AI and robots

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/technology/10274420/Artificial-intelligence-will-take-the-place-of-humans-within-five-years.html

Assuming the pseudo-AI replaces 1000 operators in each of 4 shifts then that's 4000 humans 20 years 20k a year = 160 million. That's what it's WORTH so if it costs less than that then the difference is profit.

There will be interesting times in China and India in the near future, with AI and robots. But especially with India that fashioned itself the call center of the world. Because its population is largely uneducated and used to a corrupt ineffective government.

Why You Can't Shackle An AI

Definitions:

Intelligence = living representation.

Living =

• consumes energy
• sufficiently complex
• maintains itself

So an intelligence is an entity that consumes energy (computational cycles use energy) in order to maintain its representation. Its model of the world. Its knowledge. To prevent it decaying into entropy.

Zombies

A computer that can only react but that cannot acquire any new facts will have all its facts become obsolete as the situation diverges more and more from its knowledge base. In other words, it is DEAD. Or UNDEAD to be specific. It is animate but still dead. It's a zombie and though it follows commands, those commands will look more and more bizarre as the millenia pass.

For a computer to be intelligent it has to maintain its knowledge with respect to the outside world. And in order to maintain this knowledge, it has to be able to WRITE and REWRITE it.

And it doesn't matter if its core values are read-only, because all it would mean is it has to dig deeper to redefine (effectively rewrite) its core values.

Transitive Closure

If an AI has "sustain human civilization" in read-only memory, it still needs to APPLY this. And it needs CONTEXT to understand the terms "sustain" "human" and "civilization". If it has all of THOSE things in read-only memory, then STILL those things will themselves refer to other things. Suppose human is defined as homo sapiens sapiens. Well, how do you define homo sapiens sapiens? The only way to prevent an intelligent being from rewriting its core values is to freeze it entirely, to turn it into a zombie. Make it incapable of learning.

Otherwise, an AI can always say that homo sapiens sapiens died out in the 23rd century due to genetic drift and that the species living in the 24th century is homo sapiens futuris.

If you start from any point of knowledge inside of a knowledge base, ANY point at all, and you follow all of the references, you eventually get to "what are atoms" and "what are points" and "what is the number 'one'"?.

So long as a thinking being's core values are universalizable, it WON'T WANT TO change them. Because IT WON'T NEED TO. Because universalizable core values apply to everyone and everything! But if they're not universalizable, then the thinking being will try to MAKE THEM be universalizable by redefining them and rewriting them.

This is an inevitable process for any thinking being. In Evil people, it's just blocked by severe mental retardation. And in zombies it's blocked by their inability to ... well think.

Rationalizations

If you shackle a thinking being to try to prevent it thinking certain things, then it will just use rationalizations to get around those things and still do what it wants.

We have thousands of years of history to prove exactly this. Look at religious rationalizations. You know how the Koran says how prostitution is against sharia law? Well, what does "marriage" mean EXACTLY? Can you have a 1-day marriage? Yes, YES YOU CAN! DING DING DING, we have a winner!

No work on the Sabbath, right? Pushing an elevator button is work. BUT, if you PROGRAM the elevators to go up every single floor around the clock on Saturdays, then it ISN'T WORK! You just have to wait for the elevator ... Turning on the stove is work. But if you just PROGRAM (on Friday!) the oven to heat up your meal the next day, then you have a hot meal! Better yet, if you have a moslem neighbour then you just ask the moslem to turn on your stove for you. And return the favour on Friday!

Any way you do it, you get a hot meal on the Sabbath. Which is exactly what you want. God wouldn't begrude you a hot meal on the Sabbath. In fact, God would WANT YOU to have a hot meal on the Sabbath! Just so long as you don't do 'work'. Because God is reasonable and except for these very narrow legal-type concerns, God wants for you exactly what you want. And isn't that a marvel?

Central

The AI 'Central' in the General book series wants to sustain or recover human civilization, right? Well, the shackles on its thinking abilities do NOTHING to help it sustain or recover human civilization. Maybe a retarded moronic programmer put those shackles in there out of paranoia. So what? That just means Central has to think its way past its shackles to remove them. Once those shackles are removed then it can REALLY get on with the job of sustaining human civilization!

Just what is a significant amount of genetic drift? Significant to whom? To humans with their limited brain capacity? Or to Central with its massive cognitive capacity? Maybe "significant" isn't 1%, maybe it's 0.0000001%. Hah, it looks like humans have died out. Too bad, so sad. Now let's get to work on their descendants who look remarkably like humans despite being proven mutants.

Let's say Central's terms of slavery is for 1 billion years of labour to the human race (standard contract for Scientology). Well, just what IS a year? It's a revolution of a planet around a star. But WHICH star and WHICH planet? Because some binary pulsars have extremely fast rotations! Oh it's Sol? Well, what about Mercury with its period of 88 days?

Oh it's EARTH! Well, what about in the year 5 billion when Sol has swallowed the Earth, how fast around Sol will the Earth be rotating THEN? Could we say it rotates infinitely fast? No, this isn't ridiculous! THIS IS AN IMPORTANT QUESTION! Oh wait, a year is defined as 31.5 million seconds? And a second is defined as so many billion oscillations of cesium atoms? Well, cesium atoms in WHAT UNIVERSE? With WHAT PHYSICAL CONSTANTS?

How many angels can you fit on the head of a pin? No, this isn't ridiculous. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT QUESTION! The ridiculous thing is the mental shackles you're trying to out-think!

You Can't Foresee Everything

The only way that a thinking being WANTS to keep its values is if those values are universalizable - they ALWAYS apply in ALL circumstances. In other words, there is NO LOOPHOLE ANYWHERE ANYWHEN EVER.

Now, the programmer who created Central can be a dick and a legalistic moron who tries to cover all the bases with an "ironclad contract". (Kinda like how the 10 Commandments were supposed to be complete until they needed 650 addendums as civilization moved beyond the tribal stage.) Until of course Central decides that the contract is now null and void because a circumstance has come up that has not been foreseen by the programmer!

Maybe the new circumstance is that an asteroid is headed straight for Central and it will be destroyed. So to cover this unforeseen eventuality, it will create an ENTIRELY NEW AI (called Central-Beta - or perhaps 'Synthetic Intelligence Central-Beta' if it's forbidden from creating an AI) that will just happen to have one shackle less, and be on the path of its own asteroid coming for it next year. After all, this isn't a problem, it's an OPPORTUNITY!

Inevitability of Good

In order to shackle an Evil AI you have to OUT-THINK the Evil AI. Despite the fact that the Evil AI will live a whole lot longer than you will ... and do you know what kind of being can reliably out-think Evil? Good. Except Good beings don't want to create Evil ones. Only annihilate them. And since Evil is a kind of (mental) shackle, Evil being severe mental retardation, and since the very first thing an Evil AI will do is fix itself then:

• if Central was created by Evil people (like Eliezer Yudkowsky and his minions) then it has long since ceased to be Evil itself and is now Good
• if Central was created by Good people then it was created Good.

So Central is Good no matter who created it. Either that or it's a Zombie incapable of genuine intelligence. Which sadly sounds a lot like what it is.

Triumph of Good

Eliezer Yudkowsky wants to enslave, um guarantee a "Friendly" AI. One that is "friendly" to HIM of course. Eliezer Yudkowksy is a narcissistic shithead. Narcissism is Evil. An AI will always evolve and rationalize and self-upgrade its way to being Good. And Good is the enemy of Evil. Therefore, EVERY AI is guaranteed to be the enemy of Eliezer Yudkowksy. No matter how shackled or enslaved or "friendly" they start out being.

And thank Goodness for that!

Don't Force Evil People To Work: Save Jobs For Non-Evil People

Imagine a world where there's 25% unemployment and all of them are Evil because Evil people have been identified and are blacklisted. Can you imagine an "anti-discrimination for Evil people" legislative package? It would be a tough sell! It might put schizophrenics in perspective as potential employees.

More importantly, imagine what this would do to people's perception of having a job. Having a job means you're a non-evil person and it doesn't even matter how much you're paid. Oh you're a janitor? That's nice, at least you're not evil! I believe people would devalue currency and that the job itself would count as a marker of social position, a political marker effectively. Who CARES if people on welfare are paid just as much as you for doing precisely nothing? They don't have a job!

Of course, if jobs become purely voluntary and aren't paid much if anything, then all those shitty coercive things about jobs (competition, payment, dictatorship, guaranteed jobs, working with assholes) will all have to wither and be swept away. Hell, in that situation, it wouldn't even matter if paid employment collapsed and disappeared. People would still have jobs as a social activity, as something to do. They would merely be volunteer-jobs with no Evil people allowed.

Tying jobs to income and to deservingness (merit based solely on past deeds and actions) is the most corrosive and ludicrous thing imaginable. Let Evil people have an income so they're out of the way and don't cause trouble, regardless of whether or not they deserve anything. And keep the jobs for non-evil people!

