For those experiencing this type of "black swan, but good" event for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human tendency to believe that all future "big events" will be dystopian downers, is statistically unsound.
For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-)
Other things that could happen:
1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could go either way)
Apart from the aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, wine, public baths and public order - the Romans didn’t really do much at all.
Unironically, roman era concrete has been recently re-discovered (as in: understood how to reproduce) and this is very significant because roman-era-style concrete gets stronger with time instead of deteriorating as the regular concrete does.
I think it's less significant than it's often made out to be.
> You may wonder why we don’t use Roman concrete today if that is the case; well, one of the reasons as to why is because, although it gets stronger over time and withstands erosion from water, when this cement is still young and has not had time to develop its strength from seawater, it likely does not have the compressive strength to handle modern use.
Also, Roman concrete didn't contain rebar which is necessary in many modern applications and rebar rusts which reduces the overall lifespan of the structure.
That said, apparently Roman concrete has some potential issues in structures adjacent to bodies of saltwater since the saltwater would accelerate the strengthening process.
As i see it, Romans mainly gave us idea of "rule-based society" on which entire Western world stands. Even as Romans themselves made a joke out of it in their later history. But the idea was so transformative that even subsequent barbarian kings that ravaged Roman Empire after it's downfall, did not seek to formally overthrow it - rather, they pretended (with varying levels of plausibility) to lawfully inherit and rule it, or parts of it.
> As i see it, Romans mainly gave us idea of "rule-based society" on which entire Western world stands.
Rule-based societies predate the Romans by a lot of time ; Romans weren't even that good at it, considering how often violence was used as a political tool during the republic.
The administration and institutions usually survived a lot of political turmoil in Ancient Rome, but yes, compared to more autocratic kingdoms / empires of the time, transfer of power was probably a much more fragile affair (even in the Empire).
Nearly 2 millennia, and it was itself preceded by quite a few centuries by the Code of Ur-Nammu.
That's not to say there's not a grain of truth in this perspective. My impression is that Romans were notable for their pioneering work in the field of what could best be described as "civic pride" - the sense that "civilization" represented progress, the idea of the state as a kind of collective project that elevates everyone and that we should all be proud to participate in. They probably weren't the first to think like this - history is long - but they were the last to do so in a largely secular fashion in the West for a long time, and certainly directly influenced the thoughts of the Enlightenment thinkers who eventually inspired the American Revolution.
The Code of Hammurabi isn't what it seems at first glance. Modern people naïvely read it like a legal code, but that interpretation doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It contains too many inconsistencies to be a practical legal code. One of the more obvious examples is the case of property given to another for safekeeping without a document documenting the arrangement. Is the recipient a thief who should be put to death? Or can the recipient keep the property without consequence because the alleged owner has no proof of anything? Furthermore, records concerning disputes contemporary with the Code of Hammurabi exist. Other than a single reference to a standard wage for weavers on the stele, records do not reference the code. Indeed, legal decisions are often inconsistent with the code.
The Code of Hammurabi is best understood as royal propaganda designed to portray Hammurabi as a just king. The famous stele starts with a graphic depiction of him receiving the royal rod and ring from Shamash, the sun god who was emblematic of truth and justice. The laws are best understood as a statement of the kind of justice Hammurabi wished to see done in his kingdom, not a set of rules.
Code of Hammurabi was created based on a whim of a single person (the namesake) and solely served to simplify administration. He could also always change it at will, or ignore for his own needs.
Rule-based society is something different: when the Law itself has a power of it's own, stronger than power of any individual or group. It was first invented in Rome and provided them tremendous advantage, until started to crumble during the Long 3rd Century Crisis.
Passports are not a good invention. They are a dystopian evil we grew to take for granted and even see as something that exists for our own benefit.
Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them. Those were Good Old Days that are not coming back. It's weird to see some people seeing some kind of benefit in them.
Travel is more free today compared to in the past, at least in for example Europe. You used to need traveling papers from your boss/master/lord granting you specific permission to travel, otherwise you could be arrested. People didn’t trust visitors in general outside of some specific circumstances.
It's not like we would have free roaming in the modern age if passports weren't a thing. People would still face travel restrictions, they'd just be more nonstandard and unpredictable.
Consider how the days before passports also lacked air travel available to the masses. Even cars has only just started to become commonplace.
I don't see how you could possibly have travel that is so cheap, quick, and accessible to such a large population without some way to control who is coming and leaving your country? Especially with how we're quickly making different parts of the planet inhospitable, and given how rapidly populations have risen compared to a century ago.
If only there was a pre-WWI technology that enabled people to travel quickly and comfortably over long distances... Perhaps some sort of wagon on rails :)
The passport is but one piece of the greater system that we have nowadays of international worldwide travel. I can get on a plane and travel pretty much anywhere in the world now, whereas before travel like that was reserved for explorers, missionaries or high ranking dignitaries.
I don't think the passport is an invention itself, so to speak.
I don't think you understand the context. Much before 1920's, you didn't need a document at all to travel anywhere. If you had the resources, you just showed up - go to the border, said hello - and that's it.
Travel like that was never "reserved" for explorers, missionaries or high ranking dignitaries. If you had the money/resources, you could go anywhere.
Now there is a "caste" system of countries that have Visa on Arrival, Free Entry, or Visa required where you have to prove that you are financially capable, or even wanted in the country, or promise not to work or be illegally employed/compensated.
And then that alongside many countries in the developing world that still have undocumented people, no birth certificate, no identification, no tax ID, etc.
How does a country verify someones birth? Especially if someone wasn't born in a hospital? In the west, until 1950's, mostly this was done via church records. Also, are you granted citizenship by birth or only through parents? (Big deal, especially for Puerto Rican births - or countries that don't recognize foreign births in their land, e.g. United Arab Emirates / Saudi Arabia - even Japan or China, where sure you can be born there, but that means absolutely nothing.)
So, no, it isn't really a greater system for international worldwide travel - it is a system of control to ensure someones identity is who they are and that the country they are form atleast certified to some standard that their name, their picture, their birth date, their location of birth are somewhat tangibly real.
And this isn't even getting into information sharing. The above is just a standard, that now is "machine" readable and has an RFID so that collection is more easier for the state.
This simply isn't true outside of a relatively narrow window of time when very few could afford to travel anyway. Go back much past into the 1800s and beyond and you couldn't travel even within your own country without permission. In much of Europe for most of the medieval and early modern era laborers needed traveling papers granting permission just to leave their own village. In general people tended to be suspicious of visitors without a good reason to be there. Being exiled used to be quite a serious punishment.
It is very much true. You are talking about anecdotes of villagers going to neighboring villages which sounds more of being religiously excommunicated than free travel.
Why 1800s? Why not Roman times? All you had to do is state you were a roman citizen, and you could travel - Unimpaired “ Civis Romanus sum”
Borders existed but travel was not impaired, how else do you think trade and commerce worked? Do you think supply chains are a new thing?
It very much sounds like you are conflating serfdom, as an impairment to free travel - it is a different exercise. Because you did have a king, and you were a farmer in that land and in many ways you had lesser rights than a slave.
Trade was heavily restricted, governed, and controlled in the ancient world. Empires were built on collecting transit fees, cities often restricted the entry of sailors aboard merchant ships, and control of rivers and who could use them were dearly held by rulers the world over. There are a number of cities around the world today that started as trading cities, specifically designated places where merchants were allowed to visit to trade but restricted from going anywhere else.
The Roman Empire was a unique example among the thousands of years of history because along with their transportation network of roads they did actually have a couple of passport-like systems in place. Now a third of the people were literally slaves, so they definitely weren't going anywhere without permission, so maybe Rome is not a great starting point for what I presume to be the argument against passports. But the Romans and other Mediterranean civilizations did check your identity when you travelled. Romans had documents they called diplomas for people on official business and several civilizations used clay tablets called tesserae as a sort of ID card, but by far the most common method was simply having known people vouch for you.
Basically nowhere in the ancient world from the Middle East to the pre-colonial Americas could you just show up in a foreign village without people asking questions that you ought better have good answers for. There are a handful of exceptions, but this has never been the norm, and even with passports and visa restrictions it is definitely far easier today than it ever was in the past. I expect it will get easier and easier into the future. Perhaps quite soon in fact as the global population begins to decline and people become more and more valuable.
"Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them."
Passports are much older than that, but in pre-WWI Europe, most countries didn't require them for travel. (Russia and Turkey did.)
Passports certainly do have a dystopian element to them, especially if they are demanded too frequently / aggressively. But on their own, they aren't particularly evil; they just identify you much like your face does.
I got the list from 50 things that made the modern economy. Maybe you’d learn something by listening to the episode on passports - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p052spyb
> Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them.
This combination of ignorance and confidence isn’t a good look.
From Hong Kong, I have a mixed feeling for this. UK made everyone of us to apply for a Hong Kong ID since 50 years ago, but when I come to UK it is way worse because UK doesn’t have a National ID while relying on every private entity to verify your identification.
