Re: [silk] Light on Yoga
At 2011-02-07 09:44:56 -0800, tha...@gmail.com wrote: When did Silk become the bulletin board to routinely debate threads from this Indo-Eurasian research list? For efficiency, we should clearly just subscribe silk to that list. -- ams
Re: [silk] Light on Yoga
For efficiency, we should clearly just subscribe silk to that list. -- ams :) looks like Udhay time again for u :) Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
Re: [silk] Skepticism on Technological Singularity
On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 05:13:20PM -0800, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote: The industrial revolution is dying, I give it 150 years... I don't know what Not necessarily true. There is some interesting technology in the pipeline which could allow means of production to assist with providing means of production, at a price point cheap enough to be owned by individuals and small groups. This would include sources of energy and nonscarce raw materials, mined in situ or nearby. If we make it to machine-phase, then even the sky is not the limit. the next revolution is, but it's clear that the information age is merely the last stage of the industrial revolution. Or the information age is the beginning of the postindustrial revolution. The next-closest thing to nanotechnology is biology, and there you see information technology is intricately linked to capabilities (which are admittedly very modest). -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Re: [silk] Skepticism on Technological Singularity
On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 1:29 AM, Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote:
On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 05:13:20PM -0800, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote:
The industrial revolution is dying, I give it 150 years... I don't know what
Not necessarily true. There is some interesting technology
in the pipeline which could allow means of production to
assist with providing means of production, at a price point
cheap enough to be owned by individuals and small groups.
Yes, I think 3D printing and similar technologies [0] are tempting,
but unless we answer the carbon footprint, hydrologic cycle, climate
change, food availability and population explosion questions (to list
the most obvious) conclusively we won't have the runway left to
execute on the post-industrial revolution phase. Ideally we would
discover on top of answers to the above questions a carbon-neutral raw
material that could be the input for 3D printing and would be easily
mined / grown / gathered in situ. Unfortunately the odds are about the
same for discovering aliens [1] [2] [3] [4].
Human history is full of lost civilizations, in the global age we are
all a single civilization - why shouldn't we be the next in line to be
affected by environmental factors a la Indus valley or the Maya.
I'll end this post with this set of photos:
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2011/02/07/captured-the-ruins-of-detroit/2672/#more-2672
Cheeni
[0] Nanotechnology is more hopeful to me frankly though we are farther
off than 3D printing to executing on it - anything can happen in 50
years.
[1] Not pure hyperbole, arsenic based life forms:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html
[2] Seven billion of us soon, nine billion in 2045. Let’s hope that
Malthus was right about our ingenuity.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/kunzig-text/1
[3] Water from Alaska for the middle east:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/08/the-race-to-buy-up-the-world-s-water.html
{The oil tankers turning into water tankers is surprising but we don't
even blink at the thought of bottled water which has been commonplace
for decades now}
[4] Food production must be increased 70 percent to provide for the
extra 2.4 billion people expected to come aboard planet Earth by 2050.
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2009/10/food-for-nine-billion-people.html
[4]
Re: [silk] Skepticism on Technological Singularity
On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 4:09 AM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 1:29 AM, Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 05:13:20PM -0800, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote: The industrial revolution is dying, I give it 150 years... I don't know what Paraphrasing Leo Tolstoy, Successful civilizations are all alike, every unsuccessful civilization fails in its own way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle Cheeni
Re: [silk] Skepticism on Technological Singularity
On Tue, Feb 08, 2011 at 04:09:05AM -0800, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote:
Yes, I think 3D printing and similar technologies [0] are tempting,
In principle this would scale to micro and eventually nanoscale.
Right now it would mean lots of magic ink cartridges, and prices
which make them effectively unobtainium (nevermind facilities and
raw resources required to brew them).
but unless we answer the carbon footprint, hydrologic cycle, climate
Carbon is mostly a fossil problem, so it would be adequately
addressed by renewable, e.g. thin-film photovoltaics on plastic
or sheet metal. With abundant energy water desalination and
closed circuit water in production are feasible.
