Similar basic dynamics have been identified by multiple people. Spengler, Toynbee, etc. General predictions over periods of 300+ years/15+ generations are possible and their conclusions probable. Knowing the general dynamics is very different from knowing the specifics and final players however.TallDave wrote:The long view is probably unknowable beyond ~50 years (and maybe a lot less than that) barring a technological collapse.My perspective takes the long view. Centuries of cultural evolution.
The Singularity is near.
A Green Wants to Reduce the Numbr of Humans on Earth
Vae Victis
What your solution sounds like to me, it something that will spawn giant uncontrollable shanty towns and trailer parks without adequate and reliable utilities (water, electricity etc.)MSimon wrote:Nanos,Nanos wrote:Perhaps the only thing Technocracy needs to do is to be the zoning board, and let everyone else do their thing.
I think a better avenue is to design what Bucky Fuller called an autonomous dwelling unit.
A package that can be dropped on site and erected in a day.
Design the "tools" that will move things in the direction you want. Then let individuals use them as they see fit.
Or maybe a huge domed space where individuals can use the interior as they see fit. That eliminates heating and cooling costs. So people can build "shacks" as they see fit.
In fact I would look deeply into Bucky's stuff before even heading in any direction.
As to a zoning board. The problem is even if they start out approving everything power goes to people's heads.
There are certain heuristics you can use for your simulations. Like a maximum of one hour of travel every day.
In the US, I believe cities are far more carefully planned and zoned than in Europe where they are more organic. You'd be hard pressed to find gridded streets that are perfect squares in Europe.
Re: A Green Wants to Reduce the Numbr of Humans on Earth
I think as long as we live in a situation of industrialized prosperity wars will continue to get rarer. The reason is simple: complexity.djolds1 wrote:
That settlement has been fracturing since WWII, but isn't gone yet.
Push far enough and that settlement collapses. It is possible to win people's wars, but not by negotiation. You win them by Hama Rules. Carthaginian Rules. Trojan Rules.
Raise all structures and monuments of the enemy culture to the ground. Salt the earth. Kill all the males over 13. Rape the women. Enslave the women and children. Scatter the remaining population to the four winds, and thus kill the culture. There is no enemy "people" left to come back at you in the next generation.
Play the game this moron wants to and death lists as seen in Argentina will appear. When the prey goes to ground, you leave it no ground to go to. Kill all the intelligentsia fellow travelers. No trials, just disappeared. This type of war would cause enough slaughter to gag a maggot. But if this moron and his fellow bien pensants think they can declare war on this entire society, sterilize vast tracts of people, and walk away laughing and celebrating their righteousness...
Well, if they want to play it, this game can definitely be played.
Duane
As a civilisation gets more advanced more of its wealth get associated with delicate organisations, microchip factories, finance firms, film industries, etc., etc. and less with raw materials.
This makes it harder to 'steal' the resources of another country by invading it, because by the time you finished the invasion, a large portion of the countries delicate industries have been destroyed. This is not the same as it was many years ago when fertile land, ore etc. (which can easily be seized by an invader) were very wealthly in their own right.
So the higher the value of raw commodities, the more profitable war becomes, the higher the value of services and manufactured goods the less profitable war becomes and peace reigns supreme.
On the issue of people deciding to have less children, the reality in western society is that we end up with a top heavy population and invite immigrants of working age in to work. This means that the country who acquires the immigrants gets load of people of working age in for free without having to pay for their education, maintanence or upbringing.
From the point of view of the country they come from this is a disaster, all the investment they made in educating their best and brightest just evaporates away as they leave the country. Doctors emmigrate from poor countries with chronic malaria to rich countries to perform liposuction because it pays better.
From a genetic point of view if you have country A which has 1.5 children per family and country B that has 3.5 children per family and the population of country B steadily emmigrates to country A, country A becomes a 'gene drain' while B becomes a gene fountain, the population immigrating into country B will make use of the resources freed by country A's dwindling population. In a few centuries or millenia not a single indigenous gene will remain in country A, all the population will have genes that originate in country B.
Its just natural selection. If you convince nine tenths of the population to have fewer children, the descendents of the 10th that didn't will inherit the world.
If the world's population is to decrease it has to be uniform and so far there is not organisation in existence that has the capacity to enforce such a thing.
jmc,
There is planning and then there is planning.
Gridded streets are good. Zoning for commercial vs. residential is bad.
By mixing commercial with residential you get people walking more and reduce transport costs. Mixing light industrial / commercial with residential reduces the need for autos AND public transport. Bicycles will do at least in the warmer months.
I still like Bucky Fuller's Autonomous Dwelling Unit that is a net economic producer. i.e. investment in a dwelling increases economic output instead of being a consumer.
There is planning and then there is planning.
Gridded streets are good. Zoning for commercial vs. residential is bad.
By mixing commercial with residential you get people walking more and reduce transport costs. Mixing light industrial / commercial with residential reduces the need for autos AND public transport. Bicycles will do at least in the warmer months.
