Fragile balance or Fate's punching bag?

Kurzweil, Vinge, and others use technological and other societal trends to support the vague concept of a socio-technological singularity, or a point in time in the projected future at which these exponential trends reach inconceivable heights or something, maybe like a mathematical singularity. Most people who believe that trends point to a singularity or “The Singularity” believe that the results will be overwhelmingly positive. I suspect that we’re really talking about a singularity as applies to a manifold corresponding to the state of society as a system, creating a catastrophe, but that’s all stuff I don’t understand, so I could just be spouting a load of bull. This is a subject for another entry, or several of them probably.

Before that, I want to ask a question that looks at trends in another area. It’s a question that I might consider moot given technological development and the apparent supremacy of human society over life on Earth in general, but my gut tells me that the question is relevant somehow. Here it is:


What do long-term evolutionary trends imply about the resilience of the biosphere?
Here are a couple graphics from wikipedia:




The first graph seems to indicate that fewer groups of species are dying out, while the second one shows a trend of increasing biodiversity. This suggests that evolution has not only managed to produce hardier ecologies and/or species, but that the descendents of these species or evolutionary products of these ecologies are hardy and diverse. If you think about it, it makes sense that biological evolution over a long period of time would have this effect.

On the other hand, it should be noted that these graphs include only the last 545 million years, so nothing before trilobites. Also, folks say that we are in the middle of a mass extinction (along with a climate shift and possible destabilization) right now, the effects of which remain to be seen.

And of course there are the effects of human civilization, but I think even if we do our worst, I don’t think life is going to get completely wiped out. The Phoenix has always risen from the ashes, albeit with a different look each time.

Visions of the future – The Machine Stops

The Machine Stops is a story written by E. M. Forster nearly a century ago. Keep this in mind as you read, which I recommend you do now if you don’t like stories being spoiled and such before reading them.

The setting is the future. People live in rooms deep inside the Earth and rarely venture from them, since an individual’s needs are accommodated inside their room. This is accomplished by an automated integrated system that either anticipates the dweller’s needs, or responds to cues that reveal them. For example, if a person complains of feeling ill, a thermometer and cold or hot press may pop out of the wall. There are also buttons and controls in the room through which people can accomplish tasks, such as communicating with others through videoconferencing. There is a user’s manual to guide a person through any task they might need to accomplish.

This environment is called the Machine. Everything is integrated and automated, including blimp freight transport between ports to the underground room clusters around the world (the surface is barren and presumed uninhabitable throughout most of the story). Sometimes people ride the blimps to get to assigned living spaces, but generally do not do so voluntarily, as agoraphobia is the norm.

Except for the point-of-view character’s son, residents are unable to conceive of the idea of life without the machine. The culture has been recycled into meaninglessness – something that is celebrated, as direct experience is shunned, since removal from experience is perceived to be the process that allows the objective truth of an experience to be distilled, connected to and processed in terms already known. Consider this passage:

"Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine - the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought LafcadioHearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time" - his voice rose - "there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation

seraphically free

From taint of personality,

which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine."

The story is told from the point of view of a middle-aged woman, but most of the action centers around her son. You might say that the story is about her relationship with her son, how his rediscovery of antiquated notions of human autonomy and dignity is something that his mother cannot relate to.

It is difficult to gauge the intelligence of the Machine, if it has any. It is automated, and it has the power to regulate and respond to human behavior, but there are human committees in charge of overseeing its various functions, and the Machine doesn’t exactly exhibit a will or impetus, unless a reactionary reinforcement of the status quo counts. At the end of the book, the Machine fails, at first slowly, then catastrophically. This is because the people no longer understand how it functions, or even understand that it is a machine, but venerate it as a god. Because of this, when the parts of the machine that it uses to maintain itself (The Mending Apparatuses) malfunction, the machine eventually just wears out. When this happens, everybody dies, except the few people who supposedly were banished long ago and managed to survive on the surface.

So what does it all mean?