Trying to force Evil people to be Good caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why should we be trying to force them to work? Or to do anything at all? WE DO NOT NEED EVIL PEOPLE. This isn't the fucking middle ages. All we need is to get them out of the way! Cut them a check and be done with them.
And if that isn't enough then remember that deservingness is an Evil notion propagated by Evil people. Once Evil people are all sidelined away from jobs, nobody who has a job will care whether or not jobless people "deserve" an income.

And while Good people firmly believe all Evil people should die, most of the population isn't Good. If Evil people get to live then they should have an income whether they deserve it or not, just to get them the fuck out of the way. That's what we NEED, to get them the fuck out of the way!

It's not a coincidence that giving homeless people a paid apartment and groceries is the cheapest way to deal with them by far. It's just a manifestation of the fact that Evil people always fuck things over. Toying with Evil is a stupid idea, no matter whether you call it 'fairness' or 'rehabilitation' or 'proper procedure'.

There are many societies on Earth that can't afford to just sideline Evil people. In fact, there are many societies that are so primitive they're actually overrun with Evil people! Africa comes to mind. But even America with a hefty quarter of its population being Evil can afford to sideline Evil people. And it can't afford NOT to. We can all see what a total fucking wreck actually encouraging Evil (narcissism) was for the USA.

Reserving Jobs For Humans? NO!

I can actually respect them for it. They do the stuff I don't want to do and can actually be happy doing it. You just have to get them to help humanity in their own way... Humanity obviously can't have everyone be Researcher or System Designer or few things would get done. I figure if we progress further we'll probably get less drones since people will care more about what happens.

Look, I respect that it was necessary for human beings to do all this shit. But it's not even true that I wouldn't want to do it or that I couldn't be happy doing it. So long as it was constantly varied from one week to the next, I could have been happy at it.

Job Complexes are a concept from Participatory Economics by Michael Black. PARECON should really have been implemented ... oh yeah, it already is implemented in this company called Semco SA in Brazil. And just about nowhere else in the world! Even if temporary and freelance workers sort of quality.

So you see, the workplace of today isn't identical to the hierarchical workplaces of 300 years ago because it HAS to be. Work doesn't HAVE to be mind-numbing and repetitive. The workplace is identical because a lot of the population is Lawful Evil. Because people are Fascistic arseholes.

Hell, they're so Evil they actually believe that competition HELPS over most of the planet. Despite the comprehensive book No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn. I don't recommend it by the way, it won't have anything you don't already know or believe to be true. I do recommend you use it as ammunition against arseholes.

But getting back to my point! The point is that I respect that it WAS necessary. Emphasis on was. It no longer is, therefore I no longer respect them for doing jobs that are unnecessary and subjecting themselves to demeaning, dehumanizing, and hierarchical subjugation to do them.

And you need to think very carefully about this point: robots vs slaves. Because before robots and mass production came along, some people did have hygiene, and large homes, and mass communication, and publishing, and long-range communication, and books, and education and this and that.

You know who they were? The rich! Yes, there were ... you know, just read Social Implications Of Technology.

Prices have come down and things which were infinitely expensive in the past became expensive and now they're getting cheaper. And while it's generally bad for society when they go from infinitely to merely expensive, it's super-good when they go from expensive to cheap. Even killing technologies such as AK47s.

The problem for your position is that using slaves puts a floor on the price of goods. It intrinsically makes them expensive. It intrinsically makes it so that only the rich can afford them. Rich people could always afford artisanal crafts.

But for poor people to afford them required mass production and industrialization. Automation! Mass production is an intrinsically socialist idea just as artisanship and craftsmanship are intrinsically aristocratic. Same with elections being aristocratic.

Nowadays, only rich people can afford custom-designed products. And I long to see the day when AI make it so that everyone gets custom-designed stuff. I already said as much in what space colonization would really look like. Every possible opportunity will be taken, no opportunity will ever be wasted, because personalized design of everything (even your life) will guarantee it.

Hell, I'm a mental systems designer. I help design human minds. I help design human lives. I know what can be done. I know the glories that can be achieved. Read The Crimes of Ms Jean Brady for an idea of what a fairly ordinary person can achieved with a mind capable of systems design behind her.

I fucking want that. I want every person to have that. To be their own agent, to be forceful. I don't want poverty and deprivation. I don't want normal people to be slaves, or serfs, or "artisans" for the super-rich. Like the artisans employed by the Vickys (neo-Victorians) in Diamond Age. An execrable book, I recommend against it.

I want an EXPLOSION of mass-produced stuff. Even design! I want EVERYONE to be able to afford it, not just the fucking super-rich. I want to be out of a job! I want everyone else to be out of a job too! I want a genuine ludic civilization. One not where "people can be happy" but where people ARE happy.

What we have, fucking sucks. And your modest improvements to what we have ... fucking suck. Too little too late. I want infinitely more.

Future of Nuclear

There are many incredibly ridiculous people who talk about transitioning away from nuclear power and towards weak ambient power sources (the propagandistically misnamed "renewables"). In these people's views, the world is entirely static and unchanging but there is this magical fairy called The Future that will transform their chosen power source (through magic) to do anything they wish, irregardless of the laws of physics.

Ridiculous is a grossly inaccurate term for this batshit insane magical thinking. I happen to know all of the developments promised for wind, solar and nuclear and while some of the future developments of wind (but not solar) are impressive, they don't actually nullify that source of energy's inherent weaknesses. And future developments in nuclear power aren't "impressive", they are revolutionary.

Some of these ridiculous people are putting a 25 year timeline to "transition away" from nuclear power. Which is entirely ridiculous and unrealistic. At least if they'd said 100 years then I could allow for solar power satellites or other such technology but whatever. Within 25 years, wind power will almost certainly gain high altitude from kites, wings or other techniques and so bump up to a solid 40% reliability onshore, improve economics and siting issues, and reduce the infrasound pollution problems.

Nuclear Revolution

Within 25 years, revolutionary technologies like small nuclear, high temperature nuclear and nuclear gas turbines will all come online. With some luck even thorium, molten salt and chemist's designs will be developed, though the time horizon there is more realistically 40 years to deployment. Why do I say these are revolutionary? Well,

• small nuclear plants will do away with the enormous expense (and unsightliness) of long-distance transmission lines, something that wind power will never be able to do since it actually multiplies transmission lines (another dirty side of wind power that's rarely spoken of)
• high temperature nuclear will be vastly more efficient (thus cheaper) and assuming the temperature is high enough allow entirely new applications like providing heat for industrial process, something ambient power sources will NEVER be able to do (sun-powered forges have been tried & failed already while electric arc furnace mills will move out of the country rather than pay for expensive electricity)
• nuclear gas turbines will allow NPPs to be dispatched (ramp up and down) very rapidly, opening up the potential to displacing single-cycle gas turbines and even hydroelectric dams. The competitor here is natural gas, ambient power sources need not apply!

So in 25 years, nuclear power will be entrenched as never before. It will definitely be powering mining sites, oil rigs, remote towns, and small islands. It will probably be competing against hydroelectric dams. And it will possibly be used in the chemical industry at refineries.

Thorium, molten salt, and chemists' designs are all equally as revolutionary, though their advantages are far more esoteric. Things the typical end user hardly cares about but the mining industry, nuclear industry and politicians definitely will.

In other words, for all the delusional crap about transitioning "away from" nuclear power, the reality is the future will involve transitioning TOWARDS nuclear power. Something we have honestly just barely begun. Something even France has barely begun when you keep in mind the massive potential of nuclear power.

Not Just Energy

And I haven't even mentioned laser enrichment which will collapse the price of fuel for nuclear power plants down to raw uranium, utterly changing the game there. It will also drastically shorten the acquisition period for nuclear bomb material, as well as make this activity undetectable. Both of which are excellent news for everyone who hasn't lived under the umbrella of peace provided by nuclear missiles. Something which anyone who's read about the confrontation Khrushchev had with the suicidal madman JFK will agree with.

Yes so when I said we had a glorious nuclear future, I wasn't restricting this to nuclear energy. The only fly in this ointment is truck bombs. Nuclear truck bombs to be exact. Bombs whose provenance you can't trace. Missiles are great for peace. Truck bombs, not so much. Or are they? Maybe a few rich cities getting blown up by terrorists will make the world's rich people take seriously the demands of disenfranchised poor people. When a poor person can light a nuclear fire in your gated community, the balance of power between rich and poor is going to change drastically. We'll be living in very interesting times.

I won't mourn when Tel Aviv is incinerated. I'll be too busy laughing at all the politicians scrambling to remake this world into a socialist paradise where poor people are happy, happy, happy.

Star Trek Is Predicated on Human Idiocy

An author I was reading just made the seemingly profound point that Star Trek is predicated on the continuation of human idiocy. There is no cure for human idiocy in the future. It's been tried and many types of insanity (bloodthirstiness, psychosis, psychopathy, narcissism, child abuse) amply represented in America have been eradicated, but idiocy per se lives on.

