7 ms·

Can we survive technology? (1955) [pdf]

80 points by aidanrocke 7y ago

aidanrocke 7y ago
For the kind of explosiveness that man will be able to contrive by 1980, the globe is dangerously small, its political units dangerously unstable.-John von Neumann
the-dude 7y ago
"The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit. " edit : this PDF looks like it has been scanned, but the text is selectable. Not sure I have seen this before.
- leggomylibro 7y ago
  It's called Optical Character Recognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition One of the few applications where ML-based image recognition actually works reliably enough for real-world applications; the USPS has been using neural nets to read zip codes for decades.
- IceWreck 7y ago
  This is done with OCR, specially when digitizing things. The Internet Archive does this a lot. There was an old 90s book that I needed but they never made an electronic edition. So the internet archive, scanned and digitized it with character recognition to make a select-able PDF like this, as well an epub that can be read on your phone like any other ebook. Now that book is available for anyone to borrow and read. (its still copyrighted so you gotta access it via their DRM controlled app/website, but that can be easily broken and its better than not having access to that book at all)
  - the-dude 7y ago
    Thanks for the heads-up. Of course I do know what OCR is. Just hadn't seen it combined in the wild like this.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      Acrobat has had this as a built in feature forever.
      - alttab 7y ago
        Guy's login is "the-dude," he's been around for a while.
      - the-dude 7y ago
        Didn't know that either. Makes me wonder if my browser ( PDF.js ) is doing the OCR? Anybody knows?
        philipkglass 7y ago
        He means that Acrobat Pro includes an OCR system that you can use to add a searchable text layer to scanned documents. Readers like Acrobat Reader and PDF.js do not perform OCR. You won't be able to use them to search scanned documents if the document creator did not run OCR. Google runs its own OCR pass on scanned PDF documents in order to index them better. It can be annoying when you get a 50 page scanned document as a search result and then find out that it doesn't include a text layer, so you need to run your own OCR or skim the whole thing to find the relevant parts.
        coldtea 7y ago
        No, the OCR has already happened at the time of the scanning (or shortly thereafter), and the result is embedded into the PDF document.
        visarga 7y ago
        What PDF.js is showing is an invisible text layer overlaid on top of the original image. It does not do OCR which can take up to 1-2 seconds per page, it would be too slow and require a large-ish neural net if you care about accuracy.
- dinofacedude 7y ago
  You see it a lot in academic databases
- coldtea 7y ago
  >this PDF looks like it has been scanned, but the text is selectable. Not sure I have seen this before. It's quite common. A combination of scanning + OCR on the same PDF.
erostrate 7y ago
"The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit." "Even in an airplane the number of vacuum tubes now approaches or exceeds a thousand. Other machines, containing up to 10,000 vacuum tubes, up to five times more crystals, and possibly more than 100,000 cores, now operate faultlessly over long periods, performing many millions of regulated, preplanned actions per second, with an expectation of only a few errors per day or week. Many such machines have been built to perform complicated scientific and engineering calculations and large scale accounting and logistical surveys. There is no doubt that they will be used for elaborate industrial process control, logistical, economic, and other planning"
- porknubbins 7y ago
  Airplanes ran on vacuum tubes? Shit as a electric guitarist this would’ve terrified me though I guess whatever they used was more reliable and probably power cycled more responsibly.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    I wouldn’t say “ran on.” It wasn’t a fly by wire system or anything like that. But plenty of electronic systems would have used vacuum tubes, such as radios and radar.
c3534l 7y ago
I'm not sure if there ever existed a man as ahead of his time as Von Neumann.
- carapace 7y ago
  Da Vinci? Bucky Fuller? Legend has it that when Gödel presented "On the Completeness of the Logical Calculus" von Neumann threw in the towel (on Hilbert's program) on the spot.
  - michele_f 7y ago
    Thank you for your comment. I didn't know that anecdote.
    - carapace 7y ago
      Cheers! What I find fascinating is, he was the only person in the room to understand immediately. Even today, most people (and I mean mathematicians and programmers and others who might be expected to get it) still haven't internalized Gödel.
damidekronik 7y ago
"Consequently, a few decades hence energy may be free—just like the unmetered air—with coal and oil used mainly as raw materials for organic chemical synthesis, to which, as experience has shown, their properties are best suited." I am wondering why this prediction is so off given how other ones are spot on? How the situation back then made John von Neumann believe it, and what happened differently, moving this into the realms of fantasy. Perhaps if an another effort of a scale of the Manhattan Project had happened, the concept of the "free energy" would have been more realistic.
- tim58 7y ago
  This was before Chernobyl, and without Chernobyl the industrialized world would probably be mainly on nuclear fission power by now. This was also at a time when nuclear fusion energy was theoretically possible but before half a century of research has labeled the problem 'very hard'.
- jaysonelliot 7y ago
  "Too cheap to meter" was a common assumption about the future of nuclear power when it first began. If you only look at the amount of power available based on the raw materials, it's a reasonable prediction. They simply didn't take into account all of the associated costs and complexities that would be involved with the actual nuclear power plants, not to mention the political and social complications. That doesn't mean such a future can never happen, it's theoretically possible. We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    > We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy. ...and the fact we have about 4bn more people here than we did in 1960.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      We have far fewer people than growth rate at the time suggested; IIRC, around that time growth was viewed as exponential with a doubling period of ~35 years, had it continued the population would be 10.74 bn now, nearly 1.5× what it. So, no, population (at least high population) isn't something that was unforeseen.
hi41 7y ago
I remember the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about man being able to master technology and yet not have have grown comparably enough in spirituality to live as brothers.

