Category Archives: View

Chaos Manor View, Monday, July 27, 2015

I’m still working on fiction, and although it wasn’t in the plot we conceived for our new novel, the education system for an interstellar colony in a slower than light travel universe turns out to take a lot of work; even though you’ll see little of it in the finished product.

We have a population of a few aging adults who were born on Earth but will never see it again. Most were asleep for the whole trip.

The rest are Starborn: either conceived on their destination colony, or on earth to travel as frozen embryos and be born on the colony. There are more of them than of adults, but they are growing up.

Science and technology are no problems; but culture and literature? History? The history we know was of a place they will never see. The only literature is of a place they will never visit. Their only literature was written a century before they were born on a place 14 lightyears away.

Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth. Hamlet? Of course all the works are available; most of the works of mankind are available. We teach only one culture, which is roughly Americanism as seen by the Framers, and we need to teach some history to go with that.

Racial equality is a fact: at least in intelligence, health, these are descendants of the best we have without regard to race or color.

Consent of the governed.

But I ramble, and it’s late.

The news is sufficiently depressing that I remind myself often that despair is a sin, and it’s really early days before 2016. The one guy getting attention is Trump. The Republican establishment seems bent on finding someone Hillary can beat – hard to do – but then they found Bob Dole, the only guy Bill Clinton could beat, to run in ’96. They are really working to repeat that triumph. Maybe – no. I won’t speculate.

Educating the Starborn

Jerry,
Answering your question is a complex issue. It seems you have two problems to solve — developing and inculcating a culture that makes sense on Avalon while also maintaining identity with the people of Earth. The former is important because the purpose of culture is to provide a common framework for survival and growth in a given environment. The latter is important lest Earth’s first colony eventually becomes Earth’s worst enemy. Of course, since there is no bidirectional travel between Avalon and Earth for the foreseeable future, evolution will ensure species divergence between Avalon and Earth. When bidirectional travel does become possible, the two populations may not have much in common physically or culturally.
So who are the people of Avalon and what do they wish to become? They came from the stars; will they be happy with just one planet or do they wish to continue the diaspora? Will they see value in colonizing the entire Avalon system, or will they be happy to pound dirt? These kinds of questions beg answers that inform about culture. That should then inform about education.
You do not ask about HOW the star-born are to be educated. What should an Avalon school look like? How should it operate? How will education be measured? This is an opportunity to provide a glimpse into an idealized educational setting…
No answers, but perhaps food for thought.

Kevin L Keegan

You save me a lot of typing by asking some of the questions I am dealing with. Of course this novel is not about an education system; but we need to know much of that before we can start.

What the Starborn should know

Dr. Pournelle,
I’ve been thinking about your posts on starborn education while reading “There will be war” III and IV. I assume that you are working in the Avalon universe, but I cannot remember the complete “historical” background for the stories. From your responses to other correspondents, I think that you are more concerned with curriculum than mechanics, format, class(room) sizes, or learning environment.
I’ve been speculating on the kind of multi-year course I could design on social/government theory and politics using 19-21st century science fiction. Perhaps selecting a theme (e.g. “Mars”) one could probably create a complete master’s level course — an incomplete list might include comparisons between Wells, Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Bradbury, Burroughs, Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Andy Weir along side actual historical and scientific observation and exploration in the authors’ contemporary context. Or course work on ethics and technology could include Shelley, Swift, Capek, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Wells, Orwell, Crichton, Kipling, P. K. Dick, Spider (the other) Robinson.
In other words, given the chance, I’d design a curriculum the same way you’ve developed anthologies — pick a theme that illustrates the desired lesson, and pull in the last two centuries’ worth of fiction for allegory, example, and analysis. I’d provide editorial comment to support the analysis. I’d extend the lists above to other media — Orson Orson Welles, Fritz Lang (perhaps even Walter Lang), George Lucas, Rod Serling, even Stan Lee.
I think that the Avalonians have some history in common with us now, in “real” life, as well as some idea of politics, sociology, philosophy. It seems as if the parents would design their teaching to follow those ideas and themes. I don’t see how or why they’d be constrained to choose from the literature and entertainment available to our parents’s teachers.
If I am correct and you are working on an Avalon collaboration, modesty (or suspension of disbelief?) may prevent you, Niven, or Barnes from including your own real world works in starborn course work, but I’m sure the Universe’s “book” and your combined critical reading and insight can determine what the starborns’ parents want them to know as well as how to provide it to them.
IMO the short answer to your question “what would they have read?” should begin with at least Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov.
-d