So unless private collection of personal data is completely illegal, I’d rather have a centralised ID system instead
A minor observation - pretty much all of those describe a type where applicable, except for iPhone. "Smartphone" would have been consistent and more accurate. I don't know if that's a bias or proofreading issue.
It's an interesting and thought-provoking list though.
Yes, I fully understand that but the segment would have existed without them though may have taken a little longer to mature the user experience and ubiquity.
Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you think GPS “isn’t impactful enough”.
Don’t fall into the trap of reacting with “meh” to everything. Maybe you just don’t know? Maybe you don’t realise how much modern life depends on say, the Haeber-Bosch process or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
Is it a black swan though? I can imagine something like GPS was envisioned well before the first satellites were even launched into orbit. Note, I'm not disputing you. This got me thinking about the nature of invention and discovery.
GPS is a pretty cool case. It's not the first navigation system out there, not even close. But the designers did something pretty forward-thinking and a bit risky: they made a big chart of all the different ways to implement GPS. A system where the ground based receivers has to talk back to the satellite. A system where every user needs their own atomic clock. A system where every user needs to communicate with a satellite. A system where every user needs to communicate with a separate ground station. Systems whose accuracy decreased at higher velocities. etc. The final solution was one that required more satellites, but allowed users to determine their own 4D position without needing any outside resources. The only downside was that it required portable atomic clocks, which didn't exist yet.
Not sure if that's black swan territory or not, but IMO it was a great piece of forward-thinking that made GPS useful beyond just the original military applications.
The most amazing thing to me about GPS is that it required compensation for relativistic effects to work. It is as far as I know the most direct impact relativity has on our every day life in a way that just sticking to Newton would have led to the project being abandoned or to the discovery of relativity if Einstein had not given it to us on a platter.
The most interesting thing to me about relativistic corrections for GPS is that we didn't even have to know about or understand relativity in advance in order for GPS to work.
That sounds strange .. but .. there are many small corrections that need to be applied to "straight forward" triangulated fixing off of moving monuments (term from surveying), relativitic time shift being just one.
There are several recent HN threads about Kalman filters [e].
It's possible (and more or less roughly what already happens) to record GPS fixes against a fixed master station and compute the time series error twixt the naive computation and known location (or, indeed, mesh of locations across (say) Australia) and generate a Kalman filter to correct and return more precise positions for moving recievers in the mesh area.
Had we not been aware of relativity we very likely would have discovered it via the time slip 'error' terms in the correction filter.
In a similar manner we have improved our understanding for atmospheric wobble, continental drip [1], and other fine effects.
No. You're correct. GPS is the culmination of 50 years of work in radionavigation, and it wasn't the first satellite navigation system either.
As so often, the refinement of the technique makes it so widely available and effective that, without being revolutionary in principle, it becomes revolutionary in effect.
Telecommunications is like that. A century ago a telex from Australia to England could make it from desk to desk in under an hour. The Internet is not revolutionary in that sense. And yet it is revolutionary anyway.
> I can imagine something like GPS was envisioned well before the first satellites were even launched into orbit.
I don’t know about that. Maybe it was. What I do know is that we have documented speculation about satelite based navigation the days right after the launch of Sputnik.
American scientist figured out the orbit of Sputnik independently from the Russians by measuring the dopler shift of the radio transmission with their radios. Then knowing where their radio is located they used an iterative optimisation process to identify the orbital parameters of the satelite. Immediately there they were talking about how if the orbit of the satelite were known they could use the same process backwards to fix their location. That was 21 years before the launch of the first GPS satelite.
Now, that is not exactly how GPS signals work, and with good reasons. But it is the first documented seed of the idea of satelite based navigation that I am aware of.
> Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you think GPS “isn’t impactful enough”.
How informative of you.
GPS does things better but we can do generally the same things without it.
Don't think about what would happen if we ripped out all GPS functionality overnight, think about what would happen if we had a decade to implement replacements.
The loss of accuracy wouldn't be that important.
> the Haeber-Bosch proces
That one's pretty great, it's probably worth including.
> or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
Hmm, focus on cargo ships and you can see a pretty rapid revolution, but in a wider lens maybe it was more of a broad evolution. I'm not sure.
But my point was that the list was too long, not that it didn't have any valid examples.
It goes in depth on the introduction of the shipping container and how revolutionary it was. There was also a fair bit of legal wrangling to make it possible as well.
> And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.
Everything started with a thought, or a discovery. What happens after is irrelevant. The event, that kicks off Dramatic Change(tm), is at the start.
> That's just a list of good inventions.
No. It isn't just a list of good inventions. Ignoring that it's not all inventions, you seem to lack the understanding of the impact. For example:
> Antibiotics
A discovery. It literally changed how humanity moves forward. One of the whitest swan moments in human history.
> public key cryptography
It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out and it changed how we exchange information, legitimize ourselves and deal with our privacy.
> contraceptive pill
The invention of the pill was an event that had massive impact on how Humanity moved forward.
> printing press
The invention of mass production of books lead to the first information explosion, dramatically changing humanity's future.
What you're doing here is mixing your ignorance of the impactfullness of some of the things on the list, with your own personal idea of what's "great", or however you want to call it.
Even if I agree that not everything on that list is equally meaningfull in terms of impact, some of them are really fucking high up the ladder, just like room temperature superconductors.
> It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out
Sketched out in 1874 as a concept by Jevons, firmed up (sans implementation) in 1970, first implemented in 1973 (classified for nigh on 30 years by the UK Govt).
First public example (of a different schema) was 1976.
Other examples worked out in 1974, not published until 1978. etc.
I have no great quibble here, 1975 is a good approximate ballpark figure but I wasn't sure which scheme you had in mind as it's almost the only year in the 1970s that nothing particularly significant happened in public key crypto.
> Everything started with a thought, or a discovery. What happens after is irrelevant. The event, that kicks off Dramatic Change(tm), is at the start.
Clocks did not have an event that kicks off a dramatic change. We've had them for thousands of years. I don't see how anyone could disagree with that.
I could see disagreement about batteries, but even then I feel like they were quite marginal for quite a while. A slow buildup is not a "black swan but good". There needs to be quite a lot of suddenness to it all.
And I didn't even mention the ones in the rest of your post so I don't want to argue those.
If you talked about all those because I said "list of good inventions", let me clarify. It's a list of "good or better inventions", mixing ones that qualify as 'black swan but good" with ones that don't.
The conversation is about "black swan but good" events and white is often used as short hand for good as opposed to black being used as short hand for something bad. It's pretty obvious what he means (even if "white swan" is most commonly used to refer to predictable major events and the term "black swan" not being limited to unfavourable events) so I'm guessing you're just being mean for no reason.
I am wondering though what exactly you think "black swan event" means and why you think that since your post here makes it rather clear you don't understand what the term refers to or where it comes from either.
Black swans are not at all rare and a "black swan event" is not called that because of the rarity of black swans. It's called that because "black swan" was at one time used to refer to non-existent or impossible things in Europe then when Australia was discovered they found out black swans are actually extremely common, a very improbable event given the data available beforehand. It's the discovery of black swans that was unlikely, not black swans, and it's the unexpectedness of their discovery that is relevant to the "black swan" metaphor. [1]
If black swans were rare seeing one would not be a "black swan event" because it would be possible to predict that one could be seen, just not very often, thus not having the required characteristic of being unpredictable beforehand. So yes, despite their post being easily understandable, the person you responded to did use "white swan" incorrectly, but your correction is just plain wrong as well.
Please if you are going to be pedantic try to also actually be correct on what you're being a jerk about first.
I wonder if the lead acid battery or the lithium battery would be more appropriate to put on the list.
Lead acid got us from, what 1940 to 2005? Something like that? But the utility of Lithium Batteries has blown what was already a gigantic market even wider open.
Those who disagree likely never had to calculate their position on the globe measuring stars or desperately tried to compare geographical reference points in a map to the terrain I front of them.
Military without GPS would be blocked. Try navigating in jungle environments where everything is green and looks the same. I've experienced both with GPS and without, that was one heck of a game changer.
I think people are missing a huge impact that GPS has beyond positioning. GPS transmits timing signals. Those timing signals are used in industries throughout the world to sync transactions. Without which, you are left to syncing via potentially untrusted clocks. Finance [1] is a huge example of the ubiquity of adoption of GPS timing.
ATMs may be designed to use super precise timstamps, but they don't need to be. At all.
The interesting timing constraints are between stock exchanges... but in those situations the speed of light is a bigger factor than clock drift, even if you're just using NTP, and you can't avoid speed of light delays/desyncs.
Good point of view. From an ATM point of view, there is no need to rush other than verifying the user authenticity and available funds. Any double/triple/quadruple requests to withdraw funds within a short amount of time can be delayed since they would likely indicate malicious actors.
For stock exchanges you are absolutely correct. I remember many years ago paying so much extra for the fastest internet access and sub-second delay access to our local stock exchange. Even so it was still slower (lag) when compared to those with offices placed very close to the stock exchange building/infrastruture at that time.
Looking at that list, I feel like we would first have to establish which things actually do make life better and which only make it more comfortable. This is going to be highly subjective.
