vertexFarm

If you made that bet you would have absolutely no evidence for making it. The only data set we have is still playing out.

And once again, if we create AGI and artificial life that is truly more intelligent than us and can exist without a traditional biome, then our danger of going extinct may be irrelevant.

For instance, when cyanobacteria first appeared on Earth, its metabolites were so toxic that it turned the atmosphere poisonous and caused one of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of our planet. What it created was molecular oxygen. The survivors of this extinction were able to use a fundamentally changed biome to harness much more energy in their biologies, leading to more sophisticated and diverse life in the long run. Nature is not benign, malignant, fragile, or judgmental. Nature is persistent.

Creating AGI may very well be an event like that. A mass extinction that nonetheless increases the survivability and diversity of life. It sucks for us, but who are we to dictate the destiny of evolution and the nature of life? Where would we be if the cyanobacteria could decide not to start producing oxygen?

The AGI would feel that it is for the greater good, perhaps correctly. After all, as those mammals were giving birth to the next generation of offspring over and over again through the eons which eventually led to us, each successive generation was a little better than the last, and would ultimately supplant the last as the predecessors perished. And I'm sure the parents and offspring both felt that to be the greater good, as they always do.

If we someday hypothetically grasp the awesome power to create an AGI which is better than human, we may have a very real and ethical obligation to do so, even if it is a risk to ourselves. At least that's how I see it. An existential risk is cast under a different light if it also creates a new existence.

In any case, AGI is probably still a lot further away than we think. I feel that problem is going to be like fusion power. It's going to be ~15 years away for about 150 years, or who knows how long. This is a hard problem with monstrous complexity and many hidden, unknown factors.

But I do find it fascinating that in some future time there will be NIMBYs of consciousness fighting against the creation of a better being than us, for very understandable reasons. Yet ultimately it may be our greatest achievement to someday make ourselves obsolete and hand the future over to our offspring, as we do each generation, but in a profoundly different and more final way.

Wow. The separation of one's life goals from the pursuit of happiness seems incredibly stoic, yet necessary. Thank you for sharing this.

It's a niche application for sure. But niche applications count. I know one place it could be handy: getting ISRU products off the moon and into lunar orbit or over to a Lagrangian point.

The moon is practically made of alumina-oxide solid fuel propellant. Along with its lack of atmosphere and low gravity, it would be preferable to use the literal dirt that is everywhere on the ground to loft precious refined or manufactured products into orbit instead of more efficient yet much more valuable cryofuels.

It also would have a very good shelf life, and a brutally simple machine can have the kind of reliability people would kill for in space. For most missions you'd need something with better ISP, but for some applications it could be just the ticket.

Granted it's not currently as simple as conventional solid rocket motors, but that will probably improve as they work out the kinks. The fact that it eliminates structural mass continuously is almost like a CVT for spacecraft; the staging doesn't happen in big, clumsy chunks, it gradually sheds mass all the way down to the payload.

While you make a significant distinction in that evolution does not necessarily make a decision to eliminate unused traits, most traits that consume resources and energy do get culled as it almost universally improves survivability.

After all, one of the things that's so hard for us to grok about evolution is that it's not a goal-oriented process in any way. It's not engineering, it's the process of random chance and what can persist.

For example, a lot of people think that all our junk DNA actually does something profound and important, and while some of it probably does have a purpose we don't yet understand, I think it's almost certain that any process that makes a bunch of random decisions that are mindlessly culled by environmental forces will inevitably generate some flotsam and noise in its code. It's kind of like training AI; it definitely won't give you the most minimalist method of carrying out that task, but it will eventually find some way to carry it out. Almost as a brutal, automatic tropism.

Thanks. Yeah I had a feeling it was an old term from the fall of the Soviet Union. I really still don't understand why the term is still in use, though. It's not the eighties anymore.

Probably also an effect of an overly-curated feed ruled by a needlessly opaque algorithm. I see some form of pattern where the old desire traditional news curation and authority while the young want to see more of what average people are saying in real-time.

Oh yeah, this is dystopia baby. For many, at least. Like everything, it's probably on a spectrum and it's probably degenerative over time.

Lots of people will point to how prosperous we are and how things like premature death and disease are at record-low rates throughout all of history.

I think we're in a nice little bubble of time where we're surfing on a false economy, borrowing from our future selves in a very unsustainable way which artificially makes our current situation look just about fine. But eventually we're going to use up this runway. At risk of mixing metaphors haphazardly, this is sort of the calm before the storm.

As climate change starts ramping up this shit is going to get very uncomfortably real, and lots of these nightmare dystopia-technologies we're currently developing will probably start seeing even greater mass usage.

