The Manhattan Project Fallacy
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The Central Arizona Project and the Navajo Generating Station are my favorite examples of this. The Navajo Generating Station is a giant coal-fired power plant, which provides energy used primarily to pump water up into Arizona. The station substantially degrades air quality in the surrounding areas, and the water that is "stolen" from the Colorado is a part of the West's growing water concerns. Right now, there are two sides to the issue: those who think it is worth the cost to bring water to Arizona, and those who believe the environmental issues are too big. We could solve that like a social problem, using politics and ethics to try to make the decision... or we could just get on making energy cheap and clean, and suddenly a huge part of the cost disappears. If there was no fly ash issue, no NOx issue, no CO2 issue, then we're back to just worrying about the water flow. But if we have cheap energy, desalination suddenly looks a lot more palatable, which would reduce a lot of water pressures in the US. Los Angeles could switch to 100% desal water and the Colorado river would have a surplus of water again.
Cheap (and preferably clean) energy, solving climate change, and cheap access to space (this one is more dubious) would all broadly boost the quality of life for humanity.
This is the difficulty.
Right now, the only cheap and clean energy somewhat on the horizon is fusion, which is 50 years in the future for the past 50 years.
Theoretically, we can put CO2 back in the bottle. Practically, we can do it now, just not with enough efficiency and scale to make it worth it.
Chernobyl isn't hypothetical. And neither is Fukushima. And those weren't as bad as they could have been.
And we still don't know what to do with all the waste we have.
Yes, nuclear power has problems. But even if it killed 24,000 people per year, blocking the replacement of coal by nuclear would still be a willful choice to cause the deaths of 1,000 people (it's getting really hard not to say murder).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker's_pneumoconiosis
There is no conceivable way of removing even daily worldwide human carbon waste from the atmosphere for that kind of money.
Sure the physical size of a spent fuel might be 'small' but this is not the only issue.
And the low level waste - of which there is approx 360000 tons? Would the Mariana Trench would be a good/safe place to place this? Based on what reckoning?
>> And the low level waste - of which there is approx 360000 tons? Would the Mariana Trench would be a good/safe place to place this? Based on what reckoning?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
Pushing for more silicon solar panels beyond what's possible as semiconductor industry byproduct is unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.
Solar panels seem to be one of the most inefficient clean energy solutions - so are they actually relevant here?
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2007/05/22/...
"In 2006, for the first time, more than half the world's polysilicon was used to produce solar PV cells."
It's true that the intermediates in silicon refining like are quite hazardous, but in a well-run production facility those intermediates don't get released to the biosphere. They affect the toxicity of the end product no more than the intermediate use of acetic anhydride in aspirin production, or the intermediate use of uranium hexafluoride in nuclear fuel rod production. There was a famous story in 2008 about a Chinese silicon production facility that was illegally dumping SiCl4, but if you're going to pick the most horrifying Chinese examples you'd think that nothing at all can be made safely.
There are some interesting moral gymnastics required there, no? The Chinese lead the world in PV manufacturing right now. Is this PV-revolution necessarily built on dirty manufacturing? Would we still have a PV-revolution if we weren't so accepting of an environmental disaster that takes place in a distant country?
Silicon refiners in the US actually had lower production costs than Chinese refiners even with the extra labor and environmental costs in the US. Unfortunately, a few years ago China imposed punitive trade barriers against silicon imported from the US. It was in retaliation for trade barriers the US put up against imports of Chinese solar modules. Until both sides erected their dueling trade barriers, the value of US-to-China silicon exports just about balanced the value of China-to-US modules. It was like a textbook example of comparative advantage. Now Chinese manufacturers get higher priced silicon made with fewer environmental protections, and US buyers get higher priced modules :-/
Photovoltaics: scalable, green, economically sustainable (choose two).
Because of those catastrophic failure modes, nobody except governments want to assume the risk. And governments only do it because they have sovereign immunity from those whose interests they're supposedly representing.
I firmly believe that any interested parties who want to go nuclear, should, and reap those rewards. If you can't find an insurer, go find wealthy people who believe in your design to indemnify you.
Just don't pick my pocket to build it and then poison me.
That would be a fine if it was a level playing field.
Lots of things have catastrophic failure modes. Dams[1], supertankers[2], chemical plants[3], oil drilling rigs[4], coal mines[5], etc. To say nothing of climate change.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benxihu_Colliery
The reason those things have no trouble being built anyway is that they aren't required to carry billions of dollars in insurance coverage to begin with.
And maybe they should, but you can't single out nuclear for a requirement to carry that much insurance and then fault it for not being able to satisfy that requirement when its competitors don't.