Educating the Starborn

Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Great topic. Couple thoughts:
I’m thinking technology training won’t be a problem for a few generations at least, since it’s unlikely that a huge portion of any interstellar colonists won’t be high-end tech geeks. If mom and dad spend their days laying Hobartium cables along the colony’s perimeter to power the Repulsor Array, and are recognized and honored for their labors, enough little Janes and Johnnies will want to follow suit – and will have the environmental (and genetic!) prerequisites to do so.
Establishing and maintaining a civilization, on the other hand, will be a HUGE challenge and problem. The at-rest state for human culture is barbarism and tyranny. Republican Democracy, with human rights and the outrageous notion that the wisdom of the nation lies in its people, not its leaders, is terribly anti-entropic: Falling into barbarism is as easy as falling down. That’s why Harry M’s comments about the necessity of storytelling is the right idea.
Putting the above together: the Geeks will assume they are the smart ones, and therefore naturally ought to be in charge. And, in fact, when the major pressing problems are all engineering problems, they may even be right. People being people, they will get used to the idea that the engineers ought to be in charge – less work for them, and the oxygen keeps coming and the lights are on, after all. Pournelle’s Law will quickly kick in, and the geeks who like power will get it. And then the colonists are oh so screwed. (If you’ve ever worked in a company where the Geeks are in charge, you’ve seen a minor vision of how this will work out. Just imagine throwing adulation and real power into the mix. Gasoline on an open flame)
One nice side effect of needing to have lots of engineers: I would expect graded classroom education to die the death it has long deserved, as the ‘luxury’ of warehousing kids for a decade or more for their parents convenience will not be affordable – you need the talent in the field. I’d expect apprenticeships at a young age, with something like guild training, to accompany the storytelling so essential to civilization.
One last amusing thought: resource allocation will be the underlying challenge for just about every colonial project. Could it be that boring finance types like myself would be needed in space, to do the cost/benefit analysis from a more general perspective? Heck, you might even need some internal marketing types to make sure the message gets out correctly. And the geeks will have to listen to those people! Space just might turn out to be like working in the Valley. Thus, even for geeks in space, wherever you go, you bring your hell with you…
Regards,
Joseph Moore

We certainly will not have traditional high schools; we probably will have fairly traditional early grades; because learning some self discipline is important. And the Earthborn are certainly aware that the women are strong, the boys are good looking, and all the children are above average. And we do have tools for systems analysis, and no credentialing bureaucracies, at least not yet. But don’t forget the Iron Law.

Jerry,

Not an analysis per se, but a clarifying thought:

What is the risk to the Starborn of “studying war no more?”

A ship of pacifists who never learn the meaning of interpersonal conflict will have neither the emotional constitution or the cognitive ability to deal with warfare if it becomes necessary – and may be hampered even with dealing with less personal crises.  Or the occasional headstrong individual.

Conversely, a ship of warriors will undoubtedly find internal conflict leading to casus belli which may compromise the mission.  (cf. Orphans of the Sky.)

In the final analysis, I come back to Terence, as I usually do:

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.

Teach them everything.  And give them the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights – the no loopholes version, with notes on how even those venerable documents are subject to social decay – as their guides to self-governance

Jim Woosley

They learned in the first book that there are monsters. And yes, I think the Framers and their logic are essential.

The Iron Rule writ large? —

Dr. P,

This would seem to take the cake for a bureaucratic cover-up. I apologize for the lengthiness of the excerpts, but it is too complex to fit in a sound bite:

