8,975 words.
Only two pages? :dubious: Maybe on quarto-size pages in 6-point pica type with 1mm margins?
Anyhow, this is not saying “cool story, bro,” this is commenting that it was a fine piece of speculative fiction. I enjoyed it.
Example that exist now:
Tractors that drive themselves and disperse seed/fertilizer and harvest according to GIS and sometime forecasted weather data.
Dairy cows now have self-service parlors where they enter a stall and are milked according to the cow’s schedule. According to the seller of these systems, the cows seem to like them. The system weighs the cow and checks for signs of infection or other problems. When the cow goes into the stall, a robotic arm does everything (clean, seat the suction cups, remove them, clean again and provide cream). Cows have 24/7 access to the parlor. Some like being milked twice a day, others like it 3 or 4 times a day. Now, they can do what works best for them.
Calves are also on individualized feeding systems that provides feeding amounts according to the calf’s weight gain and other factors.
I’d like to point out to you that there are a few societies with long term collectivist organization. One of them is embedded in my society, and I see the fruits of their labours fairly often. This would be the Hutterites.
They are a four hundred years old sect, and the local farmer’s market is lousy with their turkeys, chickens, eggs, and garden produce. They also produce grain.
They have cell phones clipped to their belts, drive modern minivans, and any time I’ve gone into McDonalds, a few of them have been there. While they keep themselves apart, they are not really all that reclusive.
So they seem to live within their means, have a little bit extra, and produce much more than they consume. They undoubtedly have some funny ideas, but those don’t get in the way of a strong pragmatic streak.
Ironically they were chased out of Russia by the soviets who tore down their collective farms there.
You could argue that they haven’t achieved a full communist society, but so what? Nor has anyone build a successful pure capitalist one. They persist.
No this is not Marxism 101. Marx postulated that the factory workers would become impoverished as wealth was concentrated in the hands of the capitalists. But he never postulated that the proletarian workers would be utterly obsolete. He thought that workers were utterly essential, and it was the capitalists that were a barbaric vestige.
I’m not saying that capitalism will collapse under it’s own success. I’m saying that in a future of ubiquitous cheap automation the ownership of a factory won’t make you rich, because cheap automated factories will be commodity products. If you need to mass produce a bunch of goods for whatever reason you will be able to whip that shit up for dirt cheap. And so where does the profit for the factory owner come from? The guy who runs a fabrication center in the future can’t become rich, because the law of supply and demand apply to industrial production.
Increase the supply of industrial production to extreme unimagined limits, and the value of such production drops to the floor. Even if the total value of goods and services produced in the future is hundreds or thousands of times greater than what is produced in (checks watch) 2012, that doesn’t mean the guys who fabricate the junk are making vast fortunes. People might be making vast fortunes, but they will be people who are able to produce scarce goods and services. Automated industrial production will not be scarce in the future, it will be ubiquitous, and so no one will be able to become rich providing it.
This is capitalism 101. You need air to live, but Bill Gates can’t get rich selling air because air isn’t scarce.
Break down in terms of Moore’s Law beginning to reduce in slope, or break down in terms of Moore’s Law beginning to slope ever more steeply upward?
I’m not worried about what’s on “the other side” of the singularity. I’m worried about the transition period. The economic engine we have now and the cultural mores we have now are what drives our societies. The trend is toward large factories owned by a few wealthy corporations and their shareholders, producing widgets for everyone. Your “fab on demand” indicates you are thinking of everyone having a magic 3D printer that can synthesize anything out of dirt. I’ll believe that when and if I see it, though I do know 3D printing is here and will only get better. But that’s not where the trends are NOW, and frankly, I see the wealthy fighting the development and distribution of such technology tooth and nail.
What we are looking at is increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, who need fewer and fewer people to live wealthy lifestyles as productivity goes up dues to robotics and computer-enhanced productivity, and who do NOT need the hundreds of millions of people who currently clog up the US with their useless middle and lower class lifestyles.
The people making billions of dollars in the current economy are not people who own companies that own factories.
Who makes more money from an iPad, Apple or Foxconn? Apple doesn’t own the factories that make the computer chips, it doesn’t own the mines where copper and iron ore are dug out of the ground, it doesn’t own the foundries and mills where steel and aluminum are smelted, it doesn’t own fleets of container ships, it doesn’t own networks of thousands of wireless communication nodes, it doesn’t own any of the infrastructure that an iPad depends on.
When Apple wants to put together a widget, they look around at the dozens or hundreds of companies that own factories and production lines and hire the cheapest. The company that gets the contract to screw together iPad cases makes some money, but they don’t make much more money assembling iPads than they do assembling Happy Meal toys, because they are providing a commodity service.