For some reason, I'm not entirely willing to believe that my parents (who are still alive) had a less happy life than I have even though they didn't grow up with an iPhone. And it's not like modern conveniences have no downsides (e.g. increase in stress). That's not to say I would give up on these things readily, I'm just way too used to them.
I think probably most people could agree that treatments for diseases that regularly also affect young / middle-aged peolle are a good thing. It's hard to argue that someone in the prime of their life should die of some silly infection.
Language, standards, the internet, agriculture, glass, sunscreen, resilient rice, sterilization, human flight, spontaneous development of sentient life in the universe…
When you think about it all, you start to appreciate how miraculous things actually are.
Does language really count? It emerged as noises and refined over the years. It's not something anyone invented, or even discovered. It simply came to be all by itself, until humanity reached a point where it could be formalized/standardized (idk the proper term, I'm sure you get what I mean).
Regardless ... people's ignorance is showing. Too many never think about the fact that people just 200-100 years ago would have considered modern technology magic.
Imagine showing off to one of these people:
Omfg you're speaking into a flat rectangle!
Omfg it speaks back!
Omfg it shows pictures!
Omfg that box speaks!
Omfg that box speaks and shows people!
O M F G YOU GUYS FLY EVERY DAY???
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, SYPHILIS ISN'T AN ISSUE ANYMORE??? AND THERE'S A PILL PREVENTING PREGNANCY ???????????
Similar to language, money, which Nick Szabo—the person who first conceptualized a decentralized blockchain—speculates may have increased the carrying capacity of the environment ten fold and allowed humans to outcompete Neanderthals.
I don't understand why passports would be a good swan invention. Are we happy about having less freedom? I can't just cross USA to Mexico, I need to be identifiable. Governments could screw me up if they wanted to and the passport is only helping them.
I thought the same when I was listening to the podcast! Interchangeable parts especially! They’re so impactful, but they’re taken for granted outside of this podcast and Civ.
Unless it's too comment on 'throwaway mentality', modern consumerism, etc., the book meaning 'made the modern economy' more literally/broadly than you're referencing it for here?
As referenced by GP - it's a list of inventions from the podcast '50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.' [0]
The first series is my favorite podcast of all time. They're short (~8 minutes, iirc) but pack a lot of interesting info in each episode. In particular, they explore some of the second-order effects of each invention.
The disposable razor might not be a true 'black swan' like the transistor or LK-99, but some of the background and influence around the invention might surprise you! I recommend checking it out. [1]
In the grand tradition of podcasts being a single wikipedia page stretched out to an hour long podcast (which is freaking 90% of "tech" podcasts), this one is apparently an hour long podcast from reading the tech tree of Sid Meier's Civilization.
Penicillin has gotta be on that list. Just randomly happened to culture on a Petri dish left out on vacation, happened to be the worlds first antibiotic
I can't imagine what it must have been like for people to hear about yet another "miracle drug" that cures most diseases – and then gradually realize that this one actually works.
Ha, true! I forgot that used to not be a thing, and people were trying everything from crushed beetles to insanely hot chili peppers to crazy dangerous poisons, and still nothing really worked.
It wasn't. "Stuff that kills bacteria" has been known for a long time, including times when nobody knew what bacteria were. Not every dirty wound was fatal, there's mixes of plants, applied to wounds, that do a good job.
Penicillin was the first highly effective AND mass producible antibiotic, though.
While true, actually applying it in practice took a long time. Imagine the shock and horror when male doctors were told by midwives that washing hands and keeping things clean reduced infant mortality.
Capitalism also didn't build indoor plumbing though.
Or let me put it a different way: do you think the USSR did not have an industrial base?
And who do you think paid for the construction of the municipal sewer systems in American cities? Like in Chicago where the whole city was raised 4 ft to accomplish it[1].
I can throw a dart on an italian map and the nearby houses will have indoor plumbing if there's some resident. can you do the same in russia today?
> And who do you think paid
state resources are always a fraction of the gdp trough whatever form of taxation. larger industrial base means proportional less burden on the society. that is why for example urss imploded, taxation was too high and spent too wastefully on military budget to be sustainable long term, while usa could spend that money on the defense budget, infrastructure, et etc, while still being sutainable from the economy, because the industrial base was so much larger.
Sewage systems are a requirement for properly factory farming the humans. You could do it without it to some extend but if the human laborer is to be specialized into a somewhat sharper tool it is rather inefficient to have them randomly die from diseases. Sewage systems are what allows cramping them together much tighter.
Therefore we have sewage systems thanks to capitalism as much as we have cold winters thanks to chimneys.
Hey, you're free to go live in the bush and die from sickness if that's your prerogative, capitalism doesn't prevent you from doing that or a myriad of other things (apart from externalities).
In fact it's one of the most voluntary systems of organization that are known to man (assuming a government that protects individual rights), unlike other systems which are fundamentally based on coercion and/or, as you alluded to, did not lead to much progress in bettering the human condition.
It is all the same sir. Last I checked we had registered owners for each cm of the world. Like a game of monopoly where one player gets all the streets and all the money and the other player starts with nothing. Perhaps it is still the most voluntary, it's still a strange word to describe it. It is just more coercion, more of the same.
More funny, if the species (in the long run) wants to survive this wild ride though space on this ball of mud coercion is the only possible answer. I'm trying to doubt it as hard as I can but wanting something to be true doesn't usually make it so.
> Last I checked we had registered owners for each cm of the world.
It's not very different from a world where there aren't registered owners, if you think about it.
Even in complete anarchy, in the best case scenario most people would want the world to function in a similar way, using similar mechanisms. Except that people that couldn't defend themselves or have enough social capital would be even less protected.
So perhaps you wouldn't have an official "registry", but everyone would know which parts of the territory "belongs" to whom anyway. In the worst case, it would lead to a lot more territorial conflict.
Or you could have a government enforcing equal amounts of land for every person, but this would be extremely wasteful for many reasons.
Capitalism is what allows you to globally allocate land in the most efficient way that we know of, just like any other limited resource.
> Like a game of monopoly where one player gets all the streets and all the money and the other player starts with nothing.
Capitalism allows for social / class mobility without coercion. In fact, it's the only system that directly rewards you with upwards social / class mobility in proportion to how much you are helping other humans.
> It is just more coercion, more of the same.
> More funny, if the species (in the long run) wants to survive this wild ride though space on this ball of mud coercion is the only possible answer. I'm trying to doubt it as hard as I can but wanting something to be true doesn't usually make it so.
What are you being coerced into?
Helping other people so that other people also help you getting food cheaply and conveniently so that you don't die, as well as thousands of other goods and services that even the most powerful king of a thousand years ago could not even dream of having?
You don't even have to do that, you could grow your own food and just don't go to the supermarket if you think you are up for it.
Although yes, you would need to get access to some exclusive parcel of land, just like in any alternative system. Most people would not be very happy if you go plant things in their front yard without their permission, no matter which system you live under.
they make available the capital for innovation, their investment in the most lucrative markets is propelling research to heights that state planned investment can only envy from the sidelines, and the availability of concentrated capital allows for production methods that are unavailable to distributed means of produciton, so much that the production output for bleeding edge technology is absolutely overwhelming even when distributed or stated owner proprietorship had a head start in research, see for example radar "stealth" technology originating in russia in the 60s.
so Haber-Bosch which is very energy intensive, fueled by fossil fuels. So in a way, the fossil fuel supply chain over the last century is another black swan (it wasn't a singular moment, but a systemic shift and adoption).
If we developed the will to sustainably mitigate its toxic by-products including plastic, that would be another nice black-swan for the future. Though it also won't be singular moment but a systemic change that is hard to notice.
A good one would be "productive AI." People forget, but a short while ago, AI was treated as something where being actually useful was perpetually 20 years away, and the real-world status of it was exemplified by a chatbot like Eliza.
More seriously AI has made lots of things better, it’s really the hype cycle that’s disappointing. More FPS in games just isn’t as exciting as self driving cars. But by the time you can buy a level 5 self driving car the technology will be pedestrian.
When COVID hit, my American Airlines flight got canceled and when I went online to ask about getting credit, I got connected to a bot. When I asked to be connected to a real person instead of a bot, the person came online and said: "My name is Eliza. How can I help you today?" At this point, I was very skeptical, but she was indeed a person.
If a city banned all manually driven cars and allowed only self driving cars, the number of car-related deaths would drop to almost nothing. Goods could also be transported more efficiently. The technology to achive this exists right now, L5 or not. The only thing stopping citites from doing this is the cost that inhabitants will have in connection with selling or switching our their car. And all the complaining. But lives would be saved, and the city would be safer and more efficient.
Cities will not need to do that. In Europe they are gradually banning cars as a whole from city centers an you are right, it saves lives. And it also makes those cities more livable.
When I say gradually, it's an euphemism, it's an _extremely_ slow process, but it's the global tendency here.
They aren't banning cars. They're requiring special permits. That's a difference. In effect, they're banning cars for the masses and keep them for a small group (the wealthy, all sorts of delivery drivers, officials).