I still like Bucky Fuller's Autonomous Dwelling Unit that is a net economic producer. i.e. investment in a dwelling increases economic output instead of being a consumer.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
One thing I have discovered is that the discussion over overpopulation displays an arrogance that is beyond belief. It seems that most of the Progressives don't understand economics and don't read history, their own especially . They keep repeating the the same chicken little talk and the same "If you give us control we can manage things" language while ignoring the horrors their previous actions and inactions have caused.
http://green-agenda.com/index.html
How much blood does there need to be before we stop listening to these people.
http://green-agenda.com/index.html
How much blood does there need to be before we stop listening to these people.
Maybe 300 years ago that was true, but we're too high on the curve now. With the advent of AI and artificial life, in a century humanity may not even exist as something we would recognize or comprehend.djolds1 wrote:Similar basic dynamics have been identified by multiple people. Spengler, Toynbee, etc. General predictions over periods of 300+ years/15+ generations are possible and their conclusions probable. Knowing the general dynamics is very different from knowing the specifics and final players however.TallDave wrote:The long view is probably unknowable beyond ~50 years (and maybe a lot less than that) barring a technological collapse.My perspective takes the long view. Centuries of cultural evolution.
The Singularity is near.
The Singularity???TallDave wrote:Maybe 300 years ago that was true, but we're too high on the curve now. With the advent of AI and artificial life, in a century humanity may not even exist as something we would recognize or comprehend.
A wonderful religious symbol, but the Techno-Rapture has as much real world probability as God physically ascending his 144,000 chosen into Heaven.
The Omega Point is a more realistic quasi-religious transcendent goal for a neo-religion to work toward, but it is centuries to millennia into the future.
Duane
Vae Victis
I don't believe in singularities.
I gather from quantum mechanics that the universe is fundamentally finite. If relativity disagrees, I get suspicious. For example, just because we know of no mechanism that can limit the density of a black hole doesn't mean there isn't one.
As for technology and transhumanism, I suspect that damping factors will become important, like when CPU cores hit a thermal ceiling (I have a 4-year-old 3 GHz computer. Where are the 10 GHz PCs?) or when the world's population stopped ballooning. Or when fighter jets stopped getting faster. "The Singularity" is just an extrapolation from a short-term trend, and as anyone who's done turbulence modelling can tell you, extrapolation of an observed trend without understanding ALL the underlying mechanisms tends to not work well.
Anyway, there's my two cents... Speaking of turbulence modelling, I better get out of here and study; the exam is tomorrow...
I gather from quantum mechanics that the universe is fundamentally finite. If relativity disagrees, I get suspicious. For example, just because we know of no mechanism that can limit the density of a black hole doesn't mean there isn't one.
As for technology and transhumanism, I suspect that damping factors will become important, like when CPU cores hit a thermal ceiling (I have a 4-year-old 3 GHz computer. Where are the 10 GHz PCs?) or when the world's population stopped ballooning. Or when fighter jets stopped getting faster. "The Singularity" is just an extrapolation from a short-term trend, and as anyone who's done turbulence modelling can tell you, extrapolation of an observed trend without understanding ALL the underlying mechanisms tends to not work well.
Anyway, there's my two cents... Speaking of turbulence modelling, I better get out of here and study; the exam is tomorrow...
I don't know about a techno-rapture, but the technological singularity is simply the point beyond which predictability breaks down due to cumulative, ongoing, accelerating advances unforseeable from our current vantage point.A wonderful religious symbol, but the Techno-Rapture has as much real world probability as God physically ascending his 144,000 chosen into Heaven.
It's interesting that a lot of sci-fi written as late as the 1980s now seems amusingly unperspicacious due to the sudden ubiquity of the Internet. E-mail wasn't even a word most people knew 20 years ago.
Things are changing faster than they ever have before. That's all Singularity really means.
I don't know about a techno-rapture, but the technological singularity is simply the point beyond which predictability breaks down due to cumulative, ongoing, accelerating advances unforseeable from our current vantage point.
The technological singularity , like tokamak fusion, will always be 30 years away.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Planck length squared or cubed does define the fundamental quanta of volume, which rules out singularity. Yes, I know squared is area, not volume, but matters get funky at that scale.93143 wrote:I don't believe in singularities.
I gather from quantum mechanics that the universe is fundamentally finite. If relativity disagrees, I get suspicious.
Personally I prefer Loop Quantum Gravity as the GUT approach. The Heim variant of LQG might play out.
IIRC its been demonstrated that Black Holes don't form singularities. Yes, the Event Horizon forms, but as density and gravitational forces increase within the horizon, relativistic effects set in. Time slows down more and more. Matter and energy within the hole collapse toward singularity, but never achieve it as time virtually comes to a stop. Instead of a singularity, the inner structure of the hole is more accurately described as an eternally collapsing object.93143 wrote:For example, just because we know of no mechanism that can limit the density of a black hole doesn't mean there isn't one.
