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Anytime we get practical implementations of ideas of the past by scientists and engineers working on it despite cutbacks in funding, I wonder where humanity wou
by cm3 10y ago
Anytime we get practical implementations of ideas of the past by scientists and engineers working on it despite cutbacks in funding, I wonder where humanity would be if we at least halved the money spent on state-funded violence and similar counterproductive activities. Flying cars, deep sea habitats, space habitats, clean energy, hair style robots, fully coordinated jam-free personal traffic.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoOffset by the advances made during state-funded research?
- cm3 10y agoI'm not sure I follow, can you expand?
- Tenhundfeld 10y agoI think they're saying the state-funded violence and whatnot often leads to advancements that spill out into the broader scientific world, e.g., many DARPA projects.
- cm3 10y agoRight, and I'm saying that if the funding changes, then hopefully more of it will be on topics that are useful for civilians' problems too. That means, more research on, say, cyber warfare would inevitably trickle down to the civilian world as technological improvements. Also, if more of the battles are in the cyber realm, then even if the same amount is spent, at least the chances of collateral damage will likely be lower.
- ytjohn 10y agoTill we have to deal with self-replicating, protein destroying, nanobots.
- astazangasta 10y agoYou mean bacteria? We already have this 'problem'.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- astazangasta 10y agoIf you spend 50% of your money through the military it is inevitable that much of your useful work will end up being funded that way. This in no way means we need to spend through the military; the same useful work could be funded regardless.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoIf. US is currently at 12%. Education, health care and pensions currently amount to > 60%. So its easy to cry wolf. We're really in a much better place than chicken little would have us all think.
- cm3 10y agoAssuming the percentage you cited is right, I do think the relative numbers are less important in my assertion than the absolute because with the current tools at hand it's hard to reduce that > 60% part. Only by finding better tools through more research can we, for example, reduce the need to spend that much on health care and pensions. If you consider the absolute amount spent on the battling part of the forces, I would like for battles, if they have to be fought, to shift into cyber space. Just getting rid of money spent on munitions alone would be huge. And more cyber wars means stronger need to build and use more secure IT infrastructure which will benefit everybody.
- astazangasta 10y agoIn FY2017, $582.7 billion of $1.149 trillion in discretionary spending is on defense. Where do you get 12%?
- NoGravitas 10y agoI imagine he is counting non-discretionary spending, like Medicare and Social Security, which are large, but are also separately funded.
- imaginenore 10y agoNo, the US is currently at 54% military + 6% veteran benefits, while 6% education, 6% medicare + health, 3% science. https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/discretionary_spending_pie,_2015_enacted.png https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/discretionary_s...
- curiousgal 10y agoIs there a list somewhere of DARPA projects that have had greater benefits? Couldn't find anything. (Genuine question)
- jschwartzi 10y agoYou're using one right now.
- biofox 10y agoSome of them are listed on the wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA Notable ones that caught my attention: internet (ARPANET), satellite navigation (transit), time-sharing computing (multics), onion routing (Tor), the computer mouse (Engelbart), autonomous robots (Shakey), and self-driving cars (Grand Challenge).
- MaysonL 10y agoOf course, ARPANET, Multics, and Engelbart were funded by ARPA, not DARPA.
- apatters 10y agoAnd this future would be even less evenly distributed than the one which exists now, which would lead to even more unrest which the state might try to quell with even more violence. So let's spend a quarter of the money spent on state-violence on future tech, and another quarter on health, education, liberty and peace in the developing world. I think on some level the Bill Gates philanthropist types are doing their charity because they realize that if the future moves too far and too fast then the bottom half just might rise up and destroy it.
- cm3 10y agoI mostly agree, though I'm not sure if Gates and friends are scared of an uprising. With better and fact-based education we can solve a lot. I don't mean training for jobs, I mean education as a means to, say, reduce killing each other or making more efficient use of earth's resources. For instance, the best way to fix the problem of people flocking to extremist leaders is more education on all sides. The unknown is scary enough for many people that it's used for them to be led to believe simplified but factually wrong explanations for issues they face.
- phd514 10y agoThe sentiment that education can solve a lot of societal problems is a popular one, especially on HN, but it presumes that people's outlook and worldview are primarily or at least substantially influenced by "facts" and introduction to a sufficient number of such facts will result in the adoption of a better worldview for whatever definition of "better" you prefer. In reality, people are much more influenced by those with whom they associate whether those links be tribal, familial, political, etc. Each of those groups has a narrative for how the world works and facts that challenge that narrative are downplayed or ignored while facts that support that narrative are promoted. There are those whose associations change dramatically as a result of confronting facts that challenged the narrative of their group, often combined with some sort of personal crisis, but they are among the minority. Most of us go through our lives without seriously challenging the basic narrative of our associates and increasing our exposure to facts isn't going to change that.