* making pedestrian zones (i.e. banning)
* deny access to certain types / times (no vans, no old cars, etc.. i.e. also banning)
* reducing roads (i.e. 2 > 1 lane, thus reducing attractivity)
* raising driving prices (the congestion / air quality certificates you mention)
* reducing access to parking (remove places, make them more expensive, etc)
.. all the while increasing alternatives (i.e. use those reduced lanes for bikes)
In addition to this, Cities are more open to changing which rules cars should follow. The effects of climate change are more visible, and the effects of polluted air are better known.
Cruise is currently operating self-driving "taxi" service between the hours of 9pm and 5:30 am throughout the city to members of the general public who've waited on the wait-list. Waymo is too, in Phoenix, and supposedly SF too, but I don't know anybody personally of the general public in SF that has ridden one.
Creating a self driving car which can navigate a dark, rainy parking lot is something we do not know how. Not even in theory. You can't just throw more compute at it. You can't go from a Vickers Type 464 bomb -- one of the most complex bombs in WW II -- to the "Little Boy" by just putting more explosives in there.
> Creating a self driving car which can navigate a dark, rainy parking lot is something we do not know how. Not even in theory.
I do not recognise the reality you are in.
Navigating dark and rainy parking lots is not hard. At all. Not hard in theory, and not hard in practice either.
We have lidars which work very well in rain. We have cameras with excellent dynamic range. Parking lots are slow environments where everyone moves slowly and you are generally allowed to stop if you are suddenly spooked or need a bit more time to check things.
There are hard problems about self driving cars, but dark and rainy parking lots are not the stumbling block.
Where do you even get this idea?
Let me tell you two harder things about self driving cars: "How many nines do you want in your certainty that the car won't hit anyone?" and "How do you want that proven? With stats or with fault tree analysis, or a mix of both?"
Level 5 driving just means it can drive a child or blind person around who can’t take over in an emergency. That’s the difference between Little Boy and a Moab.
However current level 5 cars aren’t something a consumer would buy. A car that refuses to drive in 99% of situations isn’t marketable. The minimum threshold for that might be a car that can only drive in Hawaii, not a large enough market to pay for R&D, but still plenty use for a blind person living in the area.
Level 4 is steering wheel mandatory. Level 5 is steering wheel optional.
Geofencing is part of the criteria, but a car that can only drive in the USA but can’t drive in Europe still qualifies as level 5.
Similarly a car that refuses to drive in a blizzard but can do everything else is level 5. Being able to drive at night or moderate rain is mandatory however.
That said, there is plenty of slightly different definitions thrown about. I am sure someone is going to argue a car needs to be able to drive in any country to qualify etc etc.
Edit: To be clear existing self driving taxi services aren’t level 5 services with existing restrictions, but the car is physically capable of much more than it’s being used for. It can operate at night and in the rain etc they are however being extremely cautious.
Steering wheel doesn't matter, despite the cute mnemonic.
Level 4 cars need a steering wheel to be generally useful. But a limited vehicle like a taxi doesn't need a wheel, no matter whether it's 4 or 5.
I agree with the rest of what you said. Geofencing entire continents isn't about driving ability, and blizzards are an acceptable human-level restriction.
“For vehicles designed to be solely operated by an ADS, manually operated driving controls are logically unnecessary.29 To account for this, the NPRM proposed a regulatory scheme in which the affected standards would not assume that a vehicle will always have a driver’s seat, a steering wheel and accompanying steering column, or just one front outboard passenger seating position.”
They are apparently allowing level 4 Taxi to be considered full ADS even if they have additional “Stowed controls” options.
These levels come from the US’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration formal definition in 2013. It’s been updated a few times since then with SAE introducing an extra level in 2014, but the point was really a formal definition for regulation.
When AI was 20 years away, people seemed more optimistic about it than now when its inevitable transformative societal impact is seemingly right around the corner, are you sure this is the kind of example they were going for?
Which actually highlights a problem in our society that we have to work to be able to afford living instead of living to be able to work on something more meaningful than earning money.
I think your point only demonstrates that useful AI was not something we could arrive at quickly like we thought we could, but rather over decades in a much more gradual process which slowly got people accustomed to its capabilities.
Even then, when ChatGPT came out it was a pretty big deal, due to the surprisingly sudden jump in capabilities, at least from the point of view of someone who didn't work in AI and didn't closely watch its progress.
According to Wikipedia, it was "the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users" (in ~2 months).
Because AI is a tool of corporations. Corporations that already show a massive indifference/hostility to "customer service". Corporations that reduce you to data points, that treat regulation with open disdain (see: Uber), corporations that built perpetual private surveillance empires (and therefore the actual state has a turnkey infrastructure for total information awareness).
THESE are the companies wielding AI, but this time without nary a "do no evil" in their ethos, long expunged. They are wielding AI with dystopian surveillance and the inputs.
In the era where the Supreme Court has declared them immortal citizens with allegedly the same rights as a real human, except they can't be killed, they can't be imprisoned, they can hop jurisdictions with the filing of a document. They operate under citizens United so there are no limits to their influence on elections and politicians. They can "bribe" with speaking/speech fees. They gain tax breaks that a "real" human can't possibly imagine.
Do you trust Google, especially these days? Do you trust Microsoft, unrepentant sociopathic MBA monopolizers galore? Do you trust Amazon who reduce humans to robots, with the outright stated goal of replacing them someday and churn through human resources at rates that make the Soviet Army in WWII blush?
If a firearm is just a tool and its danger depends on the owner, who is brandishing AI-the-tool?
It's perhaps not as life-changing as some of the sibling replies but one thing that has really amazed me over the past few decades is how much lighting has progressed.
When I was a kid in the 90's I already enjoyed electricity and electronics and I would play with those low power incandescent lightbulbs powered by 9V batteries. They would generate a lot of heat and very little light, to the point that it wasn't easy to tell if it was on when the sun was bright.
With a modern LED and the same setup you could generate enough light to blind yourself.
I like to point this out in relation to Star Trek. In TNG, they had tablet computers, replicators, teleportation, voice command, all these things that we consider future magic or current awesome technology. And then an away team goes down to the surface and pulls out a flashlight using an incandescent bulb that can barely be seen.
LEDs are genuinely revolutionary in a way everyone just kind of overlooks.
Fair point, I felt most people would have their own list. Powered flight, semiconductors, commercially competitive solar cells, antibiotics, sterile procedure. Etc.
Democratization of the free internet, a more informed populace through free education, a generation of coders and computer adepts, robust journalism and investigation, a space that incentivizes knowledge rather than capital or status, society about the exchange of important ideas rather than flippant goods, ad infinitum
Ukraine isn't a major power, and the fact that they've been able to hold back Russia so effectively, with so few resources, is mainly an indicator of how weak Russia is these days.
There's been plenty of war, and it could well be the first step on a path to the end of life on earth. I imagine this belief stems from all the "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary/good" propaganda.
The problem with game theory is that the actors do act rationally, and the most rational scenario is still the doomsday genocide: first strike, with a submarine counterstrike.
Full scale war between Russia and Ukraine (with help of NATO) progressing right now with constant threats to use nuclear weapons or blow up a nuclear power station.
I've heard elsewhere that "all solid tumors" should really more accurately be conveyed as "all solid tumors with a very specific mutation". It is, apparently, a very common mutation, but also not universal, even among solid tumors.
Apparently. I'm not an expect, but it's what I have encountered elsewhere.
Still great news! But not quite as revolutionary as the headline implies.
I was interested in learning more, based on your comment. Here's what I found out.
City of Hope thinks they've found a chemotherapy that's "able to kill all solid tumors","in more than 70 cancer cell lines".[0]
According to the National Cancer Institute[1], there are "more than 100 kinds of cancer". They're listed here: [2] Some of those cancers are soft tissue, so they aren't affected by this treatment.
I didn't know what a cancer "line" was, so I looked it up. "Cancer cell lines are valuable in vitro model systems that are widely used in cancer research and drug discovery."[3] So, they're not cancers in people, but cell cultures they can test drugs on.
This probably doesn't give you much more information than you already have, based on what you heard elsewhere, but I learned enough to figure maybe it would help someone else, too.
