Compiler takes your code and creates its functional equivalent in assembler - quite often it even changes the algorithm during optimization process. I would say there is hardly any semantic difference between what you did and what compiler does.
It's the difference between instructions and meta-instructions. Your code usually doesn't tell the compiler how to interpret your code; it already knows that. Meta-instructions tell the computer how to build new instructions.
For instance, my simple program goes through several meta-tables in a database and builds a new program that tests conditions against thousands of database fields based on information in a flat file. It would be a lot of effort to type all the fields and conditions all by hand, so I write code to perform an iterative process building the thousands of lines of code for me, then I run the new program.
Luzr wrote:I believe that the real problem there is how to make binary data free (because they are easily stolen) while still getting innovators rich. It simply requires a new system of capital redistribution.
What about this: There is a special "internet access tax". It gets collected in global fund. (Alternatively, this fund is created from different resources).
Nope. Fabbers can make wireless access/retransmission nodes. Regulating communications becomes much harder.
Make it tax per person. Or use other resources.
Luzr wrote:Anybody connected has a right to "vote" for or "send kudos" related to object (software, movie, fabber plan) freely available on internet. Global fund then simply redistributes collected tax based on on these votes.
Some sort of prize system is doable. But spending currency on consumer items becomes pointless, unless they're limited run/"artistic" items that can demand a premium for rarity. Ford disappears but Ferrari does not, etc.
Driving Ford vs driving Ferrari is mostly about status seeking. Obviously, there is a problem when everything is virtually free - becoming rich seems pointless.
But I would say there will still be things to achieve. One possibility is status (that seems to happen even today). Another is influence - expecting there still will be some companies and share markets, money will buy you influence in these. Of course, the objective of such companies will have to be different (because of fabbers), but think about space exploration or something like that...
Finally, I believe that many innovators will continue on just because it is fun. You can see signs all around...
Compiler takes your code and creates its functional equivalent in assembler - quite often it even changes the algorithm during optimization process. I would say there is hardly any semantic difference between what you did and what compiler does.
It's the difference between instructions and meta-instructions. Your code usually doesn't tell the compiler how to interpret your code; it already knows that. Meta-instructions tell the computer how to build new instructions.
For instance, my simple program goes through several meta-tables in a database and builds a new program that tests conditions against thousands of database fields based on information in a flat file. It would be a lot of effort to type all the fields and conditions all by hand, so I write code to perform an iterative process building the thousands of lines of code for me, then I run the new program.
Well, I guess this really does not lead anywhere... but all you need to do to match these things is to consider those databases as another form of source code...
(BTW, I do such things very often too. I do not see anything special there.).
Luzr wrote:Driving Ford vs driving Ferrari is mostly about status seeking.
Exactamundo!
Luzr wrote:Obviously, there is a problem when everything is virtually free - becoming rich seems pointless.
But I would say there will still be things to achieve. One possibility is status (that seems to happen even today). Another is influence - expecting there still will be some companies and share markets, money will buy you influence in these.
Certainly. My concern is that status seeking will be less of a motivation than straight profit, and that this will cut into the number of people entering tech fields.
Luzr wrote:Of course, the objective of such companies will have to be different (because of fabbers), but think about space exploration or something like that...
Territory would retain value, as (I think) would constructs of sufficiently large scale. Infrastructures.
Luzr wrote:Finally, I believe that many innovators will continue on just because it is fun. You can see signs all around...
Oh, sure. I don't think innovation will STOP, just that its rate will SLOW DOWN, and noticeably.
Luzr wrote:Finally, I believe that many innovators will continue on just because it is fun. You can see signs all around...
Oh, sure. I don't think innovation will STOP, just that its rate will SLOW DOWN, and noticeably.
If ancient Greece serves as a comparison, it isn't innovation but commercialization that slows down. The Greeks could build steam engines and mechanical computers (the Antikythera mechanism), but didn't exploit them.
Well, I guess this really does not lead anywhere... but all you need to do to match these things is to consider those databases as another form of source code...