Missed Calls Is the NSA lying about its failure to prevent 9/11? By James Bamford. July 21, 2015 On March 20, 2000, as part of a trip to South Asia, U.S. President Bill Clinton was scheduled to land his helicopter in the desperately poor village of Joypura, Bangladesh, and speak to locals under a 150-year-old banyan tree. At the last minute, though, the visit was canceled; U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered an assassination plot. In a lengthy email, London-based members of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, a terrorist group established by Osama bin Laden, urged al Qaeda supporters to “Send Clinton Back in a Coffin” by firing a shoulder-launched missile at the president’s chopper. The same day that Clinton was supposed to visit Joypura, the phone rang at bin Laden’s operations center in Sanaa, Yemen. To counterterrorism specialists at the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Maryland, the Yemeni number—967-1-200-578—was at the pinnacle of their target list. They monitored the line 24/7. But at the time, the agency now claims, it had no technical way of knowing who was placing the call. The culprit, it would later be revealed, was Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the men bin Laden had picked months earlier to lead the forthcoming 9/11 attacks. He was calling from his apartment in San Diego, California. The NSA knew about Mihdhar’s connection to bin Laden and had earlier linked his name with the operations center. Had they known he was now reaching out to bin Laden’s switchboard from a U.S. number, on the day an al Qaeda-linked assassination plot was planned, the agency could have legally obtained an order to tap the San Diego phone line. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in fact, approves eavesdropping on suspected terrorists and spies in the United States. By monitoring Mihdhar’s domestic calls, the agency certainly would have discovered links to the 9/11 hijackers living on the East Coast, including Mohamed Atta. It’s likely, in other words, that 9/11 would have been stopped in its tracks. A decade and a half later, that call and half a dozen others made from the San Diego apartment are at the center of the heated debate over the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities—namely the agency’s collection of the public’s telephone metadata, which George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations have claimed was authorized by the 2001 Patriot Act. (That law expired this June and was replaced with the USA Freedom Act, which states that, without a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the NSA will no longer have access to telephone metadata records.) According to Michael Hayden, the NSA’s director from 1999 to 2005, the failure to realize that the man phoning Sanaa was located in San Diego was evidence that mass surveillance is vital to U.S. national security. “Nothing in the physics of the intercept, nothing in the content of the call, told us they were in San Diego,” Hayden told Frontline in 2014. “If we’d had the metadata program … those numbers in San Diego would have popped up.” …. After 9/11, Thomas Drake, a member of the NSA’s Senior Executive Service, was assigned to provide an overview of what the agency knew at the time of the attacks to a Senate subcommittee during a closed-door hearing. In his research, Drake discovered the transcripts of the calls from Mihdhar to the Sanaa operations center. “We essentially had cast-iron coverage on that safe house at least since 1996.… People don’t realize how much NSA actually knew about the network,”… When Drake heard Hayden’s denial that the NSA had the technical capability to determine that Mihdhar was calling from San Diego, he completely disagreed. “Not true. That’s an absolute lie,” he said. “Every number that comes into that switchboard, if you’re cast-iron coverage on that switchboard, you know exactly what that number is and where it comes from.… You know exactly—otherwise it can’t get there.” Another problem, according to Drake, was that before the 9/11 attacks, the NSA didn’t share what it knew with other federal intelligence agencies—and it has sought to cover up its negligence after the fact. Drake put this in his report for the subcommittee, he said, but the document was rejected by his boss at the NSA, who subsequently removed him from the hearing’s roster of participants. <http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/21/missed-calls-nsa-terrorism-osama-bin-laden-mihdhar/>

      Regards,
      Bill Clardy
“Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.” — John Gardner

Overpriced and Underperforming F-35
Good morning, Dr. Pournelle,
I saw this article via Ace of Spades, and thought you might find it interesting: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421473/f-35-defense-waste-danger
Personally, I think that the real reason for this Dodo is to enrich the vendor, who hires a lot of ex-military types after they retire. Everyone wins except the people who may have to fly and maintain this junker, and the taxpayer.
Regards, and my wife and I are praying for your continued recovery.
Don Parker

Travesty in Education

I hope this does not become a pattern:

<.>

Virginia Tech is reportedly requiring professors seeking tenure to pass a sort of litmus test when it comes to “diversity” and “inclusion.”

When it comes to applying to for tenure at many universities, scholars academic work and teaching are usually what falls under the microscope. This is no longer the case at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), which recently released new promotion and tenure guidelines.

</>

http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6688

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Over the past twenty years the universities have become very much alike. The Iron Law at work.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327251

90+GHz Photonic Emitters On-chip (EE Times)

Nanopatch plasmonic antennas beat lasers

R. Colin Johnson

7/27/2015 05:00 AM EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. — Forget trying to integrate lasers on silicon chips for optical computing; instead use nanopatch plasmonic antennas (NPAs) for emission of telecommunications infrared signals at speeds up to 90 GHz now and maybe terahertz tomorrow.

“We want to speed-up in emission rate to build an ultrafast and super-bright light emitting diode,” said Duke University Assistant Professor Maiken Mikkelsen. “This will involve using conducting materials to bring electrical current to the quantum dots to create enhanced emission from same plasmonic structure.” “Such a device has the potential to operate at very low power levels — at a few attojoules — which is critical to transform future information processing and communications, currently limited by heat dissipation,” said Mikkelsen.

The whole semiconductor industry has been trying to convert from electrons to photons as the signal medium for computing on silicon chips. Every kind of silicon photonic devices have been demonstrated, except the emitters. Unfortunately, lasers — the standard communications emitter — are incompatible with silicon, though a thousand methods are being researched to solve that problem. Now Duke University electrical engineers say forget lasers, but instead use their NPAs coupled to quantum dots to communicate 90-GHz and up on-chip or between them at a radiative quantum efficiency of over 50%.