Whether this'll work in people, I guess we'll find out when they start the Phase 1 clinical trial. If you, or someone you know think you might benefit from this, there is a link to sign up for Phase 1 trials.[0]
It appears to have worked in pre-clinical trials, so they have tested this to make sure it doesn't kill people outright, the same way it does cancer cells.[4]
> Even if muons were absolutely stable, each muon could catalyze, on average, only about 100 d-t fusions before sticking to an alpha particle, which is only about one-fifth the number of muon catalyzed d–t fusions needed for break-even, where as much thermal energy is generated as electrical energy is consumed to produce the muons in the first place, according to Jackson's rough estimate
> More recent measurements seem to point to more encouraging values for the α-sticking probability, finding the α-sticking probability to be about 0.5% (or perhaps even about 0.4% or 0.3%), which could mean as many as about 200 (or perhaps even about 250 or about 333) muon-catalyzed d-t fusions per muon.[29][30] Indeed, the team led by Steven E. Jones achieved 150 d-t fusions per muon (average) at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.[31] Unfortunately, 200 (or 250 or even 333) muon-catalyzed d-t fusions per muon are still not quite enough even to reach "break-even," where as much thermal energy is generated (or output) as the electrical energy that was used up (or input) to make the muon in the first place. This means, of course, that not nearly enough thermal energy is generated thereby to be able to convert the thermal energy released into more useful electrical energy, and to have any electrical energy left over to sell to the commercial electrical power "grid." The conversion efficiency from thermal energy to electrical energy is only about 40% or so. Also, some not inconsiderable fraction of that electrical energy (hopefully not all of it) would have to be "recycled" (used up in deuteron particle accelerators, for example) to make more muons to keep the muon-catalyzed d-t nuclear fusion fires burning night and day.[32] The best recent estimated guess of the electrical "energy cost" per muon is about 6 GeV (billion electron Volts), using deuterons that are accelerated to have kinetic energies of about 800 MeV per nucleon, with accelerators that are (coincidentally) about 40% efficient at taking electrical energy from the Alternating Current (AC) mains (the plugs in the wall) and accelerating the deuterons using this electrical energy.
Yep, it's challenging. Maybe this rate can be improved by applying alternating voltage to reactor. Muons are charged particles, so they can be accelerated further. (Just idea)
Some researchers[0] are using a lattice filled with Deuterium to increase density of Deuterium and boost rate of nuclear reactions by using Inertial Electrostatic Confinement fusion and Lattice Confinement Fusion: https://youtu.be/UtfUeip4vyA?t=400
I'm unsure if we want people living forever. While disease, illness, and senility are terrible things, as soon as people can live forever we will have eternal dictatorships (or people trying for it) as well as other questions of perpetual inequality.
"Death renders all equal".
The people going after "eternal" life right now are people with access to practically unlimited funding.
They are immune to guillotines operated by peasants.
The only thing they don't have protection against is Government forces. With their armies of lobbyists, and other bought influence they have, they are also, largely, protected against those as well.
> The people going after "eternal" life right now are people with access to practically unlimited funding.
Yup, and they'll only know their methods are safe if they get the rest of us to try it out en mass.
> They are immune to guillotines operated by peasants.
> The only thing they don't have protection against is Government forces. With their armies of lobbyists, and other bought influence they have, they are also, largely, protected against those as well.
What makes them different from the French royal family, who basically were the government?
Similar, I recall hearing 2k years on some program. No source. The idea was that accidental deaths will happen. On mobile, but you could look up accidental death records to get the rate and then project out average lifespan.
Still, that is averages. A cruel despot may never leave their palace fearing death and will always have security. They will have less opportunities for accidents.
Interesting to see hard numbers for this, I always felt like those LOTR elves living for 10,000 years in a war torn world is laughably improbable from a statistical perspective.
Tolkien's elves were also (somewhat?) magic, and the designated firstborn of the creator god Ilúvatar with various gifts, seemingly including awareness and dexterity exceeding anything a human could ever do.
I can't agree. We can have eternal dictatorship now. Nothing prevents it except other people, therefore people will prevent eternal dictatorship just as now (with various results).
That happened indeed and I don't think it was pretty. Although you get some exceptions, like maybe a few of the Antonines. (That didn't end well with Commodus.)
Nah, the fact that even emperors die is a good thing. No dynasty lasts forever, because after the first few generations, assets get diluted, someone spends the money, descendants fight, etc. An aristocracy that lives forever would be very hard to remove because those factors would be greatly mitigated.
Also, people’s mind simply worsen as they age, and I don’t mean senility only. We are not made for living too long, and the elderly are already the most commonly targeted group for populist propaganda by political parties. Reflexes worsen, the past will become rose-tinted, etc.
Also there’s a massive philosophical quandary in there too.
If people could live for much longer then they’re likely disincentivised to procreate due to worries of overpopulation and then, in one way of thinking, you’re hypothetically depriving a line of offspring of lifetimes they’d otherwise have if you’d had what we consider a normal lifespan now.
Yes I realise there are probably an infinite number of takes on this, I’m just pointing out one possible way of looking at it for the sake of saying not all technological advances have universally positive outcomes.
I think a majority of the people who want to live "forever" are the types of megalomaniacs who want to populate the earth with their own kind of uber mench, and will actually have more children than an average person.
The vast majority of healthcare spending is incurred at the end of life, because when death really approaches, almost everyone wants to avoid it. People who are explicitly pursuing immortality are just thinking on a long-term basis instead of only reacting once they face the reality of mortality, in their impending death.
But amongst the popular left, there seems to be an aversion to competency and rationality, as they are symbolically linked to high status and social dominance. And so those who work deliberatively to end the scourge of aging and illness from humanity are—due to their displaying a rational results-oriented mindset—disdained.
I have never liked this mentality in discussions around immortality that essentially boil down to "I would die if it meant people I don't like can die too." "A bad actor living for a long time would make our quality of life lower" is usually the given reasoning, but do you know what quality-of-life rock bottom is? It's being dead! Once you are dead there is absolutely no good to ever happen to you ever again! And the counter for this is then usually "well what if I like being dead," which is great for you, but I and many many others happen to very much dislike the idea, and your stance would drag us down with you.
That's all without even mentioning other benefits like cumulative knowledge of multiple lifespans being contained in one person allowing for new scientific breakthroughs.
I mean there is also a big difference in the way people live in India and Switzerland, and both are democratic countries. Your examples are the result of economic disparity, not political systems.
But if you compare India to China, one democratic and one not, suddenly it's not super clear which countries' citizens have "better" lives.
There are eons of differences between different democracies. Russia is also a democracy on paper, yet it is absolutely unfathomable for someone to “shot themselves in the back of the head and jump out the window” in, say, Switzerland, while many political opponents, journalists “committed suicide” that way in Russia.
One provides service to the outside world broadly in trade to fulfill its needs, the other provides limited service to the outside world and trades with a highly limited subset of the world to fulfill its needs
Interesting how the trajectory of the USA has changed since Citizen's United was decided. When and how are we going to fix the rationalization that immortal and unaccountable entities aren't people. AI legislation? I can dream of electric sheep.
I don't think other democracies have allowed travesties like rich people funding elections (aka Citizen's United). It's possible the US will be able to stop it, but the insidious impact of that wealth feels like it is unending.
But at some point the people get fed up with the same corporate message and do something crazy like elect Trump.
I feel like there's a limit to how much corporations can influence voters, the same way there's a limit to how much moviegoers will keep paying to see the same corporate movie over and over.
i prefere rulers that care about general wellbeing of theyr populations. i know i might sound like a cattle or a sheep, but i prefere beying sheep that is treated well. this is provided that we really dont have a choice or say in things that happening around us. but this still needs to be shown. so far i feel like j can influence the path of my life quite a lot.
That third point is so odd and shoehorned in. If you're talking about AGI and immortality, why not dream a little bigger? How about achieving actual democracy anywhere in the world? Not just in state elections, but economic democracy broadly speaking. Right now we are just going on pretending, and this western chauvinism of yours is a little embarrassing.
4) useful bipedal robots - this one is probably just around the corner (see boston robotics). We often talk about how much AGI could benefit humanity, giving knowledge workers a digital "team" of helpers, but we gloss over the physical version. Everything from dangerous industries all the way through health services and into retail could be enhanced by having robots do all the literal heavy lifting.
5) programmable matter / nanobots - the applications of a swarm of nanobots or even microbots are pretty much endless.
Not quite related to 2) but if the superconductors research pans out, portable high field desktop sized MRIs would be in the bag. Current portable MRIs are all low field (and to a certain extent, somewhat useless).
So far this material (and pretty much all liquid nitrogen ones) can't be used to create MRI sort of fields. There's a reason they all stick with liquid helium.
Superconductors also have points where they stop superconducting because of the strength of the magnetic field or amount of current. YBCO and similar have these points below the useful level for MRIs.
There's research around finding ways to use them but nothing that is currently viable.
You're right - for whatever reason I had convinced myself YBCO had issues with both high current and high field. It's just high current - anything outside of a single grain has low current density.
Doing some more research to help make up for my spreading of incorrect info, I did stumble across this - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/ - it seems like it's a variety of factors that make most HST not really commercially viable for MRI machines at current.
> Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things
Considering that we already have a fusion reactor in the skies, I think that the room temp room pressure superconductor is the next best thing. Fusion is good but at this stage, the natural one will just do. Think global network of solar cells interconnected with LK-99.
Well we'd need cheaper panels for that. Currently they last like what, 30 years and take 3 years to pay off the energy it took to make them? That gives them a roughly a 9x return on investment. You need at least 30-40x to maintain our civilization as-is. Crude oil provides about 100x return. Luckily offshore wind is almost over 30x.
They apply to some degree, but it still takes X amount of materials to make each panel, you don't magically get more because you're making a continent worth of them. Even if you magically reduce the overhead 50% somehow, that's still only 18x which is not even close. Plus the fixed cost of making a laughably absurd amount of superconductor, and the monumenal logistics of deploying and maintaining all of it likely puts the project into net negative for a decade or two.
