We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
Charlie Stross writes great science fiction and a blog which usually leaves me wondering how I can enjoy so much the novels of a man with whom I agree so little. In a recent post he linked to an article by UCSD associate professor of physics Tom Murphy to explain why space colonisation will not happen. Since the site is called “Do the Math” I was expecting some numerical analysis of space colonisation. Instead the article contains lots of reasons why space travel is hard and slow and requires lots of energy and is not likely to be done much more by NASA, but nothing that suggests it violates the laws of physics.
I like physicists. They do real science that gets answers from proper observations. So I was a bit disappointed by the space article and went in search of goodness. There must be some good insight that a physicist like Murphy can offer.
He analyses the growth of energy consumption. Since 1650, total energy usage of the United States has increased by about a factor of 10 every 100 years. If energy production continues to accelerate at this rate, we’ll heat the atmosphere to 100C in 450 years. Murphy is not saying this will happen, he is saying that there is a limit to how much energy we will want to produce. So far so good. But how much energy can a person use? Why does it matter?
Once we appreciate that physical growth must one day cease (or reverse), we can come to realize that all economic growth must similarly end. This last point may be hard to swallow, given our ability to innovate, improve efficiency, etc. But this topic will be put off for another post.
So this is to be a Limits To Growth argument. In this other post Murphy talks a lot about the limits to how energy efficient things can be. He is right that it will always take a certain amount of energy to heat food, for example, and that there are processes that can not be improved beyond physical limits. But he seems unable to imagine economic growth without growing use of energy. Doing the same task with half the energy, something that is a routine advance in computing technology, is economic growth. Murphy admits this, but gets hung up on the fact that these other things can not improve. This is a problem, because
As long as these physically-bounded activities comprise a finite portion of our portfolio, no amount of gadget refinement will allow indefinite economic growth. If it did, eventually economic activity would be wholly dominated by us “servicing” each other, and not the physical “stuff.”
To which I say: what is wrong with that? Here is what Murphy thinks is wrong with that, and here we get to what may be his fundamental error:
The important result is that trying to maintain a growth economy in a world of tapering raw energy growth (perhaps accompanied by leveling population) and diminishing gains from efficiency improvements would require the “other” category of activity to eventually dominate the economy. This would mean that an increasingly small fraction of economic activity would depend heavily on energy, so that food production, manufacturing, transportation, etc. would be relegated to economic insignificance. Activities like selling and buying existing houses, financial transactions, innovations (including new ways to move money around), fashion, and psychotherapy will be effectively all that’s left. Consequently, the price of food, energy, and manufacturing would drop to negligible levels relative to the fluffy stuff. And is this realistic—that a vital resource at its physical limit gets arbitrarily cheap? Bizarre.
This scenario has many problems. For instance, if food production shrinks to 1% of our economy, while staying at a comparable absolute scale as it is today (we must eat, after all), then food is effectively very cheap relative to the paychecks that let us enjoy the fruits of the broader economy. This would mean that farmers’ wages would sink far lower than they are today relative to other members of society, so they could not enjoy the innovations and improvements the rest of us can pay for.
The first paragraph simply lacks imagination, but the second one is almost unforgivable. Food production has already gone from being nearly 100% of the economy to a much smaller proportion of it. Are farmers poorer as a result? Of course not. There are fewer of them and each one produces food for more people. This is how food has got cheaper in the first place. A human body needs 100 Watts to work. We could completely automate food production using some multiple of 100 Watts per person which is only a small proportion of each person’s energy budget, and there is your almost free food. With this kind of material abundance economic activity can be completely intellectual, no problem at all.
Can growth continue forever after that? It is possible that we will hit some limit of how much computation, and therefore intellectual activity, can be done with the available energy. Ray Kurzweil has tried to calculate the physical limits of computation and his answers are in units of how many entire civilisations can be simulated per second. So the limits are quite high.
This is Murphy’s other error. He writes, “I am unsettled by my growing concerns about the viability of our future”. In response to these concerns he proposes abandoning growth, not having kids and not eating meat. But he has gone the wrong way. He calculates that there are limits and is afraid of attempting to reach them. If you flip the argument around, what physics tells us is just how much wealth is possible. I have already described how material abundance can be had for very little energy. There is plenty of energy for a much larger population to live a much longer life with no material concerns and as much entertainment and intellectual stimulation as a person could want. Perhaps Murphy knows this, and it is the source of his cognitive dissonance when he writes, “such worrying is not consistent with who I am.”
