Posts Tagged ‘technological decline’

AI progress

Saturday, February 4th, 2023

I have for some time been complaining that progress in many fields peaked around 1972 or so, that many important fields have gone backwards. Last man on the moon 1972, cars and clothes washing machines have been getting crappier. The skyline on big western cities is starting to look less and less like the future, as is the interior of your neighbourhood shopping mall. The highest flying and fastest flying warplane retired in the early eighties.

But there has been a major breakthrough in AI. The methods proposed in “attention is all you need” have been applied to a variety of problems, and are yielding interesting, important, and impressive results.

The breakthrough is that generative techniques can generate endless instances as instantiations of a word, or set of words, and can also recognise a particular instance as an instantiation of a word or words. In other words, handles words as reference to concepts.

This has been the show stopper problem in philosophy, ai, and the philosophy of ai for a long time. That GPT works as well as it does tells us something important about meaning, thought, and words. What it is telling us is not clear, but whatever it is telling us, it is a reply to an issue first raised by Aristotle.

GPT type models can generate an unlimited number of instances corresponding to a concept or set of concepts, and can recognize the goodness of match of a particular instance to concept or set of concepts. Or at least is acting like it can in some important cases, quite a lot of important cases.

What we could do with this tool is take an enormous pile of conversations, and for each entity in the conversation, predict his response to any previous comment.

The question then is, would a generated conversation indicate a sentient response to novel prompts?

One of the things gpt can do is represent a very large body of knowledge, by predicting the response to a query about it from existing similar, but far from identical, queries.

But because it does not understand the information it is representing, the responses suffer from “hallucination” reflecting the fact that its model of the knowledge is not the knowledge, but a model of words about the knowledge, words about words. Sometimes, they superficially sounded very like a correct answer but were utter nonsense.

ChatGPT makes errors because its universe consists of words referring to words. Its errors do not necessarily reveal a lack of consciousness, but rather reveal it does not understand the words refer to real physical things.

When it makes a completely stupid error, and gives a meaningless nonsense response, it sounds very like a sensible and correct response, and you have to think about it a bit before you realise it is utter nonsense and meaningless gibberish.

ChatGPT is very very good at writing code. Not so good at knowing what code to write.

Suppose it had been trained on words referring to words, and on words referring to diagrams, and on diagrams and words referring to twodee and threedee images, and on words, diagrams, two dee and three dee images referring to full motion videos.

From the quality of the performance on words about words, and words about artistic images, one might plausibly hope for true perception. What we now have is quite clearly not conscious. But it has taken an impressively large step in the direction of consciousness. We have an algorithm that successfully handles the long standing central big hard problem in philosophy, AI, and the philosophy of AI, at least in a whole lot of useful, important, and interesting cases.

Quite likely we will find it only handles a subset of interesting cases. That is what happened with every previous AI breakthrough. After a while, people banged into the hard limits that revealed no one at home, that consciousness was being emulated, but not present. People anthropomorphise their pets, because their pet really is conscious. They do not anthropomorphise their Teslas, because the Tesla really is not, and endlessly polishing up the Tesla’s driving algorithms and giving the more computing power and data is not getting them any closer.

But we are not running into hard limits of GPT yet.

Perception is starting to look soluble. Not solved, but definitely looking like a solution may well be merely a matter of polishing up what we now have.

Will, intent, purpose, and desire still conspicuously missing. But they are problems very similar to perception, hard in the same way and for the same reasons perception is hard.

We do not yet have a robot that can take a beer out of a fridge, pop open the can and pour me a drink, or can fold a shirt in a reasonable time. And the way the wind blows, we are likely to get an AI that knows all the knowledge in the world, and can provide meaningful and useful answers about it before we can get a robot that can make me a ham sandwich. But it now starting to look a whole lot more likely that we can get an AI that knows all the knowledge in the world and can provide meaningful and useful answers.

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Posted in science | 1,104 Comments »

Tech decline bites Musk

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2022

A long time back I remarked that eye of Soros has fallen on Musk. It is starting to look like that the hand of Soros is going to fall upon him.

American technology has been declining across the board. Some stuff started declining in the seventies, and as time went by, more and more things went into decline.

Apple is still advancing cpu design, but they have no in house capability to actually implement those designs in hardware. They depend on Taiwan Semiconductor. AMD and Intel just put more circuits of their old design on the chip when TSM upgrades its chip fab technology.

But the one shining counter example to tech decline has been Musk and SpaceX.

