Month: May 2024

Actual Progress

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Over the last decade or so Peter Thiel has made a point of claiming that other than computer automation, technological progress has been at a standstill.  And he’s essentially correct.  From about 1900 to 1960 we went from horse power to nuclear power.

From 1960 to 2020 we went from nuclear power to wind power.  This is not technological progress.  It’s surrender.

And this is mostly a psychological problem we’re facing.  We haven’t hit any quantum barrier that forbids us from improving almost every aspect of our technology.  Even the make-believe problems we create have solutions that are neglected by the dim-witted “technologists” that preside over our decline.  A good example is the farce called recycling.  Currently we are all forced to dutifully separate “recyclables” in a separate pail from the rest of our trash as if this was a magical process that allowed these paper and plastic waste products to somehow become usable materials.

But in reality, the majority of this material is landfilled along with the non-recyclable garbage that we collect in the other pail.  And the reason is simple.  Crude oil is a cheaper and better raw material for making plastic than plastic scrap.  Maybe in the far future when petroleum runs out, our landfills will become plastic mines that we’ll tap for a feed stream in our manufacturing process.

Of course, another thing it’s good for is as fuel.  Paper and plastic are mostly hydrogen and carbon and as such they make incredibly good combustion fuels.  Buring these materials in a garbage incinerator associated with a turbine generator would be the most efficient use of these waste materials.  But, you know, Gaia.

But let’s assume that at some point in the next twenty years, first world people are going to get tired of being forced into third world squalor.  At that point I’m guessing that the first direction selected for energy production will be nuclear fission steam turbine generation plants.  Sure, maybe they’ll have to pay lip service to global warming pieties.  Maybe they’ll even build solar powered carbon sequestration projects to please Gaia.  But at some point, people will demand to have the amenities they’ve become accustomed to; reliable electrical distribution and convenient transportation.  In the long run what the source of that power will be is yet to be determined.  My theory is that geothermal energy will supplement and maybe replace nuclear in the long run.

One thing I’m not sure of is what will be the fuel for transportation.  Many people have said that hydrogen is too hazardous.  Maybe they’re right.  It does tend to go boom when trapped in an enclosure.  Well, it’s cheaper and easier to make than octane but with unlimited electrical energy from something like widespread nuclear or geothermal I don’t see a problem with an octane synthesizing plant.  Carbon dioxide and water are available in endless supply so all that’s needed is cheap power.  And there’s a lot to be said for a really well-built internal combustion engine car.

But this is all just getting back to where we were in 1960.  What will real technological progress look like?  Ironically, I think that there will be an emphasis on Gaia!

I think quality of life innovation will be the future.  Research into the detrimental effects of all the chemicals that we add to our foods and come in contact with our bodies will begin shaping the products our industries produce.

And likewise with containers.  Maybe bottles will start being made of glass and metal again.  Some of the older materials were safer and newer alloys and other materials can be tested and whatever the healthiest choices can be substituted for things that may be harming us.

So better living through chemistry may become something more than just an empty slogan.

With all the talk of AI I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the progress, we can expect from the ongoing computer automation revolution.  Eventually all automobiles will be subject to traffic control in densely crowded traffic.  Despite our strongest resistance, this will happen in many jurisdictions.  The nanny-state is just too strong in places like California and New York.  For many people this will be welcomed.  It will relieve them of the responsibility of driving.

Artificial intelligence will eventually make large scale industrial economic planning much more efficient.  Supply chain coordination for a whole network of companies producing a multitude of products will be optimized and trends and changes tracked and compensated for.  How this will effect capitalism remains to be seen.

Maybe the greatest use of AI will be in bioresearch and medicine.  The enormous complexity of living systems and the almost infinite number of chemicals that need to be tested for toxic and other detrimental effects cries out for the brute force that artificial intelligence can bring to bear on bioresearch and development.  I can see a future where the oncologist is a computer that scans the DNA of a cancer cell and chooses a custom antibody coded precisely to attach to and kill only the cancer cells and nothing else.

And the final area of progress is a sentimental one for me and one I’ll never see.  Mankind should send an unmanned probe to Proxima Centauri.  I guess HAL 9000 will be in charge of this mission.  It will require an enormous tank of water that will be used as rocket mass.  A fission reactor will be used to boil the water as a jet to provide acceleration.  Maybe it can get up to .3c and so the round trip will be something less than a century.  It can take readings and photos and see if there are any little green men there and come back and let us know.  Now that’s progress.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 13MAY2024 – Who Can Replace a Man?

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war pig

Infantry will be necessary for the foreseeable future. Urban fighting is still beyond drones. Furthermore, you do not own or control territory unless you have a soldier standing on it with a rifle and fixed bayonet.

Drones are a fine tool for some fighting and reconnaissance. They make good suicide weapons and you save casualties by using them. Our 6th generation fighters will have in-cockpit pilots as an option, not standard. But because of the reasons you stated about quantum mechanics and the human mind, drones/robots will not replace infantry/special ops/guerrillas. Humans can be darned unpredictable. In fact we can be crazier than a squirrel on methamphetamine. One way Bobby Fisher beat the supercomputer at chess was to make wildly unorthodox and apparently random moves. Confused the computer and he won.