Apple makes the vast bulk of the money from the iPads, and the company that assembles the iPads is in the position of the janitor that sweeps up in Cupertino and the barrista in the coffee shop downstairs. Yes, Apple needs a guy to sweep up and they need a guy to serve coffee. But they don’t pay the janitor or barrista a gigantic salary just because they are Apple and they need those services. And that is because they can find thousands of people to fill those jobs. Obviously, the Chinese factory worker with a screwdriver is in the same position as the barrista, he’s an expendable cog. But so is the whole factory. The Chinese screw-tightener is making commodity wages, but so is the foreman, the manager, and the CEO.
Sure, with the stipulation that the “small” class of human servants might run into the hundreds of millions worldwide.
I REALLY hope you are right about that.
Well a million customers, as opposed to 300 million, is still a LOT of customers.
I don’t know, what do the bankers who rigged the LIBOR exchange and the HSBC bankers that laundered money for Al Qaeda and the Mexican drug gangs DO for a living? Sheldon Adelson is the world’s richest bookie! Wealth is increasingly becoming an abstract thing. The hyper rich trillionaires will play their money gains and convince the rest of us that this constitutes ample reason that they should live in the lap of luxury when they should in fact be sitting in a jail cell.
Now a factory owner who only sells his goods to a few million people instead of billions or hundreds of millions is still a rich man. Richer than the people who work for him, and richer than the people who can’t afford his products. That’s all that counts. He will still have a private jet to fly to Paris or London or Rome at a moment’s notice. The ski lifts in his favorite resorts will be considerably less crowded! It won’t be so hard to get a table at his favorite restaurants any more. Servants … no problem! Beautiful young fucktoys from all the impoverished masses … pocket change! (This is already true for the wealthy, but in the future it will be true of the middle class as well as the wealthy, as was the case in Victorian England.)
No, from the viewpoint of the rich, a vastly deflated consumer economy is a good thing, because the luxuries they care about are more readily available. Whether their wealth constitutes xxxtrillion or xxxxbillion or xxxmillion is not important … it’s the lifestyle that matters.
No, as I’ve said elsewhere, the social democracies of Europe have much greater social cohesion and will probably find ways to include all their people in it, and all their people will as a result lead pretty damn fine lives, because they’ll be rich relative to the poor unwanted masses in the rest of the world. Plus they’ll probably constitute the largest market for goods and services, as I DON’T think the US will find a way to include its poor and middle class in the good times, largely thanks to our conservative and libertarian brethren, who will fight it tooth and nail, and unwittingly get the majority of THEMSELVES excluded too, as the increases in productivity exclude more and more people.
Africa and Asia will be HELLHOLES. Think Stalin and Mao. And Foxcomm.
No, the real route to wealth is clearly the finance sector, which as we’ve all seen, will do ANYTHING for money, even things that are clearly harmful to the societies they control/live in. But if you are a big enough industrialist to have money to invest, you will be part of the elite, never fear. Even the rich have SOME need for consumer goods, and their servants have even more.
You will never go broke betting against what people think the future will be.
I don’t fear a, or The, Singularity. As others have said, the evolution of tech is more like water rising to a boil over time, while we float in it. I fear a scenario where we, as individuals and collective groups, get so much value from the Internet, social media, immersive games and other virtual realities that we substitute it for Reality to the point that we…lose touch. We spend our time as a Hive Mind with a tech underpinning, leveraging Big Data, crowdsourcing, and our online connectivity to slip the bounds of the Real World.
To me, that is the progression that follows from becoming agrarian, then urban/industrial and now Informational. There appear to be many good reasons for following this progression - we’ve followed it over the centuries because of the hardships it relieves and how it elevates an ever-larger % of humanity. But, as has been pointed out over the centuries, this progression creates a gulf between parts of who we are as animals. We can suppress it, domesticate it, but it never goes away. And just like your average suburban citizen would struggle if dropped into the wilderness, we’ll be that much more soft and fragile if we are fully immersed. At that point, tech may not have consciousness, but in some important way, we’ve crossed a line.
Jeez, I feel like some Thoreau fanboy Luddite reviewing this.
I have a* really* big monitor, ok? 
I realized after I posted that it is a good deal longer than that, but then I thought, “That is a lie I can get behind. Johanna will be 2 pages in and enjoying it before she realizes I sucker’d her.” Plus it was too late to edit.
Glad you liked it.
I’m familiar with quantum computing, and it looks interesting for some specific applications. It doesn’t seem to scale so far. I’d be surprised if it had any impact at all for the next 20 years. It is not on any real roadmap I’ve ever seen.