80 points by aidanrocke 7y ago

For the kind of explosiveness that man will be able to contrive by 1980, the globe is dangerously small, its political units dangerously unstable.-John von Neumann

the-dude 7y ago

leggomylibro 7y ago
It's called Optical Character Recognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition One of the few applications where ML-based image recognition actually works reliably enough for real-world applications; the USPS has been using neural nets to read zip codes for decades.
IceWreck 7y ago
This is done with OCR, specially when digitizing things. The Internet Archive does this a lot. There was an old 90s book that I needed but they never made an electronic edition. So the internet archive, scanned and digitized it with character recognition to make a select-able PDF like this, as well an epub that can be read on your phone like any other ebook. Now that book is available for anyone to borrow and read. (its still copyrighted so you gotta access it via their DRM controlled app/website, but that can be easily broken and its better than not having access to that book at all)
- the-dude 7y ago
  Thanks for the heads-up. Of course I do know what OCR is. Just hadn't seen it combined in the wild like this.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Acrobat has had this as a built in feature forever.
    - alttab 7y ago
      Guy's login is "the-dude," he's been around for a while.
    - the-dude 7y ago
      Didn't know that either. Makes me wonder if my browser ( PDF.js ) is doing the OCR? Anybody knows?
      - philipkglass 7y ago
        He means that Acrobat Pro includes an OCR system that you can use to add a searchable text layer to scanned documents. Readers like Acrobat Reader and PDF.js do not perform OCR. You won't be able to use them to search scanned documents if the document creator did not run OCR. Google runs its own OCR pass on scanned PDF documents in order to index them better. It can be annoying when you get a 50 page scanned document as a search result and then find out that it doesn't include a text layer, so you need to run your own OCR or skim the whole thing to find the relevant parts.
      - coldtea 7y ago
        No, the OCR has already happened at the time of the scanning (or shortly thereafter), and the result is embedded into the PDF document.
      - visarga 7y ago
        What PDF.js is showing is an invisible text layer overlaid on top of the original image. It does not do OCR which can take up to 1-2 seconds per page, it would be too slow and require a large-ish neural net if you care about accuracy.
dinofacedude 7y ago
You see it a lot in academic databases
coldtea 7y ago
>this PDF looks like it has been scanned, but the text is selectable. Not sure I have seen this before. It's quite common. A combination of scanning + OCR on the same PDF.

erostrate 7y ago

"The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit." "Even in an airplane the number of vacuum tubes now approaches or exceeds a thousand. Other machines, containing up to 10,000 vacuum tubes, up to five times more crystals, and possibly more than 100,000 cores, now operate faultlessly over long periods, performing many millions of regulated, preplanned actions per second, with an expectation of only a few errors per day or week. Many such machines have been built to perform complicated scientific and engineering calculations and large scale accounting and logistical surveys. There is no doubt that they will be used for elaborate industrial process control, logistical, economic, and other planning"

porknubbins 7y ago
Airplanes ran on vacuum tubes? Shit as a electric guitarist this would’ve terrified me though I guess whatever they used was more reliable and probably power cycled more responsibly.
- mikeash 7y ago
  I wouldn’t say “ran on.” It wasn’t a fly by wire system or anything like that. But plenty of electronic systems would have used vacuum tubes, such as radios and radar.

c3534l 7y ago

I'm not sure if there ever existed a man as ahead of his time as Von Neumann.

carapace 7y ago
Da Vinci? Bucky Fuller? Legend has it that when Gödel presented "On the Completeness of the Logical Calculus" von Neumann threw in the towel (on Hilbert's program) on the spot.
- michele_f 7y ago
  Thank you for your comment. I didn't know that anecdote.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Cheers! What I find fascinating is, he was the only person in the room to understand immediately. Even today, most people (and I mean mathematicians and programmers and others who might be expected to get it) still haven't internalized Gödel.

damidekronik 7y ago

"Consequently, a few decades hence energy may be free—just like the unmetered air—with coal and oil used mainly as raw materials for organic chemical synthesis, to which, as experience has shown, their properties are best suited." I am wondering why this prediction is so off given how other ones are spot on? How the situation back then made John von Neumann believe it, and what happened differently, moving this into the realms of fantasy. Perhaps if an another effort of a scale of the Manhattan Project had happened, the concept of the "free energy" would have been more realistic.

tim58 7y ago
This was before Chernobyl, and without Chernobyl the industrialized world would probably be mainly on nuclear fission power by now. This was also at a time when nuclear fusion energy was theoretically possible but before half a century of research has labeled the problem 'very hard'.
jaysonelliot 7y ago
"Too cheap to meter" was a common assumption about the future of nuclear power when it first began. If you only look at the amount of power available based on the raw materials, it's a reasonable prediction. They simply didn't take into account all of the associated costs and complexities that would be involved with the actual nuclear power plants, not to mention the political and social complications. That doesn't mean such a future can never happen, it's theoretically possible. We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy.
- DanBC 7y ago
  > We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy. ...and the fact we have about 4bn more people here than we did in 1960.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    We have far fewer people than growth rate at the time suggested; IIRC, around that time growth was viewed as exponential with a doubling period of ~35 years, had it continued the population would be 10.74 bn now, nearly 1.5× what it. So, no, population (at least high population) isn't something that was unforeseen.

hi41 7y ago

I remember the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about man being able to master technology and yet not have have grown comparably enough in spirituality to live as brothers.