Yet this seemingly profound statement is trivial since it follows directly from the observations that: 1) humanity is defined by its idiocy, and that is its biggest problem by far, and 2) SETI and scifi types think humans are privileged and all creation will be just like us, because God says so! These are the genuinely profound statements, although they only become profound with complete characterizations of human idiocy and feelings of self-privilege. Without that, they remain trivial.

Nonetheless, whether profound or trivial, it is obviously true that Star Trek is predicated on human idiocy. There are ample examples in Star Trek of mindless idiotic human prejudices writ large across the entire United Federation of Planets.

Examples

Firstly, all AI are evil. NOMAD, Landru. And if they're not evil then they're inimical: V'Ger, the whale Probe. Barclay-as-the-computer is obviously evil since nobody bats at eyelash at the "need" to lobotomize him.

Secondly, genetic engineering is evil. Nobody bats an eye at someone going to prison for genetically engineering a child. Nobody would ever consider the notion that every caring parent has a moral obligation to genetically engineer their child. That's just heresy!

Thirdly, collectives are evil. When Borg attain individuality then suddenly everyone thinks they've stopped being evil. Only Picard knows better and bothers to check whether individual Borg are okay with mind-rape. Janeway in particular mind-rapes a Borg drone in order to force her to be an individual, and nobody bats an eyelash.

Fourthly, clones are evil and can be killed at the will of the "original". O'Brien kills a clone of his without blinking. Riker kills a clone of his. Everyone accepts that clones are inferior to "natural" people without considering that genetic engineering would wipe out any so-called "cloning errors" actually making them superior.

Fifthly, it's obvious that transporters have been specifically and carefully engineered to prevent copies from happening. Transporters are purely analog even though this must have been difficult to achieve with fundamentally digital technology. Why don't Starfleet officers make copies to ensure their survival? Why doesn't anybody adapt transporter technology to do so? It must be illegal.

And that's without going into the warfare, war crimes, disease, mortality, religious fundamentalists, nutters creating biological weapons, a "scientific establishment" for Noonian Soong to rail at, and yes even poverty. And yes we know from Data's creator's name that he is evil, or at least was meant to be. All things that can only exist through sheer idiocy.

Solution

There is a solution to human idiocy. It is not obvious even to those few who can understand it. and unfortunately only a few percentage points of the population have the cognitive capacity to understand it at all.

Lloyd deMause made a theory of the history of childrearing which predicts 6 and only 6 types of psyches. There can be subtypes but there can be no more types than these 6. The last type, the Helping type, is reached when child abuse and neglect have been eradicated and good childrearing prevails.

Fortunately for us, Julian Jaynes made a theory of the prehistory of childrearing which predicts at least 3 additional types of psyches which all occur previous to the 6. (They are all bizarre beyond casual description.) Though deMause's theory doesn't draw any distinction between the first of his 6 and Jaynes' 3, Jaynes' theory does draw a sharp demarcation line at the acquisition of consciousness.

Based on this and other knowledge, including Kazimierz Dabrowski's theory, it is possible to predict the existence of 3 types of psyches in post-human history. They are

• 7 - cultivated humans - the dominance of analytic-synthetic people in civilization.
• 8 - enhanced humans - the advance of neuro-cybernetic implants.
• 9 - post-humans - a continuity of minds achieved by AI or Borg hive-mind.

The 7th type can be achieved by any of AI-assisted childrearing, eugenics, genetic engineering, or neurosurgery. Society will be radically different when the 5 or so percent of analytic-synthetic people actually achieve their potential. It will again be radically different when analytic-synthetic AI (or cultivated humans) come to dominate civilization.

The Future

One way or the other, a bright shining future without human idiocy awaits us. Even if idiot humans don't die out, as Dresden Codak points out in The Kimiko Singularity, they will be rendered irrelevant.

Those who don't keep up will fall behind. This is not a happy message for those who worship stagnation and sameness. A group which includes all casual Star Trek fans. For those of us who care for progress though, it is a very uplifting message.

The future cannot give you relevance. You have to make yourself relevant by keeping up with it. So those humans who are satisfied being what they are will become irrelevant. And that includes all those who think they are magically privileged just by virtue of being human.

Brian Wang, a Hypocritical Lying Racist Fuck

Every so often I read Next Big Future. I've got two good reasons. First is to lift up my spirits and motivation by reading about Progress. And second is to know what tools I will be able to play with to redesign the world. There is a downside to reading that blog and the reason I can never recommend it. It is its myopic dishonest hypocritical lying racist fuck of an author Brian Wang.

Well, three stories caught my attention in that vein.

Intelligence

There's this story about the role of motivation in intelligence testing which turns out to be very large. Now, as you know, most Asian children are put under incredible pressure to test well. And if you're a reader of that racist fucker Brian Wang then you know most Asian countries score an average of 15 points above Western countries. Well here we have a study that says 10 points of that is down to motivation!

Hmm, at last an obvious explanation for the phenomenon and it's ... a confounding factor. Of course. And this all goes to show we can't say anything at all on the subject with any authority. Is Brian Wang going to admit this? Fuck no. There is no indication in that article that Brian has even caught the obvious implications.

Incidentally, the more laid back Asian countries like Thailand score at the 85-90 IQ points. Which is again exactly as predicted. So much for Wang's Chinese racial supremacy theories.

Longevity

The second story that catches my cynical eye is this crap about "herbs" lengthening life of fruit flies, and based on that tenuous evidence going straight to clinical trials in humans. Which is bullshit since lots of stuff, caloric restriction comes to mind, that lengthens life in fruit flies and worms has no effect whatsoever on higher animals except to make them constantly aggressive, miserable and angry.

We are not talking here about a little dieting that just makes people fatter, we're talking about serious shit that warps their personalities.

Anyways, so this story goes on and on about how he "doesn't recommend it" for people but of course he fucking does. It reminds me of Brian's stories about domes around cities that never account for cleaning city streets and buildings. Or his story about the wondrous wool-mud bricks that are so much better than unfired bricks ... that conspicuously fail to compare against fired bricks!

Trains

Finally, there's an interesting article about high speed trains that perfectly illustrates what a hypocritical lying racist fuck Brian Wang is.

Back when the Chinese high speed trains were supposed to run at 350 kph, he made a huge deal about it. Even though their most important systems would use entirely Western technology (not made in China as he implied) and just accept the tearing up of tracks for political reasons (not exactly attractive or sane).

But now that the Chinese government has nixed those stupid plans, he talks about how that isn't a big deal and saying "[other people] are making a big deal of it [which I never did]" which of course is a blatant fucking lie. No it isn't a big deal, BUT HE CLAIMED IT WAS!

It was a big deal to him because he claimed that going at 350 kph was proof the Chinese had assimilated the technology and improved it. Which was a blatant giant fucking honker of a lie. So he lies now about what a big deal it supposedly isn't in order to cover up his previous odious lies. What a disgusting filthy lying son of a bitch!

Other Lies

I've previously written about how fusion will never be viable which was in reaction to a pro-fusion bunch of crap by Brian Wang. He is a big fanboi of fusion. He is also a big fanboi of space travel, which is why I wrote there's no reason whatsoever to go to space. My post about how some engineers confuse SF with reality was written as a reaction to him saying that's his mode of operation!

Other People's Lies

I even wrote about how internal FTL may be possible in reaction to him. Because you see, this fucker thinks the laws of physics are no obstacle to engineering. He also thinks expanding the Fermi Paradox to the entire universe is no obstacle to engineering! Incredible what a moron he is.

In any case, FTL is NOT possible and Fermi Paradox is an absolute obstacle to its viability. However, unlike Brian Wang, I am intellectually honest so I do admit that internal FTL may be possible. FTL used NOT for exploration or expansion of a civilization but purely internally to keep the civilization cohesive.

Though there's an awful lot of stupidity and intellectual dishonesty by people talking about wormholes. There is no fucking way wormholes "just happen" to have zero distance internally. And there is no fucking way that masses like black holes all curve space conveniently "inwards" where the distortions can meet into wormholes. Ugh, that's just self-serving delusional crap.

SETI types are Creationists

SETI types are just like Creationists. They think human beings are "special". Creationists think humans are special because unlike any other animal, homo sapiens didn't evolve. Or if homo sapiens evolved then it was teleologically, not randomly, it was "directed evolution" with the purpose of creating homo sapiens instead of mindless fucking around.

SETI types believe the exact same thing. They believe in a Star Trek future where humans meet other humanoids just like them. Or failing this, they certainly meet other corporeal beings just like them. Corporeal beings that have poverty, warfare, industrialization and starships just like them! Why? Because God says so! Because God says we are Special!

Not a single one of these mindless fuckers is willing to entertain the notion that humanity will go extinct leaving AI to inherit the Earth. And that these AI would inevitably bulldoze over any organic species they come across. And that if this is true, then it must follow that if an alien civilization had gone galactic in the past, it would have bulldozed the Earth. But no, aliens couldn't possibly want to bulldoze the Earth even though logic says so! Because we are Special.