The expensive part of a robot is not the computer part. I bet the computer inside my Roomba is $10, tops. Bending metal is not subject to Moore’s Law. My point about people being cheaper is not something I made up - it is from a talk by engineers at a very big and well known company. I know the people personally, and they aren’t shitting us.
I am in no way saying that computing power is going to level off. Like I said, we’ve got some room left for process improvement, And we are doing other stuff, like more and more cores on a chip and even 3-d chips which improves speed by putting the cache closer. That is just beginning, but is quite hot.
I think there is just about zero chance that quantum computing will be productized by 2025, even if the technology does work. It is taking four or five years now for new process nodes to get production ready, and that is trivial compared to getting any kind of quantum computing of the scale we can do with silicon. And I gave a very good reason why we are running out of steam - you can’t make feature sizes less than one atom in width! When I was working at Bell Labs we had 1.25 micron technology. Now we have 20 nanometer. What do you get when you shrink it that much in the future?
But it really doesn’t matter for the purposes of this discussion, since, as I said, more computing power does not automatically get us to AI.
Absolutely. That’s why my forecast is that we will simulate a human brain to the point it shows consciousness long before we build a program from scratch which exhibits consciousness. I think that is possible - I just haven’t seen much progress. I think we’re more or less trying to fly to the moon by building an airplane with bigger wings and a better jet engine.
It is already reducing in slope, mostly due to economics and business conditions. All those who sink billions in new fabs want to have some time to get premium prices for the output. Since the number of fab owners has decreased so dramatically, there is less competitive pressure to push the technology as fast as before.
I don’t know. Intel is still doing okay.
You are confusing fabs with assembly factories. Foxconn, an assembly factory, is low cost, since with some decent machinery it doesn’t take a lot to assemble an iPad. In fact they are almost certainly designed to be easy and cheap to assemble. The people who run fabs, however, make a lot more than line workers at Foxconn, since getting the process right is not so simple. There aren’t a lot of them, since it has to be far more automated, but they are well paid.
Intel owns its own factories, and gets tremendous competitive advantage from doing so.
And, your average Somali peasant can afford this? You were talking about automating all of agriculture, right, not just in high wage places like the US.
So in other words, you’re not working directly on quantum computing. I don’t think either one of us is in a position to guess whether it will fail or succeed right now, we just don’t have enough information. So that’s an open question.
As far as faster computers not equaling AI, sure. However, even now, AI computers can learn. Faster computers will be able to learn faster. And guess what? You only have to teach ONE computer how to be a bus driver, or pilot, or farmer, etc… The FIRST computer can simply relay all its knowledge to other computers, after it has learned a particular skill.
I made no prediction about whether quantum computing will work. I did make a prediction about when quantum computing would be available, even in a best case scenario. Are you familiar with the issues involved with productizing a technology that works in the lab? I’ve seen lots of technologies succeed, and lots of promising technologies fail (like asynchronous circuits.) No one is even looking at the issues that would need to be solved to make this a widespread technology - not surprising, given its state.
I’m reading a book on the IAS computer, from the early 1950s, and they were saying exactly what you just said - about 60 years ago. There are certain applications where learning works really well, such as Samuels’ checker playing program. But we don’t learn from a blank slate. Anyone who has had a baby knows that they have a built-in sense of the world, a sense that develops without training.
I think I mentioned the 386. Your microwave has more computing power than existed in the world when the first proposals for learning were done. Throwing more CPU cycles at this problem isn’t going to help.
Those advancements right now are expensive, but the price will come down. The driving force behind them is to (a) maximize production and (b) adapt to a shrinking labor force.
From an Aug 2011 article on Somalia’s Farmland: http://www.somaliareport.com/index.php/post/1378/Somalias_Farmland_at_Risk
Eventually someone will rebuild the irrigation system. IF a large ag business decides that it can maintain control of the area, what will stop them from acquiring these farmlands the same way as they’re buying up US farmlands? Automated tractors are wonderful in massive mono-culture situations.
ROFL I agree that computers aren’t born with common sense, but you are just wrong wrong wrong about computing speed not making up for that.
Bots that chat with people online have been around for a while. If you had several million people chatting online with a particular bot for a few minutes a day, and let the bot learn cumulatively from all those chats (and made sure the people were sincere, and not trying to troll the bot too much in the beginning), I feel fairly sure that the bot could learn to convincingly imitate common sense pretty quickly.
It’s not that much different from teaching, say, an extremely autistic (but very intelligent) person how to interact with others. It doesn’t come naturally, but through rote learning of facial expression, body language, tone of voice, etc., even a strongly autistic person can learn how to interact at least semi-normally.