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>I'm not sure about your use of "caution" here. I was alluding to caution in reference to fossil fuels specifically because nuclear power causes less deaths pe

>I'm not sure about your use of "caution" here. I was alluding to caution in reference to fossil fuels specifically because nuclear power causes less deaths per megawatt than any fossil fuel (and, interestingly, hydroelectric, if only because of the catastrophic failure of the Three Gorges Dam), and the extra scrutiny it receives in comparison is thus unjustified in my opinion. Over 100 people are killed in car crashes every day in the US alone, which helps put the potential value of self-driving cars in better perspective (although, of course, the switchover to self-driving cars opens us up to the possibility of malicious actors suborning the entire fleet; a worthwhile hypothetical to consider, I think you'll agree, given the... lackadaisical information security standards both IoT and vehicle manufacturers adhere to). The example of economic models is more speculative, but I could well imagine any potential new system being derided for being unproven or too risky even as our current one encourages and rewards looting the planet and poisoning the communal well. To your point on ignoring unpleasant potentialities, I couldn't agree more. The optimists have always led the way, and as long as there is more commons to translate into immediate success, it shall be so. We are living in a time of whalefall, with a surplus of resources sufficient to support a maximally extractive lifestyle for perhaps one generation more, before it is gone forever. I have grown increasingly disillusioned with our potential to avert the coming global ecological and subsequent economic catastrophe; it seems that our Neros would rather fiddle while Rome burns. >But if we're going to build tools, imo they must be easy to dismantle and supersede. An interesting point, and one that I never considered before. My assumption is generally that for physical goods, robustness and long lifetimes are strongly favored over upgradability. Or rather, that "ease of transition away from" is basically never considered in the design or proliferation of new tools. That's a difficult point; is a meme that provides a path to a better meme more adaptive than one that locks the target in? Can it be made so?

walleeee 6y ago
> I was alluding to caution in reference to fossil fuels specifically because nuclear power I follow you more clearly now- yes I agree. Maybe nuclear power gets undue scrutiny because its failures are rapid and local. I think I prefer this to an object so diffuse in space and time no one can point to it ("how can the earth be warming if it's snowing"). We are too likely to disbelieve or ignore anything that doesn't slap us in the face. A caveat: any waste disposal proposal which assumes continuity of governance or ecological predictability over any significant timescale is DOA imo. Even deep final repositories assume we can predict geologic activity half a million or more years into the future. I am not a geologist but this seems a gamble. Yes, and the situation re: self-driving cars seems similar. We entertain death behind the wheel daily but hand-wring over the particulars of hypothetical autonomous vehicle accidents. It seems there is a preference (at least in the US) for injury to come with a human face attached rather than at the banal whim of an algorithm, but fleetwide hijacking is a different story. I wonder if offline AVs are feasible. Here too the present may preclude a more desirable future: e.g., we may feel compelled to connect navigation computers to the internet to avoid roadway congestion, but in an alternate reality perhaps we did not encircle ourselves with asphalt and invite a chariot powered by the fumes of the long dead into every home. As they say, "you're not in traffic..." > We are living in a time of whalefall, with a surplus of resources sufficient to support a maximally extractive lifestyle for perhaps one generation more, before it is gone forever. I have grown increasingly disillusioned with our potential to avert the coming global ecological and subsequent economic catastrophe; it seems that our Neros would rather fiddle while Rome burns. I feel much the same way. An economist turned tree farmer I once spoke to said: "We have failed to develop cultural tools of sufficient sophistication to manage the tsunami that is our technological inventiveness." > My assumption is generally that for physical goods, robustness and long lifetimes are strongly favored over upgradability. Or rather, that "ease of transition away from" is basically never considered in the design or proliferation of new tools. Good point- I didn't consider this in depth. I agree re: physical tools. The trend toward disposability or frequent upgrades is the wrong direction. Industrial processes and "cultural tools" (i.e., social technologies or memes as you say), on the other hand, have more destructive potential than a manual implement and longer lifespans. > is a meme that provides a path to a better meme more adaptive than one that locks the target in? Can it be made so? This is a fascinating question and I don't know the answer. I'm struck by the fact that one can substitute "gene" for "meme" and with a fair bit of confidence say yes. If life had "locked the target in" prior to the oxygenation of the atmosphere presumably we would not exist today. An open question in plant biology, incidentally, is whether crop trait plasticity is itself a meta-trait we can pursue[0], instead of e.g. breeding or engineering germplasm for specific regions or conditions (although for some forms of plasticity the developmental basis is not well understood). I think of it a bit like the difference between a painstakingly programmed expert system and a neural net. We will likely need analogous reserves of sociocultural plasticity to survive on a planet growing more temperamental by the year, although the engines of financial and industrial metastasis do not appear so amenable to this. [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00546/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00546...]