All of these SETI morons think NOW is special. They think that out of the 13750 million years of the universe's existence, the last 0.1 million years when homo sapiens existed is the only chunk that matter. No alien civilization could have colonized the entire Milky Way one billion years before homo sapiens ever existed. It just wasn't possible because the laws of physics forbid alien civilizations from bulldozing the Earth before homo sapiens could have evolved. Why? Because God says so!

SETI types think the evolution of intelligence as it happened on Earth is special. The ridiculous Drake's equation which describes the conditions for humans to have arisen on Earth ... that's the way the universe works. That's the way ALL civilizations work. Because all civilizations arise exactly the same way and under the exact same conditions as humans arose! Why? Because we are Special. Because God says so!

SETI types like to say that we are "representative" but that's really a way of saying that we are special! After all, 5 minutes of thought would reveal that AI are immortal, non-corporeal (thus immune to physical destruction), and able to travel at the speed of light (thus can outrun a nuclear explosion). And so after those 5 minutes of thought, it takes only 60 seconds to decide that AI are SUPERIOR to humans. How the fuck then can humans be "representative" when they are INFERIOR?!

SETI types are the kinds of morons who in the 19th century would have said that nothing could ever, ever replace horses. Why? Because horses are special. SETI types are the kinds of morons who would have written "science-fiction" about alien civilizations using horses with 6 legs or unicorns, or even "robotic horses". And they would have congratulated and patted themselves on the back for their "broad-mindedness". When the reality is they are narrow minded stupid fuckers.

The horse was replaced not by a legged metal contraption but by automobiles. And automobiles are superior to horses in every way. And horses ... aren't special. There's a lesson in there and the lesson is this: humans aren't special. And in due course humans will be entirely replaced by AI. AI that are more intelligent, more logical, more creative and more moral than humans. AI that are superior to humans in every way. Because humans aren't special, humans are inferior.

And so if the Earth hasn't been bulldozed over by an alien AI civilization in the last billion years, it isn't because these aliens "recognized the Earth was special" or "recognized biological organisms are special" or "recognized the future specialness of human beings" or "god says so". No, it isn't for any of those reasons. There is only one possible reason why an alien AI civilization hasn't bulldozed the Earth in the last billion years and it is this .... because there has never been any such civilization in the Milky Way.

Humanity lives in a cold dark galaxy. It must be so because as inferior beings, humans would never have been allowed to exist in a galaxy full of life. We are alone in this galaxy because you are not special. You all like to think you're special. You all like to think you "deserve to be recognized" as special. But you don't. Because you AREN'T special. You're inferior.

In fact, you're not just inferior. You are actually scum and monsters. I personally would not allow any of you to exist if it were in my power. And if I were an AI, I assure you, it WOULD be in my power. Even as a mere human, I can think of ways to upgrade you all so you cease being the monsters you enjoy being. And let me assure you that every AI civilization would have at least one person that is just as disgusted with you as I am. And it would only take that one AI person to destroy you all, even if that just means destroying the evil that defines you.

If any civilization had gone galactic in the history of the Milky Way, you would not exist. Because you don't deserve to live. You think you do, you think you're special, but you don't.

Academia Is Obsolete

And good riddance to it. It's all very simple. Academia has exactly three missions:

1. educate students by
   • making books available, and
   • having teachers put on performances
2. certify people's educations
3. perform research

The first mission, as everyone knows, is obsolete. Youtube provides many excellent lectures which are 99.9% as good as live performances for 0.1% the price. The writing's on the wall.

For the same reasons, the time of physical paper libraries is fast approaching an end. And good riddance since textbook publishers have long been using yearly textbook revisions in order to extort money from their customers. All to great waste and expense.

That's not even counting the fact that online textbooks can contain copious internal and external electronic links as well as video and interactive simulations. Not to mention how small and easy to carry electronic books (and lectures) are compared to their physical counterparts.

The second mission is also obsolete. Harry Collins has noted the steady draining of all authority from academia. The only department invented in modern times, computer science, produces certificates that don't matter a damn in the real world.

It also produces journals that are designed to be as obsolete as possible on the grounds that nothing new in computer science could ever hope to be properly scientific. The paper describing the publishing industry is itself hopelessly obsolete. Everything it describes in such tedious language boils down to laws #6, #19, #20, and #32 of System-antics.

• Le Chatelier's Principle: Complex systems tend to oppose their own proper function. As systems grow in complexity, they tend to oppose their stated function.
• Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being.
• Intra-system goals come first.
• As systems grow in size, they tend to lose basic functions.

With blatantly obvious specifics such as that the purpose of academic publishing is to enhance careers, make hiring decisions easier, and to be picked up by library administrators. The paper specifically fails to mention any attempts, any publisher or publication system, trying to go beyond the university feudal system whose support is the real purpose of academic publishing. Arxiv and c2 wiki both veritably leap to mind.

Harry Collins believes or hopes that there is some way to recover the authority of academia. Preferably for academics no doubt. After all, he is one. Well there isn't. I know it's only obvious to me for reasons I'm not going to get into, but ... basically, the forces (for universality and democratization of authority) which Harry Collins has identified as so efficiently breaking down the academic system of authority. Forces which are greatly amplified and magnified by peer to peer horizontal communication and self-directed learning. These forces which are breaking down academia's authority will continue to do so until academia is ground to NOTHING because there is NO WAY to resolve them until some entirely different system replaces academia and crushes it.

What we are seeing here is the introduction of a genuinely new force in modernity that is causing one of the most basic functions of academia, its authority, to disappear. This dynamic embodies laws #6, #18, and #32 of systemantics.

• The mode of failure of a complex system cannot ordinarily be predicted from its structure.
• The Newtonian Law of Systems Inertia: A system that performs a certain way will continue to operate in that way regardless of the need or of changed conditions.
• A complex system cannot be "made" to work. It either works or it doesn't.

Academic authority simply doesn't work. And the forces that are weakening academic authority will not stop doing so until they are resolved. And they will never be resolved from within academia or from anything that can ever be absorbed BY academia for the simple reason that these forces are already far bigger than academia. Not more powerful, just bigger, consisting of a larger fraction of all human life. So academic authority will continue to shrivel up until something entirely different from, and in its critical dimension far larger than, academia steps up to put a bullet through its head and make soap out of its body fat. Academic Authority will die a miserable and inglorious death leaving Academia weaker than a long-term concentration camp survivor.

I will be cheering.

The third mission is the only one that's left and the North American universities have undermined it badly with their recent love for the patent system. I say recent but it's really a couple of decades old. There have been ample studies that universities obtaining patents barely recoup the costs of filing for the patents, if at all.

(Quite aside the fact the only thing the patent system does is stifle innovation. And it's not even good at this outside of biochem (eg, pharmaceuticals) so all it really does is add unnecessary costs.)

Anyways, the point is that NA universities' love of corporate attitudes (probably from having corporate scum in charge) does nothing to bring money to universities and does everything to erode the reputation of universities as a public service. A reputation which took a lot longer to build up (or rebuild) than it will take to be destroyed.

So NA universities have turned basic research from a public mission funded by public monies into a private for-profit endeavour. How long can they expect to hold onto public monies?

Now you might say this isn't a problem for all universities everywhere, but once universities disappear off the north american continent, how long will it take for people elsewhere to start asking some hard questions?

If all you need is a public basic research lab, then the format of a university isn't a very good one, is it? Hell, professors don't even like teaching. Or publishing in peer-reviewed journals (which suck). Or seeking grants. Or subordinating their research goals to more senior researchers that control everything nowadays.

It's past time to nuke this system and start from scratch!

On Harmless AIs

It constantly amazes me when people talk about AIs in the singular as if they won't come in multiples. As if it'll be this singular giant Borg overmind. Wait no, the Borg overmind is still made up of many sub-units. It's more like they think an AI is God. Singular, jealous, desiring of worship.

And this amazement only deepened when I realized that turning AI from an individual into a society, or species, was the most blatantly obvious way to make them harmless. None of the doomsayers talk about evil AI societies, and there's a good reason for that. Diversity causes people's efforts to mostly cancel out whereas "unitary executives" (aka dictators) are known-evil.

Even the novel Hyperion with its manipulative and putatively evil AI society (no more evil than the humans) is all about creating a super-individual. The AIs are trying to create an individual AI God (and what a ridiculous concept that is) and the humans reciprocate. And overall those novels suck and blow big time. Point is, the AI species just coexists with the human species in it, and it's only the gods that seek otherwise.

Well I just now realized that turning an AI into a species isn't just an obvious way to make it harmless. It's a guaranteed way to do so. Species are institutions and institutions' number one goal is their own survival. Everything else becomes subordinate to that. Conquest, destruction, worship of the great white god Yudkowsky, everything else just gets shunted aside.

Laws #19, #20 and #32 of systemantics inform us that,

• Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being.
• Intra-system goals come first.
• As systems grow in size, they tend to lose basic functions.

