Technology doesn't work that way - SamuelA's Pit Thread

The BBQ Pit
141

Well, yeah. Technically though even fuzzy measurements can be used to reduce the drift from dead reckoning through, using some fairly complex to work through math. And obviously a satellite fix from a drone sub would be quite accurate and torpedoes work and are basically guided drone subs, so I wouldn’t want to sit here and claim “reality” is in the way. It’s just too expensive.

And no, lots of things don’t work as a concept. Faster than light travel doesn’t work. No known mechanism of physics lets you do it, and if it were possible, time travel would be, and that also doesn’t work out conceptually or otherwise. And even then, if you take it a step further, if FTL travel were possible and there was no true upper speed limit, we should be up to our necks wading through all the alien tourists who have filled our skies with self replicating machinery.

142

Consistently wrong but never in doubt, eh Sam?

JFC, you are one seriously boring asshole.

143

That’s how the friendly skies filled up with all those damn RJs? I knew those RJs were alien bots.

144

why would anyone want that?

seriously?

you can’t stop senescence. you might extend your lifespan via various means, but you’re still going to end up feeble and demented.

I would much rather drop dead cleanly at 60 than live to 100 after 30 years unable to care for myself.

and I’m not really interested in these bullshit wishy-washy mealy mouthed “discussions” about how immortality is possible so long as we ignore all of those impossible things immortality relies upon.

it ain’t gonna happen, and there ain’t one damn person on this planet important enough to deserve it.

145

You old man. You past 50 winters. You all washed up, never be a hunter again. Don’t tell me about things like “glasses” and “anabolic steroids”, it’s impossible. Me certain, me village chief, me live many seasons.

146

And senescence? It is a property of the universe set by sky daddy. Don’t tell me you could just culture my cells, reset their clocks back to zero, then grow them back into functional organs. That is impossible, space wizard stuff. Wake Forest Medical school hasn’t gotten prototype printed organs to work.

147

How is it any more impossible than the crap you’ve been peddling?

148

Ah, makes me remember a The Futurist Magazine I read back in the late 80’s that was insisting that all heavy manufacturing would move to Earth Orbit by the year 2000.

Seriously.

Like, "Wow, you really didn’t think that through, did you. Millions of tons of materials have to go to orbit - along with millions of workers - everyday? And then back down?

And we’ll have this in less than 15 years?"

149

Because it’s real? Google it. Of course it’s not ready for prime time, like any really promising biomed, but the idea works. Hundreds of experiments have been performed where it has been shown you can reset adult, “senescent” cells back to past states. If you get the growth factors right, you can move them forward down a particular differentiation path.

Your cells that are “old” are only old because a computer program written in base-4 (with some extra tags and forms of memory) has a high value in a counter*. If you set that counter to zero again, the cells will act “young” again. It’s damn hard to do this for a lot of reasons, but this is essentially our best hypothesis about reality. The reason you age and die isn’t because your cells are doing their best, it’s because they are sabotaged right in their source code.

Why the fuck do you think dogs and cats get basically the same diseases as humans in a mere decade or 2 instead of needing 60-80 years to hit that point? Moron.

And to the mouth breather above : I have never said anything about any of this shit happening in “15 years” or any of that bullshit. I mentioned robotic movement maybe being superhuman in 10 years…it’s basically superhuman already. All I have ever said is that this is where the trends are going and we really should be actively pushing them harder.

*it’s not 1 counter, that hypothesis has been disproven, but the cells do have a state and that state can be reset.

150

You said it doesn’t work and it won’t work.
Such a turnaround in an hour.

151

Sam, what follows is a serious suggestion.

I was a CS major too. Although my Masters was in business, not more CS.

CS is probably the most artificial form of engineering. The systems we rely upon, our raw materials if you will, have their challenges. But they don’t have nearly the complexities and inhomogeneities of things like actual steel beams or actual concrete. Which differ significantly from idealized beams of idealized steel.

To a CS-trained mind, the world is not only more complex than we understand, it’s more complex than we can understand. We, the CS gurus, lose our ability to recognize all the ways in which the messy substrates of the real world are not nearly so tractable as the clean, simple, and manmade substrate of pure math & logic. We spend so much time succeeding at managing spherical cows to good effect that we forget about the messy reality of real flesh-and-blood cows.

It’s a common failing of CS people. But it can be worked past.

I have no real education in biology or chemistry beyond 101-level classes. I’ve read a lot of layman’s materials and people tell my I’ve got a hell of a memory, but I don’t have any real expertise in these areas.

Some years ago I stumbled on this blog. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/12/18/genetic-variation-gets-more-real-all-the-time

Turns out the guy is real famous in his field as the elder statesman of bloggers who’ve got something smart to say about a pretty deep topic. He’s a medicinal chemist, a guy who searches for and perfects medicines. I’ve read every post of his for the last 8 years. Along the way I’ve learned a great deal about the big picture of chemistry, biochemistry, cellular biology and organism biology.

He has slowly taught me that our current understanding of cellular & organism-level biology is on a par with primitive tribes’ understanding of physics. It’s not dead wrong, but there’s vast tracts of pure guesswork and areas where we can’t tell first order effects from 4th order effects. As well as vast areas we don’t even know exist.