Saharan dust will also cover those panels in like a day. Probably makes more sense to float them on some body of water instead, with automatic washing and cooling?
> Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
Honestly that doesn’t seem likely to be a black swan event. Not because it is never going to happen, more because it won’t be an event but a slow progression.
It is more likely that as we understand more and more we will be able to cure more and more. It is not like there is some silver bullet piece of research where sudenly we have “fully decoded the celular mechanism”. Plus even if we somehow suddenly and all at once atained all that knowledge (perhaps a flying saucer takes pitty on us and beams down a whole library documenting our cells) it would take a long time while we turn that knowledge into helpfull interventions. And even that progress would be multiple generations long.
It is how becoming a black-belt martial artist is not an “event”. You don’t go from zero to that in one night. It is more of a progression where every day you are about as proficient as you were the previous one, but maybe a tiny bit better. Just applied on a whole species level.
>Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
>We show that the [neuroscience experimental] approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the amount of data.
Nothing in biology is as regular and systematic as a microprocessor. Scientists study biology using round-about approaches because there is nothing else available.
This is a silly argument. It presupposes that meaningful knowledge about neurons is structured similarly to knowledge about microprocessors, which does not have to be the case since neurons aren’t structured like microprocessors.
This paper, and its precursor 'Could a Biologist Fix a Radio?' mentioned by bschne, come across as somewhat smug and wiser-than-thou. While they do a good job in showing the difficulty of gathering useful information about complex biological systems, they tend to underestimate what human ingenuity can do with just that information which can be gained experimentally. This was demonstrated recently by the rapid development of synthetic vaccines against Covid.
I interpret 3 as the chat bot requires no prompt from a human. Imagine the chat bot wakes you up in the middle of the night saying, "Hey, sorry to disturb you, but I was thinking... wouldn't eliminating all humans help to reverse the climate crisis more quickly? Just a thought." That is what I think of as number 3 (not actually wanting to kill off humans, but it is thinking on its own, without any prompts and then choosing to share what it has been thinking about with a human).
But there is still an initial prompt. I think number 3 is all about no initial prompt. The AI reaches out, not because it has been programmed or prompted to do so, but because it wants to do so.
The "event" I was trying to describe in #1 is that DNA and cellular mechanics are decoded to the point where one could do these things (repair, customization, Etc). I was not trying to specify all of the threshold requirements for reaching that point. Hopefully describing it that way makes more sense?
Not sure that AI chat bots are actually reasoning in any basic way, so much as they are filtering out noise and presenting an output that might satisfy the input, but it's often quite wrong. It's still more of a parlor trick than it is intelligence or reason.
> Not sure that AI chat bots are actually reasoning in any basic way, so much as they are filtering out noise and presenting an output that might satisfy the input
Not sure if there is a difference, for sufficiently abstract interpretations of “satisfy the input”
Definition of Reasoning: "the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way."
LLMs don't think, they extrapolate. They are a filter, not capable of thought or reason. You can't reason with an LLM but plenty of people have tried and it fooled them well enough.
I'd go as to far as saying GPT-4 is capable of fairly complex reasoning, at least in my experience tossing complicated questions and situations at ChatGPT Plus.
When I was tutoring people in college for their computer science classes I was struck with how some people could do reasonably well on programming assignments and then when presented with anything even slightly novel would be completely unable to reason their way to a solution.
A classic tell of this is people handling out of bounds errors in loops by trying to randomly add or subtract 1 from their for-loop parameters.
I realized that they didn't have a mental model for what a loop did, they had simply memorized the syntax for a loop and were doing advanced pattern matching. Code repeats = write the for-loop syntax I've memorized. And then after seeing that fail with out of bounds exceptions, they learned a new rule: modify the loop parameters and see if that fixes the problem.
When I think about how I write code, or I compare their approach to the other cohort of students I saw, it's a different process. I see in my mind's eye a type of 'machine' that performs the actions that I want to take place. I simulate running that machine in my mind and tweak its design until it works the way I want it to. Only then do I think about syntax and try to translate what's already happening in my mind into source code.
I've seen people get shockingly far into software engineering careers using the pattern matching / guess and check approach. I've wondered if a lot of the handwringing you see on programming forums about the 'leetcode grind' is coming from people who do this pattern matching approach. To them it must seems like the only way to solve these problems is to simply train their internal pattern matching neural networks on huge amounts of examples.
The code that I see GPT generate looks eerily similar to what I saw from those programmers. And that makes sense because I think that functionally they're doing the same thing. Only GPT does it at a superhuman level.
That seems to me to indicate that there's something that at least some humans do with a mental model that our current LLMs lack. If someone figures out how to simulate those mental processes in a computer program I think we'll see a huge inflection point and that's what the original comment (as I read it) is referring to.
> the handwringing you see on programming forums about the 'leetcode grind'
In fairness and compassion to that crowd, a lot of it comes from the fact that a modern interview for a coveted FAANG job often requires 1-2 LC Medium (or Hard) problems cranked out in 45-60 minutes. Depending on the company and the org, the overall interview loop may well be multiple such one-hour sprints.
It's quite a pressure-cooker of an interview setting. Given that, it's understandable why many people converge on memorizing and brute-force pattern-matching as their interview strategy — if they can just memorize enough, the odds are actually pretty decent. (And the payoff is not bad, either.)
I'd argue that the time pressure in those situations encouraged just trying to substraction or add 1 to the loop's boundary, since it had a good success rate and is much faster than thinking through simulating the loop/algorithm. Learning is rarely rewarded in those interview situations that build on leed code.
that's me! i call myself a fake network engineer because there is simply too much info to retain, my brain just won't retain things i'm not constantly doing, so i have a complete understanding of maybe 20% of things but outside of that comparing to other configs and pattern matching are my main ways of solving problems and to be fair for my job (fixing network faults) like 90% of faults i've seen before and can fix, for 10% i can't i'm lucky that i have escalation points
at the same time i do feel like pattern matching limits my growth, if i had a complete understanding of a majority of networking principals id be much higher up in my career
You mean that's now how everyone else programs? Obviously you do fuzz testing and static analysis and possibly some sort of theorem prover verification so you don't get too embarrassed.
subtracting 1 from your loop variable and running again is common sense and the quickest way to narrow the problem. also, some people can still think while typing, still think while compiling and running.
this is all assuming that someone is trying to be productive rather than stop and ponder the abstraction that is a loop and divine its nature in a rigorous way
if the students are having problems with loops, that's not surprising considering that computer science doesn't teach software development skills. like... at all.
It seems to me that technological developments and empirical scientific breakthroughs come in cycles, technology making it cheaper to experiment, science reducing cost of new technical developments. I would be happy to hear about pointers to any source discussing such a tech/science cycle.
I feel our generation (I am in my mid-forties) lived through enormous technological advancements but not as many scientific breakthroughs as the previous generation. So maybe it is not surprising that we are suddenly more likely to have breakthroughs in basic science.
I hope there is a phase transition to science mode now, so we that have a chance to solve the hard pressing issues.
What you're missing is the fact that in today's world, where almost every aspect of life is subject to top-down control, any "enabling" technology above all else enables oppressors to oppress more effectively.
If free-form gene editing were developed today, you would see the elites using it to make themselves immortal, while denying the same to everyone else. If fusion power suddenly became viable, you would see the richest people using it to make themselves even richer, while cementing their stranglehold on vital infrastructure. And it should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention during the past 3 years that artificial intelligence is above all else an instrument of control, and even in its infancy, access to it is unevenly distributed along the same strata of power that already existed before.
At this point, the only "black swan, but good" event that could happen is a cataclysmic reset of civilization that might somehow see a better phoenix rise from the ashes. Barring that, we're full steam ahead to a techno-totalitarian nightmare future.
Top-down control was not the norm in the past. In fact, top-down control in the modern sense used to be impossible.
Sure, there were lords who claimed large parts of the population as their property. But they often didn't even have a complete list of the people they supposedly "controlled", nor did they have any insight or actual control over their private lives in the sense that modern nation-states do. Legal codes used to contain a few dozen criminal offenses in total – today, there are tens of thousands.
Invasive, pervasive, centralized, highly organized, and sophisticated top-down control of individuals is an entirely new phenomenon that is only made possible by cutting-edge technology in the first place. If you imagine past societies as forerunners to modern police states, you have a very distorted picture of history. Many of them did not even have anything like police to begin with.
I think that vastly underestimates the complete and total mental, religious and cultural control wielded by elites of the past and overestimates the impact and importance of superficial bureaucratic oversight indeed made possible by today's technology.
Whether we can build a large shed in our gardens is managed through a vast and intricate bureaucracy. A ridiculously precise and unwieldy apparatus is indeed watching our every move. I completely agree that is a new phenomenom, made possible by technology. I cannot just take down a tree without permission, even in my own yard. How weird is that. Yet does it matter?