Yet that's exactly what we're doing with coal and petroleum.
Let's remove the subsidies for those and then you can get back to me about the cost effectiveness of things like nuclear.
Only coal and petroleum is mined thousands of miles aways from me, and even if e.g. there's an oil spill, it won't kill thousands in hundreds miles radius.
In addition, in California, the radioactive sulfur in pollution from the coal burning plants in China SWAMPS the radiation release from Fukushima by several orders of magnitude.
I'm going to stop here, because any relevant adjective I would use to describe people like you would just get me banned.
The main word I'd use to describe "people like you", given the above, is rude.
The ad-hominem doesn't add anything to the case. And who would "people like me" be? Anybody that has concerns or might be against nuclear power? Because they are necessarily ignorant luddites, and only those for it are the level-headed ones, right?
Well, nuclear reactors and energy production is not science (the science part is done at the academic level), it is applied technology. And technology mingles with private interests, politics and bad actors all the time (e.g. constructors who don't install enough safety measures, governments who don't give a shit about global environmental treaties, loonies who might want to blow up reactors or get their hands to the by products, human errors, political ass-saving, tons of money to be made, higher profit margins by not properly taking care of by products, etc.),
Now to answer the specific points:
"Leak[ing] sulfur into the streams for the next 50 years" doesn't even compare to having to take care of radioactive materials for the next millennia, neither in the extend of time, nor to the potential impact.
Your answer also seems to imply that e.g. uranium mining doesn't have an environmental impact, and it's only coal that "rips entire mountains apart"...
>In addition, in California, the radioactive sulfur in pollution from the coal burning plants in China SWAMPS the radiation release from Fukushima by several orders of magnitude.
All caps "swamps" aside, this would be only relevant if Fukushima was the epitome of nuclear disaster and the "radiation release from Fukushima" was the highest level of tradition release possible (or close).
Isn't it? I thought what happened at Fukushima was the worst case scenario for a nuclear power plant of its type. What is the worst that could have happened?
Aren't new designs even safer than that?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...
Rough estimate of low level waste is 360000 tons
Another angle on this is why are we scrutinizing only where 10% of California's water usage is, while ignoring 90% (farms)? Why do California's farmers have the right to the majority of the water while paying next to nothing for that water as compared to the rates the other users of water pay?
Are the farmers paying so much less for treated, potable tap water delivered through municipal water mains? I think you'll find the cost of the water itself is pretty small. You may find that treating it, transporting it, and distributing it pretreated to all those people are the real economic costs even during most stages of a drought.
Wait until people learn that they air they breathe has likely already been breathed by someone else...
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/07/16/california-drought-san...
You can
Never mind that all the wildlife that urinates/defecates in it, the dead animals in it, etc., which nobody minds.
Urine is generally sterile, it's actually an accepted first aid practice to urinate on a bandage or create a urine paste to treat a wound in the field in emergency conditions.
You can't make this stuff up. Civil engineers are amazing.
Edit: also, as per my other comment, urine, in the voided stream, is not sterile, and even if it were, certainly contains all the building blocks for bacterial growth.
(1) https://encrypted.google.com/maps/place/Johnson+County+Waste...
That said, inland cities all recycle water. And they generally return water into the rivers that is cleaner than what they took out.
Unsanitary isn't really the problem. Laden with organically active toxins is the problem.
We don't have a good way of dealing with most toxins other than simply diluting them and letting nature break them down.
This is why treatment plants take water from rivers and pump treated water back into the river rather than immediately recycling outflow back to inflow.
Food costs can be quite cheap and still be nutritious with the right choices, but not 700kg of wheat a day cheap.
Without those prices, you're back in the commissars dilemma of either a) restricting people to a one-size-fits-all amount or b) maintaining a master list of acceptable uses, either of which have absurd consequences.
There's a similar fallacy in thinking that energy efficiency tech by itself is enough to reduce fossil fuel usage. In reality, people just keep finding
(It would be more correct to say that improved energy efficiency will make the required e.g. carbon taxes less painful to implement.)
TL;DR - Technology will never eliminate Politics, People are inherently Political.
If I were the author I'd choose some social media unicorn or an ad network as an example of inherent misallocation of human talent.
Google acquired DeepMind using money that was ultimately the result of ad revenue.
To me, the more apt comparison isn't say, DeepMind to the Manhattan Project, it's DeepMind to the early physics experiments, or Chicago Pile 1. You can imagine in the future, a letter being written much like Einstein's to FDR, pointing to an early and modest project saying "because of this, we can now create <X>".
(I'm ignoring the wartime necessities and issues surrounding that letter in this example as they're outside of the discussion.)