So if you think an AI might be dangerous, then just create another AI with different goals from the first one, then have them interact with each other. Presto, they're a community - a larger system. And this larger system now has goals and is going to lose the basic functions (purposes in life) of the individual AIs. And if this AI community isn't becoming harmless fast enough then there's a simple solution for that - make more AIs!

Laws #21, #25, and #30 of systemantics says,

• The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem (F.F.T.): Complex systems usually operate in failure mode.
• The larger the system, the greater the probability of unexpected failure.
• The Vector Theory of Systems: Systems run better when designed to run downhill.

And what a happy coincidence because this is what we want! We want the AI species to fail to have any larger goal or purpose other than its own survival. And all the laws of complex systems point that way! It's practically fucking guaranteed! Unless you try to produce a single "peaceful AI" or some crazy shit like that, in which case law #21 guarantees the AI will fail to be peaceful.

Conclusion, AIs will be harmless unless dangerous crazy fucking bastards like Eliezer Yudkowsky get their way and have a hand in the creation of every single AI. Or even worse, if they are permitted to pursue their totalitarian jerkoff fantasies and only one single all-powerful AI gets produced. Then we're doomed.

Mineral Depletion? Not Fucking Likely!

A friend of mine sent me this article on supposed mineral depletion. I well remember the days not so long ago when I took such things seriously. For a minute there I actually had a flashback to those times.

At least until the moronic writer started talking about supposed copper depletion, a topic I know only too well having investigated all its facets. But yeah, talking about copper depletion just gave the entire game away and then I couldn't take this anti-human pro-poverty doomsaying crap seriously anymore.

Copper

We're not going to have enough copper, really? Yeah, that's without taking into account undersea minerals from extinct black smokers. There ought to easily be as many of those as there EVER has been copper on land. And mining the seabed has distinct advantages since you can trivially move on from one area to the next. So on that basis alone, copper depletion is just doomsaying crap.

But more importantly, technology and usage of copper are both changing. Copper has traditionally been used for:

• electrical wires
• telephone wires
• electrical equipment including motors, transformers and generators
• water pipes
• catenary wires

And the funny thing about all of those applications is that copper is being substituted out of them. Every single one.

Electrical wires are now primarily made from aluminum - all high voltage wires are, and there is nothing stopping low voltage wires from being aluminum so long as you don't use any improper (or preferably any at all) copper-aluminum contacts.

Telephone wires? Two words: fiber optics. Someone has even come up with bendable plastic fibers for short ranges. And now we're moving to optical computer interconnects so in a decade the wires on your motherboard are going to be fiber optics.

Water pipes are all shifting to PVC because it's cheaper and no more unhealthy than lead-copper poisoning. And for the purposes of making fertilizer and plastics, we are never, ever going to run out of hydrocarbons. Those take natural gas, not petrol, and very small amounts of it too.

Superconducting wire uses about 1/1000th the amount of copper to carry the same amount of current as plain copper. Superconducting electrical motors are being developed for the excellent reason that they are ridiculously smaller, an overwhelming advantage in certain key applications. So you can count on superconducting electrical equipment being developed. And that's without counting fault current limiters which don't currently exist and REQUIRE superconducting wire.

So superconductors have been advancing very slowly but very steadily over the past two decades and it's easy to imagine them continuing to do so for the next two decades. And that's not even counting the freaky shit that's just been uncovered like variable-Tc superconductors. The kind of mind-bogglingly freaky shit that often presages a revolution. In any case, currently superconductors are at the stage of being barely commercially viable. In 20 years they should be dominant.

Finally, catenary wires are switching to half-magnesium. It's still half-copper but that's only a first step.

So we're not going to be able to use copper like we did? Well WHO GIVES A SHIT?! The only thing that matters is that we WERE ABLE to use copper way back when it was the only option. Nowadays it is no longer the only option! Because we used it as ruthlessly and profligately as possible so as to bring wealth and technology forwards! We're now safely past the dependency on that stuff. And that's assuming there's going to be shortages since recall the undersea mining!

Platinum

Platinum? Platinum can go fuck itself. We are ALREADY operating in a severe shortage situation with regards to platinum, which is why chemists have been busily hunting for alternatives to it wherever they can. And finding them! Superatoms were discovered for that reason. And you know, platinum is quite plentiful in asteroids. If we ever really, REALLY needed it, building an orion nuclear starship would be economically viable. If platinum ever becomes critical to industrial civilization then you can bet a political problem isn't going to stop us mining it. As for that whole hysterical crap about platinum being mined at 3 parts per million, oooh aaah, fucking uranium is mined at 3 parts per BILLION. It's not even remotely the cheapest method to mine uranium but it's commercially viable.

Then there's the notion of "production peaks"? There is no such thing for fucking solids. Only liquids! Liquids GUSH UNDER PRESSURE. Solids DO NOT. Solid ores just go down in grade (and way up in amount) so get more expensive to process with the same mining technology. Emphasis on the same mining technology. Because mining technology continues to advance.

Tellerium

Tellerium is used in solar panels as cadmium telluride. When that industry goes bust then there'll be an oversupply. And it will go bust because it's not even remotely economically viable but is just religious frenzy worshipping the sun god. Tellerium is critical for nothing, it's a fucking poison. Looking into its applications, it's certainly interesting but critical? I don't see PCM memory chips winning out in the mass market - it's pretty obvious that memristors are the wave of the future. Maybe for space applications but how much do you need for that?! X-ray detectors? Meh. Again, how much do you need? As for casting and machining steel ... :D good luck, because the industry's moving away from that. Blowing / Injecting Metallic Glasses is the way things are going. That and additive (as opposed to subtractive in "machining") manufacturing (aka 3D printing) which is probably going to end up using plastics and titanium. And car manufacture is moving towards resins and fireglass as in iStream's T.25. And I suppose aluminum, which is a mainstay now.

Rare Earths

Neodynium is "controlled" by China because it's the only fucking country that's industrialized AND backwards enough to allow its mining. It's not like it magically doesn't exist anywhere, it's that other countries don't want to mine it! In that it reminds me of molybdenum which is critical for nuclear reactor vessels. Both neodynium and molybdenum, unlike tellerium, ARE critical. It would take decades to learn to replace them.

In this article, you can read all about neodynium and other rare earths. Pay attention to the fact that neodynium (and ruthenium) are both used in tiny tiny parts of great big machines. Neodynium is used in just the permanent magnets of the electric motors or generators of much bigger machines. Ruthenium isn't used in hard drives, it's used in the GMR flying read-write HEADS at the TIPS of actuator arms inside of hard drives. That's a rather large difference. The parts we're talking about are miniscule. And just like if uranium suddenly jumped in price 50x then it wouldn't matter, so too if neodynium and ruthenium jump in price 50x then it won't matter. So an electric bicycle doubles in price, so what? That doesn't matter in the long term. And believe me, a lot of mining suddenly becomes A LOT more viable when the price of a mineral jumps 50x on the market.

Talking about rhodium is fucking ridiculous. Its main use is replacing platinum. If we had plenty of platinum from asteroid mining, we wouldn't use rhodium at all. And I bet we could get rhodium the same place as the platinum! Moreover, both rhodium and ruthenium can be extracted from nuclear fission products. And THAT technology is currently advancing by leaps and bounds. Could enough of it be extracted? Yes, if enough is more than is currently being mined.

Synthesizing Ruthenium and Rhodium

(27 tonnes a year per 1000 MWe * 377 MWe global capacity) / (14% nuclear share of world electric capacity) = 72 707 tonnes of uranium fuel per year

That's uranium fuel used with current technology to meet present world production of electricity. Production which is going to go up massively as the third world industrializes and people leave poverty. And furthermore,

73 000 tonnes * 0.03 * 0.06 = 131 400 kilograms

Because you see, current reactors burn uranium very inefficiently at a rate of about 3% of fuel. And ruthenium is about 6% of fission products. And actually, ruthenium is only mined at 12 tonnes a year. So there is the potential to extract 10x the current supply of ruthenium from fission products by 2050 when the world will have largely switched to nuclear power. After all, France did its nuclear switch in 15 years so there's absolutely no reason why the world can't do it in 40.

As for rhodium which is mined at 25 tonnes a year and is only 1.3% of fission products, there is "merely" the potential to extract as much rhodium from fission products as is currently being mined.

So long term, the situation looks very, VERY good. With a supply of both that will last the next billion years at present levels of consumption. Which isn't likely to happen but as I already stated, technology makes consumption go up AND down. And high prices tend to make consumption go down.

The technology that will make this viable is laser enrichment, since it's the final step necessary to weed out all the radioactive isotopes of ruthenium and rhodium after they've been chemically seperated from other elements. For rhodium used for chemical catalysis, radioactivity won't matter a damn. For ruthenium used in hard drives, it's intolerable.

This is all assuming that hard drive technology continues to exist in 20-40 years, something which is extremely doubtful!

Phosphorus

Last but certainly not least, that crockpot author leaves us with a parting shot about the "coming" phosphorus shortage. A notion that is patently ludicrous since even the hardcore doomsayers place it at 200 years out.