Long-term you would directly capture CO2 from the atmosphere
(or scrub flue gas, or use biomass as first-stage fixation)
to produce fuel and synthetics, using PV as energy input.
But it's pretty obvious we're going to burn every dead dino
we can dig out, so all this is future fixing our toxic sludge
they inherited.
change, food availability and population explosion questions (to list
An interesting approach is direct farming of single-cell algae
in photobioreactors (which can be also used for CO2 and nitrate/phosphate
scrubbing) for animal and human food. If the going gets tough,
soylent gets green ;)
the most obvious) conclusively we won't have the runway left to
execute on the post-industrial revolution phase. Ideally we would
discover on top of answers to the above questions a carbon-neutral raw
material that could be the input for 3D printing and would be easily
For large scale structures silicates are way underutilized. Either
as ceramics, geopolymer or polyconcrete. Of course no fossil fuel
for firing, which can be a problem.
mined / grown / gathered in situ. Unfortunately the odds are about the
There's some potential for perennials like Miscanthus for carbon
capture (as biochar) as well as providing cellulose for chemical
feedstock. Same applies for single-cell algae, assuming large scale
culture and energy-efficient harvesting can be made to work.
same for discovering aliens [1] [2] [3] [4].
Human history is full of lost civilizations, in the global age we are
all a single civilization - why shouldn't we be the next in line to be
affected by environmental factors a la Indus valley or the Maya.
Yeah, I'm also onboard of Diamond's Collapse. Particularly systemic
failure of complex systems through concerted propagation of individual
failures is pretty scary, and arguably already observable in places.
I'll end this post with this set of photos:
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2011/02/07/captured-the-ruins-of-detroit/2672/#more-2672
Cheeni
[0] Nanotechnology is more hopeful to me frankly though we are farther
off than 3D printing to executing on it - anything can happen in 50
years.
[1] Not pure hyperbole, arsenic based life forms:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html
It's supposed to be a facultative arsenate utilizer, and the paper is
under serious fire, and is likely to be retracted.
[2] Seven billion of us soon, nine billion in 2045. Let’s hope that
I don't see how we're supposed to go to nine gigamonkeys without
some serious crop failure and starvation along the way.
Malthus was right about our ingenuity.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/kunzig-text/1
The problem is that ingenuity is typically directed towards better
killing thy neighbor, once the food fight gets serious enough.
[3] Water from Alaska for the middle east:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/08/the-race-to-buy-up-the-world-s-water.html
{The oil tankers turning into water tankers is surprising but we don't
even blink at the thought of bottled water which has been commonplace
for decades now}
[4] Food production must be increased 70 percent to provide for the
extra 2.4 billion people expected to come aboard planet Earth by 2050.
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2009/10/food-for-nine-billion-people.html
Yeah, I wonder why water and food doesn't come up as limits to growth
more often. A blind spot the size of Texas.
[4]
--
Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org
__
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Re: [silk] Skepticism on Technological Singularity
On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 10:12:39PM -, Anand Manikutty wrote: I admit I looked for them, but unfortunately failed to find any.So you are saying that this graph by Kurzweil is actually right? I assumed that No, I think Kurzweil is at least guilty of serious cherry-picking. the silliness of the graph would be obvious. Please do describe in your own words why Kurzweil's graph is actually correct. I do not see why I have to address your strawman. Positive feedback loop dynamics do not have to follow a straight semilog plot to produce interesting behaviour. Also, I had a rather through refutation of Yadkowsky's point on communism. What is your rejoinder to this exactly? It's Yudkowsky, and I do not see any relevance of monkey politics to what is driven by nonhuman agents of widely dispersed complexity and operating on widely spread time scales. My claim is : there is just no reason to believe (based on the evidence presented by Yudkowsky, Vinge and Kurzweil) that a singularity could happen. A singularity is still very hypothetical (more or less in the realm of science fiction). Why, so is everything. Until it isn't. I fail to see the point here. This is too vague to merit a response from me. Most of things you see around you are artificial in origin, and were first represented as an activity pattern in the space between somebody's ears. Everything was 'science fiction' once, so that label is not particularly predictive. Anand P.S. More here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/223 -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Re: [silk] Skepticism on Technological Singularity
On 08-Feb-11 8:33 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: Most of things you see around you are artificial in origin, and were first represented as an activity pattern in the space between somebody's ears. I am stealing this as my quote of the day. Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] Skepticism on Technological Singularity
On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 5:18 AM, Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote:
[...]