Any data can become the basis for instructions. By this definition everything is a form of source code, so by this argument we might as well not even use the term "source code" as something with a meaning other than "data," which is obviously silly.
(BTW, I do such things very often too. I do not see anything special there.)
Yes, my whole point is that self-generating or self-modifying code is not unusual.
Last edited by TallDave on Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Luzr wrote:Finally, I believe that many innovators will continue on just because it is fun. You can see signs all around...
Oh, sure. I don't think innovation will STOP, just that its rate will SLOW DOWN, and noticeably.
If ancient Greece serves as a comparison, it isn't innovation but commercialization that slows down. The Greeks could build steam engines and mechanical computers (the Antikythera mechanism), but didn't exploit them.
If the metahistorical models (Spengler, Toynbee) are correct, science in any given civilization is "completed" at about our point of development - say by 2100 at latest.
OTOH, I've suspected for a few years that the Industrial Revolution may be as momentous as the Agricultural Revolution. The metahistorical models all rely on the predictable forms of mass civilization the Agricultural Age required to function. If the Industrial Revolution ultimately dissolves those standards as thoroughly as the Agricultural Revolution dissolved the hunter-gatherers, all models that rely on the predictabilities of Agricultural Age bureaucratically run societies pass.
alexjrgreen wrote:The Greeks could build steam engines and mechanical computers
The Greeks understood the basic principle of the steam engine. They lacked the materials science and engineering to make a steam locomotive or mining pump, and their economies were wracked by constant wars.
There's a certain level below which slaves make way more economic sense.
alexjrgreen wrote:The Greeks could build steam engines and mechanical computers
The Greeks understood the basic principle of the steam engine. They lacked the materials science and engineering to make a steam locomotive or mining pump, and their economies were wracked by constant wars.
There's a certain level below which slaves make way more economic sense.
Ctesibius of Alexandria invented the double action piston pump in the third century BC and Damascus steel was available a century earlier, so your point about the cheapness of slave labour is more convincing.
alexjrgreen wrote:The Greeks could build steam engines and mechanical computers
The Greeks understood the basic principle of the steam engine. They lacked the materials science and engineering to make a steam locomotive or mining pump, and their economies were wracked by constant wars.
There's a certain level below which slaves make way more economic sense.
Actually, from what I have read, Romans were stupid enough to ignore certain inventions because they would left crowds of slaves unemployed and thus considered a threat to the stability of empire.
Not sure if that is true, but similar things seemed to have happened in China or Japan later too.
Maybe the most important invention of modern age is that inventions are actually good and desirable...
djolds1 wrote:Certainly. My concern is that status seeking will be less of a motivation than straight profit, and that this will cut into the number of people entering tech fields.
At the level of coporations, straight profit would be the driving factor and may reduce the coporations that enter the tech field. However at the level of the individual, I think you over-estimate the effect of straight-profit. Anyway, post-scarcity, money wont mean as much. Status seeking is very powerful. Actually beyond a level of comfortable living, money is just a proxy for status. Further, the output quality of people whose primary motivation is money often compares badly against those who are motivated by interest in the subject.
A lot of people who went into IT "because thats where the money is" didn't enjoy it, didn't perform and changed careers.
Proprietry software developers only debug their software to an "acceptable" level of pain for their users - they need to get the product out the door to make some money.
Open Source developers doing it for interest (like you might do a crossword or play a game) whose egos are tied up in their code often put more effort into quality debugging. Homesteading the Noosphere is examines the property and ownership customs of the open-source culture which reveal an underlying gift culture in which hackers compete amicably for peer repute.
Any tradeoff in numbers is replaced by an increase in the quality of those that remain (but I think the numbers will go up anyway when people have more time on their hands)
djolds1 wrote:
Oh, sure. I don't think innovation will STOP, just that its rate will SLOW DOWN, and noticeably.