It means that somebody wrote a story one hundred years ago about a future that’s we may be on a track toward right now.

That’s not to say that we will all live in hexagonal rooms underground and instant message each other all day (although we might, eh?), but it is to say that the trends of society today lead to a future metaphorically similar to that portrayed in the story.

Consider the trend of increasing dependence on technology. The skills to survive in the wild or near-wild conditions are no longer common (or even rare) knowledge. Nature itself is being marginalized, and the human population is currently too high to be sustained by the wilderness without technology. As we society becomes more industrialized and technologically advanced, more literacy in technology is required to function in society. These tech skills supplant other skills that may have been necessary to learn previously in order to survive a less technological society. Hence – dependence on technology.

It has not been my observation that first-hand experience is typically shunned. However, it seems to me that there is a trend of communication being comprised more and more of different levels of symbolic meta-information. The mass media routinely report on the nature of the mass media, something that was rare until fairly recently. Modern intellectualism is a contest of one-upmanship in composing coherent meta-informational messages. The “blogosphere” is an orgy of commenting on others’ content, and then on others’ comments, etc. (Yes, I realize the irony of that sentence being posted here.)

What these phenomena have in common other than the trend of increasing topheaviness is that they are the result of society’s collective effort to discern the truth about their world. Journalism, blogging, and posting on Internet forums are all undertaken with the object of communicating information that corresponds to our environment, that it, what is truth. The problem is that our environment, our surroundings as they relate to our interactions, what influences us and what we have control over, are growing increasingly complex an indecipherable – to the extent that our endeavors are becoming so convoluted that we often miss the point – communication loses meaning as the information is reprocessed and analyzed in an enormous game of “telephone.”

In the society portrayed in the story, the culture of society and the content of communication have no relevance to the function of the Machine or any aspect of the real world. This may ultimately be where we’re headed, as broader understanding of society’s functions and technology fails. For example, who really understands the intricacies of how politics or a rocket ship works? Only those who specialize heavily in such things, and those people will have a limited view of the rest of society’s functioning.

So it may be ironic that mankind’s endeavors to unravel mysteries are the mechanism of its self-delusion. The disenfranchised son of the story has this to say:

“Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man"s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong”.

That is to say that the truth is ultimately subjective. The less our subjective experiences make sense, the more unnatural effort it takes to formulate theories to explain them, the less connection we have with a concept of truth. On the other hand, the more closely connected we are with a finite plane of reality, external and insulated from our mind’s flailings, such as nature, the more meaningful our lives will be.

This entry got a little convoluted and obtuse, so let’s just hope that future posts clarify my thoughts.

Building a space elevator – I can’t tell how plausible it really is.

The concept of the “space elevator” got a lot of press (and money) in 2005 and I didn’t have a soapbox back then, so here’s my opinion now.

I’m by no means knowledgeable in the engineering of megastructures, but my guess is that building a space elevator is not likely to happen in the next decade, that more economic alternatives exist, and that by the time building a space elevator is possible, alternative solutions will be even more obviously preferable.

In case you don’t know, the kind of space elevator I’m talking about is a station positioned above geosynchronous orbit tethered to the Equator on Earth with a, um, tether or tethers. And then there’s an elevator that goes up and down, possibly utilizing regenerative braking and an electron power beam and whatnot. The point is to get things into space and back. If that doesn’t help you, google it or go to howstuffworks or go to the wikipedia page on space elevators.

So yeah, there’ve been conventions and programs and papers and research and all kinds of stuff, and many people are saying it could be up in ten years. There are several hurdles to be overcome, and these are acknowledged. Currently, the best material we can produce (carbon nanotubes I believe) may not have enough tensile strength for its mass, and we can only produce it in very short increments, as opposed to the necessary tens of thousands of miles with no weak spots. (I should really look up a source on this.) That’s the big one, but the others are significant as well. They include harmonic vibration, atmospheric phenomena, space debris, catastrophic failure, plenty of things that I forgot, and probably plenty of things nobody knows yet.

