On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> there is another race occurring on our planet, which is the race towards > planetary scale resource depletion, biodegradation, and overpopulation. > It's true that the human race has never been more populous than it is right now, but despite the "planetary scale resource depletion" and "biodegradation" it is also true that human beings have never been healthier or longer lived or better educated than they are right now. Earlier this year I got into a debate on this list about how the world had reached peak oil production and it's all downhill from there, but since that debate just a few months ago the price of oil has dropped 40%. It's the same with all commodities, when something gets hard to find the price goes up and so there is a incentive to develop new technologies to find more of it, or to find something completely different that can perform the same function cheaper that is just as good or better. And then the price goes down. > > The pace of Singularity could falter and collapse if the industrial > scale, supply chain linked networks of vertically integrated systems, upon > which technology ultimately depends, begins to fall apart There is zero evidence of a imminent failure of a major supply chain, but if there were one millions or billions would die, but I doubt if the rate of scientific or technological development would slow much, it didn't during the great depression. > food system collapse due to high dependence on petrochemical inputs > (which will become priced out of reach for more and more farmers), > Only if we listen to idiot environmentalists. > top soil loss, evolution of super-weeds, resistant insects and other > pests (due to overuse of pesticides and petro-chemical enabled industrial > scale mono-cropping practices). > You can't feed 7.1 billion large mammals without mono-cropping practices, nor can you do so without pesticides and herbicides and artificial fertilizer, although with genetically modified crops you'd need much less of them; if environmentalists thought with their brain and not their gut they would be embracing genetic engineering with gusto, but unfortunately they don't. > > Secondly singularity is not proceeding at an equal – or even a > geometric pace -- across all facets of technology. > That is true, but as environmentalists have skillfully demonstrated the one commodity that we might really be running out of is brainpower, and AI and Moore's Law is proceeding at a breakneck pace. > Are the rocket engines we make today all that much improved over the > Apollo rocket engines? > No. > How is Singularity coming along in rocket engine technology? > Two much more important questions are, how is the Singularity coming along in replacing rocket engine engineers? And how is the Singularity coming along in replacing assembly line workers who mass produce rocket engines? > > The pace of change is lumpy. In some areas it is rapid and graphs along > a geometric curve; while in others it is linear and often the linear slope > is not much more than flat. > But the one area of technological advance that is not in dispute is the same area where humans have previously claimed superiority to everything else in their environment, intelligence, manual dexterity and information processing. And that is what will make the singularity so singular, a new battery technology by itself will not cause a singularity, but a new entity that can design and manufacture batteries better than any human will. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
