Programming for a culture approaching singularity
lukepalmer.wordpress.com
lukepalmer.wordpress.com
I just found this quote which I love:
"A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330"
I think we are hitting a new reality where people are having a hard time adding value. Over time, I think computers and robots will be able to automate and out perform most human tasks.
Much effort is put on retraining people for new jobs. The problem is that there will come a point where no human will beat the automated systems and no amount of training will fix that. On the top end of the scale, we have brilliant people that are forced to accept low wage research jobs or jobs that have nothing to do with their specialty.
Have you seen the diapers.com automated warehouse video? How long do you think it will take before every non-unionized retail chain has automated the restocking of their stores. How many net jobs do you think that will create?
I'm not saying the "Singularity" is approaching. But I do wonder what the signs would be and if these are some of them.
However, there come a point that automation approach the point where further investment will yield diminishing marginal returns. People are going to automate so much.
Just because you have a machine that produces 1,000,000 cokes in an hour doesn't mean you're going to make more money. What you will end up is a machine that actually cost a lot to maintain, and produce lot of cokes that will be thrown away due to the bottleneck in other parts of the production chain.
Sure, I think this exactly describes our current situation. Ironically, that "more wealth" is very disproportionately distributed between the owner of the automation mechanism and the workers that have been automated away. Similarly the notion of "more free time" is equally disproportionate.
One better go get another job, one can sit back and enjoy life.
Only if you care about relative wealth. Do you really care if somebody got awarded a billion bucks while you get awarded a 100,000 dollars equivalent in lifestyle quality increase?
It is a misconception to think that you can just sit back and enjoy life. There is competition from other businessmen after all. They will automates, and continue to drive down cost. One of the reason why some people can do these kinds of thing you talked about is because inefficient markets exists and people are too lazy to challenge the guy. That's not always a problem if it is not too hard for an entrepreneur to recognize and move in.
However, the cost of maintaining a given lifestyle should goes down, as long as people don't keep increasing their consumption expenditure.
Right now the balance may tip towards outsourcing to a low-wage country, but there is no reason to believe that any of the factors that contribute to this will remain constant.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-you...
The whole notion is really dreadfully implausible and poorly thought-through. A few computer-centric technologists take their hobby to be the most important thing in the world, as if the exponential growth of transistors on a chip or bits on the web are more important than the (stagnant) power grid, energy and food production, global war and peace, etc.
Admittedly, that's not an uncommon phenomenon in these parts.
* PMUs
* Dynamic, consumer-level, load response
* Superconducting transmission lines
* Distributed generation resources on distribution grids
* large scale wind farms
much moreOf course, that's driven in part by advances in computation, just like a lot of other technology. Plasma physics, for example, which could yet make a big difference for energy.
Vernor Vinge predicted the singularity not before 2005 and not after 2030. Will we have crazysauce computers by then? Definitely. Will anything else in the world have caught up with the pace at which we apply transistors to wafers? Probably not.
One of Sterling's points is that the singularity is like dot-com startups in the 1990s: it doesn't have a business model. I think it would be right to say that it doesn't scale, either; there are too many other bottlenecks in the system where we wave our hands and say something about just throwing more metal at it.
Seriously, though, check out the talk, it's quite good.
Suddenly, my playground is no longer limited to emacs, but the entire computing environment. However, this kind of code idealism is unfortunately killed by good enough and the desire of the FSF of going into politics.
That's what freedom to me is like. It's not something nebulous like fighting evil developers or something. It's a world in which users feel like a badass, and which everything is an extension of your mind. It's a crying shame that the free software world wasn't able to realize that kind of potential.
I think we're sort of in a pre-literate society in a lot of ways, and people (or whatever) will look back on this century as sort of like the beginnings of language. And like natural language, I think computer languages and their use are going to eventually have much more interesting political implications. Especially once the concept of IP dies and we start looking at code as a conversation.
I think FSF failed was due more to development methodology rather than the feasibility of the goal in itself.
Take a look at emacs. Its release cycle is very long in between, survives forks, and generally being unpalatable to new users imitated by its keyboard configuration. It still lives. It still thrive. But it doesn't thrive as much as it should.
The problem with the semantic web is that it forces a narrative based on an ontological approach.
But in my mind the real value in connecting everything is the connections themselves rather then their meaning which should never be settled. In other words the value of connecting everything is that it opens up for multiple interpretations, descriptions and clustering.
We should look at data more like neurons than ontological items. I.e. absent of meaning without context.
I'm with qwzybug, I echo his sentiment.