistance could be eliminated with roads becoming vacuum
| tubes. Wheel friction can be eliminated with magnetic
| levitation. Braking energy can theoretically be fully
| recovered, etc.
|
| Today we don't do that because we care about other things (cost
| etc), but if in the future energy costs went up dramatically,
| engineers would reconsider...
| diarrhea wrote:
| There are fundamental thermodynamical limits to certain
| processes involving energy transfer, conversion etc. Heat
| transfer comes to mind. Those cannot be engineered away.
|
| For simple mechanical systems, yes, inefficiencies can be
| removed, but it's more like externalizing them. How is the
| vacuum created and maintained? That requires a compressor, an
| inherently not lossless machine.
| Twisol wrote:
| > The theoretical energy expended to move an object is zero.
|
| The theoretical energy expended to _keep an object moving_ is
| zero. The theoretical energy transferred _to_ the object to
| get it moving is deeply non-zero, even as the energy
| transferred _from_ the object to get it to stop moving is
| also nonzero. If you have a finite energy budget, even under
| theoretical conditions, you can only have a finite number of
| objects moving up to speed at any given time.
|
| I know you acknowledge this in the rest of your message, but
| I don't think the original example is poor for the reason you
| give.
| sfink wrote:
| The theoretical energy expended to move an object tends
| toward zero, without limit, as the allowed time increases.
| Which is _almost_ the same thing.
|
| (Allowing it to take 12 billion years to move an inch is
| rather useless, but that's the same issue with the
| ephemeralization argument in general: it ignores all other
| measures of "cost".)
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| And for that matter, data can only be processed and transmitted
| at a certain efficiency.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| This article is about technological progress enabling doing more
| with less. I've been having a tangentially related thought about
| general project planning as it pertains to technological
| progress.
|
| The thesis is: Unless you can create an optimistic project plan
| that results in the project's completion within 5 years, the
| money would be better spent on doing basic research.
|
| The thesis is informed by the ITER fusion reactor project, which
| was started in 2007 and whose current target date is 2025 (but
| will likely slip, as it has before), but that date is for first
| plasma formation and not actual deuterium-tritium fusion, which
| won't happen until 2035.
|
| Meanwhile, during this timeline, advances in materials science,
| namely higher temperature superconductors, have opened the
| possibility of significantly smaller and simpler designs, some of
| which are being plausibly pursued by startups (eg SPARC).
|
| So I wonder if a general heuristic to guide science funding would
| be something like "if the optimistic timeline is > 10 years,
| invest instead in basic research that could potentially develop
| technologies that would shorten that timeline".
|
| This thesis is also generally informed by the relative success of
| New Space (eg SpaceX) companies compared to Old Space (eg Boeing)
| companies. Elon has famously said "if the plan is long, the plan
| is wrong", and I think that philosophy has demonstrably worked
| out well for SpaceX.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
| [deleted]
| kurthr wrote:
| Agreed, for hardware and manufacturing related development it
| is very difficult to see out past 5 years where anything new is
| being attempted. Within 3-5 years you are largely constrained
| by current available manufacturing, fabs, and processes, but
| farther out there may be better choices. You may be better
| served by doing the research (or collaborating with a supplier)
| to build new production capacity (understanding their
| challenges) for anything further out.
|
| Look at DUV lithography where a huge industry flipped on its
| head in 5 years, while X-ray lithography had been in
| development (and written off) for so many decades it had to be
| renamed. That required real R&D not tweaking current available
| equipment, which led to asymetric advantages and huge profits
| (Zero to One).
| kmarc wrote:
| THANK YOU for posting this. Another piece of the puzzle is in
| place for me.
|
| I myself sometimes thought-experiment about this (the
| ephemeralization tendency) during running, taking the tram etc
| but until now I didn't realize much bigger thinkers than I am ;-)
| already described this
|
| The wikipedia article with referenced other pages and this HN
| topic are a great source of info for me. Thanks for it!
| bsedlm wrote:
| I like to think mathematics is really all about this
| *theroetical* pursuit.
|
| Assume nothing, explain everything. Thus I claim that
| mathematical constants are a failure of the mathematicians. This
| level of constantless mathematics would have its users
| recalculating pi every single time.
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