“Typical emitters such as molecules, quantum dots and semiconductor quantum wells have slow spontaneous emission with lifetimes of 1–10 nanoseconds, creating a mismatch with high-speed nanoscale optoelectronic devices such as light-emitting diodes, single-photon sources and lasers. Here we experimentally demonstrate an ultrafast (<11 pico-seconds) yet efficient source of spontaneous emission, corresponding to an emission rate exceeding 90 GHz,” Maiken Mikkelsen’s group at Duke say in the introduction to Ultrafast spontaneous emission source using plasmonic nano-antennas.

To achieve their high-speed switching rate, the researchers use plasmons (free electrons on a surface that oscillate together in a wave) as nano-antennas consisting of silver nanocubes coupled to a thin gold film (20 atoms thin) separated from the substrate by a thin polymer spacer layer with a colloidal core of shell quantum dots. This structure increases the spontaneous emission rate by 880-times while simultaneously enhancing the fluorescence intensity by 2300-times while maintaining a high efficiency.

“We have demonstrated an ultrafast spontaneous emission source with an emission speed exceeding 11 ps from a hybrid system consisting of plasmonic nano-antennas coupled to ensembles of colloidal quantum dots,” Mikkelsen and colleagues say in their research paper.

As a extra bonus, the frequency of emission can be tuned to the precise telecommunications frequencies in use today by controlling the dimensions of the nano-cubes and the gap thickness of the insulating dielectric. Plus NPAs coupled to their quantum dots are much lower energy in operation than lasers, allowing photonic chips to run cooler and mobile devices to have longer battery life.

For the future, the researchers want to excite the plasmonic nanoantennas (which for the proof-of-concept demonstration used lasers) both optically and electrically so as to enable both the methods to thereby solve the last remaining obstacles to integrating photonics with traditional electronics. The team also hopes to more precisely place the quantum dots so as to boost the fluorescence rates to closer to the terahertz range.

Funding was provided by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Oak Ridge Associated University’s Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, the Lord Foundation of North Carolina, and the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program.

Get all the details in Ultrafast spontaneous emission source using plasmonic nano-antennas published in Nature Communications (under 6:7788 | DOI: 10.1038).

— R. Colin Johnson, Advanced Technology Editor, EE Times

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, July 23, 2015

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/01_1.shtml

After this great glaciation, a succession of smaller glaciations has followed, each separated by about 100,000 years from its predecessor, according to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit (a fact first discovered by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, 1571-1630). These periods of time when large areas of the Earth are covered by ice sheets are called “ice ages.” The last of the ice ages in human experience (often referred to as the Ice Age) reached its maximum roughly 20,000 years ago, and then gave way to warming. Sea level rose in two major steps, one centered near 14,000 years and the other near 11,500 years. However, between these two periods of rapid melting there was a pause in melting and sea level rise, known as the “Younger Dryas” period. During the Younger Dryas the climate system went back into almost fully glacial conditions, after having offered balmy conditions for more than 1000 years. The reasons for these large swings in climate change are not yet well understood.

I have been worrying about education: what is the curriculum for children on an interstellar colony? There must be some common culture, and it won’t all be science and technology. Sure, as time goes on, there will be those who choose to specialize, “Classicists”, Shakespearian experts, and so forth; but, besides Dr. Seuss, what books have all the kids read? And whose history?

And with that I need to go to bed.

“Cold” fusion report

Acknowledging that you once noted that the signal to noise ratio at Slashdot can be quite high.

Independent Researchers Test Rossi’s Alleged Cold Fusion Device For 32 Days – Slashdot

Independent Researchers Test Rossi’s Alleged Cold Fusion… WheezyJoe (1168567) writes The E-Cat (or “Energy Catalyzer”) is an alleged cold fusion device that produces heat from a low-energy nuclear reaction where nickel and…
View on tech.slashdot.org Rod McFadden	Preview by Yahoo

Laser Launchers Subject
Paging Dr. Pournelle:

 http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/microwave-power-beaming-for-launching-satellites-into-orbit

Rod McFadden

platinum asteroids.

Dear Jerry –

You kindly printed my letter about the (possibly) dodgy evaluation of 2015-UW158, and responded

“We don’t need it to be worth $5 Trillion”.

True enough.

But if we do need it to be worth $500 billion (big infrastructure, NREs, energy/resource costs for delta-v, etc.) then a value of $250 billion is a real problem.

And while there are any number of mitigating factors such as the reusability of research and infrastructure, nobody in their right minds is going to be the first to make the effort if only his successors won’t go bankrupt. And if the first guy goes bankrupt, his potential successors may have a hard time getting backing.

Which is why getting the numbers right in the first place is important.

Regards,

Jim Martin

Space metals 
Dr. Pournelle:
Concerning 2011 UW158 in the July 20 View: Sure a butt-load of platinum might produce dreams of wealth, but if such amounts of the precious metal were to be that available, the price would drop through the floor. What would be the commodity price of platinum if it were as common as iron ore?
Not to say industrial uses for platinum and gold wouldn’t benefit, but I suspect the terrestrial sources of these metals would resist any attempts to drop prices through flooding the market with ET metals.
Pete Nofel

Still hope for being exiled to glory?