walleeee 6y ago

> I was alluding to caution in reference to fossil fuels specifically because nuclear power I follow you more clearly now- yes I agree. Maybe nuclear power gets undue scrutiny because its failures are rapid and local. I think I prefer this to an object so diffuse in space and time no one can point to it ("how can the earth be warming if it's snowing"). We are too likely to disbelieve or ignore anything that doesn't slap us in the face. A caveat: any waste disposal proposal which assumes continuity of governance or ecological predictability over any significant timescale is DOA imo. Even deep final repositories assume we can predict geologic activity half a million or more years into the future. I am not a geologist but this seems a gamble. Yes, and the situation re: self-driving cars seems similar. We entertain death behind the wheel daily but hand-wring over the particulars of hypothetical autonomous vehicle accidents. It seems there is a preference (at least in the US) for injury to come with a human face attached rather than at the banal whim of an algorithm, but fleetwide hijacking is a different story. I wonder if offline AVs are feasible. Here too the present may preclude a more desirable future: e.g., we may feel compelled to connect navigation computers to the internet to avoid roadway congestion, but in an alternate reality perhaps we did not encircle ourselves with asphalt and invite a chariot powered by the fumes of the long dead into every home. As they say, "you're not in traffic..." > We are living in a time of whalefall, with a surplus of resources sufficient to support a maximally extractive lifestyle for perhaps one generation more, before it is gone forever. I have grown increasingly disillusioned with our potential to avert the coming global ecological and subsequent economic catastrophe; it seems that our Neros would rather fiddle while Rome burns. I feel much the same way. An economist turned tree farmer I once spoke to said: "We have failed to develop cultural tools of sufficient sophistication to manage the tsunami that is our technological inventiveness." > My assumption is generally that for physical goods, robustness and long lifetimes are strongly favored over upgradability. Or rather, that "ease of transition away from" is basically never considered in the design or proliferation of new tools. Good point- I didn't consider this in depth. I agree re: physical tools. The trend toward disposability or frequent upgrades is the wrong direction. Industrial processes and "cultural tools" (i.e., social technologies or memes as you say), on the other hand, have more destructive potential than a manual implement and longer lifespans. > is a meme that provides a path to a better meme more adaptive than one that locks the target in? Can it be made so? This is a fascinating question and I don't know the answer. I'm struck by the fact that one can substitute "gene" for "meme" and with a fair bit of confidence say yes. If life had "locked the target in" prior to the oxygenation of the atmosphere presumably we would not exist today. An open question in plant biology, incidentally, is whether crop trait plasticity is itself a meta-trait we can pursue[0], instead of e.g. breeding or engineering germplasm for specific regions or conditions (although for some forms of plasticity the developmental basis is not well understood). I think of it a bit like the difference between a painstakingly programmed expert system and a neural net. We will likely need analogous reserves of sociocultural plasticity to survive on a planet growing more temperamental by the year, although the engines of financial and industrial metastasis do not appear so amenable to this. [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00546/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00546...]