Human history is full of lost civilizations, in the global age we are
all a single civilization - why shouldn't we be the next in line to be
affected by environmental factors a la Indus valley or the Maya.
Yeah, I'm also onboard of Diamond's Collapse. Particularly systemic
failure of complex systems through concerted propagation of individual
failures is pretty scary, and arguably already observable in places.
I didn't know of Diamond's Collapse, I've partially read Guns, Germs
and Steel - sounds like an interesting book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed
[...]
[1] Not pure hyperbole, arsenic based life forms:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html
It's supposed to be a facultative arsenate utilizer, and the paper is
under serious fire, and is likely to be retracted.
Attempting to sell the paper on hype backfired for sure, but that
doesn't make the ability to substitute arsenic for carbon worthless.
[2] Seven billion of us soon, nine billion in 2045. Let’s hope that
I don't see how we're supposed to go to nine gigamonkeys without
some serious crop failure and starvation along the way.
If you think about it there's not much a large government(s) can do.
It's like searching for the keys under the street light rather than
where one lost it. We have plans to stop asteroids from hitting the
earth since that's easily fixed, because of course historically more
civilizations were killed off by asteroids than drought and famine.
Malthus was right about our ingenuity.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/kunzig-text/1
The problem is that ingenuity is typically directed towards better
killing thy neighbor, once the food fight gets serious enough.
A whole lot of Africa, and to a lesser degree the Indian
sub-contintent, parts of China, and Americas will be affected.
Previous generations went through the world wars with attendant food
rations, water rations and such, we will probably have to repeat that
exercise.
[3] Water from Alaska for the middle east:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/08/the-race-to-buy-up-the-world-s-water.html
{The oil tankers turning into water tankers is surprising but we don't
even blink at the thought of bottled water which has been commonplace
for decades now}
[4] Food production must be increased 70 percent to provide for the
extra 2.4 billion people expected to come aboard planet Earth by 2050.
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2009/10/food-for-nine-billion-people.html
Yeah, I wonder why water and food doesn't come up as limits to growth
more often. A blind spot the size of Texas.
Not blind spot, elephant in the room. China, India, Japan, S Korea and
the West are buying up land in Africa for a reason.
Cheeni
Cheeni
Re: [silk] Skepticism on Technological Singularity
Well, many of the Singularity proponents do say that they are not taken seriously in academia because of monkey politics, et cetera. To me, it is a matter of incentives. Kurzweil's theory is more than *a* theory. His theory is one of the bases of the arguments for Singularity. I haven't seen a single theoretical development of the idea of Singularity by any of the major proponents (Kurzweil, Vinge, Yudkowsky) that isn't ridden with holes. I would have thought that the proponents of the view would go back to fix the issues. But instead of the revise-and-resubmit cycle in academia, non-academics have no incentive to fix problems in a theory. Rather, they have an incentive to simply gather more data and lay down the same argument as before. For example, here is a TED talk by Kurzweil which also uses that infamous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PPTMooresLawai.jpg graph : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJsHRltEVBcfeature=related I quite disagree with Kurzweil's claim that Moore's Law operated right through the Great Depression. In some ways, I am very surprised that somebody would even claim that the law has been in operation prior to the Great Depression without providing great statistics for it (Kurzweil's statistics on this aspect are quite weak). Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. =+= As I noted before, prior to the rise of corporations, there is no reason to believe that this law was operating any place any time. This is because it is only the corporatization of innovation that proceeded after the Second World War that seems to be part of the phenomenon of Moore's law. Specific technologies and the politics surround those (3D printing, nanotechnologies, Water politics, Food politics, monkey politics, etc.) are interesting, but the growth of these technologies seem to be well modeled by traditional micro- and macro- economics, and so while the discussion preceding was interesting, it does not change the conclusions as far as I am concerned since all this is already modeled quite well using traditional economics and traditional social sciences. I would go further and put a non-hypothetical model out there. Here is a (non-hypothetical) model of AI. Because it is non-hypothetical, it describes a situation that could actually arise out of the utilization of artificial intelligence in modern technology. Here it is : * Artificial Intelligence can be both a complement for human productive activity as well as a substitute. * In the beginning, as AI is less developed, it will act as a complement for productive activity (spreadsheets, word processing). Wages will go up as humans start becoming more productive (for a given X number of work hours). * As AI gets further developed, it will start becoming a substitute for human productive activity (online travel sites as opposed to human travel agents; online stock trading as opposed to human stock brokers; online/computer tax software as opposed to human accountants). Unemployment will increase as AIs start taking over some of the jobs of humans. * This may help answer one of the puzzles of the current economy. The GDP of the world has continued to grow even as unemployment has increased in many developed economies. Anand --- In silk-l...@yahoogroups.com, Eugen Leitl eugen@... wrote: On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 10:12:39PM -, Anand Manikutty wrote: I admit I looked for them, but unfortunately failed to find any.So you are saying that this graph by Kurzweil is actually right? I assumed that No, I think Kurzweil is at least guilty of serious cherry-picking. the silliness of the graph would be obvious. Please do describe in your own words why Kurzweil's graph is actually correct. I do not see why I have to address your strawman. Positive feedback loop dynamics do not have to follow a straight semilog plot to produce interesting behaviour. Also, I had a rather through refutation of Yadkowsky's point on communism. What is your rejoinder to this exactly? It's Yudkowsky, and I do not see any relevance of monkey politics to what is driven by nonhuman agents of widely dispersed complexity and operating on widely spread time scales. My claim is : there is just no reason to believe (based on the evidence presented by Yudkowsky, Vinge and Kurzweil) that a singularity could happen. A singularity is still very hypothetical (more or less in the realm of science fiction). Why, so is everything. Until it isn't. I fail to see the point here. This is too vague to merit a response from me. Most of things you see around you are artificial in origin, and were first represented as an activity pattern in the space between somebody's ears. Everything was 'science fiction' once, so that label is not particularly predictive. Anand P.S. More here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/223 -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org
Re: [silk] The greatest rock song of all time
On Tuesday 08 Feb 2011 1:19:11 am Anand Manikutty wrote: And now, what is possibly the greatest rock song of all time : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6B8JayH6NQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6B8JayH6NQ Anand wtf? What am I missing here? shiv
Re: [silk] The greatest rock song of all time
Sweet Child of Mine, to be precise. On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 10:44 PM, ss cybers...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday 08 Feb 2011 1:19:11 am Anand Manikutty wrote: And now, what is possibly the greatest rock song of all time : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6B8JayH6NQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6B8JayH6NQ Anand wtf? What am I missing here? shiv
Re: [silk] The greatest rock song of all time
On Tuesday 08 Feb 2011 10:49:53 pm Lahar Appaiah wrote: Sweet Child of Mine, to be precise. Sorry - I still don't get it. shiv
Re: [silk] The greatest rock song of all time
Q: What are you missing? A: The Greatest Rock Song of all time. Also known as Sweet Child o Mine, as opposed to the stuff we had to endure in that video. On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 7:53 AM, ss cybers...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday 08 Feb 2011 10:49:53 pm Lahar Appaiah wrote: Sweet Child of Mine, to be precise. Sorry - I still don't get it. shiv
Re: [silk] The greatest rock song of all time
On 9 February 2011 10:13, Lahar Appaiah thew...@gmail.com wrote: Q: What are you missing? A: The Greatest Rock Song of all time. Also known as Sweet Child o Mine, as opposed to the stuff we had to endure in that video. My personal favorite is Set the controls for the heart of the sun, but for many it is not classified as a rock song. Kiran