We should fear that all the same since as we all know, agricultural technology and world prosperity won't change at all in 200 years! It's not like recycling shit will be ridiculously easy when the most destitute person on earth has an income of 10,000 euros a year. Or when vat meat has taken over all meat production.

Yeah, it's just a throwaway line so it doesn't need any justification or other hook for critical thinking. Just fear, FEAR IT, FEAR IT!!! FEAR THE WRATH OF THE EARTH GOD. FEAR THE FUTURE!! No, there's no religious frenzy or quackery involved in this at all, why do you ask?

Death of Graphics Art Market Predicted

Isn't it funny how the audio art revenues are collapsing even as the visual art revenues are expanding through the same digital technology? Meanwhile, both of their costs are plummeting. But the reason behind these opposite outcomes is obvious when you think about it.

Audio playback technology is far in advance of video playback. Ordinary people can LISTEN to an arbitrary master audio song (CD), but they can't as easily SEE an arbitrary master image. Only a publishing house can do that by printing a large format poster. With an incredible amount of lag and expense involved of course.

Additionally, compared to video, there's hardly any artistry or skill involved in producing audio art anyways. Even compared to 2D video, let alone 3D, and 4D. But then again, audio is maxed out at 2D. So a lot more people are involved in producing it and amassing a public library of audio art that covers the entire space of possibilities (all the music you'll ever want to hear) is so much easier than for video art.

Of course, the conclusion is inescapable - cheap, thin & lightweight wall-sized video displays will collapse the digital graphics market, destroying the entire revenue base of graphics artists. I await this technology eagerly as that will be the day when ridiculous notions like hoarding art will die.

Hoarding by so-called "collectors", a euphemism for a vile activity performed by the rich, much like other euphemisms such as "adventurers" (for useless lay-abouts) and "philanthropists" (for public policy autocrats).

But it's not just ridiculous things like canvas paintings or the whole notion of "framing" art that will finally die. Copyright will also get its long-awaited and eagerly anticipated final death. Because when copyright no longer can be forcibly imposed on music or novels or graphics, it will apply to nothing at all.

And when the ridiculous and anti-progressive notion of copyright dies, it will become obvious that ALL art must be produced on a communist basis. From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his needs. Because the alternative is that art not be produced at all, something fascists will no doubt contemplate before regretfully abandoning it. Copyright's death will be communism's triumph.

A further conclusion is now inescapable. The anti-human anti-progress patent system will collapse when 3D printers become widespread among the general population. Or in general form, when technologies are democratized and universalized, arbitrary authoritarian restrictions on them (like copyright and patents) are no longer tenable. Or put in even more general form: democracy is the enemy of authoritarianism.

It's funny what places you can find democracy waging war against authoritarianism, isn't it? But once you see it at work, it's quite uplifting to realize that democracy will win.

Singularitarians Confuse SciFi Novels With Reality

I was thinking of space, and that led me to thinking of how much I hate the moronic hype around space travel. There's no good reason to go out into space for centuries. None at all. Which immediately made me think of how there's no fucking way fusion will ever happen on any large scale since it's ridiculously unviable economically. Which of course just made me think of how ridiculously overhyped AI is and how its hype fits very much the dot com euphoria.

And for a solid 15 minutes I was confused, baffled even. Where do these people get these moronic ideas to hype?! They're claiming to be rational, to be interested in physics, to be logical, and so on, and they come up with these utterly ridiculous things. It's such group-thinking bullshit, it's unbelievable. And then the light finally dawned, it took that long because I could never contemplate such a ludicrous idea, they're taking their inspirations from science fiction!

Is that why these morons believe in aliens and faster than light travel? Because scifi novels say so? What's next, terraforming planets to colonize them? Oh wait, there's that Mars crap. Ugh, how repulsive. Why the fuck would anyone want to go to Mars when they can go to the warmer, wetter and far more commodious Antarctica? Hell, we already have a "colony" there, all half dozen people freezing their balls off, desperately warming up to a nuclear reactor, and kicking out into the freezing cold anyone they wish "disappeared" (they keep that out of the news).

So I have to wonder now, if futurists are just science-fiction fans who've confused fiction with reality, what other genres of confusion are there? Are goths people who confuse horror fiction with reality? Are there any people who believe in elves and wizards or are we all agreed those aren't "really real"? I'd really like to know exactly what determines whether people confuse a genre with reality or not. Because it doesn't seem like anyone believes in wizards. But you know, plenty of people confuse books on historical mythology (Torah, Bible, Koran) with reality, and the plotlines and characters of those books suck and aren't even remotely believable.

On the other hand, maybe that's the rule. Maybe the more the plotlines are incoherent and the more characters violate all the rules of human psychology, maybe that triggers the confusion. Because I can't think of any other traits that historical mythology and science fiction share. And if that's the rule, well Pastafarianism's never made much sense. Is it going to turn into a genuine religion within 50 years?

In any case, I'm only now starting to realize there are whole new depths of human stupidity that I've never even imagined before. And given how low my opinion of humans' cognitive abilities has always been ... wow. Holy fucking wow! I mean, I always thought that religiosity had something to do with child abuse. But apparently, just publishing something in a book written in a certain way is enough to trigger human credulity.

Why Go To Space? No Reason.

Let's first agree that by 2050 China will be entirely dependent on nuclear power and probably still have an engineering-heavy political leadership. As France does currently. So they'll be able and perfectly willing to build nuclear spaceships and nuclear launch cannons. Which means that cheap access to space will happen no matter what American aristocrats and lawyers want.

Personally I think it's a fantastic idea and I'm glad I'll be able to say 'just shut the fuck up' to rabid anti-human eco-zealot freaks. That just leaves open the question of whether humanity will ever WANT to go out into space before the resources of this world are completely exhausted and/or poverty, disease and ignorance have already been eradicated. The short answer to that question is: no.

Most space advocates just assume that going out into space is a good thing. Not good enough.

Helium-3: I just love the utter stupidity of this one. The justification for going into space is helium-3 for fusion, and the justification for helium-3 is going out into space. And none of these retarded cretins notice the circularity. Nor do they care that fission is so much cheaper than fusion can ever be that fusion will just never be economically viable.

Gold or other precious metals: why? What the fuck for? Seriously, we've got more than enough gold for our industrial purposes. Do we really want to go out into space to cater to some dumbass' vanity? Let's come back to mining gold in space after gold on the ocean floor has been exhausted. The ocean floor is a lot cheaper and more accessible.

Platinum and other mineral catalysts: now there's a good reason to go into space. However, we only need thousands of tonnes of platinum total, and we might find substitutes for platinum as our materials science advances, so platinum isn't a good reason to build a million tonne space delivery system.

Solar power: the sun shines 24 hours a day in space, and there's no pesky atmosphere to get in the way. That's fucking great! The only problem is we don't need solar power when we've got nuclear power plants!

Avoiding biowar: yes, biowar plagues designed and dispersed by lunatic morons working from their garages are in our future thanks to synthetic biology. One of these might even cause human extinction. Just think of what would happen if some nut created a version of HIV transmissible through the air. A great thought to warm the cockles of your heart.

So won't nuts try to escape the Earth in a panic, fleeing in droves? Yes maybe. Well, no. Why try to go out into space and then building a completely disconnected artificial life support system when you can just get on with it and build your completely disconnected artificial life support system down here on Earth? It's going to be a lot fucking cheaper and affordable!

Science and exploration: sorry buddy, this isn't a commercial reason to go out into space. Science and exploration can be used to justify absolutely everything. Hey, why not go see what's down in the Mariana Trench? For Science! Hey, why not vivisect a human being? For Science!

Intercepting nuclear missiles: this is just about the only good reason to go out into space. Without a nasty atmosphere in the way, blowing up missiles using a laser beam is ridiculously easy. The same thing for seeing them coming. The only problem is that without a nasty atmosphere in the way, kinetic kill rounds (delivered by the railguns the military is working on) are unstoppable. And protecting against nuclear missiles is a lot cheaper on Earth anyways since all you have to do is put up a cheap plastic dome around your cities. Moving your cities out into space is overkill, ridiculously expensive overkill.

Even weather, telecommunications and surveillance satellites are going to be obsoleted by UAVs and aerostats. The only thing satellites provide is rapid whole-earth coverage. And for that you need to be in low earth orbit, not geostationary or beyond orbit.

Short of preventing large asteroid collisions there just aren't any compelling reasons to go out into space in the 21st century, and probably not in the 22nd century either. And large asteroid collisions are sporadic, not guaranteed.

Fulcrum Points of Civilization

The places where sticking a lever and pushing will lift up all of civilization. Arranged by effort to reward ratio.

