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We don't have an example of such a complete collapse in the world since the arrival of globalization. It's easy to envision that a lot of knowledge will be con

• YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  Yes, in our hard drives.
  • kijin 7y ago
    No, in books and journals. We're still printing them by the billions every year. Software of various kinds might be lost, since we usually don't print them out. But the theory required to re-implement them are all available on paper, sitting in a library somewhere. A book on algorithms and data structures will be far more useful to a future civilization than raw source code for a hardware architecture that won't even exist anymore.
    • YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
      I often have to read articles published in the MLJ, or the proceedings of IJCAI and AAAI in the 1990's. That was the time when machine learning was predominantly preoccupied with modelling the world with logic languages, particularly propositional logic (and, less often, first-order logic). Although I have a background in logic programming and I study logic-based machine learning for my PhD, I find that I often have trouble to understand important terminology - and I mean "important" in the sense that entire papers are based around it, but take it for granted that the reader is very familiar with the terms, what they mean, and how they're used. For example, I recently struggled with the following terms: "finite axiomatization", "explanation-based learning", "constructive induction", "knowledge-level learning", "weakest preconditions", and others. I eventually managed to get on top of those terms, sufficiently to read and understand the papers that used them. I did this by searching online for an explanation ("finite axiomatization" is used in mathematical logic) and by digging in the literature for terms that were defined in previous works. I found all of that material online, of course- and where I couldn't find a copy online, I basically had to "wing it" and hope I grokked it right. Searching for anything published even in a major AI conference or journal before the 1990's is a big pain and even university libraries seem to lack physical or electronic copies. To conclude- yes, there are going to be various works left behind if civilisation collapses. But a lot of them are going to be like maps without the key. The people surviving us will be able to read them, but not able to understand them, because they will miss key knowledge, that is currently spread around hundreds of thousands of sources that only experts in niche sub-fields are even aware of.
    • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      A book on software and algorithms would be useless without hardware to experiment on. There's only so much you can do with cogs and rods, so software only really starts to make sense with electronics of some kind - and only becomes useful when you have enough speed and memory to do real work. Which in turn assumes that you have real work to do. One of the earliest civilian computing systems was a payroll calculator - which is only useful if payroll is a problem you need to have solved, which in turn is only necessary if your economy is complex enough to need payroll calculations at significant scale, and human "calculators" aren't available. The point is that the Greeks and the Romans had the IQ to invent modern technology. The Greeks especially also had the philosophical background. But neither had the politics or the economics. Modern computing is a political phenomenon, not just a scientific one. It exists because it solves certain economic and political problems, and there's no reason to assume that a different culture would have identical problems - even if it could understand the theory.
      • kijin 7y ago
        All the more reason to appreciate the general knowledge we've written into books, rather than the cutting-edge implementations that only live on computer disks. The former is much more likely to be useful to a civilization with radically different needs and available tools.
  • imtringued 7y ago
    That hard drive doesn't exist in isolation unless you have forcibly removed it from its computer. I would be more worried about not having an electric grid that lets you power the computer.
    • jerf 7y ago
      One of the salutatory effects of pervasive solar is that it becomes less and less plausible that the electric infrastructure could totally collapse, because every house with solar on it is its own independent power station that has enough juice to use electronics. We still have the problem of decay, but it still gives a window of many years to potentially recover. I'm a big fan of house solar for that reason. In the short term, there's every reason to prefer big solar installations run by power companies interested in every last percentage of efficiency and willing and able to maintain it well, but for disaster prep it's great to have as many independent islands that can run to some degree in an isolated mode as possible. (Although I'd be a lot happier if house solar was more conveniently integrated into the house system. Then again, if the grid was down in the long term there's a lot of people who could tweak the solar installation to be the primary house power in not too much time or effort. Even in their current form it's a lot better than nothing. The difference between one powered outlet and zero powered outlets is pretty big.)