Having worked on the ground where making life miserable for the other side by misdirection, dirty tricks and random acts of sabotage, I can say that the more random you go, the more the other side tries to analyze your acts and tactics until it takes up more and more of his resources and drives him to distraction. If humans have problems with that, given we’ve had a couple million years to improve our internal programming; what chance does an inflexible machine have?

 

 

 

 

Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Intelligence and Life

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Roger Penrose is a Nobel prize winning mathematical physicist whose most important contribution was work on black holes in relation to the theory of general relativity.  But he’s getting old and so he decided to think about the nature of consciousness and he has come to the conclusion that the phenomenon of human consciousness is caused by quantum effects generated in the cells of the human brain.

Wow!

 

 

If you watch the video, you’ll get a little information how the flow of chemicals in the microtubules or even the shaping of the atoms in the tubulin that makes up the tubules might be responsible for the quantum effects that provide the indeterminacy necessary to make human brain more than just a computer running a program.  Penrose equates that quantum indeterminacy with the basis of human consciousness.

Wow!

Okay, maybe that’s an interesting idea.  Is it true?  Damned if I know.

But I do like the fact that it gives us a way of saying that computers won’t have consciousness.  Lots of people think that if we just make a computer big enough, then it will suddenly develop consciousness because humans have consciousness and we have the best brains in the biological hierarchy.

Of course maybe if we can build indeterminacy into computers maybe they’ll become conscious.  Will that happen when the size of the circuits on the chips become so small that the actual paths that the electrons take become indeterminate?  I guess that’s possible.  We can make the AI as flawed as we ourselves are.  Maybe we’ll be able to make them neurotic or bi-polar or even psychotic if we want.  That’s kind of what happened to HAL 9000.  He became psychotic because he was forced to lie about the mission that was such an important part of his self-image.

And maybe that’s possible.  But somehow I don’t think complexity makes consciousness.  We “know” we have consciousness.  But is that because we have giant brains?  Dogs don’t have giant brains but try to convince any dog owner that his pet isn’t conscious.  He’ll laugh you out of the room.  I don’t think consciousness is a synonym for intelligence.  I think consciousness is a synonym for life.  We’re conscious.  Dogs are conscious.  Even mice are conscious.  Are mosquitoes conscious?  How about protozoans.  What about our individual cells?

I’m guessing the all are.  Obviously, a rotifer isn’t spinning around a pond saying, “I rotifer, therefore I am.”  But I think he knows he’s there in some sense.  Does that mean he has indeterminate microtubules providing him with agency?  Well, maybe it has nothing to do with quantum effects but for whatever reason, In some minimal sense, I think the answer is yes!  Consciousness equals life.

Now don’t ask me if viruses have consciousness.  I’m not going to bring this down to individual DNA and RNA molecules.  That would make my head hurt.  But I believe that life is life and it is all of a piece.  And whatever we have that is called consciousness is only the most exquisite version of what every other creature has writ small.

Whether God created quantum mechanics to allow us to have agency or whether the actual mechanism of our souls is completely impossible to reverse engineer by any human intelligence is unknown and probably unknowable.  What has already become apparent over the course of the last four hundred years of scientific investigation is that the more we learn the more we learn that we know absolutely nothing.

Isaac Newton “knew” what kept the Moon in orbit and how to calculate the orbits of the planets to whatever accuracy he needed.  He had discovered God’s textbook for his creation.

James Clarke Maxwell knew what the equations were that governed electromagnetism and ushered in the modern age of electric power.

Albert Einstein decoded time-space and “corrected” Newton’s laws.

But a generation later, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle forever locked the door on our knowledge of the quantum world.  We invented quarks and gluons and muons and who knows what else.  But every time we learn something new we find out that ten other things are just illusions.  Dark matter and dark energy and string theory and who knows what else crowd around the dark corners of the forefront of our knowledge and we still know less than nothing about ourselves and why we’re here.

Well, I’m okay with that.  Just as long as we’re not kidding ourselves about where we stand with respect to our dogs.  They’re our friends meant to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.

One of the Ways Drones Have Changed the Battlefield

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FPV (first person view) drones have become ubiquitous over the battlefields of Ukraine.  And they’ve changed the way war is fought there.  These cheap and numerous devices can destroy a main battle tank or drop a munition in a trench without any reliable way of preventing these attacks.

So what’s a tank commander to do?  Well, so far the answer is to cover your tank with sheet metal and chicken cages (see photo below).

These ad hoc modifications sort of remind me of what was done to the Striker vehicles with wire additions used to catch RPG’s before they reached the armor.  The other change in tactics I’ve heard about is outrunning the drones.  Now we have infantrymen riding motorcycles and even golf carts in order to avoid the drones while crossing open fields.  So speed trumps armor for protection for now.

