In The Age Of Batshit Crazy Machines



I can't imagine why I haven't stumbled over this essay previously; it's dated July 4, 2005. And I did a search of the name and didn't find any other posts of it here.

I've read a couple of Ray Kurzweil's books - Kurzweil, who is a big proponent of the Technological Singularity, has written books with titles, "In The Age Of Intelligent Machines" and "In The Age Of Spiritual Machines" - and, hence, Prieur's wordplay.

KMO, who hosts the C-Realm podcastdrew my attention to it. He read a portion of it on a past episode. KMO often interviews people with whom we are familiar like Dmitri Orlov and James Kunstler. And he will talk to others about peak oil, learning how to farm again and sustainability issues in general. But he also occasionally has some exponent of the Singularity on as well. (This, of course, in addition to his shows on shamanism, entheogens and tripping your balls off on Ayahuasca somewhere down around the Amazon).

And it makes for a good mix of shows with interesting ideas. I didn't realize that some Singularitarians think there could well be a collapse of industrial civilization and a mass die-off; they just don't think it's going to make a damn bit of difference to the exponential march of technological progress. I have to admit, that is the camp I think I must belong to.

I haven't made up my mind yet. But thinking about our impending doom whilst remaining aware of the tremendous technological boom we are living in reminds me of that thrill I sometimes get when listening to a piece of music which is both descending and ascending at the same time. The chords formed along the way seem ingeniously accidental.

Anyway, I thought someone ought to post Ran Prieur's essay on PeakOil.com. Better late than never.

Humans could experience a mass die-off not because we've all "died off," but because we've all downloaded our minds into computers and abandoned our bodies.

You type on your keyboard and low and behold==J Lo's butt appears on the tiny screen. If that is a technologic singularity then I am a monkey's uncle.

One itty bitty little fly has more intelligence then all the processors on the planet combined. He can fly upside and land on a ceiling. He can search out his own nutrition, then another fly, and--like magic: maggots and then more flies.

Can Pentium recreate itself? Not yet. Not never.

we are alone and we will die alone

I want what Ran Prieur is smoking. About 10 pounds of the stuff, cause I'm going to be rich when I sell it.

Our very high technological society requires a few things.

1) Electricity and lots of it. A single desktop computer can use about 5 watts of power + whatever the display uses and lets say everyone got smart and switched to that type of setup. Now multiply that by 100 million... then add the servers that require hundreds of watts each and multiply that by 10 million. Now add an average of 5 watts for every switch, router, bridge, hub and firewall device and multiply that by 200 million.

Oh, and we want refridgerators, A/C, TVs and ipods.

2) People running around keeping the system running. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of miles of cable, fiber optic, and the occasional orbitting sattellite need maintenance and replacement. You have to pay people to do that.

3) People to pay for it. If I'm out of a job, along with my neighbor, along with half the country, that means you've got 150 million or so people scrambling for jobs, growing gardens, hunting, gathering, and perhaps even a few shooting at each other. Who's going to be paying anything to look a somebody's butt?

Ok, 150 million people are gone because of die off... Some of those dead were the very clever people who know how to keep the system going but relied upon a now seemingly utopian-society-of-past to live. Sorry, I'm not buying it. The internet will stay up as long as there are lots of people who are capable of working at maintaining, supplying and creating content for this monster network. And lots of people with the means of paying for the ability to look and someone's butt.

BTW, I consider it the "Internet" as long as the country's infrastructure is mostly up and connected to a few other countries. When it falls back to national or regional coverage, it's just a network. I've got one of those in my house, big deal.

Also, what happens to the internet if Reston, VA get's hit by a 20 megaton candygram? Are there other "master servers" somewhere in the world capable of taking over?

I don't think you read the article. In the above quote, Prieur is paraphrasing the Singularitarians he has read and known. He goes on to trash the notion. The essay is all about why the Singularity will not happen.

id say about half is about why it wont happen. the rest is about why it shouldn't.

Moore's law only applies to proccessor capacity. There are still bottleknecks in memory and software. Not to mention Moore's law is going to end in 2021. Even though we have advanced greatly in AI, we aren't even close to primitive "commonsense reasoing"

*cough*

Moore's law is not a law. It has nothing to do with science.

actually Moore's law has probed itself again and again, but its marketed as something that it's not.

"transistor density will double every x months (until physically not possible with the technology of that time)". this doesn't imply that "CPU performance will double every x months", but it's basically marketed as such.

Advertising: one of the economical activities that should be most affected after peak [s]oil[/s] everything.

Here's the science regarding the energetics of information.



http://dieoff.org/page170.htm#info

John Smart ain't so smart. The internet is an extremely labor intensive system; electricity, silicon chips, maintenance hungry computers and servers, and millions of people tap, tapping away at their keyboards exchanging ideas. Incredibly rich emergy value, but very ephemeral and one of the first things to go in the descent.

Information in seeds, genes, and house plans are ways of sharing information that can create new entities within the system and develop useful information, thus the value of this information is extremely high. PStarr is right about his fly on the wall in that "genetic information is developed in interaction with environmental processes over geologic time represents the memory of the earth as a whole" (Odum, 1996, 230). Our internet is not as sturdy as the earth's gene pool of diversity.

We're still working on developing "commonsense reasoning" in real humans.

Yet another shadow between the idea and the reality.

These guys have a long road ahead. Just in the denial stage, they still have anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

It isn't that sturdy, but I think that the Internet (or computer networks) should be preserved... if anything they will record our descent. The Net can become our recorded history, but it will be valuable only if it's used to learn from past errors (that assuming we survive as a species).

Well of course that's true, but Gordon was accurately describing a trend going on in integrated circuits.

I would suggest a great read Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change. It explains the reality of technological progress.

It's hard to get a discussion going about the trend of highly advanced and rapidly advancing technology here on PeakOil.com. People's minds snap shut when you bring it up. It's threat to their preconceived idea that industrial civilization will crumble in the relatively near future due to dwindling energy supplies.

It's entirely understandable that people do not find "The Singularity" to be a plausible future event but to completely disregard the powerful trend of advancing technology is just silly. According to the Doomer scenario, advancing technology must soon reverse itself in the face of declining energy supplies. But I think it's more realistic to foresee that global society will become greatly more innovative in the face of such dire circumstances.

No one knows the future and the future inevitably surprises.

If you were to hold my feet to the fire and force me to predict what will happen in the next few decades, I suspect we could see times get much tougher in the developed world, some frightening die-off numbers and resource wars in the undeveloped world, and an incredible spurt of adaptation and use of high technology globally. The energy cliff will be more gradual (with subsitutes and conservation factored in) and we will reach a new ecological/technological/energy equilibrium with our culture of technological advancement intact and growing.