I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).

The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.

I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?

On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:20:16 PM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).
>
> The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
>
> I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?

It wouldn't matter. The cultural reasons for the radicalization of academia (and to a lesser extent, the radicalization and alienation of the 'intellectual class' generally) have deep roots, and those roots go back to the 19C. (Actually, they go back to the French Revolution.) A warp drive, from their POV, would just make this worse by enabling the West to expand.

The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding. I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.

It's true that the Western elite class is alienated from their own culture and roots, and some of them are reflexively anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-Western generally, but that's not why technical change has slowed.

On 10/22/2023 10:20 AM, Andrew McDowell wrote:
>
> The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government > regulation nothing wrong.

Well, the MAGA branch of the Republican party is definitely the exact
opposite, at least on government regulation.

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

On Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 18:40:49 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:20:16 PM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> > I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).
> >
> > The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
> >
> > I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?
> It wouldn't matter. The cultural reasons for the radicalization of academia (and to a lesser extent, the radicalization and alienation of the 'intellectual class' generally) have deep roots, and those roots go back to the 19C. (Actually, they go back to the French Revolution.) A warp drive, from their POV, would just make this worse by enabling the West to expand.
>
> The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding. I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
>
> It's true that the Western elite class is alienated from their own culture and roots, and some of them are reflexively anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-Western generally, but that's not why technical change has slowed..

For how long have you owned a pocket videophone?
Does yours include an artificial intelligence yet?

And (some) cars can drive themselves pretty well
if they were allowed to, but they're not. And yet
self-piloting delivery air-drones abound.

On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:52:54 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> On Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 18:40:49 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:20:16 PM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> > > I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).
> > >
> > > The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
> > >
> > > I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?
> > It wouldn't matter. The cultural reasons for the radicalization of academia (and to a lesser extent, the radicalization and alienation of the 'intellectual class' generally) have deep roots, and those roots go back to the 19C. (Actually, they go back to the French Revolution.) A warp drive, from their POV, would just make this worse by enabling the West to expand.
> >
> > The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding. I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
> >
> > It's true that the Western elite class is alienated from their own culture and roots, and some of them are reflexively anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-Western generally, but that's not why technical change has slowed.
> For how long have you owned a pocket videophone?
> Does yours include an artificial intelligence yet?
>
> And (some) cars can drive themselves pretty well
> if they were allowed to, but they're not. And yet
> self-piloting delivery air-drones abound.

Refinements on old technology. They don't change daily life or the shape of society in anything like the way the big developments did.

Telephones date back over a century, the telegraph further, they represented the advent of (effectively) _instantaneous communication_. That was the _BIG_ development, in terms of communications it shrank the world from being years wide, down to zero size, almost overnight. Subsequent developments are refinements of that, and shrinking in importance with time. Phones were a huge advance over telegraphy by permitting actual conversation. Radio made it possible, in principle, to do it from anywhere to anywhere on Earth. Television was a huge social change, arguably as big as radio had been.. Video telephony has been possible for decades, it just wasn't widely desired. Being able to carry your phone around with you is a huge convenience, but still not a big development compared to the original Big Change from a century ago, or even the advent of radio.

Cars go back over a century. Self-driving is useful, or potentially so, but not life-changing or world-changing the way automobiles themselves were in the early 20C. You could hire a chaffeur to get most of the same result, after all, even a century ago.

AI is not AI, not in the same sense that Moravec and Goode meant back half a century ago. One of the people in the field has been urging people to drop the 'AI' terminology entirely because it's misleading, we're talking about things like 'large language models', there's no actual intelligence involved. But the hype machine loves pretending that we're talking about R2D2.

On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:04:20 PM UTC-5, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
> On 10/22/2023 10:20 AM, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> >
> > The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government > regulation nothing wrong.
> Well, the MAGA branch of the Republican party is definitely the exact
> opposite, at least on government regulation.

In terms of what Gingrich and Drake _et al_ are talking about, the MAGA movement is precisely the political and social opposite of the people they're talking about.