Dr. P,

This sure sounds like something I read about some time in the last millennium:

Company is Launching Spaceships Using a Microwave Antenna

Colorado company Escape Dynamics (EDI) has designed a spaceship engine that doesn’t rely on chemical propulsion (in the form of a controlled explosion), like in traditional rockets. Rather, the engine utilizes the power beamed at it from a microwave antenna—“external propulsion.” 

Here’s how it works: power is drawn from a giant set of batteries (or solar panels, wind turbines, etc.). Once charged, power is sent to a set of modular, phased array microwave antennae, spanning a square kilometer, that then fire a microwave beam at a heat exchanger on the spacecraft. The exchanger heats up the hydrogen in the fuel tank, which in turn powers the ship’s rocket into orbit.

<http://www.wirelessdesignmag.com/blogs/2015/07/latest-rocket-science-company-launching-spaceships-using-microwave-antenna>

    Regards,
    Bill Clardy

“The faster I run, the behinder I get!”– Pogo

: Space Access Update #145 7/20/15

 
Monday, 7/20/15 – We have a new Space Access Update out, #145, with SpaceX’s Preliminary Diagnosis of the recent Falcon 9 loss, plus a quick word on how the SLS Mafia may try to exploit this.  You can see this Update at:
http://www.space-access.org/updates/sau145.html

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, July 22, 2015

I’m in novel writing mode now, which means that for a few days I will have less time for this page and Chaos Manor Reviews; but Chaos Manor Reviews will generally have something computerish, and I’ll try to keep this place going; and it won’t be that long.
We had a good Wednesday story conference including Skyping Dr. Jack Cohen in England, and one thing it indicated is that we’ve come to a part in the opening of the book that needs me; technical stuff mostly, and fitting it into dialogue and action scenes so you don’t get lumps in the stew; the sort of stuff I used to turn out fairly quickly, but it seems to go slowly now because my typing is so bad. I am not able to touch type at all. The good news is that I am getting better at two finger; but, alas, that means I have to look at the keyboard and not the screen. Then when I look up I see the silly mistakes I have made, and have to go about fixing them. It’s slow; but it’s faster than typing on a Selectric and we wrote quite a lot, including The Mote in God’s Eye http://www.amazon.com/Mote-Gods-Eye-Larry-Niven/dp/0671741926 on typewriters, and Mote still holds up (and sells pretty well, too; if you haven’t read it, you will probably like it a lot).

Anyway, that’s the way things are. I also learn that all my little ornaments each open a new file, and those add up, so I’m trying to get a new scheme to put in the little gold bubbles a different way. We’ll see.

I need to comment at length on the Iran “deal”, but it is sort of pointless: it’s pretty well a done deal. Mr. Obama has made that clear. He’s in this all the way.

As to why, unless you assume deliberate malice on his part, he must be assuming that he’ll win the Persians around to his way of thinking: we are showing trust and good faith, and we expect that in return; after which we will both be better off. After all, we’re not on a war course with Iran, but they can’t know this because we sent an invading army into Iraq. Jihadists don’t blow up Brazilian airplanes and civilians. Treat Persia right and they’ll stop holding Death To America parades, and the world will be a better place.

We tried force, and CIA operations and such; give peace a chance. And of course he is President and it’s pretty well his call.

I do point out that in the early 1500’s, a sophisticated Prince, Suleiman, later called Suleiman the Magnificent, became Sultan of Turkey; It was thought by many of the European leadership that this was a man you could do business with, and many set their policies to accommodate that assumptiuon.

Islamic scholars were just completing new editions of the Koran and the Hadith (Sayings of the Prophet), and the plain language laid upon the Leader of Islam the duty to bring the entire world under submission; there could be truces with the infidels, but peace with them is forbidden by the black letter law of the text. But there are black letter commandments in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament that were no longer taken seriously (see Jonathon Swift on that 200 years later); surely Suleiman would be a reasonable man.., Of course he was not, and in 1529 marched to besiege Vienna after taken much of the Balkans and starting feuds there that continue to this day. His siege was not successful, although it could have been; it was a near thing, actually. And the campaign was undertaken at considerable cost, both economically and to his prestige. Fortunately his rule was tempered by the loss of his genius advisor and his oldest son to palace intrigues and the Ukrainian/Polish girl known as Roxelana, but that’s another story. So are the Ayatollahs ruling Iran, and the Sunni/Shia conflict continues.