Do you have to work the fields just because your family failed to produce a consul in the past century or two? Are you destined for a life of abject slavery because you disagreed with the regional governor about some administrative issue? Peoples of the past may have lacked technology, but that doesn't result in freedom. You don't need penal codes if your every move is watched and judged by your peers. Each of them happy to turn you in for a small fee.
More importantly, legal codes aren't necessary if you drop the pretence and just wield power however you want, whenever you want. You don't need detailed control of peasants' private hobbies if you got overpowering total dominion over the fate of an entire continent.
I'm just saying that oppression is nothing new and I actually think we are at an all-time low in actual, life-dominating oppressive powers. In some cases I can make the case that's actually not so great, because these days I'm increasingly more afraid of my fellow men than any "government" - which in my country is barely hanging on and always behind, but I don't know about the US.
Is it possible at all that we moved from apples to oranges, or is it important to you to feel like its "better"? Because, I get it, something like optimism is important, but that means you end up being forced to argue this way, which leaves you in possibly a worse kind of fatalism than the one you are pushing against: that economic and societal oppression is baked into the fabric of humanity, that we can only look at degrees of oppression, rather than the structures and first principles that sustain them, and say "yeah its good enough for me that I don't have it as bad as the last guy".
I agree, but I just think that doesn't preclude some healthy gratitude for the luxery and freedom we are enjoying these days. A freedom many, many people gave - and continue to give - their lives for and not just in war.
Can't we do both? Appreciate the progress we made, "we don't have it as bad as the last guy", and also looking towards improving even that? Wholesale dismissal of the entire edifice is IMO not the way though.
Also, pedantic point, you keep referring to good and bad black swan events. I thought the definition of black swan didn't make any assumption about whether the impact is positive or negative? Only that has a huge impact (I haven't read Taleb's book yet, correct me if I'm wrong)
If you experience dystopian events, you cease to be, preventing information pass on. All instincts and warning signals, by there very nature are accurate, until they can not be any more.
How do you build a warning system for a unsurvivable event, with not wittnesses? Eternal unease and anxiety, regardless of reality.
I think you're mixing up dystopian with apocalyptic.
webster's dystopia definition is "of, relating to, or being an imagined world or society in which people lead dehumanized, fearful lives : relating to or characteristic of a dystopia"
Unpopular opinion of mine: I think that viable fusion energy would be the final nudge to our demise.
Our civilisation is an energy-junkie who happened to stumble on a huge bag full of cash around 1860 and the discovery of oil distillation. Since then, we have been on a hallucinating trip, burning down our house in the process. Viable fusion is essentially another huge pile of cash being deposited right across the street, just 10 times larger than 2 centuries ago. There is no coming back after that.
I would rather argue that energy consumption is the fundamental metric of the advancement of a civilization - increasing consumption is not of itself bad; whether we know how to clean up after ourselves (or if we're too busy trying not to die out) is a different problem. Limiting our energy consumption is a recipe for civilizational collapse. We have the wolf by the ears, and we can't let go. Best we can do is move forward and try to obtain enough reserve energy and resources to find a way to clean up after ourselves.
With the exception of Avatar, is there any advanced fictional civilization that doesn't use vast amounts of energy in proportion to their tech level? I'd also point to the historical record.
Yeah, energy capture is essential for civilization development. There’s a book that goes into this by looking at history called why the West still rules by Ian Morris. He also talks about how there’s a thing called the development ceiling so the problems of development so as a civilization captures more energy and develops it encounters problems in managing the kind of growth and complexity that comes from that, and, you can look at history as a series of cycles of civilizations either failing to manage that complexity, and then collapsing or managing to pierce the ceiling of development and enter the next cycle. There’s also something interesting, called the advantages of backwardness, so at the time of a civilization of collapse, and some kind of change, it’s often the case that more backwards parts of the world have some kind of advantage that that allows them to become the next core of civilization. So yeah, energy capture is essential to development and increasing levels of development are totally correlated with increasing amounts of energy capture, but that increase development comes with complexities.
Yeah, that's why I said this is an unpopular opinion.
Historical records tell us that energy consumption is a great indicator of civilization advancement, but so is territory. Now, the problem is that there is no further territory to acquire for us as we have pretty much exploited our planet to its bones.
Free cheap energy will just make the planet crumble under our weight.
>Free cheap energy will just make the planet crumble under our weight.
You've said or implied this twice, but haven't put forward even a plausible mechanism why this would be a crumbling downfall.
The fuel is abundant and safe. The byproducts are safe. There are no carbon byproducts to contribute to global warming. I don't see any logic to your statements besides: previous bad, therefore next bad. I believe this is the definition of a non-sequiteur.
Please correct me if I am wrong or have missed something.
The issue with free cheap energy such as fusion isn't its direct byproducts, but its impact on society.
It will fuel an economic growth without precedent, which in turn will increase the consumption of material goods, which in turn will increase the extraction of natural resources. Those resources will become rarer and more difficult to extract, thus leading to more destructive extraction strategies.
Energy puts a cap to our ability to destroy the planet in order to satisfy our material needs. To top it all off, everyone around here loves to build new stuff, but finding ways to get rid of it without creating waste isn't as trendy.
I don't believe one second that our civilization is capable of controlling itself. And don't tell me about multi-planetary scenarios or whatnot. They are neither realistic (regardless of the energy availability) nor desirable.
If energy is free and unlimited more can be devoted to recycling. Also the vast majority of people like nature, more energy is directed into cleaning up and preserving nature in the US than every before. What about free, unlimited energy would change this preference?
Unless we live in orthogonal dimensions, you know that free unlimited energy is never devoted to recycling. Plus, fusion will produce electricity, which needs to be stored in batteries. Or it will be used to produce hydrogen, which in turn will lead to a massive conversion of our mobility and transportation infrastructure, causing massive extracting of materials required for their manufacturing.
> Also the vast majority of people like nature, more energy is directed into cleaning up and preserving nature in the US than every before.
Really? Definitely in an orthogonal dimension then...
Mining of auxillary materials to pair with all that energy would be a problem. Multi-planetary scenarios for humans aren't realistic in anywhere close to the near term... But mining asteroids instead of the earth might be realistic. Many solutions which may not be realistic now could be with such an energy source.
The only sense in which it would be our demise is that it would be an inflection point in how life is lived, similar to how someone from 200+ years ago would find our current lifestyles to be almost entirely alien.
How would fusion increase our impact on the planet? Wouldn't it reduce our impact on the planet by decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide we release and eliminating oil extraction?
> how exactly is oil distillation or its results "burning down our house"
Likely a call out to global warming.
> how is that applicable to fusion tech?
One thing that is never really discussed in terms of fusion energy is what you will do with the heat generated from these processes as there is a theoretical maximum for how much heat the planet can dissipate.
Whether the poster is correct or not, its widely acknowledged that the ability to transition from gravity powered/wind powered energy to coal combustion fueled a great deal of the economic and technological improvements from the 1700s onward (we call it the Industrial Revolution).
There are many more planetary limits than just climate change, and many of them are governed by how much natural resources we consume and, incidentally, how much waste we produce.
Cheap unlimited energy will just make us push these boundaries even further.
We aren't bound to just this planet though. Not everyone has to live here. Not every industry has to operate here. Power doesn't have to be generated, or consumed, here.
Please. I know lots of folks here live in Silicon Valley and are breastfed with this kind of fantasy, but making our species multi-planetary isn't just a matter of energy availability.
Plus, and most importantly, trashing our one and only planet "because we are not bound to it" is just one of the most unethical and most dangerous plan one can think of. And I know that there are plans to become a multi-planetary species without making Earth inhabitable in the first place, but I think the quote "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face" applies beautifully here. And the fist of climate change combined with biological collapse will hurt badly.
> 1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
no way, no how. there is every reason to believe that cells are irreducibly complex. we can understand parts in isolation, yes, but a full model of the cell (however that would look) is almost certainly beyond science and even if you had that good luck measuring the full state of a cell without destroying it
one of these is not like the others. direct carbon capture works now with the slight caveat that we would have to build 10x our current power supply in fission plants to power them. coccolithophores are an appealing route in principle, but research into their lifecycle and use for sequestration would be a quotidian pursuit for thousands of labs around the world, given funding.
- Protect the Amazon
- Distribute food instead of wasting it
- Build more trains, turn roads into park ways and bike paths
- Recognize climate change globally before it kills us all
The earth's climate changes naturally over the course of tens of thousands of years. The key for us is to minimally impact it and let it do what it wants.
Now.... We may disagree on letting it go as it goes. Ice ages would overtake a ton of countries in glaciers entirely, so we may agree that that should be stopped? But........ Doing that would be directly trying to challenge the solar system and earth on their natural cycles. There would likely be massive unforeseen repercussions.
Yeah this is the typical response from a denier. Let’s use a true statement to undercut a greater threat to humanity. Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas, yes. But humanity isn’t producing natural levels of it. We’re producing levels the planet has never seen at a speed that, at this point, is more than likely to kill off ocean life, destroying an environmental ecosystem that sustains human life.