At a higher level what we are seeing is the beginning of automated weapon systems fighting each other on the battle field.  As soon as we have drones attacking drones we have to wonder where the humble foot soldier stands in this rapidly escalating clutter of deadly devices.

Update:

War Pig:

Infantry will be necessary for the foreseeable future. Urban fighting is still beyond drones. Furthermore, you do not own or control territory unless you have a soldier standing on it with a rifle and fixed bayonet.

Drones are a fine tool for some fighting and reconnaissance. They make good suicide weapons and you save casualties by using them. Our 6th generation fighters will have in-cockpit pilots as an option, not standard. But because of the reasons you stated about quantum mechanics and the human mind, drones/robots will not replace infantry/special ops/guerrillas. Humans can be darned unpredictable. In fact we can be crazier than a squirrel on methamphetamine. One way Bobby Fisher beat the supercomputer at chess was to make wildly unorthodox and apparently random moves. Confused the computer and he won.

Having worked on the ground where making life miserable for the other side by misdirection, dirty tricks and random acts of sabotage, I can say that the more random you go, the more the other side tries to analyze your acts and tactics until it takes up more and more of his resources and drives him to distraction. If humans have problems with that, given we’ve had a couple million years to improve our internal programming; what chance does an inflexible machine have?

Tales from the Van – Part 1 – The Sisterhood

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Many years ago, I commuted into Boston for work.  And because at the time there was no commuter rail from where I lived, I took a van in.  We all paid a fee and some of us drove the van on occasion and on those days, we’d get a day knocked off our fee for the next month.  And I’ll have to say that we had a very “diverse” cast of characters.  And I mean that by every definition of the word.  Not only racially, ethnically, careerwise and socio-economically but also philosophically and by personality type.  We were a motley crew.  We even had a guy who worked for one of the intelligence agencies (or so he said).  There were a few people who couldn’t stand each other and there were some very close friends.

But even though most of us didn’t know each other “in the real world,” for an hour in the morning and the afternoon we spent our time talking about the events of the day and the latest sit-com and our work day and our home lives and anything else to pass the time.  And it’s a funny thing but to the people on the van what we thought about the world was a pretty important part of our day.  We would argue politics and social trends.  And once in a while, the guys would even get together for a social gathering.   One time I had the boys over for a poker game and sandwiches.  It was a great success, meaning no one lost too much and everyone ate too much and drank way too much beer.  And this cemented the male camaraderie of the van immensely.  Once you’ve bluffed yourself to a pot with a broken straight it’s almost like you’re boyhood chums.

There was a feminist contingent on the van too and they would provide a united front when explaining why men were the cause of all the problems in the world.  That is until they needed help with a flat tire or an angry motorist on the road.  I remember a time when I was riding shotgun while one of the most strident feminists was driving the van through Boston street-traffic.  It was an awful ride.  We were in a bumper-to-bumper jam and she had lost all patience and was laying on the horn every other minute or so.  Finally, the guy in front of us in a brand-new sports car, throws his car into park, jumps out of his car.  He’s about six foot five and comes running over and bangs on her window with his fist.

Well, this champion of female equality, jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran to the back of the van like a shot.  Which I found hilarious.  Until I realized she had left the van in gear.  So of course we rolled into the back of the sports car.  Now I had to climb over the hump and get into the driver’s seat.  The engine had stalled out and I had to nurse it back to life and then throw it into reverse to separate us from the sports car.  All the while the irate driver is hopping up and down screaming over us hitting his car.  I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I shrugged my shoulder and pointed out to him that traffic was moving and tried not to laugh.  After he convinced himself that his bumper wasn’t much the worse for the bump and realized that if he wanted to make an accident report of it, he’d have to tell a traffic cop that he had been threatening a woman driver for being a woman driver he slunk back to his car and we proceeded.

But that little demonstration had us laughing at the sisterhood for a good long time about having a concrete answer as to, “What good are men?”  But pretty soon the sisterhood had convinced themselves again that women were the only intelligent life in the universe.

There was another occasion when the gals were plotting their takeover of the world.  And they had managed to set off one of the less easy-going guys with their claim that a pack of five women could kill any man in a fight.  They badgered him for a good long time and they could see this talk got under his skin so they did it all the more.  They demanded that he tell them how he could possibly hope to fight against five opponents.  After all, they said, if all of them constantly pummeled him from all sides they’d eventually injure him enough to overwhelm him.

So finally, he said, the tactic he would use would be to get a strong hold on one woman and bash her head into the ground and then do the same to each of them consecutively.  He believed this would have a twofold advantage.  Firstly, finishing off one opponent completely would significantly improve his position in the fight.  But more importantly, he believed that psychologically women would be unlikely to continue attacking a man that had just bashed a woman’s head in.

His logic seemed to have been persuasive.  The gals gave up that thought experiment completely and the rest of the ride was very quiet.  After that they didn’t bother him about the war of the sexes, so to speak.  I think they were kind of scared of him.  What he said must have struck them as accurate.

But by the next day we had some new thing to argue about.  I think it was the Oscars.  The girls had a very long talk about that with very little help from us.  But at least things were back to normal.