The scarcity of the long term
kk.org
kk.org
Over the years I also noticed students getting ever more abstracted into wishful thinking. They hugely underestimate research and development. Proposals are filled with the word "just... ". On realising that something is difficult, they recoil and abandon the whole project.
Although the article talks about the hubris of planning over multiple lifetimes, we have more serious and immediate problems of getting people to plan over mere weeks or days. Everything seems to be making that worse, "AI" in particular.
I get the author's drift, and broadly agree. But I don't think it's really a long attention span that would get in the way of (e.g.) a Mars colony, or interstellar travel; it's that people's views change from one generation to the next. My kids have been imbued with some of my attitudes, sure; but I've not had much of a hand in the raising of my grandchildren. And kids rebel against their parents' views, even if they're objectively less sensible than the latest kids' fashion.
The Death Star, to take the author's example, is the product of a particular hypothetical society that looks a lot like fascist authoritarianism: a Glorious Leader, militarization, and oppression. But how many societies like that have lasted 500 years? The Golden Horde lasted about 250 years; the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years? Egyptian pharoahs about the same, if you treat the Early, Middle and Late as distinct empires. But these empires changed their character as the centuries passed, and were not characterized by any particular continuity of social outlook or collective goals.
I have only a vague knowledge of what the attitudes of my grandparents and their generation were - too vague for me to either support them or to rebel against them. So I think it's not so much a matter of attention-span, and more a question of plain old memory; history lessons and books are no substitute for talking to the people who were there, and after 200 years there's nobody left who "was there".
+ the original meaning, not the internets one, which is only an extremely short-lived subset.
So, I guess, pyramid-building; that's a collective project spanning a few centuries. I struggle to think of any collective project that spans centuries, that isn't fundamentally a religious enterprise.
Certain parts of mathematics and science may qualify.
Yes they have practical outcomes (as do certain religious projects - building a cathedral will employ craftsmen), but isn't the pursuit of 'pure' mathematics a collective project which serves no purpose apart from intellectual satisfaction.
> religious
Probably the most enduring meme.
Maths requires a huge amount of creative effort and there often is no logical next step. There was a reason that it took three hundred years to go from an idea that a^x + b^x = c^x has no integer solutions when x is greater than two, to a proof of that, and it involved some crazy twists and turns of thinking.
However, while a pyramid may have a definite endpoint, cathedrals have historically been in a near constant state of flux - a bishop wants to show his influence and rebuilds a tower higher, a burgher of the town want to show his power by adding a side chapel. New windows are installed, a porch is demolished and replaced with something more beautiful. For the cathedrals which took five hundred years to complete, it wasn't that they were abandoned building sites during that time - they just took that long to reach the state that we see as final today. Maybe in-between there was a wooden roof instead of a stone roof, or a tower was capped at thirty meters tall rather than fifty!
> In the Western world, 66 institutions have enjoyed a continuously visible identity since 1530. Among those 66 are the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church and the Parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man. What makes these 66 so interesting —and I owe the knowledge of this fact to our President Dr. Berdahl— is that the remaining 62 are all universities!
The basic unit of humanity, the human, does not have consistent long term desires or goals.
In fact within the span of a lifetime the same individual is expected to have completely divergent goals and conception of reality when they are 20 versus 50 versus 80.
In effect this means that a consistent, coherent goal state for human action is not possible to define that would satisfy the self-reported desires of any individual.
Having a life long goal require a conjunction of passion for a topic that requires that much attention span and relevant available resources to explore it. I dare to say that having enough resources at hand including not being interrupted too often with other hassles and hazards from life is the biggest source of scarcity.
The difference is that Knuth is providing something of value to others, while your grandmother’s fully complete American Girl doll collection she started at age 5 is of limited value.