On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 9:23:57 PM UTC-4, Johnny1A wrote:
> On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:52:54 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > On Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 18:40:49 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> > > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:20:16 PM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> > > > I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).
> > > >
> > > > The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
> > > >
> > > > I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?
> > > It wouldn't matter. The cultural reasons for the radicalization of academia (and to a lesser extent, the radicalization and alienation of the 'intellectual class' generally) have deep roots, and those roots go back to the 19C. (Actually, they go back to the French Revolution.) A warp drive, from their POV, would just make this worse by enabling the West to expand.
> > >
> > > The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding. I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
> > >
> > > It's true that the Western elite class is alienated from their own culture and roots, and some of them are reflexively anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-Western generally, but that's not why technical change has slowed.
> > For how long have you owned a pocket videophone?
> > Does yours include an artificial intelligence yet?
> >
> > And (some) cars can drive themselves pretty well
> > if they were allowed to, but they're not. And yet
> > self-piloting delivery air-drones abound.
> Refinements on old technology. They don't change daily life or the shape of society in anything like the way the big developments did.
>
> Telephones date back over a century, the telegraph further, they represented the advent of (effectively) _instantaneous communication_. That was the _BIG_ development, in terms of communications it shrank the world from being years wide, down to zero size, almost overnight. Subsequent developments are refinements of that, and shrinking in importance with time. Phones were a huge advance over telegraphy by permitting actual conversation. Radio made it possible, in principle, to do it from anywhere to anywhere on Earth. Television was a huge social change, arguably as big as radio had been. Video telephony has been possible for decades, it just wasn't widely desired. Being able to carry your phone around with you is a huge convenience, but still not a big development compared to the original Big Change from a century ago, or even the advent of radio.
>
> Cars go back over a century. Self-driving is useful, or potentially so, but not life-changing or world-changing the way automobiles themselves were in the early 20C. You could hire a chaffeur to get most of the same result, after all, even a century ago.
>
> AI is not AI, not in the same sense that Moravec and Goode meant back half a century ago. One of the people in the field has been urging people to drop the 'AI' terminology entirely because it's misleading, we're talking about things like 'large language models', there's no actual intelligence involved. But the hype machine loves pretending that we're talking about R2D2.

When I was a kid, long distance telephone calls required booking a call ahead of time, and then rushing your call to Grandma on the other coast because of the per-minute expense. Today I can make a video call to my sister on another continent using WhatsApp for more or less free. That's an advance.

Pt

On Monday, 23 October 2023 at 02:23:57 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:52:54 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > On Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 18:40:49 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> > > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:20:16 PM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> > > > I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).
> > > >
> > > > The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
> > > >
> > > > I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?
> > > It wouldn't matter. The cultural reasons for the radicalization of academia (and to a lesser extent, the radicalization and alienation of the 'intellectual class' generally) have deep roots, and those roots go back to the 19C. (Actually, they go back to the French Revolution.) A warp drive, from their POV, would just make this worse by enabling the West to expand.
> > >
> > > The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding. I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
> > >
> > > It's true that the Western elite class is alienated from their own culture and roots, and some of them are reflexively anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-Western generally, but that's not why technical change has slowed.
> > For how long have you owned a pocket videophone?
> > Does yours include an artificial intelligence yet?
> >
> > And (some) cars can drive themselves pretty well
> > if they were allowed to, but they're not. And yet
> > self-piloting delivery air-drones abound.
> Refinements on old technology. They don't change daily life or the shape of society in anything like the way the big developments did.
>
> Telephones date back over a century, the telegraph further, they represented the advent of (effectively) _instantaneous communication_. That was the _BIG_ development, in terms of communications it shrank the world from being years wide, down to zero size, almost overnight. Subsequent developments are refinements of that, and shrinking in importance with time. Phones were a huge advance over telegraphy by permitting actual conversation. Radio made it possible, in principle, to do it from anywhere to anywhere on Earth. Television was a huge social change, arguably as big as radio had been. Video telephony has been possible for decades, it just wasn't widely desired. Being able to carry your phone around with you is a huge convenience, but still not a big development compared to the original Big Change from a century ago, or even the advent of radio.
>
> Cars go back over a century. Self-driving is useful, or potentially so, but not life-changing or world-changing the way automobiles themselves were in the early 20C. You could hire a chaffeur to get most of the same result, after all, even a century ago.
>
> AI is not AI, not in the same sense that Moravec and Goode meant back half a century ago. One of the people in the field has been urging people to drop the 'AI' terminology entirely because it's misleading, we're talking about things like 'large language models', there's no actual intelligence involved. But the hype machine loves pretending that we're talking about R2D2.

My point isn't that you can drive about while
making a video call instead of concentrating on
the road, it is that in terms of technology,
vehicles can go cross country with /nobody/
in them. To, you know, deliver stuff.

Computers do clerical work.

Robots do manual work.

So what are we for?