Innovation would accelerate. Similar to how the agricultural revolution generated free time for people to specialise away from hand-to-mouth living, a post-scarce world would leave more time for technically inclined people to follow their interests. Take an example close to home. If you had the opportunity, would you build yourself a Polywell to experiment with? What is stopping you? Stopping me is the equipment expense and time away from my day job feeding my family. In a post-scarse world, those constraints drop away and I, and everyone in this forum could build a Polywell each. Image the discussions we could have here on the physics, using raw experimental results, rather than the data-blind speculation we have - and the multiplying effect of the rate of innovation.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
All discussions of post-scarcity economics sooner or later lead to discussion of sentient AI. I believe the development of such AI is unlikely in the next 50 years for neuro-biological reasons.
Brains are very different from semiconductor-based computers.
Brains are dynamically reconfigurable. The synaptic connection reconfigure themselves all the time (I think this occurs during sleep and is one of the reasons why we sleep). No semiconductor technology has this dynamism. FPGA's do not count as they are not reconfigurable in the same manner.
Memory storage is chemical in nature, not electronic. Synapses vary as to chemical type. Also, dendrites are not the only way neurons communicate with each other. They also use diffusion-based chemistry as well.
There are various kinds of memory storage. There is short-term storage, there is long-term potentiation, then there is the really long term memory which is still not understood. Both the various kinds of memory as well as communications are interactive with each other.
The software to simulate all of this would be so complex I cannot imagine it being done in the foreseeable future. Having computers that exceed the so-called computational capabilities of human brains is not difficult to imagine. By Moravec's estimates, we all ready have them. By Kurzweil's estimates, we will have them in 10 years. But brains works so incredibly different from semiconductor-based computers that such comparisons are essentially meaningless.
I believe the only way that sentient AI will be possible will be to use the same fabrication methods that are used to grow brains to grow artificial brains based on synthetic biology or some kind of biology-like nanotechnology. This technology will be developed sooner or later.
CMOS semiconductors are reaching their limits. If 22nm is not the limit, most certainly that limit will be the 15nm design rule. The reason is that the depostion, patterning, and etching fabrication technology cannot make structures smaller than this. Also, there are issues with quantum mechanics with structures smaller than this that make CMOS transistors impossible. A new fabrication technology is necessary.
Graphene appears to be the most likely candidate. Transisters with feature sizes down to around 2-3 nm appear to be possible. The manufacture process may be a molecular imprint process, if they can get the through-put up. In any case, some method of self-assembly chemistry is necessary to repeatably make such structures with high enough through put to be cost competitive. Biology constructs itself using self-assembly chemistry. So, the manufacture of nano-semiconductor devices in 2040 will be based on the similar set of processes of how our bodies develop and growth themselves. Our computer chips will be wet and squishy, just like our bodies. Making AI will involve "growing" an artificial brain that will be remarkably similar, both in fabrication process as well as molecular structure, to our own brains. In other words, its not going to be that much different from us. The same set of technologies will make it easier to redesign and restructure our own selves as well.
I would rather improve myself than to make my superior replacement. What say you?
I would rather improve myself than to make my superior replacement. What say you?
Along that line of thought, what comes first, the mind machine interface, or the strong AI?
Personally, I think interfaces capable of transfering data between electronics and brains are much more achievable than an artificial consciousness. If so, we'll have the capacity to improve ourselves well before we could create our replacements. Moreover, this will remove the incentive to build our replacements, because you could just hire a human to interface up and do the same job.
alexjrgreen wrote:The Greeks could build steam engines and mechanical computers
The Greeks understood the basic principle of the steam engine. They lacked the materials science and engineering to make a steam locomotive or mining pump, and their economies were wracked by constant wars.
There's a certain level below which slaves make way more economic sense.
Ctesibius of Alexandria invented the double action piston pump in the third century BC and Damascus steel was available a century earlier, so your point about the cheapness of slave labour is more convincing.
Those were basically curiosities. The first practical steam engine is generally ascribed to Savery in 1698. It wasn't very good (tended to explode). Newcomen's was better, and Watts' better yet, and then Richard Trevithick started using high pressure. It's hard to imagine any of this could have been done by Hellenistic Greeks.
But I suppose that also argues again markets and labor costs were as important as the other elements.
Last edited by TallDave on Fri Dec 18, 2009 10:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