Your last point is really the key takeaway: How do we create a global society that gives every single human the freedom, opportunity and resources to produce their version of the computing bible? We have more than enough natural resources to make that happen
- afforded every citizen access to whatever education which they might choose/be interested in
- the chance to become the best version of themselves which is possible
- the leisure time to apply their talents to a project which makes the world a better place
It's kind of hard though, when the best school I ever attended, one which separated academics from social classes and allowed students to work at their ability level (up to 4 grade levels ahead through 4th grade, but after, one could work as far ahead and as fast as one's abilities allowed, and faculty members were dual-credentialed as high school teachers and professors at a local college, so students could easily graduate high school _and_ be conferred a 4 year degree, some students received multiple college degrees when graduating at age 18) which excelled at education was deemed an illegal arrangement by the Mississippi Supreme Court because it conferred an unfair advantage to those students who were able to apply themselves and take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were unable to do so.
I thought it lasted much longer than that in the East?
But that's a really bad way to think about it. A Roman in 30 BCE and 20 BC probably wouldn't notice much difference. There was still a Senate, still elections, still powerful men exerting massive influence over the lives of ordinary people. Essentially someone had just written 'Augustus' in chalk at the top of all the organization charts.
Similarly, in the west a Roman in 470 CE and 480 CE wouldn't have noticed much difference. There was still a Senate, and powerful 'barbarian' generals were still exerting massive influence over the lives of ordinary people. There even was still an Emperor who was nominally in charge - he was in Constantinople, but the Emperors hadn't lived in Rome for decades.
The fall of Constantinople was probably a bit different since a whole new political regieme was imposed, but even there I believe the Ottomans actually claimed to be the inheritors of Rome and the rightful emperors (Rome was Pagan, then Christian, why couldn't it now be Muslim?)
Realistically, there were a series of political regimes which evolved into each other time:
* Aristocratic Republic,
* 'Constitutional' Monarchy,
* Absolute Monarchy,
* Military Dictatorship,
* Theocratic Dictatorship.
The Roman Empire lasted about 500 years - from 31 BC to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. If we include the period of existence of the Eastern Roman Empire it would be almost 1500 years - until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
It was very surprising to me that I could, more or less, understand what they were saying, despite the accent. Then came the realization that I could actually understand something written thousands of years ago by someone whose mind worked in a very different way, and yet I could, sort-of, communicate with that person.
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I had to move a lot in my life. So, I don't have any childhood photos, nor do I keep in touch with my classmates from wherever I studied, I had to switch the language I use in my everyday life at least twice. I always "traveled light", so, I almost don't have any objects that are more than some ten years old. Except for the razor my grandfather brought from Germany in 1945 (now, I realize that it was probably looted, but many years back I was kind-of proud to inherit that). It says on it that it was manufactured in 1939.
I've never really met my grandfather -- he died when I was one y.o. I don't know what kind of person he was in his everyday life, in fact, I've ever only seen a single photograph of him. And yet I know that in many ways, subconsciously, I continue things he was doing. We have very different perspectives on life: he was a member of the Communist party, and I'm strongly in the Humanist camp. He liked gardening, and I hate being in the country etc. But, in a more broad sense, I keep a lot of the same culture he was part of: I'm pretty sure we learned the same multiplication table, or that we both had to read War and Peace at school, we both have the same idea about alphabet or using a dinner table for, well, dinner. And in that sense, I'm distinctly farther away from someone who sits down on a mat to eat their dinner, or, like ancient Greeks, who semi-lied down on a bench for their dinner.
In fact, it's very easy to trace my and my grandfather's differences to a common ancestor. It's not hard for me to understand why would he think the way he did, even though he's in the opposite camp. It's much harder to understand those who cannot disagree with me because they don't even know what they can possibly disagree about.
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We don't have an obvious structure for projects that take multiple generations to complete. Not like the cathedrals that used to be built for hundred years or more, or even the books that used to be written by generations of scribes. But we still carry out such multi-generational projects by following conventions. We read books written by the previous generation, reinterpret them and embed their discoveries in our own.
It would've been nicer if we could organize this inheritance better, but it's not fair to say that it doesn't exist.