Musk’s internet in space has the highest satellite technology (those laser links are a big advance in space to space communication), but the key requirement is the capability to launch huge numbers of satellites cheaply.

For which he needs Starship. Not to mention making mankind interplanetary.

Currently the FAA is slow walking approval. When something gets slow walked in this manner, chances are that approval will never be forthcoming, or will be approved with poison pill conditions.

The vast majority of the objections that they are supposedly so carefully evaluating are just random variations on a script, a very familiar pro forma script, with the word “pipeline” replaced by “rocket”. This is a stalling tactic while bureaucratic infighting over the real decision continued. Reading between the lines, it starting to look like the bureaucratic infighting has ended in victory for a priesthood that sees techies as adherents of a hostile faith. They no longer need to manufacture stalls, they can just stall.

On the other hand, it is going to be mighty embarrassing if the US government has send men to space station by hitching rides on Russian rockets again. The rhetoric of progress is a key part of progressive ideology. We are supposedly so much wiser than our ignorant racist sexist predecessors, and supposedly all this wonderful technology makes the advance of the left inevitable and irreversible. They don’t want to kill off space access, but may be unable to restrain themselves.

If, as is likely, Starship is sitting on the launch stand ready for its first orbital test, and the FAA is still indefinitely stalling the launch, some top level pressure may be applied to approve it. I was quite surprised when the obvious desire for war with Russia was reigned in from above. Perhaps the same may happen with Starship.

They perceive access to space is status and power for an enemy faith. One big reason for Musk’s success is that when he hires people, he shows profound disrespect for official Ivy League qualifications. He and his organization are not putting the right people in power over his rockets. They don’t like that. (They don’t like open source software either, and Linux has succumbed to the demon worshipers.)

If Musk wants to get us to space, it starting to look like a launch facility on the periphery of the Chinese hegemony or the Russian empire might be necessary, or the borderlands between the US empire and the other two. The Russians seem to have given him an invitation for a launch facility in Russia, but that is likely to prove a little close to the bear’s embrace.

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Posted in science | 680 Comments »

Technological decline

Friday, July 6th, 2018

As societies enter a dark age, military technologies are apt to be the last to be lost, and in the recovery from a dark age, the first to advance.

In dark ages, art declines, great buildings decline, ordinary people’s living standards decline, people harrow the ground with stones tied to bits of wood instead of iron plows, but weapons technology usually goes right on improving.

Our art is crap, we no longer build Cathedrals, but until recently, weapons were good and improving.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review has recently appeared, revealing that we have lost all nuclear military technology:

U.S. production of tritium, a critical strategic material for nuclear weapons, is now insufficient to meet the forthcoming U.S. nuclear force sustainment demands, or to hedge against unforeseen developments. Programs are planned, but not yet fully funded, to ease these critical production shortfalls.

This is euphemistic.  Recent attempts to produce tritium were fully funded, but failed, which failure resulted in new plans for new attempts to produce tritium, which have not yet been fully funded.

I have regularly remarked on America’s inability to produce tritium.  All existing nuclear weapons require tritium to juice their detonation, and without tritium, would produce a low yield explosion.  Tritium decays over time, and so fresh tritium continually needs to be added.  The US is out of tritium, has repeatedly attempted to produce more, and repeatedly failed.

Fully funding the Obamacare website did not produce an Obamacare website, and I doubt that fully funding proposed new tritium production facilities will produce tritium.

In the absence of sustained support for these programs, including a marked increase in the planned production of tritium in the next few years, our nuclear capabilities will inevitably atrophy and degrade below requirements.

The U.S. is also unable to produce or process a number of other critical materials, including lithium and enriched uranium. For instance, the United States largely relies on dismantling retired warheads to recover lithium to sustain and produce deployable warheads. This may be inadequate to support the nuclear force replacement program and any supplements to it.

So, our enrichment facilities have ceased to function across the board.

And, recapping my previous remarks on technological decline:

Fighter planes are getting slower, and can no longer fly as high or as far.

We need Pu238 for nuclear batteries. The 2006 New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt was launched without enough Pu238 to keep all its equipment live during the Pluto flyby, and without enough Pu238 to do its Kuiper belt mission,

Existing nuclear weapons have not received maintenance for a very long time, and it is unclear whether there is anyone with the relevant skills to perform maintenance and adequately test them for readiness.

Fusion weapons require lithium enriched in lithium six to juice them.  Enriched lithium does not decay, but the US has lost the capability to make more of it.

