11 ms·

Can we survive technology? (1955) [pdf]

168 points by georgestrakhov 5y ago

est31 5y ago
I wonder how long we'll go without another nuclear explosion used in war. I think the armageddon scenario is quite unlikely, simply because so few people have access to the needed amount of nukes to pull it off. It's only a couple of states which can do it. One of those states even survived a regime change without those nukes being triggered. However, there has been a trend of smaller states obtaining nuclear weapon capabilities. The more states you have, the more likely it is that one of them is willing to use the bomb. So I think rather talking about whether these small states will use nukes, we should talk about when this will happen. 30 years? 50? 100? 500?
- RobertoG 5y ago
  Even if you assign a low probability to an Armageddon, why you assume that a more "tactic" explosion will come from a small state instead of the states that have the vast majority of weapons in the planet?
- DaedPsyker 5y ago
  There is a few points that make it worrying but certainly not guaranteed. MAD policy appears to be effectively over, or at least there is no longer any mention publicly, perhaps it is just assumed. While it can appear crazy, hence the name, it was a rather ingenious way to solve the problem, albeit we know now we have come dangerously close at times, at least we knew the risks and the lines that had to be crossed. The next point and somewhat related is the change in nature of nuclear weapons. The variable ability of tactical nukes to change their explosive size, has resulted in a modern range of weapons that aren't as destructive as their elder brethren. It may seem like a good idea but the issue is it also opens the possibility of their more active use. A state may consider it acceptable. This could result in the reverting to an older policy of nuclear weapons. The MacArthur plans to use them in active combat, it becomes too easy to dial the Nuke down, target a military base and say "sure it's ok it's a legitimate military target". That to me is the danger in the modern world. Attitudes, at least Western are still as a weapon of last resort but I can't predict the future and say that will always be the case or that other nations will share the same sentiment.
  - DaedPsyker 5y ago
    I should also say that nuclear weapons in dictatorships (more so than oligarchies like Soviet Union) is dangerous. Hopefully there will be those that can prevent its usage but dictatorships are fragile things. A dictator may consider their removal an existential threat.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      This hasn't born out in practice. Dictators want to live - that's why they're dictators. They ubiquitously loot their countries widely enough to be able to retire to safer waters but don't. Nuclear weapons in the modern world are useful deterrants, and that's it: a dictator with nuclear weapons has no external enemies they could consider targeting without guaranteeing total annihilation in response. The one exception here is that using a nuclear weapon on your own country and people might be a useful exercise of power...but even then, it's abundantly clear that the most likely outcome is still total annihilation - the world won't tolerate a nation lighting off nukes against targets in it's own borders much either.
      - DaedPsyker 5y ago
        That's very true, I'm usually careful not to fall into the assumption of the 'mad man' since it's usually just an illusion to appear dangerous.
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        > the world won't tolerate a nation lighting off nukes against targets in it's own borders much either. Why do you think so? Famines seem to work just fine within borders.
        XorNot 5y ago
        Famines don't blow fallout into the air, or have indistinguishable targets when a ballistic launch is detected.
    - zingplex 5y ago
- PicassoCTs 5y ago
  We said a similar proliferation sentence once on communication technology and biology - and here we are. Everybody can build and wield information-technology weapons and very soon everyone will be able to craft his/her own bio-weapon in a sink. Exponential tech and social peace of a basically unaltered species do not go well together. Atomic capabilities are basically just one of the thousands of facets of this problem. Imagine air-borne-electric taxis being prevalent in a future city. A 9/11 event might just look like a hack into traffic control and rerouting a thousand flying batteries to smash into buildings. With great power, comes great incapability for responsibility.
  - vharuck 5y ago
    >We said a similar proliferation sentence once on communication technology and biology - and here we are. Everybody can build and wield information-technology weapons and very soon everyone will be able to craft his/her own bio-weapon in a sink. I wonder if there isn't a massive difference of likelihood between remote (IT) and physically deployed terrorism. For example, it may be easy to mess with smart cars by tampering with electronic billboards or leaving devices by the road to "fake out" cameras. But it's always been easy to leave dangerous things on a hidden part of a road (over a hill, around a sharp turn). It doesn't happen because very few people want to hurt random people, and those that might do it impulsively have plenty of time to rethink while going to the location, waiting for a chance, and then placing the trap. So I'm not worried the future will have more location-based terrorism or dangerous pranks. Even biological. I'm worried about easy and remote terrorism. Where people don't have to see or even think about the victims, and there's little time for reconsideration between planning and acting. Needs citation: I wonder if the need to be sneaky in a location is itself a guard rail. It requires the would-be terrorist to imagine how other people might catch them and react, which maybe triggers the social part of our nature. And maybe it only works if they imagine people being present and with faces, instead of disembodied actors on a network.
  - bserge 5y ago
    Everyone could craft their own bombs at home for a century, and have them detonated remotely for decades. Very few actually did it.
- fulafel 5y ago
  Besides states, an intresting question is how soon it'll become cheap enough for underground orgs or religious fanatics to do it privately.
- mellavora 5y ago
