smiley wrote:2 years ago you did not have google streetview, 5 years ago you did not have acces to realtime weather data, 10 years ago you did not have GPS car navigation, 15 years ago internet was a difficult and sluggish creature with little practical use other than to ping your geek friends, 20 years ago you had to go to a bank and write a paper cheque to get some money.
But all the vital scientific discoveries that needed for implementation of all these technologies were made quite a long ago, some time at late 60s-early 70s at the latest probably. Some of these technologies worked for quite a while on a limited basis, eg. military applications, such as geo-positioning systems and Internet.
What we have done since then was mainly accumulation of the capital investment and setting up mass production in order to deliver these to the mass consumer. Setting up cameras on every street, cabling, writing up tons of program code (often not ideal), and so on. This all demanded quite a lot of time. But this did not involve any substantial scientific breakthroughs.
Throw away your expectation and walk the world in amazement.
I surely do
We're currently in the midst of the information revolution. The only thing, and that was the aim of my remark in the last post, is that our ability to absorb and to use information has not grown. Therefore this revolution will hit a wall sometime. (Judging by my inbox, that point for me is around now
).
This observation (including your inbox management issue) seems to be playing into hands of the Singularity idea. Indeed, we seem to be actively working on something that we may not even be able to utilize with our limited abilities. This way it looks like we are the blind tools of the technological progress aimed at achieving a certain evolutionary goal, rather than the other way round as we over-confidently think.
Look at the following example illustrating an approach to resource allocation when working on improvement of the performance of computer systems (this example is probably quite well known). The numbers are illustrative of course, not real.
As we know, any program execution by computer involves work of hardware and software components. Suppose that it takes 1 second for a computer to execute a program, with 0.5s being attributable to the hardware delay, and 0.5s to the software delay.
Now, our investment of 100 USD will halve either the hardware delay or software delay, depending on how we spend the money. So let's say we spend these 100 USD to reduce the hardware delay to 0.25s, so that the aggregate delay is now 0.75s.
It does not make sense now to invest the next 100USD in hardware again this round, because if we invest 100USD in hardware we will reduce our aggregate delay to 0.625s, while if we invest them in software, the aggregate delay will be reduced to 0.5s (maths seem to be simple). So we will get (0.625-0.5)/0.75=16.7% greater improvement in performance for the same money, time and resources, if we invest 100USD in software rather than in hardware this time round.
And then the investment iterations go interchangeably between the hardware and software. Simple logic, hopefully.
Now lets extrapolate this example to the technical sciences in general, and to these ends equate the hardware aspect to the IT/high-tech field, and software aspect - to the field of the energy sciences
Question: why do we invest so heavily in IT, where we are already reasonably happy for the time being, while we have this huge energy problem right at our doorsteps? Investing our way, we should only hope that a viable AI model arrives before the humanity goes extinct, in order to preserve evolution and intelligence in the form of Singularity or something similar.
This investment bias appears to be driven by the logic of profit-taking/consumer/free market mechanisms. Under the "investment" I understand not only financial resources, but also human, organisational etc. Arguably, the free market mechanisms will guide us through the bottleneck and will fix the energy problem with the "invisible hand", once the market participants have to confront this problem face to face. But how do we know whether this is true.
My thesis is that the free market logic seems to be faltering here. It appears to be unsuitable when dealing with the problems of the scale that are far beyond the capabilities of a single corporation, and sometimes even a single country.