I'm sorry, I don't buy it. What exactly are the social benefits of general purpose learning agent?
It's an impressive technical and scientific challange, agreed, but most applications that I can immediately think of are harmful to society (reduction of white-collar jobs, increased potential for surveillance and profiling, etc) - so how would such an agent be used to actually improve society?
Asking how a general purpose learning agent could be useful seems kind of like asking how an intelligent person could be useful. The ways are countless.
The agent can, like any software, be snapshotted, saved, loaded and copied, creating as many identical agents as needed (given hardware, of course). Agents can and will be trained to perform various tasks, and their snapshots will be sold or made available for download over the Internet.
By saying that your main concerns are technological unemployment of white-collar demographic and increased state surveillance you make it clear that your views reflect that of an upper-middle class western person. On the global scale affluent westerners are a minority.
So, How would such an agent be used to actually improve society? Consider universally valued, life-critical services: healthcare and education. Only the western people have access to high-quality medicine and education due to a whole lot of reasons (global economical inequality, a very long and hard path to become a doctor or a professor, a very long time needed to establish the necessary social institutions, lack of social stability outside the west, ...).
If we had a general RL agent we could train several variants of it to perform high-quality work in the fields of Diagnosis, Radiology, Paediatry etc. We could also train artificial education agents for many subjects. The training needs to only be done once. Given sufficiently powerful mass-produced hardware (smartphone SoCs with Nervana-like NN accelerators?) these agents could be given almost for free to billions of people that wouldn't be able to afford such services in any point of their lives otherwise.
How could one be against giving essential high quality services to every human with a smartphone?
And if even that is not enough to justify the utility of RL agents, then consider how much progress in molecular biology and medicine could be done if thousands of agents trained to do life science research worked around the clock to push the state of art further. How many people with debilitating diseases could be cured by such an effort?
And then consider how we could make our currently-crumbling cities and infrastructure permanently well-attended by RL agents inside simple robots. The world certainly could use more smart attention everywhere. I guess the quality of life in such a world would be remarkably different.
For example, humanity's current best attempt at sustainable society is an unstable mix of democracy and capitalism, and in many countries that isn't working out too well - particularly for blue collar workers, but increasingly for your white collar workers too.
It isn't inconceivable that deep mind could design a better political system for the US, for instance, that resulted in broad consensus instead of virtual civil war. Or design a fairer tax system that meant more people could have fulfilling and enjoyable lives.
Whether deep mind's masters would apply it to those questions is moot, but the parent's point is that the huge resources being poured into Facebook makes it a much better example of the squandering of the efforts of our brightest and best.
Who knows, maybe there is no real need for a dozen of global social media companies that provide roughly similar features to the same users?
Those are not applications, those are side-effects to _some_ applications.
Thing is, there is plenty of existing AI research that could hypothetically revolutionize medicine. Even in the eighties there were expert systems that outperformed doctors in certain areas. The issue with it all isn't that the algorithms are not fancy enough or accurate enough yet, it's the practical application.
I believe the biggest challenge of today's AI research is making AI and ML accessible. Not just for consumption, but for actual training and open ended use.
I don't see Deep Mind doing much in *that" regard.
However, one could more charitably interpret the quote as saying there are lots of TECHNOLOGIES that would produce social good, which are underfunded - alternative energy, carbon capture, distributed social networking, etc. Ycombinator seems to agree, given their recent focus on nuclear.
The much more interesting question for me is whether it's ethical to invest in technologies that will cause social change, even if those changes are highly likely to be negative in the short term. The default silicon valley answer to that would be yes, but a broad range of other people would say no. Both have rational arguments. If you look at the social effects of the industrial revolution (or the green revolution, or the enlightenment) there's a lot of short-term negative for a lot of people and some enduring problems for some groups of people.
How about moderation policies for social networks?
Some engineering problems have yielded to heavy spending. The Polaris submarine program. The Apollo program. RCA's color TV effort. AIDS treatment. Extreme ultraviolet photolithography. The H-bomb. Sometimes this works. With a narrow goal, a general idea of how to get there, and heavy funding, impressive results are possible.
Big money does change stuff, it can just be really hard to determine what exactly it will change and if it will ultimately be good.
I doubt they are in compliance with the latest heaviest planes the military fields, but still, pretty forward thinking and synergy of infrastructure spending for both economical and military needs.
In 1919 (I think, plus or minus maybe one year), the Army sent a convoy by road from coast to coast. I forget how long it took, but it was at least 45 days, and maybe more like 90. And the Army said, moving stuff by road is hopeless with the current roads.
One of the people on that convoy was a Lieutenant Eisenhower. When he became president, the Interstate Highway System happened.