I do not think Mr. Obama has the correct appreciation of the situation, but I was not elected President; and under the Constitution we have only one President.

As to what strategy we adopt if this one does not work, one thing is certain: Iran will have nuclear weapons before we can know.

Still more on automation and jobs
There is little doubt that, someday, robots will be taking a lot of jobs from people. Whether that will be in five years or fifty cannot be determined with certainty until after it has happened. It is however true that, right now (which is where we are on the time-line), truck drivers are not seeing their wages fall because self-driving trucks are taking their jobs from them. Right now, much of the talk of automation taking jobs is clearly a smoke screen designed to obscure the real reason that current wages are stagnant or falling.
However, there is another angle to automation that I think people have missed. It’s possible that, at least under some conditions, robots could simply be a stealthy means of offshoring jobs to low-wage countries that have, until recently, been hard to offshore!
For example, there is a company that makes robotic floor cleaners for large establishments. These floor cleaners are only competitive when wages for that class of labor are over ten dollars an hour. Obviously the businesses would be even happier employing human labor at a dollar an hour – that would be cheaper than using robots (for now).
But here’s the thing: these robots are, I believe, largely assembled by hand in places like Vietnam where wages are a dollar an hour or less!
So here’s the thing: what if the total amount of human labor saved by these cleaning robots is equal to the total amount of overseas human labor required to assemble the robots (and their spare parts etc) in the first place? In this case we haven’t saved any human labor at all – we’ve used the robots as a conduit to replace $10/hr labor with $1/hr labor!
Yes I know – the truth is in the specifics, and in this case would require the kind of careful quantitative analysis that modern jingoistic economists have largely abandoned (‘Anything labeled free trade is always good just because’ etc). Still, something to consider.

TG

The problem of ‘unemployment’…
Dr. Pournell,
You have hit “ glancingly “ at the problem.
The last time industrialization created a surplus of goods-per-working-hour the response of the industrialized world was to simply decrease hours to match. (It is amusing – but the reduction of factory hours from 60 per week to 40 per week is nearly a match to the reduction of farm laborers. Effectively we got more factory workers but each did less factory work – and the total volume of factory work hours remained fairly stable.) Why can we not do the same again? Well, one block might be the law/union homogeny that has demonstrated itself entirely resistant to any shift in the ‘eight-hour-day/five-day-week’ formula. Another might be the burden of confiscatory taxes – which have in effect already removed a third of the working hours so far as the worker compensation is concerned. In effect, 1/3 of the ‘surplus hours’ have already been taken away – just not the work involved. These are both injurious, and annoying, and frustrating… but the stupidity of the master class has been overcome before and can be again. What can NOT be overcome, unfortunately, is the unsuitability for productive action of a fair percentage of the population. The productive cannot lay down a portion of the working day because the unproductive are incapable of picking up the ‘slack’. [One may, from another angle, view the division as having occurred, if one takes idle dependency as a form of work. Which – I grant – as it is paid for – can be so viewed. Consider the percentage of ‘career welfare’ personnel. The numbers are, again, amusingly close.]
As for solutions? I have none save that of history. The industrial revolution destroyed a fair percentage of the English population. Whatever upheaval cuts off the bread for the charity-dependant class will do the same. This is sad, but hardly a unique event, or one difficult to anticipate in any context save time.
With respect
Keryl Kris Reinke

When there is little shortage of goods, all is well; it is easy to divide a large pie. Or it is said to be.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Monday, July 20, 2015

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

I have installed – well Eric has installed while I watched – a new XBOX ONE in the TV room. At the moment it’s more used to get the TV into my local network than anything else, and I have little experience with it; but we seem to be able to access the web, and my various servers. It’s on HDM2 while the regular TV is HDM1 because I didn’t want the way we use the set to change much, particularly for Roberta; eventually we’ll have integrated it into the system, and we can use voice control. So far I’ve sort of seen the potential but we don’t do that.

Eric’s report will be in Chaos Manor Reviews.

We did test SKYPE. We usually Skype the kids on Sunday, and it’s a problem because Roberta’s machine faces a bright window, so it’s a bit hard for me to get into her office and in the picture with her; but we used Skype on the XBOX now that we have reliable Internet in the back TV room – and it worked splendidly. The camera adjusts to get both of us into the picture, and if we add a third the view expands to include him too. I expect there are apps that will do that for the MacBook Pro or Widows 7 with Logitech Camera that we normally use, but I haven’t seen them.

It probably means that we’ll use it for Skyping with Dr. Jack Cohen next time since it’s easy enough to get three chairs in there, and it’s been hard getting all three of us in the picture using the Mac; although I suspect there is a Mac app that would make it easier. We’ll see. In any event. Look for more about the XBOX One now.