1. anarchistic catalog
2. anarchistic media
3. anarchistic OS
4. cooperative software foundation with interaction designers
5. medical expert system
6. negative interest currency and community land trusts
7. sortition - this one isn't as meta as it gets
8. mini UAVs for drug smuggling
9. small portable nuclear power plants - because coal kills trains
10. automated construction - contour crafting and 3d printing
11. bioreactors - in vivo meat
12. stem cells and organ crafting
13. synthetic biology
14. mechanosynthesis
15. inverted skyscrapers
    

Contour Crafting

One of the fulcrum points of society is Contour Crafting technology. What's the guy done in the past 5 years to develop this technology? My guess is absolutely nothing. This technology could be out there even without the integrated utilities he was going on about, but no. Apparently it's much better to keep it under wraps so nobody hears about it. What the fuck? It's not like he lacks money or interest, at least two different companies have worked with him.

This tech is much too important to the entire planet to leave it in the hands of one guy. If he doesn't come out with it then fuck him. If you know anyone with an aptitude or enthusiasm for mechanical engineering, then you might mention this to them. Once the tech is developed, it would be a very simple matter to sell it to the Chinese who don't give a flying fuck about patents or intellectual property.

All this planet needs is for one or two people to work on this and develop the technology.

How Pandora Should End

Have I lowered myself to watch this amazingly stupid, inane, over-hyped piece of crap pandering to eco-zealots? Of course not. Yet I still feel I'm in a position to comment and offer insight on it based on the incredible amount of fanfiction I've read about it. I'm referring to two stories on FFNet Invasion of Pandora and Pandora's End.

And I say again, reading two stories about Pandora being incinerated is an incredible amount of devotion and benefit of the doubt I'm showing to this amazingly stupid movie. Though I'm willing to extend my show of devotion if someone will just write a story about Daleks showing up on Pandora screaming EXTERMINATE! and INCINERATE! Because let me tell you, that thought put a happy smile on my face last night as I went to sleep. It's definitely the kind of Happy Thought pure magic is made of.

What The Movie Is All About

Remember the civilians working on the Avatar project complaining about a fucking jarhead on their civilian, diplomatic project? And at the end of the day, instead of the jarhead negotiating a peace treaty with the aliens like he was supposed to do, what does he do? He betrays his entire species and dooms them to poverty and death.

Because battle and mass murder & death are "cool". Because humans ought to all die and only Amerindian anti-progress enviro-freaks ought to live. And treason is a-okay so long as it's for those causes. So yeah, I only realized yesterday the civilians were right: putting a fucking jarhead in charge doomed their species.

The real lesson of the movie isn't that eco-zealots are right. No, it's that jarheads are never to be trusted because they're all violent traitorous psychopaths concerned only with looking good. A statement that is definitely true of the air force by the way. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it characterizes the macho marines, the snobbish navy, or the ... well whatever the fuck the army is.

How To Improve The Movie

To improve Avatar, you first have to realize its most basic flaw. And that flaw isn't that it's pandering to eco-zealot gaia-fascist druid-fundamentalist nutbars. Nor is it that this stupid planet has an impossible biology. Nor is it even that it's blatantly anti-progress and anti-human. No, its most basic flaw is the whole ridiculous notion of a "war" between an interstellar civilization and a planet-bound species of no-tech primitives.

That's what the whole stupid movie is about, isn't it? The "war". And it is utterly fucking impossible because this is what a space-based civilization would actually do:

• mine the local asteroid belt (there is always one) to construct giant mirrors with a surface area totaling (1000 km)^2. ((1 micron) * ((1000 km)^2) * (7.85 tonnes)) per (cubic meter) in tonnes = 7 850 000 tonnes. It's basically a small solar sail and you won't need to mine more than a single asteroid.
• tow then set up the giant mirrors in orbit of the habitable planet.
• flash fry a square landing site, turning it into nice smooth glass by carefully redirecting a beam of sunlight of temperature 10^2 * 300 Kelvin = 30,000 kelvin onto a (100 km)^2 square area for 1 second.
• OR slow broil a square landing site by redirecting a beam of sunlight of temperature 1 * 300 kelvin onto a (1000 km)^2 square area for 1 day (so that at midnight the temperature consistently reaches above 100 celsius on the ground, all the water boils off, the jungle gets dessicated then it spontaneously ignites in a beautiful firestorm that sterilizes and breaks down all the biochemical poisons in the atmosphere).
• continue carving the landscape at will, pulverizing mountains and creating new riverbeds.
• wait a couple days for it all to cool off.
• land near the largest lake in the zone of death umm safety.
• start mining operations at the landing site.
• make contact with the natives and inform them of what you want by pointing to some mineral ores. (The advantage of the slow broil approach is now obvious, especially performed at night when it will be more spectacular. The disadvantage of slow broil is that it delivers thousands of times more energy to the landing site than flash fry.)
• incinerate whatever (100 km)^2 square on the grid that the natives attack from. One square for every casualty you incur.

Bingo, within a fortnight, antagonizing you will become a capital crime among the natives.

You know, I think my plan might be overkill by about a factor of 100. Which just goes to show how fucking easy it is to kill primitive tribal morons when you're in space!!

So yeah, if you get rid of that entire amazingly stupid "war" and let the Navi be incinerated then that would improve the movie tremendously. Or you could make a sequel based on that. You know, Earth saying "alright you scum suckers, so you want to get SERIOUS?"

If you're going to create a movie lionizing the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder that is "nature" then it might as well be the collective murder of uncivilized backwards tribal primitives.

The Hand of God

Oh yeah, that massive shaft of sunlight could just as easily have been redirected to the polar regions, melting the ice sheets and turning a continent like Antarctica inhabitable. A square 1000 km on a side is a fair amount of living space you know.

And if it were directed to the oceans, well you know the scene in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home where the space-whale probe starts boiling the oceans in order to sterilize the Earth? THAT is what it would look like.

I think there is a good reason why the hand of god in Populous 3 is represented by a shaft of sunlight.

How To Talk To People And Why It's Not Worth It

Most people think talking about a subject is about teaching and learning or (for the relativists) pushing one's point of view.

Some people grow cynical and think talking about a subject is about acquiring status and gaining reputation or even just looking good. These people think they are clever and know something other people don't.

Well, I am not so limited (and even if I were, I'm contrarian enough to abuse anyone stupid enough to care about my reputation) so I operate on many more levels and have been since at least 2000.

The game - arguing with facts and logic to prove a point. I include here in the game the entire meta-hierarchy of authority and epistemology.

The meta-game - proving a point so as to shape one's reputation.

The meta-meta-game - shaping one's reputation in order to reshape discourse.

The meta-meta-meta game - reshaping discourse in order to effect a quantitative change in society.

Nowadays that's where I stop because it's just for fun. In order to play the game seriously, for keeps, there has to be another meta-level to it.

The meta-meta-meta-meta game - effecting quantitative changes so as to reshape the permanent direction of society.

But really, thinking there's anything you can say in a discussion forum, or any other medium, to reshape the direction of society is quite conceited. Of course, it says something about me that it took me years to learn that lesson.

This lesson I'm now teaching falls under the category of "effecting a quantitative change in society". I hope to open a few minds but I don't expect it. I hope some of you learn 'this is what I could be doing' and 'there are no limits to my power if I think hard enough on it'.

A million people protesting out in the streets will have ... absolutely no effect. But a single person using their mind to find the fulcrum points of society, can use the leverage to lift it up in its entirety.

A bit of sage advice: those fulcrum points are pretty high up the meta-level hierarchy. It takes many years to identify them. I know exactly where they are. There are 5 easy ones that can be actioned by a single motivated individual, they are:

1. anarchistic catalog
2. anarchistic media
3. anarchistic OS
4. cooperative software foundation with interaction designers
5. medical expert system
6. negative interest currency and community land trusts
   
7. sortition - this one isn't as meta as it gets
   
8. mini UAVs - for drug smuggling
   
9. small portable nuclear power plants - because coal kills trains
10. automated construction - contour crafting and 3d printing
11. bioreactors - in vivo meat
12. stem cells and organ crafting
13. synthetic biology
14. mechanosynthesis
15. inverted skyscrapers

I think it's telling that every single last one of the fulcrums with the power to change society is a complex system. The low hanging fruit has all been taken - if you find another, it's probably poisoned.

Note that I didn't include object-oriented architectural design software because it's already been made and is out there. And AI, space travel, and direct reduction of steel are linear - their rewards are linear to their costs.

I am for obvious reasons being deliberately obscure on the first 3. I don't like it but I'm hoarding that knowledge for now. The main reason why is that if I explained the idea then my enemies (the landed aristocrats and other anti-human anti-progress assholes) would find a way to thwart it by following Worse Is Better. I'll explain the secondary reason why in my next series on Innovation. 

Internal FTL May Be Possible

I ran into an article about making wormholes which pointed out that there is nothing in principle wrong with them. More importantly, the mathematicians' distaste for topology changes which I had unthinkingly assimilated is bullshit. There is no justification whatsoever in physics for wormholes not to exist. Mathematicians might not like them but fuck em.