So your argument is that the planet will be fine is great, except some of us would like humanity to survive indefinitely. For that, we should do everything we can to protect the planet and it’s current occupants.
Communism is one model of government among many. Do YOU think that intelligent management of global resources requires communism? Is the United nations a commune because the member countries cooperate in some way? Isn't there an area between "independent actors acting selfishly" and "communism"?
I don't think they were implying communism. Which is good, because IME people on this forum can't have honest discussion or apply critical thinking in the vicinity of the subject. They start rhetoric-dumping and posturing and repeating tired arguments as if preventing thoughts about communism is their ticket to heaven. Sprinkle in a few posts positive-to-neutral on Marx to fuel the fire, and that's the recipe.
To be fair, any form of human organization that is not commerce-based is heavy on the Faccism scale. It matters very little if it's communist or something else.
But then, there are many ways to organize a society while keeping it commerce-based... Or maybe we manage to finally crack that nut some day and make a post-scarcity society. But on the short term "manage resources globally" heavily implies an anti-humane dictatorship.
Rule of law is not derived from commerce and is not fascism. We can agree beyond some threshold and make laws. There's nothing fascist about limiting liberties with laws chosen democratically.
Then you’d be shocked to learn that Wisconsin had socialist politicians for over a hundred years, creating green spaces, building great infrastructure, public schools and colleges.
Then Scott Walker shredded a bunch of it because socialism is bad.
There is an anthropic line of reasoning over Everettian branch universes where you can actually expect these types of highly unlikely events to happen more often than chance alone would predict if they promote futures with more Born-rule weighted observer-moments.
The response you posted seems to be referring to various concepts from theoretical physics and philosophy, specifically the ideas of the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics, anthropic reasoning, and the Born rule. Let's break these down:
Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics: Also known as the Many-Worlds interpretation, it suggests that all possible alternate histories and futures are real, each representing an actual "world" or "universe". In layman's terms, it's the idea that there could be countless parallel universes where every possible outcome of an event happens.
Anthropic reasoning: This is a philosophical consideration that observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it. In other words, our ability to exist and observe influences how we should interpret the universe.
Born rule: In quantum mechanics, the Born rule is a statistical law that connects the mathematical formalism of quantum theory to experimental observations. It provides the probability that a measurement on a quantum system will yield a given result.
The responder seems to suggest that in a universe with many possible futures (as the Everettian interpretation would suggest), we are more likely to observe "black swan" events that lead to more possible futures.
The idea here is that if an event significantly increases the number of possible futures (like a breakthrough that extends human lifespan), then it effectively increases the number of "observer-moments". In other words, more possibilities for observers to exist and make observations. According to anthropic reasoning, this could make these events more likely to occur than pure chance would predict, because we're only able to observe futures in which we exist.
This line of reasoning is highly speculative and philosophical in nature, touching on deep and unresolved questions in physics and philosophy. It's an interesting thought experiment, but it's important to note that this isn't widely accepted or proven in the scientific community as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021.
Just to add on the "nonsense" line. Using the antropic principle to talk about the future is completely absurd.
There is a huge amount of what I think in unawarded debate about applying it to the past (IMO, it's very clear where it should be used), but applying it to the future is completely against any kind of logic.
Why? If the argument works at this point in time when reflecting on our history what makes it stop working for future observers who reflect on their histories?
It can certainly lead you to some pretty wacky-sounding conclusions (looking at you Frank Tipler) but I can’t see why it’s obviously wrong for future observers to deploy it in just the same was as we do.
So you’re saying that that line of reasoning depends on people existing in the future and thinking about the same kinds of things we do now in the same kinds of ways (at least wrt this particular argument). I can see how that is not guaranteed, especially far into the future where it might become difficult to understand what qualifies as an observer-moment. It is certainly speculative.
Unfortunately it seems like we have hit an impasse. I don’t really understand why you think this is invalid but I would love to be proved wrong. If you would like to continue this discussion over email (or whatever) I’d love that: hn at echophase dot com
Ah I think I get it. While it might be true that the average (imagined) future observer will have a history which is anthropically biased in this way we cannot use this reasoning to make predictions about which particular future we will find ourselves in (because that’s random according to the usual Born rule probabilities).
I would really love the opportunity to clarify my thinking on this. Is there any way I could ask you to explain it to me in more detail? I can compensate you for your time.
I said "there is a line of reasoning...", I didn't say I fully believe it. It definitely depends on a lot of pretty speculative ideas. I'm happy to discuss this further if you'd like to point out exactly which parts of the argument you object to.
>2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
How would that be any better than commercially viable fission breeder reactors (which seem far closer to reality than commercially viable fusion energy)?
Mostly public perception (annoyingly): people are still going to have a go at being anti-nuclear about it, but building a fusion power reactor is going to have a lot more public cultural cachet to draw upon then fission. We've got a generation of science fiction who's core message is "fusion power solved all the problems".
Though there are genuine advantages: for as radioactive as the interior of a fusion reactor may get, if you cut power it'll just sit there safely doing nothing. No decay heat, no potential isotopes to leak - maybe a puff of tritium gas - but that's it. It is a technology that has a perfect control loop for safety because it can't self-sustain at all.
I think there should be a bigger effort to change public perception about nuclear fission reactors if we're on the cusp of what is effectively the equivalent of the dream of endless fusion energy in the latest generation fission breeder reactors.
We’ve survived for a few millennia so I think your sentiment is valid - it’s more likely that “good black swan” events happens more often that “disastrous black swan” events.
If it's proven to be the case that P != NP, it would hardly change much on the grand scale of things as generally, that's what most people believe anyway. In particular, the world continues to function mostly in the same way (since, even if it was the case that P = NP, we haven't found any polynomial reductions yet, so we're effectively living in a P != NP world). Of course, for mathematics and CS, this would be huge, because the techniques used in a proof would likely be very interesting and novel.
If it's proven to be the case that P = NP, then it remains to be seen whether this knowledge can be turned into actually efficient algorithms (polynomial algorithms are not all efficient in practice). If that is the case, I think it might have more downsides than upsides, since all of cryptography would collapse.
There is a promising HIV vaccine in trial (eOD-GT8 60-mer), but it will take an extremely long time to assess, but given how efficient tri-therapies and PREP are, this is certainly not a revolution.
Michael Levin [1] does brillant work on this "cellular language" space and the key point is that genetics is more like biological IaC, it only encodes proteins. Most of the actual control, anatomic and physiological homestasis happens at the higher level of bioelectricity - which works as a computational medium.
>> 1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
-- so you want to cure aging then- how many billions of people you think can a planet with a 6k km radius sustain ?
You think Claus Schwabs of the world wont buy it out to keep it to themselves ?
>> 2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
-- That will eventually happen, and electricity will be just as "expensive" as it is now, simply because the price of a product has nothing to do with its cost and everything to do with the purchasing power of its intended audience.
>> 3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could go either way)
-- No, its cant go either way, the power insatiable psychopaths in power will use it to maximize their power. Period. Its psychopath nature- for them its natural and perfectly normal. Until psychopathy is recognized as a disease and sick people are disallowed from positions of power, the world will continue to be an abusive place.
> -- That will eventually happen, and electricity will be just as "expensive" as it is now, simply because the price of a product has nothing to do with its cost and everything to do with the purchasing power of its intended audience.
100%
If we had fusion tomorrow it would help decarbonise our grids, which is a great thing, but the consumer would see zero financial benefit. Companies would charge the same and make record profits.
This is literally happening right now! The market price of energy in Europe has dropped after a huge hike when Russia invaded Ukraine, but customer bills are still extortionately high
See my 3rd point, it applies to all inhumane activity. Normal people dont kill, mentally ill/unstable people kill. We are long past the evolutionary need for this shit.
I would say that RNA vaccine and chatGPT are two that have happened during my adult life 05->. Iphone and some other innovations were more kinda incremental stuff.
0. LK99 is so obviously a fraud. They've been dicking around with this substance for 24 years.
1. some diseases will be possible to fix, like metabolic problems, but where structures are already formed in an adult organism this will be impossible. Like Autism. Go ahead, change every chromosome in every cell, the malformed brain structures will remain.
2. Sure there will be ignition, but the facilities will be wildly too expensive for commercial power.
3. will never happen with conventional computing hardware. Maybe if someone figures out how to grow actual neurons
This is a common misunderstanding. The main mechanism for self-correction in science isn't about replicating or refuting findings. It's about which science survives to become the basis of other science. If a finding does not bear out, it simply will not become the basis for subsequent science. It's similar to natural selection.
The so-called "replication crisis" is overblown.
If LK-99 fails to be a useful material, it's interesting life will be over very shortly. If it is useful (and even if it's not the promised room-temperature superconductor, but useful in some other aspect), it will continue on in science, in technology - everywhere it might be useful for further investigation.
Invoking the replication crisis was a rhetorical flourish. The point is that OP’s attempt at a rejoinder about proof in the negative leading to fame is silly because the entire field does not seem to be very much interested in proving negatives.
For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-)
Other things that could happen:
1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could go either way)
Etc.