On Monday, October 23, 2023 at 9:04:47 AM UTC+1, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> On Monday, 23 October 2023 at 02:23:57 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:52:54 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > > On Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 18:40:49 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> > > > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:20:16 PM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> > > > > I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).
> > > > >
> > > > > The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
> > > > >
> > > > > I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?
> > > > It wouldn't matter. The cultural reasons for the radicalization of academia (and to a lesser extent, the radicalization and alienation of the 'intellectual class' generally) have deep roots, and those roots go back to the 19C. (Actually, they go back to the French Revolution.) A warp drive, from their POV, would just make this worse by enabling the West to expand.
> > > >
> > > > The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding. I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
> > > >
> > > > It's true that the Western elite class is alienated from their own culture and roots, and some of them are reflexively anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-Western generally, but that's not why technical change has slowed.
> > > For how long have you owned a pocket videophone?
> > > Does yours include an artificial intelligence yet?
> > >
> > > And (some) cars can drive themselves pretty well
> > > if they were allowed to, but they're not. And yet
> > > self-piloting delivery air-drones abound.
> > Refinements on old technology. They don't change daily life or the shape of society in anything like the way the big developments did.
> >
> > Telephones date back over a century, the telegraph further, they represented the advent of (effectively) _instantaneous communication_. That was the _BIG_ development, in terms of communications it shrank the world from being years wide, down to zero size, almost overnight. Subsequent developments are refinements of that, and shrinking in importance with time. Phones were a huge advance over telegraphy by permitting actual conversation. Radio made it possible, in principle, to do it from anywhere to anywhere on Earth. Television was a huge social change, arguably as big as radio had been. Video telephony has been possible for decades, it just wasn't widely desired. Being able to carry your phone around with you is a huge convenience, but still not a big development compared to the original Big Change from a century ago, or even the advent of radio.
> >
> > Cars go back over a century. Self-driving is useful, or potentially so, but not life-changing or world-changing the way automobiles themselves were in the early 20C. You could hire a chaffeur to get most of the same result, after all, even a century ago.
> >
> > AI is not AI, not in the same sense that Moravec and Goode meant back half a century ago. One of the people in the field has been urging people to drop the 'AI' terminology entirely because it's misleading, we're talking about things like 'large language models', there's no actual intelligence involved. But the hype machine loves pretending that we're talking about R2D2.
> My point isn't that you can drive about while
> making a video call instead of concentrating on
> the road, it is that in terms of technology,
> vehicles can go cross country with /nobody/
> in them. To, you know, deliver stuff.
>
> Computers do clerical work.
>
> Robots do manual work.
>
> So what are we for?
Somebody found an example of true driverless vehicles in real use the last time the topic came up, but I suspect that a limiting factor on their use, especially carrying people, will be.... regulation. Computer systems that can cause human death, such as flight control systems, are subject to extremely stringent regulations, which makes developing them much more complex and expensive than most other software. The usual get-out is to have what we used to be allowed to call a "man in the loop" - the requirement that at some stage a human will be required to give their consent before the system proceeds with something, whether that is steering a boat or firing a missile - just because it is so complex to create the software without the get-out.. A true driverless car, which could be used by somebody who is not capable of driving, or not legally qualified to do so, would come under these regulations. For some of the technologies involved in driverless cars, such as neural networks, the ability to prove that the system will function correctly, as opposed to simply testing it a few time, is the subject of current research. For the error rates required of such safety-critical systems, testing alone is not sufficient - it is not practical to test the system a few million times in order to show that the failure rate is under one in a million, and I think the demanded failure rates are lower than that - yes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B describes a standard requiring a catastrophic failure rate of less than one per billion hours.