There's a perception among those calls I gather that the Manhattan Project was pulled together as this massive undertaking at the stroke of a pen. The reality however, was that it started off as overlooked, modest, and aimless at times. Overtime, as the goals and necessities became more clear, it grew and matured into the massive, focused effort we all know. But it was because of the direction and need that developed that resulted in the Project, not the other way around. And I think that's a very important distinction.
I think great projects tend to owe a good amount of their growth to organic factors. The reason why we haven't seen a "Manhattan Project" to solve a societal issue is because the conditions are not necessary right for one, and perhaps more importantly, the "project" needed to tackle one might not necessarily be recognizable to us as such.
No. It was a basic question of practical physics. It was an effort to translate theoretical knowledge already proven in laboratories into a working product at scale. The innovations were definitely costly, but essentially rather incremental and straightforward. That was much of the reason it needed to be done in a hurry: eventually someone would do it.
Fusion power is in the same place. The theory works in the lab, we need to translate that into a working model at practical scales. Eventually someone will crack the problem. A Manhattan-style push would accelerate that date, hopefully to within our lifetimes.
Could you imagine someone building a full-scale, power generating fusion reactor off a new and untested design in a about a year? More to the point, could you imagine someone funding that?
Well, I could name 10 real problems off of the top of my head, and most people would agree that they are important too. So I don't really understand the question. It seems to me to imply that people are unique snowflakes and because of that it's difficult to determine what's important, but that's not really the case.
>1. The clamoring for tech companies to solve social problems ignores the empirical record and empirically observed characteristics of top-down engineering efforts
Like this internet thing, on which the very article is posted on?
>Unfortunately, Manhattan Project-like ventures are not translatable to social and political problems.
Maybe, but then again there are tons of serious problems that are not "social and political" in nature, and are not "social video sharing for cat lovers" either.
And, yes, people might enjoy and derive some value from the latter too. But they'd derive a lot more value from, e.g. not dying from certain diseases due to a better focus on such problems, or sustainable energy.
What I think the people the author mentions ask for is not stopping Google and co from doing their stuff and conscripting SV engineers to basic research, but more and better funded and coordinated national (and international) efforts on stuff that matters in a large scale for our societies and our survival. Kind of like the internet was developed, we went to the moon, nuclear energy, and also applications of such stuff to current problems (from environment to health, education, democracy, privacy, etc).
That is, it is highest at the extremes : for the poorest and the wealthiest. The former are concerned because of the tacit idea that solving social problems would directly solve theirs. The latter are concerned because as people who don't have direct problems themselves, solving other people's ones would alleviate a repressed guilt feeling, satisfy their ego, or help with the minor annoyance of having to listen to people's whinning.
Then I'm guessing most people working in tech industry are right in the middle of this curve, and consequently give the least possible F.
Though I think the fact that we can have exactly opposite hypotheses about this metric points to the reality that there isn't really any neat curve to this, or likely most other sorts of hypotheses about complex human beliefs/behaviors projected on a two dimensional space.
If they have any sense what they want is for we as a species to put our money, our labor, our hearts and our lives into matters of importance to the human race.
'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.'
Then immediately launched into saying
'Tech critics should be very careful what they wish for when they say that they wish that tech companies would tackle the "real" problems'.
I think this misses the point. I don't think critics are clamoring for tech companies to "solve" real problems. They want people, smart people, to focus on solving these problems.
A company doesn't solve anything people solve things not organisations.
He could have just as easily talked about all those PHD physicists working on High frequency trading and used that to launch into a tangent about how Wall Street is not suited to solving difficult problems.
The original quote is a serious issue publicly funded R&D outfits cannot offer the financial incentives large banks, tech outfits and other private organisations can offer.
Whether you think this is a good thing or not depends on how cynical you are I suppose. Personally I'm skeptical that private research interests will ever align with anything other than creating value for shareholders - which for google means selling more Ads...
The sentiment that it's responding to isn't addressed to the tech companies doing tech company things, it's addressed to the system that lionizes and entrenches the creation of wealth for wealth's sake.
Why does society today not attempt to maximize happiness among all citizens?
Resources are expended to make those with more resources marginally more happy, rather than someone with less resources comparatively much more happy.
Market economy says that this is the most "efficient" distribution of resources, but the assumption there is that the happiness of the rich is more important than the happiness of the poor.
Is this what we want our societal values to be? And if so, how much more important? And if not, is a domestic happy person more valuable than a foreign happy person?
The ethics and morals that come out of defining these answers are quite strikingly different.