The Padfone is supposedly going to be available in April and now has a keyboard attachment too. There’s a good chance I will buy one.
The point of the Padfone is that it is a mobile phone, a tablet, and a regular computer with a regular keyboard, all in one big clutch of stuff. It has just the one “brain” so to speak, and it is all in the phone. When you want the tablet or the computer to power up, you stick the phone inside the tablet, and the phone does everything from in there.
This is what it all now consists of:
And this is how the phone goes into the back of the screen:
And here is video of the(se) thing(s), being demonstrated by someone who knows his way around it/them.
Also prompted by Rob Fisher, I did a posting here about this same gadget last July, when it was merely due Real Soon Now. I am especially proud of this bit of commenting on that from me (which follows on from a bit about how Apple kit (such as my Apple keyboard which I use with my otherwise totally PC PC – which still works absolutely fine) just works more nicely:
And I am starting to love Asus in a similar, and yet also completely opposite, way. They too are now setting new standards. Not in the sense that their stuff works, the way Apple stuff works. It doesn’t. But, it does work, as a specification. Their stuff says to everyone else: this is what you now have to make work, and this is what you have to charge for it. Look at all the people blogging about this, and even pre-ordering it, poor fools. This is the next Thing, people. Just do it.
Not every commenter agreed that this Padfone idea was a runner. Many thought the demand just would not be there for this new set of toys, and some who did think the idea a good one doubted whether the Asus version would be a success. We shall soon be finding out who was right.
Personally I love the idea, but have my doubts about Asus making it work well (based on bad experiences with the Asus Eee-PC). If I am wrong, and this spec doesn’t catch on, it will be Asus and their immitators who lose money, not me. If only the world’s financial system could work this well.
If this set of toys, or some set very like it, does catch on, my non-geek sense is that this will maybe represent a huge breakthrough for Google and their Android operating system, because Android was all along designed with this kind of integrated all-in-one system in mind? Yes? Maybe: no. What do I know? But, comments on that last point in particular would be much appreciated.
The other day I wrote a slightly lighthearted short item about the use of drones (in this case, by civilians). But it is clear that the use of these things, such as by the Coalition forces in the Middle East, for example, or by other agencies of states and private entities, raises a number of important ethical, military and related points. Over at the Cato Institute, there is an interesting collection of articles on this matter, which I recommend if you have the time to go through them.
An issue that bothers me, although it is not clear what the solution is, is when terrorist forces get their hands on such things and put WMDs in them. We cannot just assume that this is the stuff of Hollywood movies – the threat must be plausible in the not-so-distant future and I imagine and hope that our own defence forces are thinking about what to do about it. Another serious worry is that if we can send thousands of remotely controlled aircraft or sea vessels and destroy targets without putting our own humans in danger, that might encourage governments to get increasingly arrogant and reckless in the projection of force. (Think of how British forces thought they could easily control most of Africa via the Maxim gun, only to find how this technology would eventually be thrown at them in the First World War).
And this book, Wired For War, is an eye-popping tour around the use of modern technology and how it will effect warfare, including issues surrounding non-state actors. But remember, before getting nightmares, that the impact of this new tech will not, in terms of its impact, be necessarily any more severe than say the development of the muzzle-loading gun, the ironclad warship or the helicopter. And principles of self defence and the need to stand up to bullies while having the humility to realise the limits of state action, are unchanged.
“By now many will have seen the news stories reporting how an animal rights group sent up a small drone with cameras attached to take video of a group of hunters out on a pigeon shoot. The hunters responded to the drone by shooting it down.”
Classic. The author of this item, Kenneth Anderson, goes on to consider some of the legal issues posed by the use of drones not just by the military and law enforcement bodies, but private civilians.
I want one. And you can buy them on the internet. One such drone gets checked out by Technology Review.
“The late Douglas Adams once said that any technology that exists when you are born is a normal part of the world; anything invented before you turn 35 is exciting and creative; and anything invented after you turn 35 is against the natural order of things . It’s not a new development: Socrates warned against learning to write, saying it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories”.