On Monday, October 23, 2023 at 12:21:39 PM UTC-4, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> On Monday, October 23, 2023 at 9:04:47 AM UTC+1, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > On Monday, 23 October 2023 at 02:23:57 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> > > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:52:54 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > > > On Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 18:40:49 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> > > > > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:20:16 PM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> > > > > > I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).
> > > > > >
> > > > > > The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?
> > > > > It wouldn't matter. The cultural reasons for the radicalization of academia (and to a lesser extent, the radicalization and alienation of the 'intellectual class' generally) have deep roots, and those roots go back to the 19C. (Actually, they go back to the French Revolution.) A warp drive, from their POV, would just make this worse by enabling the West to expand..
> > > > >
> > > > > The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding. I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
> > > > >
> > > > > It's true that the Western elite class is alienated from their own culture and roots, and some of them are reflexively anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-Western generally, but that's not why technical change has slowed.
> > > > For how long have you owned a pocket videophone?
> > > > Does yours include an artificial intelligence yet?
> > > >
> > > > And (some) cars can drive themselves pretty well
> > > > if they were allowed to, but they're not. And yet
> > > > self-piloting delivery air-drones abound.
> > > Refinements on old technology. They don't change daily life or the shape of society in anything like the way the big developments did.
> > >
> > > Telephones date back over a century, the telegraph further, they represented the advent of (effectively) _instantaneous communication_. That was the _BIG_ development, in terms of communications it shrank the world from being years wide, down to zero size, almost overnight. Subsequent developments are refinements of that, and shrinking in importance with time. Phones were a huge advance over telegraphy by permitting actual conversation. Radio made it possible, in principle, to do it from anywhere to anywhere on Earth. Television was a huge social change, arguably as big as radio had been.. Video telephony has been possible for decades, it just wasn't widely desired. Being able to carry your phone around with you is a huge convenience, but still not a big development compared to the original Big Change from a century ago, or even the advent of radio.
> > >
> > > Cars go back over a century. Self-driving is useful, or potentially so, but not life-changing or world-changing the way automobiles themselves were in the early 20C. You could hire a chaffeur to get most of the same result, after all, even a century ago.
> > >
> > > AI is not AI, not in the same sense that Moravec and Goode meant back half a century ago. One of the people in the field has been urging people to drop the 'AI' terminology entirely because it's misleading, we're talking about things like 'large language models', there's no actual intelligence involved. But the hype machine loves pretending that we're talking about R2D2.
> > My point isn't that you can drive about while
> > making a video call instead of concentrating on
> > the road, it is that in terms of technology,
> > vehicles can go cross country with /nobody/
> > in them. To, you know, deliver stuff.
> >
> > Computers do clerical work.
> >
> > Robots do manual work.
> >
> > So what are we for?
> Somebody found an example of true driverless vehicles in real use the last time the topic came up, but I suspect that a limiting factor on their use, especially carrying people, will be.... regulation. Computer systems that can cause human death, such as flight control systems, are subject to extremely stringent regulations, which makes developing them much more complex and expensive than most other software. The usual get-out is to have what we used to be allowed to call a "man in the loop" - the requirement that at some stage a human will be required to give their consent before the system proceeds with something, whether that is steering a boat or firing a missile - just because it is so complex to create the software without the get-out. A true driverless car, which could be used by somebody who is not capable of driving, or not legally qualified to do so, would come under these regulations. For some of the technologies involved in driverless cars, such as neural networks, the ability to prove that the system will function correctly, as opposed to simply testing it a few time, is the subject of current research. For the error rates required of such safety-critical systems, testing alone is not sufficient - it is not practical to test the system a few million times in order to show that the failure rate is under one in a million, and I think the demanded failure rates are lower than that - yes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B describes a standard requiring a catastrophic failure rate of less than one per billion hours.

Cruise and Waymo are already offering driverless taxi rides in San Francisco. They sometimes get stuck, and
don't play nice with emergencies.

As for impracticality - Tesla has now logged over 500 million miles of driving with its 'Full Self Driving' Beta.
That amount of data allows you to make some fairly strong statements about its reliability.

Once the systems are demonstrably safer than human drivers, insurance companies will drive widespread adoption.
It doesn't have to be perfect; it has be enough better than manual driving that its irresponsible not to use it.

pt

On Monday, October 23, 2023 at 12:23:13 AM UTC-5, pete...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 9:23:57 PM UTC-4, Johnny1A wrote:
> > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:52:54 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > > On Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 18:40:49 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> > > > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:20:16 PM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> > > > > I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).
> > > > >
> > > > > The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
> > > > >
> > > > > I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?
> > > > It wouldn't matter. The cultural reasons for the radicalization of academia (and to a lesser extent, the radicalization and alienation of the 'intellectual class' generally) have deep roots, and those roots go back to the 19C. (Actually, they go back to the French Revolution.) A warp drive, from their POV, would just make this worse by enabling the West to expand.
> > > >
> > > > The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding. I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
> > > >
> > > > It's true that the Western elite class is alienated from their own culture and roots, and some of them are reflexively anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-Western generally, but that's not why technical change has slowed.
> > > For how long have you owned a pocket videophone?
> > > Does yours include an artificial intelligence yet?
> > >
> > > And (some) cars can drive themselves pretty well
> > > if they were allowed to, but they're not. And yet
> > > self-piloting delivery air-drones abound.
> > Refinements on old technology. They don't change daily life or the shape of society in anything like the way the big developments did.
> >
> > Telephones date back over a century, the telegraph further, they represented the advent of (effectively) _instantaneous communication_. That was the _BIG_ development, in terms of communications it shrank the world from being years wide, down to zero size, almost overnight. Subsequent developments are refinements of that, and shrinking in importance with time. Phones were a huge advance over telegraphy by permitting actual conversation. Radio made it possible, in principle, to do it from anywhere to anywhere on Earth. Television was a huge social change, arguably as big as radio had been. Video telephony has been possible for decades, it just wasn't widely desired. Being able to carry your phone around with you is a huge convenience, but still not a big development compared to the original Big Change from a century ago, or even the advent of radio.
> >
> > Cars go back over a century. Self-driving is useful, or potentially so, but not life-changing or world-changing the way automobiles themselves were in the early 20C. You could hire a chaffeur to get most of the same result, after all, even a century ago.
> >
> > AI is not AI, not in the same sense that Moravec and Goode meant back half a century ago. One of the people in the field has been urging people to drop the 'AI' terminology entirely because it's misleading, we're talking about things like 'large language models', there's no actual intelligence involved. But the hype machine loves pretending that we're talking about R2D2.
> When I was a kid, long distance telephone calls required booking a call ahead of time, and then rushing your call to Grandma on the other coast because of the per-minute expense. Today I can make a video call to my sister on another continent using WhatsApp for more or less free. That's an advance..
>
> Pt