There have been ways proposed of dealing with some of these difficulties, including a mobile base to avoid tracked space debris and building a protecting tower around the tether extending only through the levels of atmosphere that may pose threats to its integrity. Thinking about the measures necessary to surmount these problems prompts me to consider that alternative methods of getting people and things into space could be more economical.

Here are some of those alternatives:

There are variations on the space tether concept used in the space elevator, some which don’t require an Earth-based anchor, which may alleviate problems related to anchorage, but we might want to get away from tethers entirely.

Rocket propulsion, although inefficient, the only proven method, and continues to be refined.

Variations on a mass driver:

Theoretically, a mass driver could catapult payloads at escape velocity like a giant rail gun. More realistically, a track up a high mountain could help rockets accelerate through the dense troposphere. It seems to me that you could even cover the track and combine a near vacuum with a superconducting maglev-style track to reduce friction. My unqualified opinion is that this kind of thing would be the best project to pursue for an entity genuinely interested in large-scale space infrastructure development.

Mass drivers can also be used in ways that don’t propel the payload directly. Take for example, the space fountain and its variant, the launch loop. What I like about this is technology is its implication that the structural integrity of a mechanism can be derived from electrical energy. That opens up whole new avenues of engineering. Pursuing something like this would be more technologically beneficial to society as a whole and makes the idea of a space elevator seem as humanoid robots and flying cars, like a relic of old science fiction.

Visions of the future – The near future of the media and communication

This is a little flash ditty is that spread around the Internet quite a while ago. It poses as a documentary, made in 2014, of recent changes to the mediascape, starting with some Internet Age milestones the viewer is already familiar with, and moving seamlessly past the present into the future. In fact, it requires a little bit of current events knowledge to figure out exactly when that this takes place during the presentation, which I think was in 2004. The reason it was so popular I suspect was because the vision was plausible, simple, near to the present, and profound in its implications considering this nearness.

In this vision the practically unpredictable elements include such trivia as which companies will emerge, merge, and fail, and the specifics surrounding the features of the products and services these companies render.

The real prediction being made is continuation of the decentralization of content creation, organization, and distribution. This might seem obvious enough, but the vision prompts us to consider the implications. One is a kind of freedom, or power to choose where to get your information from. Another is the disintegration of a bond that helps hold the broader society together, particularly a democratic one – a collective government will be more effective and enlightened if its participants are making decisions made on the same set of data (which is hopefully accurate). In a future entry I’ll go into more detail on how this problem is presently manifesting itself.

…

They made one for 2015, updated with 2005 information (and again already slightly outdated). It seems to hint at an impending decentralization of the physical information-distributing infrastructure as well.

There’s a copycat for the financial industry, but it doesn’t make much sense to somebody who has no money (me). It also starts off with a ridiculous futuristic flying car highway shot.

A common theme of these presentations is that the way people interact with each other and their surroundings (assuming society’s current technological trends continue) will entail less human-regulated ritual formality and more automation and individual customization. My concern is that crucial unifying elements in the human experience will be eliminated. More on that some other time.

Visions of the future – Preface

Speculation about the future is one of my obsessions.

By nature, the future is composed of predictable and unpredictable elements both. For example, I can reasonably predict that the sun will continue to rise and set for many years, but can only guess at the weather one month from now. In the course of human events, it is difficult to pick out what is predictable and what isn’t. There exists both unstoppable trends and seemingly irreducible chaotic complexity in the mechanisms of society.

Our way of thinking allows for the consideration of possibilities, but those envisioned possibilities exist in our mind the same way the present does, as a final nuanced product of both the chaos and inevitability of cause and effect. Both science fiction and non-fiction speculative visions present themselves with full milieu.

Periodically, I intend to pull a vision from the cesspool and do my best to distill the inevitable from the unpredictable – separate out the truth, the fiction, and the speculation.

Introduction

This blog is my soapbox. Its contents are my opinions. I shout them and you might hear. Maybe they interest you. Maybe they don't.