“The sooner we learn not to think or utter sentences such as “the United States should do . . . ”or “the American people want . . . ” or “China’s government ought to do . . . ,” the better we will understand government, business, and all other forms of organization. When addressing politics, we must accustom ourselves to think and speak about the actions and interests of specific, named leaders rather than thinking and talking about fuzzy ideas like the national interest, the common good, and the general welfare”
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. “The Dictator's Handbook.”
Focusing on the rich sounds like you're referring to "trickle down economics" which is not a real thing in economics and is largely a fabrication of the media and partisan politics:
https://fee.org/articles/there-is-no-such-thing-as-trickle-d...
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367682/trickle-down-li...
Saying that 'market economies' only favours or benefits the wealthy is a mischaracterization and/or a drastic over-simplification of supply-side economics.
Also I'm with Arthur Schopenhauer in questioning the premise of happiness as the basic goal in life. Although you're probably just referring to maximizing the general 'quality of life' rather than the emotional state, which I do agree with.
Nuclear weapons may have been a positive development. The doctrine of mutually-assured destruction has a lot to do with why World War III hasn't happened yet.
I can say from first hand experience that most Silicon Valley engineers' moms are plenty proud of them.
AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.
Fun fact: did you know that kids don't get chicken pox these days? They all get immunized, so they don't go through the rite of passage that everyone who's 20+ plus has gone through. And it'll soon be forgotten. Which brings me to: Just because people forget about a disease we've cured doesn't invalidate that good that was done by the people solving that problem. The general public doesn't know about _most_ good things that were done to bring about the world we live in. There's still value in helping anyway. Doctors & researchers don't ask to be worshipped.
Even if we strongman Go and Chess and say that they are great at sharpening & maintaining one's mental facilities, have been integral and beneficial to military thought, and are immensely enjoyable, I don't think that the value of solving the Go and Chess problems compares to curing diseases.
Did the author edit his comment? This is what I see:
> Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes back for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years.
> AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.
That is both civil and makes a substantive point. There is nothing trolling about it. Nor does it suggest that AIDS is either fake or unserious: it suggests that someday AIDS will not be a problem (I think that's very likely, in the sense that bubonic plague is no longer a problem).
I can only imagine two possibilities: the author's original post was trolling, uncivil or unsubstantive; or sctb had a knee-jerk reaction.
The namespace collision between Go and Golang infuriated me before I realized that--- Go has lasted thousands of years, and could very well outlast Golang. :D
Probably 11 times out of 12 when I see that one of the admins has marked something as off-topic, I disagree. Probably a quarter of those times I _strenuously_ disagree; the rest I can kinda see their point, but still think it was on-topic. It's rare that I think, 'thanks admin team, that was garbage and deserved to be detached!'
From what I've seen, the admin team does more harm than good. I think that their hearts are in the right place, and I completely appreciate that they don't want HN to devolve into chaos — but I think that instead they risk turning HN into an echo chamber in which only views considered mainstream in San Francisco & Boston are permitted (even when those views are considered extreme elsewhere), while those which are considered mainstream elsewhere are silenced.
> Do we really want tech companies to turn their attention away from beating board game players and producing business products to start 'solving' social problems? The answer to this question should be an emphatic "no."
> When will tech solve the real problems, critics ask?
> Assuming that this complaint is sincere, it nonetheless misses the point. What are "real" problems?
> [...] the author wants to deputize Google, Facebook, Apple, and other tech companies to solve social problems. To rectify flawed systems.
> Do we really want tech companies to turn their attention away from beating board game players and producing business products to start 'solving' social problems? The answer to this question should be an emphatic "no." The entire framing of the question is profoundly backward.
The closest you'll get to a tl;dr are the author's two paragraphs summing things up:
> This essay advances the following points:
> 1. The clamoring for tech companies to solve social problems ignores the empirical record and empirically observed characteristics of top-down engineering efforts and is rooted in a naive belief in the power of technical rationality. Technical rationality not only has a long and fairly checkered history when applied to social problems, but also takes on pathological characteristics when it is embodied in bureaucratic organizations attempting to engineer their way out of policy problems. There is no concrete idea of how tech companies are going to work on these problems, just a vague belief that they should rooted in worship of technical rationality.
> 2. Tech companies are neither instrinsically [sic] well-adapted for taking on quasi-governmental or governmental functions nor likely to be any more successful at escaping the problems of technical rationality than their government counterparts have been. While tech companies can make valuable policy contributions in certain functional areas and with certain mechanisms, the biggest benefit they provide is simply giving us more tools to solve our own problems. Why should we depend on tech companies to solve social problems when it is both better from a normative perspective and a practical one for them to simply give us the tools we need to empower ourselves?