williatw wrote:djolds1 wrote:The vulnerability is not the computers, nor the eminently digitally editable numbers we call bank accounts. The vulnerability is the electricity. Dies the fire, and everything dies. Freezers shut down and meat goes bad, pumps do not function to pump fuel into car gas tanks, batteries in the ipads do not recharge after the current charge runs down, pharmaceutical synthesis plants do not function and the only stocks of meds remaining are what is on the shelves. Mount a stuxnet attack on the power plants, burn out the turbines and the high end step-down transformers, and we are back in the iron age for decades.
You maybe right but I would assume/hope that the authorities know about the vulnerability of specifically our power plants &/or electric power grid and have hopefully taken some steps to at least "harden" the former (power plants) against attacks cyber or direct. Much harder to protect the entire internet...would think that would be a softer target, a series of "killer" viruses infecting computers and servers all over the country & beyond. The resulting disruption that might last only days or weeks while much less severe than what you are talking about would probably be tougher to defend against & easier to accomplish; the lower hanging fruit so to speak.
American authorities
knew all about WTC and airline security vulnerabilities before 911; Tom Clancy wrote a freaking book on the subject, albeit with a more popular target building and target population. But nothing was done.
Western electrical infrastructure is vast and old. There are few to no ways to retrofit security onto so many legacy systems of such vintage, and forcing "unjustified" major expenses and "digital efficiency limitations" on the utilities will only create massive resistance. Even when such retrofits have been offered, accepting them puts the retrofitted facility on the national critical infrastructure list, and so makes the retrofitted plant liable to random Federal audits and inspections. Offered pro-security retrofits have been REFUSED by some utilities for just this reason.
Nothing will be done until an attack. If we are lucky the attack will be relatively minor. But if it is too minor, we will ignore the implications, just as we did after the first attack on the towers in '93.
williatw wrote:djolds1 wrote:Eventually and inevitably, the society falls into a Tainterian collapse. Population collapses as per the behavioral sink of mouse utopia, wealth is spent to nothing. The society collapses into smaller, mutually squabbling factions and neoethnoi. Life in society is once again nasty, brutish and short. Welcome back, K-selected. Rinse, repeat, do it all over again.
Two things might head that off or at least blunt it:
Plus side, human collapses are not as genocidal as the ends for mouse utopias, so we are different. We see either feudal dark ages, or feudal interregnums in the aftermath of collapses. Feudal interregnums are illustrated most clearly by China, India and Ancient Egypt. The Empire collapses into feudalism; the problems of excess debt and administrative structure are wiped clean. Eventually a feudal baron claws his way to the imperial throne. The empire reboots, but from a new low-cost level. Imperial culture is relatively unchanged from before the collapse, so these societies are essentially static. The other option is a feudal dark age. These act as cultural pressure cookers to create new ethnic groups and a new civilizational spirit. Unlike the static renewed empires, these new civilizations and their protonations of neoethnoi have fresh possibilities once they emerge from their formative periods. I suspect the difference is the integration of disparate immigrant and old line ethnic groups into neoethnoi in the dark ages, vs continuity of the old imperial ethnoi in the feudal interregni.
However, Tainter is not entirely apocalyptic: "When some new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential at least temporarily to raise marginal productivity" (p. 124). Thus, barring continual conquest of your neighbors (which is always subject to diminishing returns), innovation that increases productivity is – in the long run – the only way out of the dismal science dilemma of declining marginal returns on added investments in complexity.
And, in his final chapters, Tainter discusses why modern societies may not be able to choose to collapse: because surrounding them are other complex societies which will in some way absorb a collapsed region or prevent a general collapse; the Mayan and Chaocan regions had no powerful complex neighbors and so could collapse for centuries or millennia, as could the Western Roman Empire - but the Eastern Roman Empire, bordered as it was by the Parthian/Sassanid Empire, did not have the option of devolving into simpler smaller entities.
His paper Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies (1996) focuses on the energy cost of problem solving, and the energy-complexity relation in manmade systems.
More productivity and more resources only heighten the pressures of the mouse utopia. The entire r-selection syndrome is predicated on the easy availability of vast resources. As to other (relatively) advanced societies absorbing and incorporating the collapsing and collapsed, this is nothing new. The barbarian incursions into the Western Roman Empire did precisely that, the barbarians being the absorbers of the collapsed Romans. And the Byzantines did not stave off their collapse forever. It was long, painful, and eventually final.
williatw wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
Admittedly this is from Wikipedia not the original source you are probably basing on. I can think of a few themes along the lines of delay: 1) 3-D Printer manufacturing making the cost of finished goods eventually much cheaper and spreading the means of production further and wider. 2) The fracking boom that might last long enough for one of our fusion startups (or possibly even photovoltaics eventually) including possibly polywell to come into its own. 3) The explosion of computing power; seems to me there is at least one wild card that might be able to handle for a very long time the increase in complexity of society; AI (either "true" AI or just some kind of exponential extension of what we already have). 4) The general decline in birth rates even among the poor and just possibly increases in longevity caused by SENS or related; this would extend the life/productivity of those slow breeding affluent high IQ types.
Again, all this expands resources and only heightens the pressures creating mouse utopia social situations. r-selection is not an artifact of privation, it is a consequence of too much prosperity. More toys and ambrosia for the lotus eaters do not alleviate the situation, they worsen it. And the evidence is fairly good that r-selection does NOT heighten the general IQ.
williatw wrote:And of course technological/industrial society itself is very widespread; if we in the West did collapse sure China (or India) would happily swoop in and claim the easy pickings from cheap land (like their doing in Detroit right now) to patents (gaining controlling interest to greatly undervalued--post collapse companies likes say Lockheed or GE & therefore their patents) to factory equipment to Aerospace/military hardware to ex-pat American scientists/engineers willing to relocate to India/China, because unlike the western Roman empire we do have "complex society" neighbors who only be too willing to absorb/replace us.
I anticipate a collapse of the political order and a simplification of administrative procedures via autocratic diktat first. The rule of a Caesar is always only "for the duration of the emergency," an emergency that never ends. But so long as the emergency continues, all red tape may be cut at the Caesar's whim to "address the problems confronting us."
As to economic functions, industrial, financial and service cartels with state sponsorship are not especially creative, but they can endure at sufficient if not impressive levels of economic efficiency for a good long time. The Byzantine Empire ran its economy on state-client craftguilds of similar type. IOW, I expect the West's next collapse to be one of Republic into Empire, not a general economic collapse into medieval chaos. The economy will be finessed back to moderately efficient function. Expenses will be defrayed by looting vulnerable border areas and demanding taxes (tribute) from the client states. Between 'Tribune of the World' and 'Tribute of the World' lies but a single letter.
As to general technology levels... technics once gained are rarely totally lost. There may be some retrogression in SOTA, but the iron age was not repealed in Western Europe during the medieval period, even if no one was building ships of the extravagance and technical refinement seen in
the Nemi ships for a millennium. If modern industrial civilization were to collapse, I doubt the SOTA goes much farther down than 1920s era crystal radios and light prop aircraft. Civilization can rebuild from such a floor, given some time. If we think Afghans are trouble now, just think of the headaches the Chinese would have with screaming Baptists hiding out in the highlands of Appalachia and Mormons in the Rockies. Not worth the aggravation for a regime that thinks of itself as the Axis Mundi; Middle Kingdom is no boast.
And China is in the same r-selection trap the West is. With Dengism, they chose to pursue prosperity. r-selection syndromes are the cost of economic success.