Hah - I also have an old razor. I inherited it from my Dad. He seems to have bought it in about 1935, from a cutler in Cambridge, where he went to University. It was made in Sheffield, but is engraved with the name of that Cambridge shop. He would have been about 20 when he bought it - perhaps his first razor.
I've tried to sharpen and use it; but it was pretty rough. I find that modern razors from the likes of Dovo are much better.
> I've never really met my grandfather
My paternal grandfather died before I was born. My father says he was sitting in his chair; then he just coughed and died. I hope I am lucky enough to die like that.
I knew my maternal grandfather quite well; I used to visit him when I was 13 - 15, most Sunday afternoons. He was a pacifist, an atheist, and a hero: he was head of education in Hong Kong, when the Japanese took over. The story is that he stole a truck, and drove around the rich neighbourhoods collecting mattresses, medicines and - whisky. He liked a wee dram. He drove the truck to the concentration camp, blagged his way past the guards, and delivered the truck to the camp medical centre (minus the whisky, I imagine).
I'm also an atheist, and spent most of my life as a pacifist. I'm no hero, though.
You're right, sharpening kitchen knives is much easier.
The Roman empire lasted considerably longer than 200 years - perhaps 500 years in its best understood form going from Octavian becoming emperor in ~30BCE to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in approx 470CE. The eastern end of the empire lasted in various forms for another 1000 years (!) until the fall of Constantinople.
The upshot, however, is that few empires last as long as 500 years, and only a couple lasted as long as 1,500 years. And those empires change a lot over the course of their existence; they weren't effective vehicles for a collective effort at, say, colonising Mars.
Completely agree!
Or in other words, our society itself currently has a short attention span.
I think that's what Kevin Kelly means by attention in the essay.
He writes:
> It is much easier to build a rocket that will sail 500 years to the nearest star, then it is to ensure that the future generations of people born on board that 500-year rocket maintain the mission
So he doesn't mean we'll flake out and flit our attention to something else on a whim. He's saying if we drop a project due to changing beliefs, opinions, and goals, that's "not having a long attention span".
I don't love his use of the word "attention" to mean that, but I think it's pretty clear what he means by the word from the essay.
This is true only if you consider many dynastic orders with significant periods of instability in between to constitute a single uninterrupted period "Imperial China". No single dynastic order lasted more than 500 years, arguably none more than 300.
And on a smaller scale, institutions can keep grinding away far longer than makes any sense. A grant and a trust fund can last centuries. Look at the educational institutions like Oxford for interesting examples of maintaining a culture. It is pretty easy to imagine a group like that sustaining long term technical projects.
I don't think a millenium of sustained technological effort is actually that hard to achieve. We've obviously never done it before because industrial society is less than 1,000 years old. But assuming we don't self-immolate as seems likely then setting up ultra-long-term-projects isn't that hard to see.
I think the difference here is we can view a company / institution as a machine to do a job, and between a company that has a controlling mind able to change its own machine “code” hence chnage its job.
Without software the two things are needed - but with software we can concieve of a programmable company that just does its tasks as assigned for as long as inputs occur. If those tasks involve say sending jobs out to gig workers the idea kind of works
It does mean you could build a Death Star using robots in place of gig workers (which is the obvious multi-generational solution)
But it does imply something about our companies - that once the whole company can be specified in code, splitting off the “controlling minds” bit (ie management, plus developers) into seperate location seems interesting
It also explicitly makes the issue of who decides what chnages and how come to the fore
Are you sure? It seems to me that Jesus would be dismayed by how establishment they've become and not nearly radical enough.
> Look at the educational institutions like Oxford for interesting examples of maintaining a culture.
They have changed over the centuries though. The ethos and aims of Oxford are hardly what they were when it got its royal charter in the 13th century. True, it still values scholarship, but it has also changed in a lot of ways.
So I agree: it's no longer the same institution at all.
Not that different a subject. A different focus traditionally, but still related to a monotheistic religion.
> Business
Definitely very different, especially in ethos.
> There is still a number of Oxford "halls" devoted to Divinity, but the number of students and fellows engaged in that kind of work is tiny.
and I believe the powers that be at the university would like to get rid of them?