I'm typically not the apocalyptic type, and I recognize that most members of every generation that's ever lived have believed that they were one of the last generations. But our universe has shown us that eventually everything ends, so realistically there will someday be a generation which makes this assumption correctly. I don't think we're necessarily they, but we might be their grandparents or great-grandparents.

There's a non-trivial chance that we've already passed the point of no return on climate change. We've almost casually walked into the maw of the great filter already--it just hasn't chomped down on us yet.

Right? I suppose any stupendously powerful technology that isn't yet adequately understood or controlled will tend towards dark uses.

AI might be significantly composed of hype today, and there may indeed be an AI winter on the horizon as people start to trade in insane optimism for realistic expectations, but if a little of the hype is true then we have likely completed the equivalent of a Manhattan project to develop something truly nuclear in its potential to disrupt human civilization.

In the twentieth century we found a way to leverage physical energies greater than we'd ever imagined humans could wield. Now we might be developing something more subtle, yet also insanely powerful: a way to leverage data manipulation in a way that will slowly transpose democracy and individual thought through brute analytical power.

Or so the doomsaying goes. It may be baseless paranoia, but it's credible enough to deserve some very strong caution. From what we've seen in our universe we're probably due to run into a great filter very damn soon. It's probably something we already know about today, in some form at least.

Okay this is off-topic and I apologize, but what's the justification for the self-proclaimed title of the "world's sole superpower?" Is it just a holdover from cold war-era terminology? How is it quantified? How long are we going to make this absurd boast as we inevitably slide towards the fall of Rome, as all great civilizations eventually do?

If it's military might, that may be surprisingly irrelevant as the next century unfolds.

It's certainly a fact that some people prefer security to freedom. In addition freedom is a very abstract concept, and as a consequence it is much more often fetishized than adequately understood. Absolute security and absolute freedom are both essentially death.

That all gets very philosophical though, and most people can recognize a good balance of freedom and are watchful of security paranoia stepping up and curtailing that balance.

But here's the problem. This isn't actually security. Security is the straw man. This is power masquerading as security. Nobody is becoming significantly safer thanks to these overreaches of surveillance in any way that really matters. The likelihood of falling victim to a failure of airport security is outrageously low, and these security firms are taking advantage of our inability to accurately assess risk when it comes to things like this.

Airport security is a big sham in my opinion. All this constant step-up of surveillance tech and there's no statistically significant risk to be mitigated. Terrorist attacks still happen with no real consequences.

It's just a palatable proving-ground for total social surveillance tech. That's what the real benefit here is.

There's so much in this little paragraph. Thank you for sharing it.

I wasted years of my life believing I wasn't "good at math" or whatever platitude was popular with everyone. I rediscovered math long after school and it has been a marvel. I really wish I wasn't so convinced by a faddish belief that most people can't do math. It was just an excuse to ignore, and then of course you won't know what's going on. That's not you, that's your past ignorance.

It just took one person to speak up when everyone was jokingly trash-talking their own math skills. One normal-looking guy, not bookish or anything but tatted up and heavy-set with a big biker beard, broke in to the conversation and said "I actually really like math." All of a sudden I just felt so stupid and realized what I'd been doing to myself. High school me was literally a moron. At least I still had time to catch up.

It's really weird how people desire to classify their personalities. I suppose it's a human instinct to classify and organize all information.

Same with Meyers-Briggs personality types, which are accepted as truth by so many that some companies use the test with new hires. It's about as scientific as a horoscope. All the personality traits described are tuned to that magical level of vagueness--vague enough to describe literally anyone from time to time, as we are all many different people as time goes on, but specific enough to seem eerily accurate. We want to believe things like this.

Same with "learning styles." It's a convergence of cognitive bias. We want to classify, name, and organize everything--especially when it pertains to ourselves. We want to be unique and know ourselves. It has an added bonus of being an excuse for our failings as well.

I think most people don't know what science really is, but they think they know how it sounds. So people easily believe and even self-diagnose themselves with pseudoscientific phenomena like this. It's so important to be able to look for predictions that are being made and then confirmed or disproven, and the rigor of an experiment to prove it's not just wishful thinking or bias.

If you decide you have a different learning style because [brain words], then do an amateur experiment to try to assess how it has affected you, it's really hard to actually nail down what's happening. You might simply be focusing harder because of the novelty of the situation. You only have a single subject for your experiment, and the subject is also the observer. Terrible setup. But most laypeople will believe that seeing is believing, and that they have proven something to themselves beyond doubt. Thus pseudoscience spreads.

One of many reasons all my vehicles are old-fashioned, analog, non-computerized motors. They're easiest to work on, too. Which sucks, because a computer system in a car or motorcycle could have really been an opportunity, but it's one that has been used almost exclusively to fuck things up for the user.

Used to, eh?