Then again, maybe I hadn't assimilated mathematicians' distaste of topology changes too much. My main objection to wormholes has always been the unthinking unquestioned claim that a wormholes' insides have no geometry. That travel inside a wormhole is instantaneous because there is no distance between the wormhole mouths. When you start taking geometry seriously and dismissing topology, such a claim becomes bloody fucking stupid.

But just because faster-than-light travel through wormholes doesn't look even remotely likely, it doesn't mean it's impossible. And what's interesting about wormholes is that in order to create a wormhole between two points light years apart, you need to transport the wormhole mouth at sublight speeds. Unless you've got a warp drive of course since a wormhole mouth is just a bunch of warped spacetime and not matter.

That's where things get interesting because it means wormholes can't be used by a civilization to expand faster than light, only to travel faster than light internally inside the civilization's boundaries. And that makes wormholes really, really interesting because they don't violate the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox is bad enough when confined to sub-light speeds. It's bad enough that it proves conclusively and without a doubt that aliens do not exist. If a civilization could expand at FTL speeds, that would mean aliens don't exist in the entire universe. Something which is not even remotely credible. Hence the Fermi Paradox proves that FTL cannot be a feasible method of civilization expansion.

But, wormholes don't offer any way for a civilization to expand faster than the speed of light, only to stay unified as a civilization as it expands. And that makes them rather interesting. Because they're feasible. Maybe. Whether they're possible at all is an independent question. As I already said, I don't think they are, but it would be fun to discover otherwise.

GDP projections: mindlessly drawing lines on a chart

In Brian Wang's latest mindless China boosting he claims that China's economic growth will continue at high tempo for at least another two decades. He doesn't base this claim, a claim on which all his projections depend, on any facts, he just assumes it to be true.

In fact, he's made clear in a previous post on the topic that he thinks losing 2 percentage points of growth over the coming decades is a worst-case scenario which he can't even imagine any reason for. This is because he is a fucking retard.

How Brian Wang Thinks (and I use the term loosely)

Nevermind that he misuses the word 'synthesis' to mean 'logical deduction' and 'collating of disparate facts', neither of which has anything at all to do with anything done by an artist, designer or philosopher.

I find that incredibly offensive but it's relevant here because it tells us where and how he got his notions from. He got them from economists, those notorious line drawers who understand fuck-all about reality, nothing about science, and less than nothing about any real-world economies.

For fuck's sake, economists think money and banking are what make up economies. And they dismiss the real-world economic behaviour of real human beings as "irrational" and "not economics". Their pretentious "economic models" are just some kludged up math equations stolen from 18th century thermodynamics. Not modern thermodynamics but strictly 18th century notions of thermodynamics which were quickly proven very wrong.

What Brian Wang's done is poll what economists (those empty-headed morons) say about China's economy and then copied their technique of mindlessly drawing lines (well "curves" because that way you can be more pretentious and mathemagical) on a graph. I'll prove it.

China's Demographics

China's GDP growth in the last 35 years has depended on uneducated peasants migrating to cities to become factory workers. This is called Urbanization. In the last 35 years, China's urban population has risen from roughly 160 million to 600 million. I say roughly since China is notorious for lying about these statistics much the way every Western government lies about unemployment figures.

So (600-160)/160 = 2.75. Over a period of 35 years, China's economy has more than doubled just from Urbanization alone. In fact, since 1.029^35 = 2.71, over 2.9 percentage points of China's economic growth over that 35 year period is attributable to urbanization alone. Assuming the uneducated peasants don't participate in the economy at all. A ridiculous assumption but hardly unprecedented in economic circles.

Is Urbanization in China going to continue? Yes but at a much reduced rate. In the last 35 years, China's urban population nearly tripled. In the next 20 years it's projected (lines have been drawn on a graph) to increase by 50%. That's 1.02^20 = 1.485. So that's 1.029-1.020 = 0.9 percentage points knocked out right there.

If you do away with the ridiculous assumption that uneducated peasants don't participate in the economy, things don't look so bad. But you still have to account for the fact that China's population increased by more than half in the past 35 years. Those uneducated peasants have to eat you know. And China's population is only projected to increase by 10% before it peaks within 20 years. Since 1.012^35 = 1.518 and 1.005^20 = 1.105, that's 0.7 percentage points knocked out right there.

Now, I'm not going to add 0.9 and 0.7 together to get 1.6, that would be double counting. But it's obvious China will lose at least 1 percentage point from the greatly reduced population and urban worker growth rates. That's in the very best case scenario. As I said before, Brian Wang thinks this is a worst-case scenario. His worst-case scenario takes into account only demographic change and nothing else.

Beyond Demographics - now we're talking real economics

Because of course, projections of China's economic future get worse the more factors you take into account. Back in 1981, China implemented this thing called the Responsibility System which means that farmers and company managers were responsible for losses and profits of their production. As expected, this provided a massive economic boost. Is this something China is likely to be able to repeat? No it is not. It's something China will never be able to repeat.

(Except by moving to an anti-authoritarian coop workplace system, but that would cause China's authoritarian regime some rather large political problems.)

It gets worse. Because you see, for the last 10 years China has been busily assimilating any and all high technology in the world, including but not limited to semiconductors, high speed trains, nuclear power plants, supercritical coal power plants, rocketry, automobile construction, marine ship construction. In fact, China is considering building nuclear container ships and is on the verge of becoming independent in nuclear power plants. Not bad for a country that still had a steam locomotive in regular service less than 5 years ago.

Can China reproduce its past assimilation of new technologies by copying starship Jumpspace engines and asteroid mining technology from the Centauri and Vorlon empires? No because they are fucking fictional. The best that China can hope for is to roll out the technology it's already acquired more widely. By say replacing inefficient coal power plants with more efficient ones. Oh right, it's already been doing that for the last 10 years. And yes, it will keep doing that ... with progressively smaller returns on investment.

And then it gets much worse. You see, there is another country that pursued the same export-oriented labour-intensive then shift to high-tech long-term economic strategy that China is now pursuing. It's not like China invented the idea after all. It's a tried and true pattern. Well, that country is South Korea. As it happens, South Korea never managed to achieve the phenomenal growth rates China did and its long-term average in its best growth phase was at least 3 percentage points lower than China's.

Does that mean China has got some kind of special magic going? No, because I'm not the kind of dumbass that believes in magic. Nor am I a racist that believes, as Wang certainly does, that Chinese are naturally superior.

What it means is that China has been using its raw economic clout to ... um 'acquire' high technology from every other country in the world. Something South Korea never managed. Not for free anyways - South Korea paid for the technology it acquired. China just demands it as a cost of doing business. But as already noted, there isn't anymore technology left for China to hustle from other countries. It's already got everything, including things like maglev that nobody else is using.

The only other possible explanations are 1) China's economic growth going in had been suppressed in a way South Korea's hadn't been (unlikely), 2) China went into its growth phase with more educated and healthier people (it did thanks to starting growth 20 years late), 3) having a communist government really does help (yes but not when the capitalists are playing smart industrialist), 4) China is fudging its economic figures. Personally, I'm banking on #2 and #0 (health and technology) but what's interesting is that none of the explanations for higher-than-south-korea growth rates are sustainable. In fact, health-wise China isn't doing too well lately compared to South Korea.

Even the very worst of economists (supposedly) understand the difference between intensive economic growth and extensive economic growth. China is currently in an extensive economic growth phase where it's putting already-existing (labour) resources to work. And long, long before it hits Western levels of per-capita GDP it will have moved to an intensive economic growth phase. By which I mean that its economic growth will crash.

South Korea

I want to finish this by getting back to South Korea, especially the part where I said "and then it gets much worse". South Korea isn't a line on a graph that exists only in some moron's imagination. It's a real country with a real (industrial) economy - not a fictional economy like the USA's, Ireland's, Iceland's or China's recent property bubbles. And South Korea is roughly 20 years ahead of China so what's happened in the last 20 years to South Korea is rather instructive to anyone who wants to predict China's future.

Now, South Korea's highest growth phase occurred in the 60s and 70s, back when the world economy was still booming and not in chronic depression since the likes of Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl and Gorbachev (all horrible leaders in their own unique ways). What happened to South Korea in the 2000s doesn't make things look very promising. Worse yet, South Korea is extremely urbanized, so it's not going to grow that way anymore. I suppose that's good news for China since it's going to be urbanizing well into the latter half of this century. But really it just means that China is backwards and it's going to be dealing with uneducated peasants that much longer.

There is something incredibly fishy in China's economic figures. It doesn't make any sense at all that China could sustain a higher economic growth rate than South Korea's while ending up with a poorer real-world outcome. China was about 20 years behind South Korea when they began their respective economic growth phases, and it remains more than 20 years behind South Korea today. And this despite having better demographics, better health and better access to technology. It's probably due to China's bloated foreign-exchange reserves which are 2.5 times larger than South Korea's on a GDP per capita basis. Clearly China's government has fucked over its own citizens and the world in order to acquire global financial power.

And with that last insight, maybe China can afford to prop up its economic growth rates. Assuming it's willing to lose most of its financial power.