– Tom Chivers, knocking down some lazy assumptions about video games, an issue that sometimes comes up as a target by today’s puritans.
The subject gives me an excuse to re-recommend this book by Gerard Jones, now a few years’ old, that argues that a lot of video games, including violent ones, are a healthy thing for children to play.
“Each example of information technology starts out with early-adoption versions that do not work very well and that are unaffordable except by the elite. Subsequently the technology works a bit better and becomes merely expensive. Then it works quite well and becomes inexpensive. Finally it works extremely well and is almost free. The cell phone, for example, is somewhere between the last two stages. Consider that a decade ago if a character in a movie took out a portable telephone, this was an indication that this person must be very wealthy, powerful, or both. Yet there are societies around the world in which the majority of the population were farming with their hands two decades ago and now have thriving information-based economies with widespread use of cell phones (for example, Asian societies, including rural areas of China).”
I like this point about agriculture at the end. A few years ago, my father, a retired farmer, showed me a satellite photograph that had been taken of our family farm, and provided by his agronomist consultant, showing which parts of a field needed more fertiliser, had better soil conditions and drainage, and so on. In two generations, the Suffolk farm had gone from a process where it took the whole of late July to late September, with 20 people, to get in the harvest, to just two guys using a massive John Deere combine harvester, some big trucks to carry the grain, and a state-of-the-art grain store with drying, filtering and cleaning equipment. And we just take it for granted that this level of technological change has happened, and is possible. So we should perhaps not be so despondent about the future.
There are all kinds of useful links on the Web to such satellite links of farmland, as well as other categories for business and scientific use. Here is the ResMap site, for instance. The Economist has a short item on the agricultural uses of space technology.
“….here’s the problem with the comparison between creationism and climate skepticism. Evolution is a scientific theory. It is the one that best fits all of the available evidence. There is also a creationist theory that fits all the evidence: God did it, complete with evidence that evolution occurred. The problem with the latter theory is that, while it might be true, in some sense, it is not scientific, because it isn’t falsifiable. “Intelligent design” also isn’t a scientific theory — it’s merely a critique of one. And hence, it does not belong in a science class, except as an example to illustrate what is science and what is not. If people want to challenge the theory of evolution, they have to come up with an alternative one that is testable, and to date, they have failed to do so.”
“In contrast, even accepting for the sake of the argument that the planet is really warming abnormally (despite the cooling trend of the past decade), there are numerous scientifically testable alternative theories to explain this, which is why AGW skeptics “are better able to get their message across in the mainstream media than creationism supporters.” In fact, as has been pointed out on numerous occasions over the past several years, belief in AGW has taken on the aspects of a religion itself, complete with sin, a corrupt priesthood, indulgences for the rich to buy absolution and into green heaven, and the persecution of heretics.”
I could not agree more. I have nothing against people who contest evolution and Darwin’s ideas, but it is odd to conflate a skeptic about man-made global warming (where the evidence is far from settled) with someone who thinks that life on Earth was brought about by a Supreme Being.
And here is Simberg’s signoff:
“I have a modest proposal. Instead of promulgating either the Christian religion, or the Green religion in our science classes, let’s get teachers who actually have degrees in science (as opposed to “education”), so they don’t need “teaching materials,” and teach kids how to do math (including statistics), think critically, and actually formulate testable and falsifiable hypotheses and test them, so that they will be inoculated to all religions, when it comes to learning science.”
And this surely is the key. If we want people to learn science, a crucial thing is that it involves understanding the scientific method in all its rigour and painstaking discipline.
Brian Micklethwait recently, on a similar topic, asked the question of how much it really matters if people believe that the Earth and life on it were created rather than evolved. It is a good question.
I really liked that first Madsen Pirie short economics video, about the subjectivity of value, flagged up here. Now number 2 has emerged, on the closely related topic of price control. I happened upon this second video here, which would suggest that these things are getting around and being noticed. They should.
The short video lecture is the perfect medium for Madsen. Many is the time that I have had a short lecture on this or that topic bestowed upon me, by Madsen in person. From most others this would be intolerable. From him, it was welcome, because you had the feeling he had really thought it through, having bestowed it also on many others, each time slightly better. He has been working on these little videos for years, maybe realising it, maybe not. Almost always, when technologically enhanced things emerge that are really good, the person doing them has been doing them for quite a while by hand, as it were, before the technology came along to make the thing even better.