- zodPod 10y agoSo, let's fund things that make people live longer and save their lives but not things to help solve problems related to increased and older population? Seems asinine.
- cm3 10y agoI don't know where you think I wrote the above to be a full list of things I consider in need of more research, but I can assure you that it was a sample of stuff I find is not getting enough focus. So, I certainly would include issues of the increasing unbalanced population too.
- frozenport 10y agoThe department of defensive funds a lot of science. Don't forget that progress in most of the fields you mentioned came directly from military tagged expendature.
- cm3 10y agoExactly, and I'm saying if their focus would shift a little and, if absolutely necessary, take wars into the cyber realm, then more progress would come out of that which is applicable in civilian life. We just need the right goals for the desired side products to emerge. The race to get someone on the moon and back was one such overarching goal.
- melling 10y agoYeah, many people has wondered this sometime in their life. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen for the foreseeable future. Rather than dream about the ideal world and not changing anything, we'd be much better off figuring out clever ways of financing more R&D, moonshots, etc. More X-Prizes, for example? http://www.xprize.org http://www.xprize.org Privately funded challenges similar to the DARPA Challenges?
- jcbeard 10y agoI totally agree. The only problem is that when we innovate, sometimes parts of society fall behind. The real turning point to bring about what you speak of is how to enable all of society to reap the benefits of innovation. If you have a way to do that, and gain buy-in from the entirety of the third rock, then we can make some real progress :).
- cm3 10y agoWhat one does with innovations is up to us. We can use it to wreak havoc or widen the poverty gap by benefiting just 1%, but we can also use it to solve critical issues and reap positive effects.
- seer 10y agoWe've already had that experiment - it was called "the 60s" - obscene amounts of money (basically a blank check) was given scientist to reach the sky and we went from barely touching the atmosphere to sending humans to the moon, sending robots everywhere else, inventing robots for that matter. And from the investments from that era came the american semiconductor breackthroughs aka - Silicon Valley. So yeah we've seen it happen, it's amazing and I hope I could witness such a magical period in my lifetime. Sigh...
- bluGill 10y agoI have seen people argue that we wasted a lot of money on the space effort, and if we had not allocated so many resources there we could have had smart phones 10 years sooner. Of course you can never know, but it is something to consider. Those semiconductor breakthroughs probably would have happened sooner - the moon mission was happy with vacuum tubes on the ground and the transistors of the day: their big problems of engineering were not in the electronics area. Or to put it a different way, if we put similar effort into genetic engineering we could have fire breathing dragons instead. Nobody has been to the moon in my lifetime (and I'm getting old!), and I have no hope of going (though probably someone will go in the next 10 years it won't be me). At least the circus could show me a dragon.
- mahyarm 10y agoBut without the space race, would those smartphones have GPS? Without GPS, how practical would self driving cars be? Would the lack of GPS push self driving cars out another decade?
- dmix 10y agoIn the hypothetical scenario where we didn't have a "space race" with Russia doesn't mean humans would not have figured out how to send a few satellites to space. Or learned how to triangulate signals to make GPS work. The OP said "lots of money was wasted". Sending rockets into space was very valuable. I don't think anyone questions that. But that was hardly the only part of the space race.
- kafkaesq 10y agoFlying cars, deep sea habitats, space habitats, clean energy, hair style robots, fully coordinated jam-free personal traffic. An actual end to mass violence and cruelty would be infinitely more valuable than any of those things (except for clean energy).
- Aelinsaar 10y agoHe's not even talking about an end, just a reduction in spending. When you look at how much mayhem is going in in Syria, it's hard to believe that you need to spend trillions just to massacre people.
- visarga 10y ago> An actual end to mass violence and cruelty People need to be more self sustained. We need technologies that will empower people and communities to rely on themselves and not depend on systems that are outside their control as much. I think that efficient agriculture in the hands of small communities, solar, 3d-printing, open sourced robotics and AI, open source and creative commons in general would help ease a lot of this tension. Violence comes from disenfranchisement and being socially marginalized, but if each community could stand on its own feet, this would be much less the case. We need to reduce the gap between the super powerful and ordinary people to have a less polarized society, and I fear this will not happen through politics, but rather from technological empowerment. People are living today at a much higher standard than a century ago, and we have all seen the benefits of putting an internet enabled mobile phone in the hands of everyone - the things we could do today that we wouldn't have dreamed of 40 years ago... We just need to spread the benefits more evenly.
- _audakel 10y ago>end to mass violence and cruelty would be infinitely more valuable than any of those things (except for clean energy). clean energy is infinitely more valuable than end to mass violence? That seems like a bit of an overstatement.