Undoubtedly. So is the convenience of the having your phone with you all the time, the other features bound up into the swiss army knife that is a smartphone, etc. But none of them are fundamental, society-changing advances.. They're _refinements_.

Try to put yourself in the position of someone who was born before the telegraph. Communication meant sending a letter by horse, or ship. Very rarely, under special circumstances, it might mean signal flashes using mirrors, or smoke signals. To send a message of any sort further than shouting or smoke signal distance necessarily meant sending a messenger in some form, or occasionally a pigeon or something.

A town _twenty miles away_ could be messaged in one day, IF it was urgent enough to justify the cost of a rider and exhausting the horses. Further than that and the message automatically took much longer. Moreover, it had _always been that way_ , throughout human history.

Then, in rather less than the course of one lifetime, it became possible to communicate instantaneously across tens, then hundreds, then thousands of miles, then across _oceans_ . Then came the telephone, and not only could a message be sent that fast, but personal conversation over global distances became possible. Yeah, it wasn't always convenient, or cheap, but it was a _radical_ change, a world-shaking change, over all previous history, and it happened over the course of one adult lifetime. Radio was a lesser change, but it in turn opened up the _possibility_ of 'anywhere to anywhere' instantaneous communications. Television was another big change, as big as radio in terms of impact, probably. Subsequent advances certainly happened, but they are refinements on those big changes.

I'm not sure moderns are psychologically capable of fully grasping the impact of the technological changes of the 19C and early 20C on people who could remember the previous world. Nothing in our experiences matches it.

On Tuesday, October 24, 2023 at 1:27:35 AM UTC-4, Johnny1A wrote:
> On Monday, October 23, 2023 at 12:23:13 AM UTC-5, pete...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 9:23:57 PM UTC-4, Johnny1A wrote:
> > > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:52:54 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > > > On Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 18:40:49 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
> > > > > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:20:16 PM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> > > > > > I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).
> > > > > >
> > > > > > The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?
> > > > > It wouldn't matter. The cultural reasons for the radicalization of academia (and to a lesser extent, the radicalization and alienation of the 'intellectual class' generally) have deep roots, and those roots go back to the 19C. (Actually, they go back to the French Revolution.) A warp drive, from their POV, would just make this worse by enabling the West to expand..
> > > > >
> > > > > The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding. I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
> > > > >
> > > > > It's true that the Western elite class is alienated from their own culture and roots, and some of them are reflexively anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-Western generally, but that's not why technical change has slowed.
> > > > For how long have you owned a pocket videophone?
> > > > Does yours include an artificial intelligence yet?
> > > >
> > > > And (some) cars can drive themselves pretty well
> > > > if they were allowed to, but they're not. And yet
> > > > self-piloting delivery air-drones abound.
> > > Refinements on old technology. They don't change daily life or the shape of society in anything like the way the big developments did.
> > >
> > > Telephones date back over a century, the telegraph further, they represented the advent of (effectively) _instantaneous communication_. That was the _BIG_ development, in terms of communications it shrank the world from being years wide, down to zero size, almost overnight. Subsequent developments are refinements of that, and shrinking in importance with time. Phones were a huge advance over telegraphy by permitting actual conversation. Radio made it possible, in principle, to do it from anywhere to anywhere on Earth. Television was a huge social change, arguably as big as radio had been.. Video telephony has been possible for decades, it just wasn't widely desired. Being able to carry your phone around with you is a huge convenience, but still not a big development compared to the original Big Change from a century ago, or even the advent of radio.
> > >
> > > Cars go back over a century. Self-driving is useful, or potentially so, but not life-changing or world-changing the way automobiles themselves were in the early 20C. You could hire a chaffeur to get most of the same result, after all, even a century ago.
> > >
> > > AI is not AI, not in the same sense that Moravec and Goode meant back half a century ago. One of the people in the field has been urging people to drop the 'AI' terminology entirely because it's misleading, we're talking about things like 'large language models', there's no actual intelligence involved. But the hype machine loves pretending that we're talking about R2D2.
> > When I was a kid, long distance telephone calls required booking a call ahead of time, and then rushing your call to Grandma on the other coast because of the per-minute expense. Today I can make a video call to my sister on another continent using WhatsApp for more or less free. That's an advance.
> >
> > Pt
> Undoubtedly. So is the convenience of the having your phone with you all the time, the other features bound up into the swiss army knife that is a smartphone, etc. But none of them are fundamental, society-changing advances.. They're _refinements_.
>
> Try to put yourself in the position of someone who was born before the telegraph. Communication meant sending a letter by horse, or ship. Very rarely, under special circumstances, it might mean signal flashes using mirrors, or smoke signals. To send a message of any sort further than shouting or smoke signal distance necessarily meant sending a messenger in some form, or occasionally a pigeon or something.
>
> A town _twenty miles away_ could be messaged in one day, IF it was urgent enough to justify the cost of a rider and exhausting the horses. Further than that and the message automatically took much longer. Moreover, it had _always been that way_ , throughout human history.
>
> Then, in rather less than the course of one lifetime, it became possible to communicate instantaneously across tens, then hundreds, then thousands of miles, then across _oceans_ . Then came the telephone, and not only could a message be sent that fast, but personal conversation over global distances became possible. Yeah, it wasn't always convenient, or cheap, but it was a _radical_ change, a world-shaking change, over all previous history, and it happened over the course of one adult lifetime. Radio was a lesser change, but it in turn opened up the _possibility_ of 'anywhere to anywhere' instantaneous communications. Television was another big change, as big as radio in terms of impact, probably. Subsequent advances certainly happened, but they are refinements on those big changes.
>
> I'm not sure moderns are psychologically capable of fully grasping the impact of the technological changes of the 19C and early 20C on people who could remember the previous world. Nothing in our experiences matches it.