If the rest of these little videos are as good as the first two, they could add up to a classic set.
I recently had one of those eye opening web surfing sessions where I find lots of new awesome stuff to explore. I was checking up on the progress of Raspberry Pi, itself a very exciting project to make and sell an ARM-based PC board for $35. They say:
We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere; we actively encourage other companies to clone what we’re doing. We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children. We think that 2012 is going to be a very exciting year.
I saw a video of a demo of Raspberry Pi running XMBC, which is open source media centre software designed to run on a PC connected to your TV and display all your photos and videos and play your music. During the demo, a movie is played and I happened to catch the title “Peach Open Movie Project”, which caught my attention.
It turns out that this is a short animated film made by the Blender Institute. Blender is open source computer animation and 3D design software. The Blender Institute in Amsterdam funds Blender related projects. For the past few years they have been making a short film each year. Peach was the codename for what became Big Buck Bunny. The film is completely open, Creative Commons licensed, and you can buy the DVD with all the assets, 3D models, scripts and tutorial videos showing you how to do all this stuff yourself. It strikes me that if you are a motivated teenager who wants to get into 3D animation your life is vastly better than it would have been 5 years ago in terms of the wealth of information available to you.
So far there are three Blender Institute movies and a computer game. My favourite is Sintel, a bittersweet fantasy about a girl and her dragon. Currently the Blender people are working on a fourth movie: project Mango. This is a “VFX-based” movie, which I take to mean real actors and filmography composited with 3D computer graphics. Blender can do camera and object tracking, so you get things like digital makeup and augmented reality. One of the main aims of these projects is to improve the Blender software, so at the end of each one, Blender is better; the free tools for making movies are better.
One of the guys working on project Mango is Ian Hubert who makes the sort of SF art that I love. He made a short film called Dynamo in his spare time, and is working on another independent, no budget movie called Project London that is made by compositing 3D digital elements onto live action. His showreel is particularly impressive.
If you look at the quality of these projects as compared to a big Hollywood movie like Avatar you will find that the gap is not so wide; certainly it is less wide than the same gap measured a few years ago. All this is being done using freely available tools that are getting better all the time. These tools and these projects may be offshoots of commercial projects or spare time projects, but now they exist the next iteration of artwork done with them will be better. We are all richer as a result and none of this is going away. It is one small aspect of economic growth that is very visible.
It is possible to get a sense of a what a lot more growth would bring: an economy where the essentials are cheap enough to leave us with even more time to work on projects like these; whether making movies or developing circuit boards or designs to be 3D printed.
Now consider this comment left on Eric Raymond’s post about SOPA. Shenpen is talking about the problem of software and movie piracy and how the business models are flawed. The problem, he says, is that music is not scarce.
So the long-term answer is much more simple: selling non-scarce things is going to be stop being a for-profit business in any form whatsoever.
Take music. There will be no profits. There will be no music industry. And most musicians will not be able to make a living out of it. It will stop being a viable business model and a way to make a living altogether. Sure, some musicians will make a living out of fundraisings, advertisements and live performances, but it no longer will be a reliable way to make a living.
Is it wrong – how? The profit motive is great for a lot of things and not so great for a lot of other things. Some things – like sex – are best given for free. Take away the commercial motive and what you get is a lot better music. Sure, musicians will often have to work a day job and thus have less energy to invest in making music. This will reduce quantity – so what? As for quality, I think that will counterweighted by that then they won’t invest their energy into making plastic crap but genuinely good stuff, stuff they themselves would want to listen to, stuf they want to remembered for. When money gets out of the picture, artists often discover they have better tastes than formerly thought.
Why do we have to limit our imagination to the way these things are being done now? Record sales, movie sales etc. did not exist 150 years ago, why should they exist in 50 years from now? Time for some innovation.
This kind of innovation is just what we are seeing. Anyone can make a feature film or record an album and put it on the Internet. As the tools improve, so does the quality of the work done. It would be nice to make a living out of movies and music, but if the cost of living is low enough, and with freely available tools, high quality movies and music will be made even if it is not possible.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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