All technologies and most physical development processes such as the early emergence of animal life follow s-curve development and complexification clines. Initial breakthrough, rapid definition of the various basic types (turbojets/ramjets/pulse-detonation, the various phyla of life), relatively rapid elaboration of the possibilities of the basic types, and then general stability. IIRC there have only been one or two new phyla in 500 million years, most appearing very quickly after the emergence of animal life.93143 wrote:As for technology and transhumanism, I suspect that damping factors will become important, like when CPU cores hit a thermal ceiling (I have a 4-year-old 3 GHz computer. Where are the 10 GHz PCs?) or when the world's population stopped ballooning. Or when fighter jets stopped getting faster.
Any religion requires a transcendent element. God, Nirvana, etc. IMO, the Aristotelean cosmologies of the old religions are badly out of date. The Singularity or the Omega Point are useful transcendent ends for the next generation of religions. And any human society needs religion to survive.93143 wrote:"The Singularity" is just an extrapolation from a short-term trend, and as anyone who's done turbulence modelling can tell you, extrapolation of an observed trend without understanding ALL the underlying mechanisms tends to not work well.
Luck.93143 wrote:Anyway, there's my two cents... Speaking of turbulence modelling, I better get out of here and study; the exam is tomorrow...
Duane
Vae Victis
Yes, but that ignores the fact that a single technology at the top of it's S-curve may enable new developments in another tech or even entirely new techs, creating an overall curve that is exponential. Cumulative technology/science gains are more than the sum of their parts. The microscope and materials science enabled advances in biology and chipmaking, and from the latter processors are now in turn are used to model problems in biology and materials science. As Newton said of his own breakthrough insights, "I stood on the shoulders of giants" -- the Industrial Revolution based on his laws of motion came in part from the telescopic observations of Kepler and Brahe. Now we use computers to detect the wobble of extrasolar planets.All technologies and most physical development processes such as the early emergence of animal life follow s-curve development and complexification clines.
True, it does recede as you approach, beacuse the breakdown in predictability is dependent on where you are in the curve, but it becomes smaller over time. People in the year 500 AD would probably have noticed very little difference in technology in 700 AD, but someone from the 1950s sees very different technology in 2000 -- and it is probably just as hard for someone today to predict what technology will look like in 25 years.The technological singularity , like tokamak fusion, will always be 30 years away.
And society changes along with tech -- hormone research and materials science led to birth control and widespread use of latex condoms, creating the sexual revolution. It wasn't that long ago homosexuality was still considered a mental illness and out-of-wedlock sex a major taboo.
There's a finite amount of stuff we can know about the universe, and there's also a finite amount of stuff we can do to it in order to get a useful technological result. Groups of technologies should also show an S-curve, which can be extended by timely scientific advance but not transformed into an unbounded function.
I don't know how far up the S-curve we are. We may be just starting, in which case a societal collapse is likely before we get anywhere near the top. Human civilization always works that way; the limiter isn't technical, it's human nature, and our civilization is showing the familiar signs...
I don't know how far up the S-curve we are. We may be just starting, in which case a societal collapse is likely before we get anywhere near the top. Human civilization always works that way; the limiter isn't technical, it's human nature, and our civilization is showing the familiar signs...
Sure, there must be a theoretical top to the S-curve, but there are indications that it's so far beyond today's tech that the limit is as meaningless to our lives as the limit on the amount of hydrogen the Sun can fuse. Groups of techs don't show an S, they show an exponential progression.
Civilization collapse is certainly a concern, but tech now rules out virtually all the ways prior civilizations collapsed. Famine, disease, and natural disaster are all much more manageable now, and with the spread of liberal democracy full-scale major power war is increasingly unlikely. The danger is going to be that smaller and smaller groups can access more and more powerful tech. With luck, we'll be able to expand beyond Earth's biosphere in some fashion, to something both more robust and which allows us to keep our eggs in more than one basket.
Civilization collapse is certainly a concern, but tech now rules out virtually all the ways prior civilizations collapsed. Famine, disease, and natural disaster are all much more manageable now, and with the spread of liberal democracy full-scale major power war is increasingly unlikely. The danger is going to be that smaller and smaller groups can access more and more powerful tech. With luck, we'll be able to expand beyond Earth's biosphere in some fashion, to something both more robust and which allows us to keep our eggs in more than one basket.
I would beg to differ on both famine and disease, a few years of very poor harvests would I reckon see society crumble in many parts of the developed world.
And disease due to ease of movement of people between many countries could see a plague quickly take hold and overwelm us.
I still tend to see civilisation as pretty fragile, perhaps even more so that due to so few experts being around in various fields, should one diaster hit us, we may lack the people to help fix things a few years down the road, so any prolonged difficulties could well see us thrust back into the stone age, and with pollution from defunk sites not helping us at all recover.
And disease due to ease of movement of people between many countries could see a plague quickly take hold and overwelm us.
I still tend to see civilisation as pretty fragile, perhaps even more so that due to so few experts being around in various fields, should one diaster hit us, we may lack the people to help fix things a few years down the road, so any prolonged difficulties could well see us thrust back into the stone age, and with pollution from defunk sites not helping us at all recover.