AI is a hard problem, and even if we had a healthy society, we might still be stuck. That buildings are not getting taller and that fabs are not getting cheaper and not making smaller and smaller devices is social decay. That we are stuck on AI is more that it is high hanging fruit. According to Yudkowsky, we will have AI when computers have as much computing power as human brains. The GPU on my desktop has ten times …
Category: economics
mens rea
I have been arguing that social decay is ending technological and scientific progress. In most areas it has strikingly slowed, in some areas, going backwards in the west, as we forget how to do what once we could do. Others, however, argue that technological and scientific progress is still running hot, or that if it has slowed, it is that we ran out of low hanging fruit. But a big tell is that people are lying about it. The lie …
Tall buildings and the social order
To make and keep the upper stories of a tall building habitable requires routine high technology. The lifts have to work, the water needs to be pumped, the toilets have let the poop down one hundred stories without shattering violence. It is not all that expensive. Current office space costs in the centers of major cities are so high that very tall buildings are immensely profitable. It is simply difficult to do, requires able people working together, both initially to …
Global Warming Scientists trapped in Antarctic Denial
This expedition to Antarctica is led by global warming scientist Chris Turney, whose company, Carbonscape, sells carbon indulgences. If you sin by emitting carbon, Chris Turner will, for a suitable payment, offset your sin with his carbon offset credits. In the course of this expedition, they have repeatedly smacked up hard against ice that their ideology said could not possibly be there, and then proceeded to act as if the ice was not there. And then their ship got stuck.
No peak oil
Inflation adjusted price of oil shows no obvious trend, suggesting that limits on oil production reflect social decay and technological slowdown, rather than physical exhaustion of resources. Oil prices rose, and rose, to 2008, and in 2008, it looked like the peak oilers were, like a stopped clock, finally correct. And then prices fell, a lot. They have risen since, but not to their 2008 peaks. From 2010 to the present oil prices have been high and steady in nominal …
Equal opportunity
Whenever someone announces that they are in favor of equal opportunity, in favor of equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome, they have usually a few paragraphs, or a few comments away, defended some outrageously unjust inequality of opportunity implemented and enforced by state power to destroy group X, as punishment for group X privilege. Everyone is in favor of equality of opportunity. I am in favor of equality of opportunity. But, realistically, you are not going to get …
anti anti anti anti reactionary faq
Scot Alexander has answered the anti anti reactionary faq. The anti anti reactionary faq argument to which he replies is that leftist have a dreadful record of misgovernment, terror, tyranny, artificial famine, and leftists tend to get lefter over a time. It is a slippery slope, the slope gets steeper and steeper, and at the bottom of that slope, a deep pit filled with sharpened stakes. Scot’s reply is that these bad things done by leftists were a response to …
Pilgrim socialism
By now everyone knows the real story of thanksgiving. The pilgrim fathers attempted socialism, as usual famine ensued, followed by mass die off, they appointed a new governor who concluded that when God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden, God ordained private property in the means of production. Famine solved, prosperity ensues. Pilgrims ordain a day of thanksgiving to thank God for their prosperity. But strangely, the New York Times, and the left generally, is fighting back, attempting to …
Moore’s law ends. Technological singularity postponed indefinitely
The fabs will soon be delivering “16nm” chips. But they are not in fact 16nm chips. That is just marketer spin. The wire to wire spacing, the pitch, is still 64nm, as it has been for some considerable time. There have been substantial improvements in power consumption, and this and that, but chips have just stopped getting denser. There are no more transistors per unit area than in previous technology generations. They are 64nm chips, and we have been stuck …
Predicting collapse
I am a prophet of doom. There tends to be an oversupply of prophets of doom, and the proportion who turn out correct is quite small. Equally, there are also a large number of prophets of non doom, for example the numerous prophets of complacency during the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, who assume that everything will continue as today, often even when spectacular collapse is under way, they assume that everything has now stabilized, or will …