This book covers that revolution well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet

IIRC, in the 1850, it took weeks to get a message from London to India.
In 1870, 28 minutes.

pt

On Monday, October 23, 2023 at 4:20:16 AM UTC+11, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).

He's full on guzzling the Trump fluid election denying idiot
Quite apart from him being one of the early drivers of the GOP arseholery that has resulted in the current insane twits calling the shots in the party
>
> The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong.

Oh bullshit, that's just standard GOP "the government is wrong and let the donors do what they want" propaganda.

>Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
>
> I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?

On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 11:40:49 AM UTC-6, Johnny1A wrote:

> The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half
> century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical
> standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that
> saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the
> world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw
> weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding.
> I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed
> everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same
> people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking
> months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across
> the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way
> to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and
> inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see
> Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.

Yes, you are quite correct. While we're still making impressive progress with computers -
and even *that* is starting to slow down, Dennard Scaling having come to an end, even if
Moores' Law is still alive if slowing down a bit for a while longer - when it comes to changes
in the basic parameters of life, current technical advancement isn't having consequences
that are nearly as impressive.

I think this is because we happened to hit upon a rich lode of benefits from scientific and
technical progress which is coming to an end, not because we aren't working as hard
any more.

Of course, it _is_ true that we don't have the government and military driving technological
progress the way it had been - instead, progress depends on private enterprise, and thus
has a more short-term focus. No doubt that has helped. But how much military advantage
would a country gain from having a bomb even bigger than the H-bomb? What _would_ be
really useful is if a country discovered a foolproof defense against nuclear missiles fired
from submarines. But nobody really has a clue where to go to look for one.

John Savard

On Monday, October 30, 2023 at 2:03:10 AM UTC, Quadibloc wrote:
> On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 11:40:49 AM UTC-6, Johnny1A wrote:
>
> > The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half
> > century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical
> > standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that
> > saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the
> > world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw
> > weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding.
> > I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed
> > everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same
> > people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking
> > months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across
> > the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way
> > to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and
> > inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see
> > Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
> Yes, you are quite correct. While we're still making impressive progress with computers -
> and even *that* is starting to slow down, Dennard Scaling having come to an end, even if
> Moores' Law is still alive if slowing down a bit for a while longer - when it comes to changes
> in the basic parameters of life, current technical advancement isn't having consequences
> that are nearly as impressive.
>
> I think this is because we happened to hit upon a rich lode of benefits from scientific and
> technical progress which is coming to an end, not because we aren't working as hard
> any more.
>
> Of course, it _is_ true that we don't have the government and military driving technological
> progress the way it had been - instead, progress depends on private enterprise, and thus
> has a more short-term focus. No doubt that has helped. But how much military advantage
> would a country gain from having a bomb even bigger than the H-bomb? What _would_ be
> really useful is if a country discovered a foolproof defense against nuclear missiles fired
> from submarines. But nobody really has a clue where to go to look for one..
>
> John Savard
I would much rather have a guarantee that nuclear missile submarines could continue to hide in the deep than a guarantee of a defense against them. The point of strategic second strike is to make surprise attacks unprofitable by retaliating against them. While I suppose they _could_ be used for a first strike, they are far from the cheapest way of doing so. Wars both great and small start with the aggressor believing that a surprise attack will give them a great advantage - very often an advantage that they believe is both necessary and decisive. The existence of strategic second strike stops wars by denying this. (Plus I admit that the UK's very expensive nuclear deterrent is entirely based on keeping a single on patrol nuclear missile sub at sea at all times).