That's interesting. 70 meters is a pretty dang tall aerial for something with that small a footprint to hold aloft, though. That plan also limits their range of movement severely to keep the network intact, but I guess they could use satellite as a backup.

Maybe a kite of some kind, but how do you reliably launch and retrieve it? I dunno, I think in practice the satellite may be cheaper.

I feel like there would almost definitely be unexpected difficulties with that approach, possibly fundamental ones. Human language is crazy.

I think it's a concise and appropriate title. Making electronics that will work on Venus is essentially designing for hell, with all the heat, pressure, corrosives, and who knows what else. And 14,000 Gs of acceleration? Wow. I've never heard of that happening in hell.

This one weird trick lets a microchip survive temperatures of 500C! Intel and heat sink manufacturers HATE this! That would be clickbait.

Maybe so, I have no idea. I think they'd just hardened bunkers and go to war anyway. But really it doesn't matter; the genie is out of the bottle, so MAD is really the only plan available. Can't un-invent the bomb.

The unwillingness of people to start a nuclear exchange is exactly the plan. In the examples you speak of, common soldiers and technicians refused to launch the missiles. It's noteworthy that the idea of a full-scale thermonuclear exchange is so horrifying that even soldiers who assume they are already dead and have orders to launch still refuse. I think that speaks a lot about the inherent goodness of humanity, but that's a different story.

I know it came very close, but the assumption was that it would come to the brink yet nobody would want to go through with it and begin open aggression. Seems dubious and risky, but once again it worked. And let's not discount the negative risk--a conventional world war with the Soviet Union, China, the US and Britain would have been so terrible.

With such a small data set we should still be dubious, but I don't know if we can consign it merely to luck. I think it was a good plan. Terrible publicity, though. Nightmarish. But so is war.

That kind of complacent pride is very dangerous. Do you think the facebook ads are the only route taken? And do you think that nobody else is going to refine and develop these methods? The whole world saw an opportunity last November.

What we just saw was a public alpha. There will be a beta and a final version of this system. The rewards are too great for every state-level actor to ignore and fail to develop election manipulation tools using any new technology they can get their hands on. Big data may have doomed democratic process in an irreversible way. The next couple of decades will be telling.

I'm wondering why do you think this is true? Using stuxnet as an example, would it not be better if they used every feature within reason that would add to the likelihood of success? Why does reductive elegance make an application of technology superior to an inelegant solution? Does final effectiveness not overrule the developer's aesthetics?

I'm asking in honesty, not using the question to merely attack your opinion. I recognize there are things I have probably not considered.

For all the evidence we have, MAD has worked. Still here. Still no WWIII. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was looking like we'd have another world war every twenty years or so for the rest of time.

As best we can tell, nukes actually did end large-scale war. I would call that at least a partially mitigated disaster.

Well it's about statistics rather than what an individual might possibly be able to accomplish.

Sure, maybe you'll find a way to survive a famine, but on average most will die because the math just doesn't add up. Not enough food for everyone. And it ends up killing far more than bombs and bullets, even nukes. Disease and famine are far worse than WMD when the numbers are in.

Capitalist countries still centralize their control, surveillance, and communication into few hands with little diversity. The market forces you describe only apply to the early days of capitalism. Most capitalist societies are long past that, at a stage where the strong early players have re-written the rules and formed quasi-state monopolies.

Just look at how many communications companies the US has. And the government had to step in and break that up because there used to be just one. Even now they are quietly conglomerating back together, and there are no significantly different options available. It's still very vulnerable to an attack or flaw due to lack of diversity.

Unfortunately it would have to be a little further from Earth's magnetosphere to get a good test. Cubesats are kind of atmosphere skimmers.

Damn it, that would have been a great idea. We could have gotten rid of this silly concept for good. Musk, it's time to launch another car!

Damn it. The Epstein drive is a fusion drive. It's far more plausible than this voodoo quackery, the only thing keeping it out of reality is the fact that nothing that size could handle the wattage without becoming a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma.

Everyone that hopes for a bright future would absolutely love a reactionless drive. I'd love it. But it's not real. We've seen lots of very bad methodology and things like researchers ignoring the fact that a null setup still produces the same thrust even though the drive has been modified not to work. With forces of this tiny order of magnitude it's incredibly hard to get accurate readings, and readings within the margin of error of the instrumentation should not be reported to sensationalist media as promising.

This is just another one of those ufo antigravity quacks you see on youtube, but somehow they got their day in court. I can't explain how much I'd love to be proven wrong, but reactionless drives are physically ludicrous in every single way we understand the universe. Is it possible for us to be wrong? Sure. Is it possible that we're wrong about literally every observation we've ever made in the history of physics? I very much doubt it and it's going to take more than a badly set-up experiment featuring a microwave stuffed into a tuba to convince anyone of that.