However, if it was to combat communism/the USSR, which is my hazy understanding of the official justification, note communism has largely been expunged as a political ideology. All the communist states failed. The majors (USSR & China) have moved to capitalism. Well, China did. The USSR was removed from the map.
From https://www.britannica.com/event/Vietnam-War
In fairness, it also says that some people think the US won because it won the major battles and inflicted more casualties. That sounds like winning the battle but losing the war, to me.
They then crushed communism. I don't see an argument that communism is a credible ideology these days. We all know what will happen to any country that makes a serious go of it - the citizens will starve and the economy will collapse. Then they can't spread communist ideology any more because they're broke and humiliated. The defeat was so resounding that the options became liberal capitalism, authoritarian capitalism or irrelevance.
If I hated someone enough that I wanted to bring war to their doorstep, and then decided that wasn't enough, I'd wish communism on them to. So insofar as the US was defeated in Vietnam, they won the war so much that the battle turned out not to need sustaining. I don't think this example shows any sort of survivorship bias, I think it is just a case where the project was achieved quickly.
The Florence Cathedral took over 140 years to build. There is clear precedent that humans can design, plan and then execute a project that spans multiple lifetimes.
Even better, they didn't have a final design when they started:
> While the main structure of the nave was completed by 1380, a solution to constructing a dome to top it was not determined until 1418. [0]
This also reminds me of a personal story when visiting Florence:
Florentine Tour Guide: "It took 140 years to build the Cathedral. How do you think they were able to do this given that it took so long?"
Me: "I would think they needed a committee since that can last longer than a lifetime if the current members add in new people as the old members die"
Tour Guide: "Yes! Exactly! So few people realize that is what happened."
0 - https://editions.covecollective.org/chronologies/constructio...
> Tour Guide: "Yes! Exactly! So few people realize that is what happened."
This also implies that C++ will potentially live forever...
Who knows what advances in material science, computing, energy and transport will bring in coming generations? Not to mention climate changes. Therefore it can be presumptuous to think that sticking to a long term plan is the best course. To the extent that a long term plan depends on the supporting environment of the plan staying the same, a plan might be judged foolish in retrospect.
However, this situation will not continue indefinitely. An advanced, post-scarcity human civilisation will (hopefully) not face constant danger of war, disease and famine, Technology will still advance, but at a slower pace, and not in ways that significantly transform day-to-day lives. Human lifespan will probably also be significantly increased. The result will be a more homogenous, stable and static society. There will still be differences, bug huge disparities of economic and societal status will no longer exist.
In this environment, having no longer to deal with a constant background of threats to their survival, it's likely that humanity will have the time and space to turn to far longer term projects. Indeed, such projects will probably be the only way for a person to imbue their life with a greater meaning in such a future society.
Having a planet of hyper long-lived people who never have to work hard, who are constantly fed without concern, fully dependent on advanced technology sounds like the context of a YA novel. In reality, none of us are hardwired for that kind of lifestyle. Hell, we're not even hardwired for this one. We're just messily and sloppily trying to hang on as we stumble forward. Core human conflicts and oppositions and disputes and wars and existential meltdowns and all of the other things our emergent survival consciousness deal with aren't going anywhere.
This is why government deficits and long term debt are evil (regardless of one's political views). Spending money today that must be paid back by people not yet born is, at the very least, a dick move.
I mean, think about it. If you have a project that has a $1000 benefit every year, why shouldn't the recipient of this benefit pay for it? The fact that the beneficiary is in the future doesn't fundamentally change anything. What matters is that the project is a net positive for the future. Do you think it would be justified to tear up all the roads after we are done with them so that we don't leave anyone with debt?
> If the emperor demands, it will be built.
The emperor rules for 50 years at best. His descendants may have different demands.
“Construction of Cologne Cathedral began in 1248 but was halted in the years around 1560, unfinished. Attempts to complete the construction began around 1814 but the project was not properly funded until the 1840s.”