On Monday, October 30, 2023 at 12:29:14 AM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
> On Monday, October 30, 2023 at 2:03:10 AM UTC, Quadibloc wrote:
> > On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 11:40:49 AM UTC-6, Johnny1A wrote:
> >
> > > The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half
> > > century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical
> > > standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that
> > > saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the
> > > world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw
> > > weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding.
> > > I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed
> > > everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same
> > > people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking
> > > months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across
> > > the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way
> > > to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and
> > > inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see
> > > Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
> > Yes, you are quite correct. While we're still making impressive progress with computers -
> > and even *that* is starting to slow down, Dennard Scaling having come to an end, even if
> > Moores' Law is still alive if slowing down a bit for a while longer - when it comes to changes
> > in the basic parameters of life, current technical advancement isn't having consequences
> > that are nearly as impressive.
> >
> > I think this is because we happened to hit upon a rich lode of benefits from scientific and
> > technical progress which is coming to an end, not because we aren't working as hard
> > any more.
> >
> > Of course, it _is_ true that we don't have the government and military driving technological
> > progress the way it had been - instead, progress depends on private enterprise, and thus
> > has a more short-term focus. No doubt that has helped. But how much military advantage
> > would a country gain from having a bomb even bigger than the H-bomb? What _would_ be
> > really useful is if a country discovered a foolproof defense against nuclear missiles fired
> > from submarines. But nobody really has a clue where to go to look for one.
> >
> > John Savard
> I would much rather have a guarantee that nuclear missile submarines could continue to hide in the deep than a guarantee of a defense against them. The point of strategic second strike is to make surprise attacks unprofitable by retaliating against them. While I suppose they _could_ be used for a first strike, they are far from the cheapest way of doing so. Wars both great and small start with the aggressor believing that a surprise attack will give them a great advantage - very often an advantage that they believe is both necessary and decisive. The existence of strategic second strike stops wars by denying this. (Plus I admit that the UK's very expensive nuclear deterrent is entirely based on keeping a single on patrol nuclear missile sub at sea at all times).

The problem with that is that it pre-assumes that the potential aggressor interprets the situation accurately, and that he _cares_ . That is, that he is motived by what is usually called 'rational self interest'. I say 'called' because 'rational self interest' depends entirely on the underlying articles of faith that start the logic.

If the potential aggressor mistakenly believes he can strike fast enough to win, the deterrent effect disappears even if that belief is mistaken. The fact that the aggressor is dead too is cold comfort when the whole thing is over.

Likewise, if the motives of the aggressor are such that he's _ok_ with you wiping him out back, the deterrent effect disappears. There are certainly situations where that sort of thing has arisen, where hate is stronger than fear.

So yeah, if we could create a practical defense, that would be better than relying on deterrence. Deterrence is what you rely on when nothing else is available.