What makes him magic is that beyond his PhD and his 30+ years in the industry doing cutting edge stuff there’s a deep-seated humility and a total absence of boosterism and hucksterism. We know more than did the witch doctors baying at the Moon. But not *that *much more versus how deep this stuff really is. We’ve barely scratched the surface of understanding how any of this stuff really works.

Try reading him for a bit. Follow the links back to earlier articles. Learn how much we know that we don’t know. Which supports the reasonable estimate that the unknown unknowns are far larger yet.
IMO there’s not much difference between something that’s impossible as a matter of physics and something that’s impossible as a matter of engineering we won’t have for another 5000 years. I recognize that logically those are polar opposites: one impossible, the other possible. But practically they amount to the same thing. 100% of any effort spent today in that direction is waste and distraction from more practical things that are just beyond our grasp. That’s where scientists and engineers live and work: just beyond our current grasp.

Ultimately, thinking and debating about humanities’ tech in 5000 years is sterile. The noise so far outweighs the signal as to be pointless. All it leads to is people pointing fingers and stamping their feet.
As you almost said, the Universe is an existence proof for a way to make a universe. And biology is an existence proof for nanotech. But to jump from there to a) humans will master that tech; and further that b) we, or one of our AI tools, will do it soon is hubris. Nothing but hubris.

Dunning-Kruger is real. The greater one’s expertise, the more they recognize the limitations to their knowledge and skill. Their awareness of those unknown unknowns grows ever larger. There is wisdom in the intellectual humility that flows from that understanding. Reductionism is the blithe statement that either there are no unknown unknowns, or they don’t matter. Either of those POVs are foolish.

I think you’re probably smarter than that. What you are not yet, is disciplined enough to act on those smarts.

152

He’s got a great imagination, and with a little work, and some research, he could end up being a great Sci-Fi writer. Seriously Sam, go take some writing classes, a little effort here and you might do it.

153

Izzat what we got here, some young punk with a brain who thinks he’s accumulated all the knowledge and knows everything while the rest of us who may have passed through that brief stage in high school or college as well are morons to the last man?

Take a number kid, you ain’t all that.

154

One post is sarcasm. Tell me which one if you want me to continue reading your posts.

155

Choose carefully, running coach. The stakes are high.

156

Do you need help figuring out how the “Ignore” function works?

157

You realize that what you are talking about there are terms where some of them nearly infinitely times harder than others.

I don’t know how the universe was made and it might require things that don’t exist inside the universe itself or can be manipulated in any way. I did mention it was far fetched.

Believe it or not, most of my ideas do not require nanotech. Self replicating factories don’t need it. And the AI I’ve talked about in my posts in the last 6 months isn’t the sci fi concept of AI. We’re not talking about machines that can even carry on a conversation, they are just big mathematical algorithms that explore a solution space and choose the min( possible paths ). They use other algorithms, also capable of automatic adjustment, to actually model the world and classify what is in it.

Such algorithms could control a robot to efficiently perform any repetitive factory task. But they could also scale to controlling a robot that can actually build a rube goldberg machine to solve a defined task, and later to automated designs that are as good as human engineers.

Oceans of money are flowing in this direction. The difference between now and “then” (none of these algorithms are new) is that quantity matters. It’s a different world when billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people are working on AI vs millions of dollars and dozens of people in elite computer science labs are working on AI.

It may take decades to go from “we know the tech can do it, it does scale far enough” (present state) to “basically all factories, mines, farms, retail stores, warehouses, and cars and trucks can be automated, with commercial off the shelf products existing for all tasks”.

And as I mention, once you hit that point, you could dip into nanotech or mass biological research and hit the problem with a million times current capabilities. Instead of a few greying PhDs like your favorite blogger, working semi-independently, you’d study the problem on a colossal scale using a lot of new tools.

So it’s not going to take 5000 years. It can’t. This would be like you saying that a flight around the world is going to always take 2 years in the air. Distance and time don’t add up and your estimate is so far off it’s silly. With that said, no I can’t say exactly when, and I do not know what the social outcomes will be in a world where every job can be automated. The current system of capitalism, working exactly as it has worked for centuries, would reward only those who own robots and land and give not a penny to any of the displaced human workers. Those same rich owners can then bribe the government, since that’s allowed in the United States in practice, to make sure only the most meager and grudging forms of social support are given to all those lazy “takers” who can’t seem to find a job because all their skills are tasks a machine can do better.

158

You really get a kick out of that one, huh. “This guy thinks he’s smart yet he can’t even find a small text button in the UI visible from a certain screen on his 4k monitor. He must be a moron, I can’t be the moron.”

Totally logical reasoning there. And I only put the deserving on my ignore list, which currently has just 2 entries. Though it may be about 5 soon, given there are several posters in this thread who are just wasting space.

I don’t mind being argued with. I like being reasoned with. I don’t like being blithely dismissed in 1 sentence or called a crackpot when most of what I am posting you can just read about in scientific american yourself…

159

Stealth brag!!!

Pretty pathetic, actually.

160

You *really *don’t grasp the concept of a pit thread, do you, you condescending, patronizing, self-aggrandizing delusional racist asshole?