If a building took one year to build, but they didn't work on the weekends, would you object and say no, it only took 260 days?
So would you say it took 200 years to build Analytical Engine, or would you consider the Babbages original attempt and the current day attempt two separate projects?
and you can clearly see which part was done by which architect, as it's style, and structure shifts. Is the same vision of Gaudi still present in more modern parts of it?
(personally i think no, after seeing on vacation)
We send a mission to Alpha centauri that would take, lets say, 100 years to get there with the current propulsion technologies, and in 30 years we discover a new one that would take 20 years to get there. Or the same for big buildings (I don't know, arcologies) where new materials and techniques would turn obsolete how it started if it was long enough in the past.
And not only new ways to improve, but different priorities or things that are out of our control that happen during its development. What if the land where the The Line in Saudi Arabla is being built gets permanently flooded because sea level rise or the entire region becomes unlivabable because frequent high enough temperatures in the region? Even social trends may turn something built for the future obsolete, there are plenty of ghost megacities in China.
Both acceleration in technologies, and acceleration in changes outside what is the construction by itself (climate, society, etc) can turn into (potentially hamrful) waste decades of effort.
The farther out, the more abstract and fuzzy, but they had a long-term view.
Also, they kept employees forever.
The app I just released (for a small nonprofit -I no longer work for that company) was three years in the making. I also was the initial author of an infrastructure service that is doing quite well, but it took ten years to get there.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Pas...
These are really not two sides of the same coin.
Freeman Dyson famously commented that no project should be planned that takes longer than five years. Anything beyond that and the ground shifts out from under the foundations of the effort. One ends up with efforts that persist not because they are useful, but because they are established, because there is an entrenched constituency for the consumption of resources the project entails.
„It‘s emitting lethal doses of radiation for the next 100k years.“
I have to wonder if there's something about the current material conditions that orients us towards short term thinking?
Cathedrals might be more typical example of centuries long projects, although for me its not clear how expansions and renowations are delineated from initial construction
In fact, liquidity preference theory is the theory of reluctance to commit resources in the present for a future cause because the future is uncertain. Only the most versatile assets have any chance of being useful in the future and the most versatile asset is money. Metal money is easy to hoard dragon style. Metal currencies therefore make people artificially short term oriented, simply because thinking about the future is irrelevant beyond a certain point, the money is perfectly versatile after all. Except, this is an illusion. You cannot hoard money in the long term without causing deflation and once trade is unprofitable it simply stops and business closes down. The value of the money becomes more volatile until there is enough scarcity in production that prices start rising again and you get boom and bust cycles.
In this way, money fools people into being short sighted and unwilling to commit to longer time frames.
Deflating currencies inherently discourage doing work in the future and actively encourage short term thinking. Being an early adopter and HODLing a cryptocurrency as soon as possible while it's value rises let's you get rich without working. As time passes, the quantity of money that an hour of labor buys keeps shrinking until it is utterly impossible. Earning money in your 20s becomes your top priority so as to maximize the total return from the deflation. Meanwhile working in your 50s and 60s is meaningless. Do you see the problem? The best time to earn money will always be in the past, but the past is already over! It's too late! I hope it is clear that an economic system that rewards the past and punishes the future is inherently counterproductive to any long term project and incompatible with the fact that the arrow of time points forwards, not backwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
[0]: https://longnow.org/store/clock-long-now-time-and-responsibi...
[1]: https://longnow.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi
Those VCs were waiting a long time.
Any proof for that? Death Star is big as a Moon, it has energy of several millions of Suns (it can blow up entire planet to pieces in seconds, just calculate energy needed to overcome gravity well). The only thing we know that could even remotely theoretically approach it, are impacts with asteroids at almost light speed.
Saying the only thing preventing us from building it, is unstable political system, is just delusional! We really need to get away from this "technology will solve anything" mentality!
What is desirable now are things like a fidget spinner, that makes some quick cash, and gets forgotten soon after.
For me a language, culture, sexual arousal.