Attempts to build new nuclear reactors in the US keep running into indefinite delays.  To make significant amounts of plutonium 239  will need new reactors.

Plutonium 239 is the stuff used in nuclear weapons, plutonium 238 the stuff used in nuclear batteries, plutonium 240 is the stuff you don’t want because it spontaneously fissions.  You want to produce your plutonium using enriched uranium in a sodium cooled fast neutron reactor because then you get considerably more of the plutonium you want, and considerably less of the plutonium you do not want.  The US used to build fast neutron reactors, but all recent attempts to build a fast neutron reactor in the west have failed, and all existing fast neutron reactors in the West have stopped working.  The only existing fast neutron reactors that are working well enough to produce significant amounts of plutonium are in Russia and China.

If all existing fast neutron reactors have ceased to work, if all our existing isotopic enrichment plants have ceased to work, should we really believe that our existing nuclear weapons will work?

Money, “full funding”, is unlikely to be the issue.  Obama threw stupendous amounts of money at the Obamacare website, and the site did not come up.   It only came up when a conspicuously undiverse team of white and east Asian heterosexual males led by white heterosexual males took over the job.

Nuclear weapons were produced by western civilization, and since 1972 the core project of our universities has been “Western Civilization has got to go.”

Science requires a level of trust and trustworthiness that a diverse society is incapable of, and a level of truth speaking that a progressive post christian society is incapable of.

 

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Posted in science, war | 193 Comments »

China passes the US

Wednesday, March 14th, 2018

The most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is a fifty year old plane firing seventy year old cannons scoured from museums and looted from ancient forgotten overseas arms depots.

Some people may say that the most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is nukes, but after all these years, who knows if they work any more? We can no longer make tritium, we can no longer make Pu238, why should nukes have fared better?

Russia has been called a gas station masquerading as a country, because total GDP is very low, and per capita GDP unimpressive.  Its civilian technology is not especially impressive, but it produces military technology that is as good as the US at a considerably lower price, and is hoping to soon surpass the US in ways that will deny the sea and the air to the US.

China’s total GDP has passed the US, though the US official statistics are in denial.  Per capita GDP remains well below that of the US, but the gap is rapidly shrinking, with increasing numbers of westerners seeking Chinese jobs.  Technologically, China has focused on buying, stealing, and copying US civilian technology and Russian military technology.  But in civilian technology, the pupil has surpassed the master.  All Chinese CPUs are based on the Arm design that they purchased from the US long ago, but they are now improving on this design in ways that arguably leave the US behind.   They are at least equal in CPU design and fabbing, arguably superior.  They are still copying, but are less reliant on copying.

Meanwhile US academia focuses on combating masculinity and raising female self esteem by showering them with unearned credentials.

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Posted in economics, science, war | 225 Comments »

Technological decay

Sunday, December 6th, 2015

I have long argued, and commenters on this blog have long been disputed, that science died shortly after World War II, replaced by official state religion wearing lab coats as priestly robes, and using test tubes as aspersoria for holy water.

The age of science began with the Restoration and the Royal Society.  The Royal Society’s motto was “Take no one’s word for it”.   Feynman, in his address “What is Science?”, rephrased this as “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Now, however science consists of taking the word of secret anonymous committees meeting behind closed doors, committees that refuse to show their evidence, data, calculations, and method of calculation even while demanding trillion dollar programs, gigantic human sacrifice, and challenged by freedom of information requests.

I have long argued, and commenters on this blog have long been disputed, that since 1972, the west has been in technological stagnation or outright decline in most everyday fields, in an ever increasing number of fields. Yes, DNA reading and computer disk drives keep improving, but clothes washing machines have gone to $#!&, and there is a reason why people are nostalgic for the old muscle cars.

Observe our ability to build and operate tall buildings has been diminishing since 1972.

The highest level of technology is found in war. Soldiers are to take control of or destroy men and assets. Tanks, artillery, mortars and Armored Personnel carriers are to destroy soldiers. Ground attack planes and helicopters are to destroy tanks and armored personnel carriers, and air to air fighters are to destroy ground attack planes, and other air to air fighters.

So the highest level of technology, and the greatest expense, is found in the air to air fighter. A people’s capability to build and operate air to air fighters is the most sensitive barometer of its technological level, and a vital factor in that people’s capacity to win wars. You get air superiority, so the other side cannot use tanks against your soldiers, and you can use tanks against their soldiers, and artillery against their population centers and assets. You flatten their population centers and destroy their assets so that they cannot feed and equip their soldiers, and then your soldiers take charge.