We need a new version of capitalism for the jobless future

By Vivek Wadhwa July 20 at 7:00 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2015/07/20/we-need-a-new-version-of-capitalism-for-the-jobless-future/

“There are more net jobs in the world today than ever before, after hundreds of years of technological innovation and hundreds of years of people predicting the death of work. The logic on this topic is crystal clear. Because of that, the contrary view is necessarily religious in nature, and, as we all know, there’s no point in arguing about religion.”

These are the words of tech mogul Marc Andreessen, in an e-mail exchange with me on the effect of advancing technologies on employment. Andreessen steadfastly believes that the same exponential curve that is enabling creation of an era of abundance will create new jobs faster and more broadly than before, and calls my assertions that we are heading into a jobless future a luddite fallacy.

I wish he were right, but he isn’t. And it isn’t a religious debate; it’s a matter of public policy and preparedness. With the technology advances that are presently on the horizon, not only low-skilled jobs are at risk; so are the jobs of knowledge workers. Too much is happening too fast. It will shake up entire industries and eliminate professions. Some new jobs will surely be created, but they will be few. And we won’t be able to retrain the people who lose their jobs, because, as I said to Andreessen, you can train an Andreessen to drive a cab, but you can’t retrain a laid-off cab driver to become an Andreessen. The jobs that will be created will require very specialized skills and higher levels of education — which most people don’t have.

I am optimistic about the future and know that technology will provide society with many benefits. I also realize that millions will face permanent unemployment. I worry that if we keep brushing this issue under the rug, social upheaval will result. We must make the transition easier by providing for those worst affected. In the short term, we will create many new jobs in the United States to build robots and factories and program new computer systems. But the employment boom won’t last long.

Within 10 years, we will see Uber laying off most of its drivers as it switches to self-driving cars; manufacturers will start replacing workers with robots; fast-food restaurants will install fully automated food-preparation systems; artificial intelligence–based systems will start doing the jobs of most office workers in accounting, finance and administration. The same will go for professionals such as paralegals, pharmacists, and customer-support representatives. All of this will occur simultaneously, and the pace will accelerate in the late 2020s.

The article is quite long and quite thoughtful. I recommend it to your attention.

The problem is real: our education is increasingly unable to teach people to do anything that someone else would pay to have done; yet it drives us increasingly into debt, both public debt and saddling the students with lifetime debts. That can’t last, and we all know it.

But the Federal Government is relentless: No child is to be Left Behind, and since in the real world there are only a very few Marc Andreessens there will be unequal results – but inequality is not acceptable in public education. So the smart ones flee to private schools, but if these are not – suitable – to the bureaucracy? Of course the rich will not give up their schools. Perhaps we can make them do it. But the rich can hire armies too. If this sounds a bit familiar, you probably didn’t get history in a public school, where government, we are taught, always produces good results because it has good intentions.

After all, intentions are more important than results…  If the Regulators have pure hearts and mean well, surely they will find an answer; can’t leave such things to freedom, no can we?

Apple Hires Auto Industry Veterans

Tech giant has been building a team for an electric-car project

http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-hires-auto-industry-manufacturing-veteran-1437430826

By

Christina Rogers,

Mike Ramsey and

Daisuke Wakabayashi

Updated July 20, 2015 7:51 p.m. ET

Apple Inc.is recruiting experts from the auto industry, a signal that its efforts to develop an electric car could be gaining ground.

Apple leaps in, but slowly?

Windows 10 Signifies Microsoft’s Shift in Strategy

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/20/technology/windows-10-signifies-microsofts-shift-in-strategy.html?_r=0

By NICK WINGFIELDJULY 19, 2015      (nyt)

SEATTLE — Next week, when Microsoft releases Windows 10, the latest version of the company’s operating system, the software will offer a mix of the familiar and new to the people who run earlier versions of it on more than 1.5 billion computers and other devices.

There will be a virtual assistant in the software that keeps track of users’ schedules, and Microsoft will regularly trickle out updates with new features to its users over the Internet. And the Start menu, a fixture of Windows for decades, will make a formal reappearance.

But one of the biggest changes is the price. Microsoft will not charge customers to upgrade Windows on computers, a shift that shows how power dynamics in the tech industry have changed.

The decision to make free a product that once cost $50 to $100 is a sign of how charging consumers for software is going the way of the flip phone. Companies like Google have crept into Microsoft’s business with free software and services subsidized by its huge advertising business, while Apple in recent years has made upgrades to its applications and operating systems free, earning its money instead from hardware sales.

