[ExI] Bryan & Kevin's exchange on technology

Bryan Bishop kanzure at gmail.com
Tue Jul 1 03:11:08 UTC 2008


On Monday 30 June 2008, Tom Nowell wrote:
> Apologies for the length of this, but I have to add my comments to
> the discussion between two people, and I want to make sure I've
> quoted accurately.

Hey Tom. Let's see where this goes.

> To quote Kevin Freels and Bryan:
> On Sunday 29 June 2008, Kevin Freels wrote: The technology necessary
> for singularity isn't going to be made by some guy in a cave. Bryan
> replied:
> Excuse me, but where do you think we started if not in a cave? So how
> is everything else after that not by the same tech, to some extent
> also manufactured from within a cave anyway? Okay, so we moved ten
> meters outside the mouth of the cave, so what? You can walk that in a
> couple of seconds.
>
> My response to this: the difference between us and the cavedwellers
> is a succession of big changes in society and technology. We've

What is the difference between a big change and a small change? Is this 
a degree of emotion that it stirs in you, or is there some real 
quantification that can be done to illustrate it? I don't need the 
actual quantification, just an idea of what we're talking about.

> recently seen in the media pictures of an uncontacted tribe aiming
> their bows at a plane flying overhead. They are unlikely to play a
> part in causing the singularity, for reasons I shall outline.

Just because they are thinking about the same problems in different ways 
doesn't mean that they aren't going to do it. I agree that it does seem 
unlikely considering the historical context, but just from the basis 
of "uncontacted tribe", that means little. What if they are passing on 
rituals of logic circuits and advanced mathematics, orally ? Or some 
such.

> According to Toffler's wave theory (check wikipedia under "The Third
> Wave" if you're not familiar with it), the first wave involves
> adoption of agriculture and early states forming. This takes you away

Sounds familiar, but I've never heard of Toffler or these wavethings.

> from everybody gathering their own food, with a low population
> density, to food being cultivated by a proportion of the community,
> leading to much higher population densities and allowing some people
> not to work in agriculture at all. These people can take up crafting

Yes, but this can be done with technology anyway and it's becoming quite 
the interesting development (check the news), so there's no need to 
bring up arguments that "so therefore this specialization must still 
exist if we are to allow people to do anything but agricultural work".

> The conditions most conducive to developing technologies for the
> singularity are these: 1. Somebody gets funding for their new tech
> idea, has the money to pay specialists to devote their working week
> to it, and the facilities to develop it. Eventually this will be
> taken to market, and the investors will either make money or have to
> write the investment off. 2. A group of highly educated people devote
> spare hours outside of their working week to an open source project,
> and people donate excess money generated by their jobs if a
> manufactured end-product is needed. 3. A government uses the tax
> money from the economy to pay people to work on a project, and then
> subsidises it to production. 1 & 2 are most likely in a society with
> a market economy, with a widely educated workforce, and sufficient
> economic freedom to let people do this. 1 probably requires decent
> intellectual property laws. Even for 3, the more educated people
> there are, the better the odds of finding the right team. As a
> result, even if we were to take someone from a hunter-gatherer
> society, teach them to read, give them a computer and tell them to
> look everything up on wikipedia and search the net for things, they
> would have a colossal difficulty adapting to way in which we produce

That sounds more like the societal context in which the innovations are 
introduced. Everyone can create. Maybe you're just being subtle and 
telling me that I'm having colossal difficulties -- you've basically 
described my entire life. Taken from an isolated environment, taught to 
read, given a computer, and then I've been reading on the net ever 
since. Seems to work so far for me. ;-)

> technological innovations. Many of the technologies transhumanists
> are interested in require considerable education and/or
> specialisation (as people complaining about lack of physics education
> on this list know all too well).

The existence of autodidactism might show otherwise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidactism

> Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is self-education or
> self-directed learning. An autodidact, also known as an automath, is
> a mostly self-taught person, as opposed to learning in a school
> setting or from a tutor.
>
> A person may become an autodidact at nearly any point in his or her
> life. While some may have been educated in a conventional manner in a
> particular field, they may choose to educate themselves in other,
> often unrelated areas.
>
> Self-teaching and self-directed learning are not necessarily lonely
> processes. Some autodidacts spend a great deal of time in libraries
> or on educative websites. Many, according to their plan for learning,
> avail themselves of instruction from family members, friends, or
> other associates (although strictly speaking this might not be
> considered autodidactic). Indeed, the term "self-taught" is something
> of a journalistic trope these days, and is often used to signify
> "non-traditionally educated", which is entirely different.