-------- Original Message --------
> On Monday, October 23, 2023 at 12:23:13 AM UTC-5, pete...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 9:23:57 PM UTC-4, Johnny1A wrote:
>>> On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:52:54 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>>> On Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 18:40:49 UTC+1, Johnny1A wrote:
>>>>> On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:20:16 PM UTC-5, Andrew McDowell wrote:
>>>>>> I haven't bought or read this book, but I have listened to a couple of podcasts pushing it. The one on "Newt's World", with Newt Gingrich, is pretty good, perhaps because Ginrich also claims to be a futurist, thanks to his book "Window of Opportunity" (with David Drake).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The thesis is that since the 1970s innovation has been hampered because people believe that technology can do nothing right, and government regulation nothing wrong. Nuclear power is proposed as a striking example of this, and here I agree with them. I think I have found an example, though, where extrapolating growth trends did not predict the future, but neither stagnation nor government opposition can be blamed. The F-35 is inferior to the F-14 in theoretical range, top speed, and altitude ceiling. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a far more effective warplane for its intended role.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I also wonder about cause and effect. How many academics would be turning themselves into political campaigners or explaining why we must follow their ethical codes for responsible use of technology, if they thought they could expend an equivalent investment of time and effort and, in return, have even a slim chance of inventing the Warp Drive?
>>>>> It wouldn't matter. The cultural reasons for the radicalization of academia (and to a lesser extent, the radicalization and alienation of the 'intellectual class' generally) have deep roots, and those roots go back to the 19C. (Actually, they go back to the French Revolution.) A warp drive, from their POV, would just make this worse by enabling the West to expand.
>>>>>
>>>>> The cold fact is that technological progress has slowed enormously over the last half century, compared to the period from, say, 1700 to 1950. It's still fast by historical standards, but compared to the rapid pace of the 1800-1950 period, the period that saw daily life from horseback to trains to cars to planes to spacecraft, that saw the world shrink in terms of communication speed from years wide to zero size, that saw weaponry grow from single-shot rifles to atomic bombs, the current pace is plodding. I laugh when I hear young people today talk about how current tech has changed everything and their elders can't keep up. In their great-grandparents' time, the same people who travelled as youths from St. Louis to California by wagon train, taking months to do it and praying they'd reach Independence Rock by July 4, _flew_ across the same trip in a few hours in late life. People who were adults when the fastest way to send a message was a special rider on a horse lived to make trans-continental and inter-continental life phone calls. Men who fought in the U.S. Civil War lived to see Hiroshima. _That_ was rapid technological change.
>>>>>
>>>>> It's true that the Western elite class is alienated from their own culture and roots, and some of them are reflexively anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-Western generally, but that's not why technical change has slowed.
>>>> For how long have you owned a pocket videophone?
>>>> Does yours include an artificial intelligence yet?
>>>>
>>>> And (some) cars can drive themselves pretty well
>>>> if they were allowed to, but they're not. And yet
>>>> self-piloting delivery air-drones abound.
>>> Refinements on old technology. They don't change daily life or the shape of society in anything like the way the big developments did.
>>>
>>> Telephones date back over a century, the telegraph further, they represented the advent of (effectively) _instantaneous communication_. That was the _BIG_ development, in terms of communications it shrank the world from being years wide, down to zero size, almost overnight. Subsequent developments are refinements of that, and shrinking in importance with time. Phones were a huge advance over telegraphy by permitting actual conversation. Radio made it possible, in principle, to do it from anywhere to anywhere on Earth. Television was a huge social change, arguably as big as radio had been. Video telephony has been possible for decades, it just wasn't widely desired. Being able to carry your phone around with you is a huge convenience, but still not a big development compared to the original Big Change from a century ago, or even the advent of radio.
>>>
>>> Cars go back over a century. Self-driving is useful, or potentially so, but not life-changing or world-changing the way automobiles themselves were in the early 20C. You could hire a chaffeur to get most of the same result, after all, even a century ago.
>>>
>>> AI is not AI, not in the same sense that Moravec and Goode meant back half a century ago. One of the people in the field has been urging people to drop the 'AI' terminology entirely because it's misleading, we're talking about things like 'large language models', there's no actual intelligence involved. But the hype machine loves pretending that we're talking about R2D2.
>> When I was a kid, long distance telephone calls required booking a call ahead of time, and then rushing your call to Grandma on the other coast because of the per-minute expense. Today I can make a video call to my sister on another continent using WhatsApp for more or less free. That's an advance.
>>
>> Pt
>
> Undoubtedly. So is the convenience of the having your phone with you all the time, the other features bound up into the swiss army knife that is a smartphone, etc. But none of them are fundamental, society-changing advances. They're _refinements_.
>
> Try to put yourself in the position of someone who was born before the telegraph. Communication meant sending a letter by horse, or ship. Very rarely, under special circumstances, it might mean signal flashes using mirrors, or smoke signals. To send a message of any sort further than shouting or smoke signal distance necessarily meant sending a messenger in some form, or occasionally a pigeon or something.
>
> A town _twenty miles away_ could be messaged in one day, IF it was urgent enough to justify the cost of a rider and exhausting the horses. Further than that and the message automatically took much longer. Moreover, it had _always been that way_ , throughout human history.
>
> Then, in rather less than the course of one lifetime, it became possible to communicate instantaneously across tens, then hundreds, then thousands of miles, then across _oceans_ . Then came the telephone, and not only could a message be sent that fast, but personal conversation over global distances became possible. Yeah, it wasn't always convenient, or cheap, but it was a _radical_ change, a world-shaking change, over all previous history, and it happened over the course of one adult lifetime. Radio was a lesser change, but it in turn opened up the _possibility_ of 'anywhere to anywhere' instantaneous communications. Television was another big change, as big as radio in terms of impact, probably. Subsequent advances certainly happened, but they are refinements on those big changes.
>
> I'm not sure moderns are psychologically capable of fully grasping the impact of the technological changes of the 19C and early 20C on people who could remember the previous world. Nothing in our experiences matches it.
>
>
>

When the telephone was invented to carry voice all the "bosses" said,
"No. We need something in WRITING!"

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