If you have Window 8, you probably should grab Windows 10; but if you’re happy with Windows 7, I wouldn’t be in any great rush. ”Be not the first by whom the new is tried, nor yet the last to cast the old aside.”

https://medium.com/@Blakei/artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-work-abacce6328d6?curator=MediaREDEF

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work — Medium

By Blake Irving, CEO, GoDaddy — Artificial Intelligence has been the topic de jour lately with every corner of intellectual thought sounding in on the perils, and the potential rewards, of synthesizing a machine intelligence that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human can. Elon Musk, Bill Gates and even Stephen Hawking have all suggested that an AI with this sort of general intelligence (also known as Strong AI or Full AI) could bring about an apocalypse that sees an end to human civilization, or even an end to the human race.

There’s no doubt that Strong AI is the subject of intense research by DARPA, MIT, Berkeley, IBM, Google and many others. But it’s hard not to notice that despite all the anxiety, Strong AI today lives only in the imagination of science fiction writers and in the hopes and dreams of research scientist. At the prestigious “Future of AI” conference in San Juan this January, the estimates for when an AI might emerge vacillated wildly from 5 years to a hundred years in our future — its variables are that unknown.

While a singularity triggering AI is tantalizing to speculate about, like day dreaming with a lottery ticket in your pocket, it’s still all hypothetical. So when I was asked to join a panel discussion about “when AI will change our lives” at this year’s Fortune Brainstorm Tech, my first thought was, “who knows, it may not happen in our lifetimes.” That thought was followed quickly by a second thought: “when it happens it will probably just kill us all, so let’s talk about something more practical.”

There’s considerably more.

Todos Santos in reality? 
Dr. Pournelle,
This came from the UK Daily Mail.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3167922/The-end-urban-sprawl-Ambitious-plan-fit-entire-CITY-inside-single-bee-hive-skyscraper-house-25-000.html
I wonder if the architect has heard of Paolo Soleri?
Best regards,
Bill Kelly

Arcologies make sense for some people.

A foolish consistency.

Dear Jerry –

I expect that you looked benignly on the recent publicity concerning the close approach of 2011 UW158, with its much-mentioned valuation of $5.4 trillion (in platinum alone – or maybe it’s all precious metals, that part seems to get left out). http://www.rt.com/news/310170-platinum-asteroid-2011-uw-158/

Unfortunately for the cause of space exploration, the numbers don’t add up. With measurements of 500 meters by 1000 meters, a brick-shaped object will have a volume of 250 million cubic meters. Since the pictures show that it is not remotely brickish, lets work with 100 million cubic meters. Assuming it is solid metal, with a specific gravity of about 8, that’s about 800 million tons. Assuming a platinum abundance of 100 ppm, that’s 80 thousand tons, or 80 million kg. With platinum at $32 per gram, total value is $250 billion.

While this is certainly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, it’s not $5 trillion.

Regards,

Jim Martin

We don’t need it to be worth $5 Trillion

advise and consent

Dear Mr. Pournelle,
In a recent posting you commented “this process of Presidential agreements without advice and consent of the Senate, with the President able to veto Congressional disapproval is a recent Constitutional discovery, unknown through most of the history of the Republic.” I agree; but it’s been a long time making, and I don’t know how we walk back from it.
In the run-up to the first Gulf war, I saw no congressional appetite for actually taking responsibility and declaring war. Much easier to hand it to the executive. From a cynical perspective, Congress seems to be more eager to cast votes which please “the base” but have no real effect (as in “repealing Obamacare”) than to enact something for which they might have to take ownership of the consequences. Recovering a more robust Constitutional government would, I think, require a Congress with the courage to make choices and accept responsibility for their consequences.
On another level, I am becoming convinced that the level of polarization in our current politics is pushing us toward bad government. Consider a Republican Congressional leadership which declared it to be their first priority, from the beginning of President Obama’s term, to make him a one-term president. Not to do the business of the Republic, but to ensure the ineffectiveness of the President. What might be plausible results of this?
One, of course, might be that the President in question would throw up his or her hands and say “My goodness! They don’t like me! I’ll just go play golf for four years.” Another option would be to try to work with the Congress anyway. As I remember it, President Obama tried this; and found that even originally Republican proposals (such as the substance of the Affordable Care Act) became intolerable once his hands touched them.
Another option — and I agree both that we seem to be moving toward this, and that it’s harmful — is that a President who actually wanted to accomplish something might look for ways to do it without relying on Congress. Cue the ominous music; but echo-chamber discourse and red-meat rhetoric move us in this direction.
If we are to recover a better balance among the branches of government, we’re going to need to learn to work together; and that “compromise” is not a dirty word.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

The usual path when democracy decays to decadence is some form of dictatorship, which can go in several directions after that.  Governor Schwarzenegger of California started with good intentions, and was called hideous names by nurse and other people he wanted to like him, so he just gave in. But of course he was only a governor.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.