And as you know, American air to air fighters have been getting slower and slower, more and more expensive, less and less maneuverable, flying less and less high, and carrying less and less ordinance. But now they are stealthed, right?  And Russian fighters are not stealthed.

Stealth can be beaten by sufficiently advanced electronics – you need two radars in substantially different locations whose radar is coordinated – one paints the target with a radar beam, and the other views the scatter from a substantially different angle. In response to the Turkish attack Russia now has part of the technology to beat stealth deployed in Syria: AEASA radars that can spray beams out in several thousand completely different directions per second. Does it have all of the technology deployed? Does it have the capability to coordinate two AEASA radars so as to see through stealth? Maybe. Probably. Though we will not really know until we see a major air battle between Russia and another advanced power.

Further Russian air to air fighters can fly faster, fly higher, are more maneuverable, and carry more ordinance than American air to air fighters. The recent display of Russian capability in Syria seems to be giving the Pentagon a nervous breakdown.  The Su-34 is every way superior, except for the very important defect that it lacks stealth.

When Dubai wants to build a tall building, it hires western experts. But those western experts are expatriates, semi permanent exiles from the west. They have foreign wives, girlfriends, and concubines. They don’t build tall buildings in the West because a horde of bureaucrats would shake them down for bribes (politely laundered through “consultants”, aka bagmen) and because they could not get any decent pussy in the west.

Our increasingly diverse ruling elite loses cohesion, in part through diversity, in part through selecting for cowards and liars. Because of this loss of cohesion, if you want to build a tall building in the west, you have to bribe a thousand priestly bureaucrats (whose self justifications are increasingly priestly – mostly they are protecting Gaia) and each of these thousand bureaucrats wants his pet consultant to collect ten percent of the surplus value that would be created by the building, adding up to a demand for one hundred times the value, while the King of Dubai is likely to content himself with a mere fifty percent of the value.

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Posted in science | 47 Comments »

Technological decline

Saturday, May 31st, 2014

Konkvistador has drawn my attention to the Pu238 shortage. We stopped making Pu238 in 1988 You need Pu238 for nuclear batteries. The 2006 New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt was launched without enough Pu238 to keep all its equipment live during the Pluto flyby, and without enough Pu238 to do its Kuiper belt mission, from which I conclude that since 2011 we have been totally completely flat out of Pu238, just as the Fed is totally completely flat out of gold. For the last few decades, the government has been acting as if we are very very short of Pu238. For example, no allotment for pacemaker batteries, so people with pacemakers have to have surgery every so often. The Europeans are using (dangerous and expensive) americium based nuclear batteries for their space program.

Supposedly we can simply make more Pu238, just as supposedly when the two towers fell, we could supposedly build buildings just as tall or taller, just as we can supposedly still build warplanes that can cruise at supersonic speeds, we just supposedly do not want to. Today’s businessmen are supposedly so secure in their masculinity that they do not want a higher corner office with a bigger view than the next businessman.

Maybe.

But I rather think if we could do that, we would not have run out in the first place. we would not have launched New Horizons with a half flat battery. We have been mighty short for at least a couple of decades, and since 2011 the cupboard has been just flat empty.

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Technological decline

Sunday, April 27th, 2014

If we cannot build high buildings any more, progressives say we are now so sophisticated that we are now superior to status competition based on giant penis substitutes, and status competition based on having a higher corner office than the other business executives.

If high art is an aids infested trannie projectile vomiting over the audience, progressives say that we philistines just don’t get high art.

But the most important thing about a military aircraft is that it can fly faster, higher, and further than its opponents, so that you can get away from enemies, but enemies cannot get away from you.  And of these, the most important by far is to fly faster, so that you can bring trouble to your enemies, but your enemies cannot bring trouble to you.

SR 71 Blackbird, first built in 1972, about the time we put the last man on the moon.

Cruising Speed Mach 3.2
Ceiling 85 000 feet
Range 3 200 nautical miles

Today’s latest and greatest American warplane, the impressively named F-35 Lightning II. Does not that sound so much more impressive than “Blackbird”?