Back to the email:

>  To cover other points that Kevin and Bryan talked about:
> Kevin> Technology requires industry.
>
> Bryan> Don't know what you mean by this. Arguably, biology is
> technology. And biology came before human industry. I think what
> Kevin meant was "you don't build an Intel chip at home, and backyard

You certainly don't build an Intel chip at home, but you can build 
vacuum tubes, and then you can assemble the vacuum tubes in an 
organization that mimics an Intel microprocessor, although you'd be 
very stupid to do this :-) and should probably use a RISC architecture 
instead. 

> rockets don't compete with the Apollo programme." If you need

Are you sure? I haven't heard of any backyard rockets even attempting to 
compete with Apollo, so it's not that it's impossible, just that nobody 
bothered to do that when the Apollo program was around.

> high-tech manufactured goods, the odds of you having the knowledge to
> design it, the knowledge to use it, the knowledge to build it and the
> tools to build it all at once are small. You are likely to need to

Yes, but we're fixing this, remember?

http://heybryan.org/exp.html

> get a lot of people to help you out, and for the manufacturing end
> the straightforward solution is to pay people to make it. As for

That's completely straightbackwards. The notes on exp.html mention the 
idea of the formal encapsulation of this knowledge and information so 
that it can be repeated on more than one occassion, and this is 
essentially much like the scientific method, except that the majority 
of scientific publications are still in natural language form instead 
of a computationally executable format -- but there are projects that 
are moving towards fixing this:
	http://expo.sf.net/ the "robot scientist"

> non-manufactured goods - whether it's music or software or something

The human brain manufactures music and software.

> else rapidly copiable - in order to get these spread, you and all
> your potential audience need to pay communications companies so you

Haha. That's funny because a good number of my friends aren't paying 
communications companies. In my last email or so in reply to Keith I 
mentioned how many of them have tin can antenna setups to steal the 
access and do wireless meshes to hop from node to node.

> can spread them. The bands on myspace rely on everyone paying
> telecommunication companies for internet access, and collaborative
> software development relies on email, file transfer, and people
> communicating with each other lots.

You need to look up the mesh projects. :-) These are pretty awesome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_network
http://cuwireless.net/

"The CUWiN Foundation develops decentralized, community-owned networks 
that foster democratic cultures and local content. Through advocacy and 
through our commitment to open source technology, we support organic 
networks that grow to meet the needs of their community."

http://weblog.mrbill.net/archives/2005/07/31/mesh-network-completed/
http://bcwireless.net/moin.cgi/Mesh
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3520231
http://www.vdomck.org/blog/2005/07/22/how-to-build-a-mesh-network-with-wrt54gs/
http://csircoin.blogspot.com/2005/06/setting-up-olsr-mesh-on-linksys.html
http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=WRT54G+mesh+network&sourceid=opera&num=50&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

etc. There was this one open source mesh network that has been 
developing over the internet for a while now, and has something like a 
few ten thousand contributors that have their wireless networks 
intersecting each other. And you don't know how many of them are using 
proprietary networking equipment, or if they have built their own. 
Chances are that they are still using proprietary, but the system is 
designed to be robust so that they can go replace the modules with 
other modules that they build (or their friends build for them, or 
their machines in a garage somewhere).

> Kevin> Industry requires economies.
>
> Bryan> Certainly, look at ecosystems, but it's not the same thing as
> money. I think Kevin was trying to say that money-based economies
> provide clear, obvious mechanisms to encourage industrial production
> and reward innovation. Certainly, the beginnings of better production
> and new products took a great leap in England after the
> monetarisation of the economy in the thirteenth century, and the
> invention of double-entry accounting in medieval Italy revolutionised
> commerce and encouraged the spread of goods. There may be other ways
> of encouraging industry and production, but none of them so far have
> worked as well as money.

I'd point to open source in general. It's worked very, very well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

> Kevin> A cell phone without civilization is just a paper weight.
>
> Bryan> That's not true ... just throw up some towers/antennaes, a few
> electrical generators and also some distribution equipment. you can
> make a rudimentary hydrodynamic power generator with wires (or less
> optimally other shapes) of magnetic materials wrapped around other
> conductive metals basically, etc. etc.
>
> Well, in Burma the cyclone took the telecoms network down. Telecoms
> Sans Frontieres offered to send in telecoms engineers to put up a
> temporary network and offer every refugee a phone call to someone, so
> they could let relatives know what was happening. The temporary
> network would also allow aid agencies on the ground to co-ordinate
> better. The Burmese government rejected this, and kept aid agencies
> out. In Burma, your cell phone IS just a paper weight. As to Bryan's
> point - a cellular network requires a fair amount of technology,
> you're not likely to knock this up in your backyard. Without a
> certain degree of civilisation, it's hard to rebuild a downed
> network.

Go read some of the antenna documents I linked to Keith. It is not 
impossible to do communications in your backyard. In the case of wired 
communication, go get a string and place it between two cups and 
whisper in one cup, listen through the other, over a suitable distance 
that I sadly forget the mathematical definition of.

- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/



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