Cruising Speed Mach 1.6
Ceiling 60 000 feet
Range 1 200 nautical miles nautical miles

So let us make a little table:

Capability Then Now
Speed Mach 3.2 Mach 1.6
Ceiling 85 000 feet 60 000 feet
Range 3 200 nautical miles 1200 nautical miles

(more…)

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Posted in economics, science | 85 Comments »

mens rea

Sunday, January 26th, 2014

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 indicates not only failure, but that the failure is shameful – that the failure is in us, not in external circumstances.  That we are lying about it shows the failure is social decay. (more…)

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Posted in economics, science | 23 Comments »

Progress

Sunday, October 27th, 2013

In 1900, there were no planes, no space travel. Motorcars were toys that enthusiasts played with, not useful means of transport.  There were no computers, no radios, no antibiotics, no rockets, no nuclear power, no knowledge or understanding of the interior the atom, no very useful plastics.

In 1961 we had all of this stuff

Since 1961, what have we got?

The last man on the moon is getting pretty elderly.  We have abandoned supersonic transport, and supersonic fighter planes are close to being abandoned.

Cell phones and the internet show radical improvement, but are just more intense and improved use of computers and radio, technologies that existed well before 1961.  Genetic technology shows promise, but is not yet doing anything big.  While reading genes continues to improve, writing them may well have peaked, and without vastly improved writing, gene technology is not going anywhere exciting.  AI remains thirty years in the future, as it has been for the past sixty years, even though every desktop now contains more computing power than the human brain.

And, as I regularly point out

The last man on the moon left in 1972

The tallest building in the united states was finished in 1974.

Cars are becoming humbler.

 

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Posted in economics, science | 101 Comments »

Technological decay

Monday, March 19th, 2012

Earlier I argued that technology in the west peaked in 1970, Tallest building 1972, coolest muscle cars, last man left the moon,though it continues to advance in some other parts of the world:

Unreasonable expectations points at another indicator. The most advanced plane ever built, the SR71, was built in 1966, retired 1972. One would have expected stealthed mach three fighters and bombers to replace it, but instead, slower, lower performance stealthed fighters and bombers replaced it. Unreasonable expectations argues that all advances since then have been driven solely by advances in photolithography, and that when photolithography runs out, technological advance will end.

A number of posts have appeared by a number of people reporting slowing in technology, or actual decline in the level of technology: See Locklin for a summary and review.

I would instead predict that technological advance in the west will end. I see new technologies, such as the blue light semiconductor laser, which makes possible modern DVDs, e-ink, which made possible the kindle, and new construction methods for very large buildings, which make possible the remarkably cool asian airports, continuing to appear in Asia.

Oslo cityscape

Shanghai cityscape

Shanghai cityscape

You can see where the future is being made. The Oslo cityscape looks as though it should be in sepia, for the nineteenth century look – similarly when you google up street scenes from Europe and the US and compare them with equivalent street scenes from China.

In the 1930s, they imagined the world of tomorrow would look shiny and futuristic. It does look that way, but not in the west.

What is causing it?

Contrary to Charles Murray, it looks to me that our elite is less and less elite, less and less selected for ability, creativity, and intelligence, that it is now primarily selected for conformity and political correctness, and secondarily selected for race and gender, and thus excludes the person who is smarter than those around him, who tends to have difficulty conforming, and is apt to show signs of noticing the more illogical aspects of the holy faith. You observe a lot more women in today’s ruling elite, and women are noticeably less intelligent and logical, less capable of comprehending or advancing technology, and the smartest women are considerably less smart than the smartest men. There are no great female composers, despite the fact that women have been very strongly encouraged to go into music for several hundred years. There are no great female scientists, Marie Curie being a completely faked up poster girl and an affirmative action Nobel prize. So when you see lots of females in the elite, you are simply going to see less technology. You are going to see the really smart man (and he always is a man) simply have lower status and less time and resources to accomplish stuff.

If you read up on the challenger disaster, it is pretty obvious that the people making the decisions were just stupid, and engineers under them were markedly smarter.   Mulloy simply did not understand Lund’s presentation.  And because the bosses were just too dimwitted, the space shuttle fell out of the sky.  Further, the reason Lund was low status and Mulloy was  high status is because Mulloy was stupid enough to fit in with the elite, while Lund was just too smart to fit in.

Reading old books, it looks to me that in the US, selection on the basis of ability maxed in 1870 if we suppose breeding counts, and if we instead suppose that the college board test (which later became the SAT) is vastly more predictive than breeding, so that breeding should be completely and totally disregarded, then it looks to me that selection on the basis of ability maxed in 1910, when they started to worry more about the fact that high scorers tended to be affluent white males, than whether the exam accurately measured ability to benefit from the kind of material taught at college.

Ever since then, since 1870 or 1910, depending on how reactionary you are, our elite has just been getting dumber and dumber, hence, technological decline.

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Posted in economics, science | 69 Comments »