  Minor point, not brought up by other posters. The armageddon scenario might be much easier to trigger than von Neumann believed. Even 'just a few' 'small' nukes could kick up enough dust to the stratosphere to severely disrupt sunlight and weather, where 'severely disrupt' means (probable) total global social collapse.
  - wobbegongz 5y ago
    We have detonated 2000 bombs in testing. So "just a few small nukes" is not enough to start any atomic winter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing
    - sgt101 5y ago
      But not over forests or cities - which burn.
      - wobbegongz 5y ago
        We have tested that also. During 1945 we burned down 69 cites and killed 800 000 in Japan. The two small nukes was only 5% of the smoke. The result was at most an cooling of the global temperature of 0.1-0.2 Celsius. But the "multiple uncertainties mean we cannot say for sure". https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-did-bombing-during-second-world-war-cool-global-temperature https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-did-bombing-during-se... So we need about 5-10 times larger bombings when ww2 to cool the global temperature with one degree. But we have increased the global temperature with one degree thanks to global warming. So you need at least 10-20 times larger bombings then ww2 to get a tiny atomic winter. And probably a lot larger to get any catastrophic cooling.
      - throwaway316943 5y ago
        Well we’ve done 2 over cities closely spaced with each other and also following a firebombing campaign that burned a lot more cities. If a burning city or forest was all that was required for a nuclear winter we’d have had one long ago. Forests burn without the aid of nuclear weapons. To get to nuclear winter levels of ash and dust you probably need dozens to hundreds of detonations and burning cities.
- narrator 5y ago
  Gain of function research is a lot cheaper than nuclear weapons. It also doesn't radiologically pollute the world, can, theoretically, be genetically tailored, and can even be denied. These factors will make it the preferred means of waging world war scale war in the future if it's not already being used for that presently.
- arminiusreturns 5y ago
  Its much more complicated and dangerous than you seem to imagine though. There all all kinds of ways nuclear weapons could still be used (including accidentally), and a lot more instability there (Samson option from a non NPT signing Israel, who by the way, used a Hollywood mogul with ties to Epstein to steal timing devices for use in manufacture, or what about an inceasingly unstable Pakistan, etc) These days the threat model is broken because its preciously not needed to be a nation state to develops some major biological/chemical/drone etc attack with new technologies that on the battlefield would be called force multipliers. So for those of you who also care about surveillance, I try to explain this is part of the reason for its increases... now when the threat model has evolved but you havent caught up, the rational response is (not saying right, but it makes logical sense on the surface to MICCIMAC) to surveil everything. I have a great book on the post nuclear world I keep picking up to reread sections of that talks about the political transitions that will happen because of this that is worth a look: "The Shield of Achilles" tldr - corporations are going to take over the gaps left by increasingly ineffective government.
dsign 5y ago
I have a huge respect for this guy, but the irony of this is not lost on me: > Since most time scales are fixed by human re- action times, habits, and other physiological and psycho- logical factors, the effect of the increased speed of technological processes was to enlarge the size of units— political, organizational, economic, and cultural — affected by technological operations. That is, instead of performing the same operations as before in less time, now larger-scale operations were performed in the same time. We call von Neumann architectures to the very devices that have allowed to operate--by proxy, so far--in different timescales. And we do tons of stuff these days in less time, thanks in part to von Neumann. Had he lived today, I would imagine he would be still concerned with timescales and sizes of physical places, but from an entirely different perspective.
- solarist 5y ago
  That’s the essence of both Parkinson‘s and Gustafson's laws, but apparently even earlier than both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Man I didn't know about Parkinson's law even though Ive been obsessed by that topic
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  I would say once multi core processors became the norm we moved away from what can be strictly considered ‘von Neumann architecture’.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    In the general case, how is multi core different than saying “complicated CPU”, you still have computation in a separate box from data and move bits back and forth. And if we’re being precise, aren’t we all on modified Harvard systems these days? :P (I am not a computer scientist)
spodek 5y ago
Regarding the environment and humans decreasing the Earth's ability to sustain life, the tech community doesn't seem to pick up on the pattern that technology augments the users' goals and values. As long as our culture values growth, extraction, externalizing costs, comfort, and convenience, technology that makes that system more efficient may decrease pollution in one element, but it makes the system more efficient. That is, we pollute and decrease Earth's ability to sustain life more efficiently. When Watt made his steam engine, coal use went up. Uber was supposed to lower congestion and miles driven but they went up. We repeat the pattern over and over. The "father" of the Green Revolution, on winning the Nobel Prize said > "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only. > Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the “Population Monster”. . . Since man is potentially a rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth…" He understood the value of technology as well as anyone in theory and practice. He recognized that we have to change our values from growth to enjoying what we have, from externalizing costs to responsibility, and so on or technology will keep exacerbating and augmenting our problems. That pattern includes nuclear, electric vehicles, and space travel. They may solve local problems, but they exacerbate the systemic effect. Electric vehicles, for example, make sense as a tactic under the strategy of reducing vehicles. Nuclear makes sense only as a tactic under the strategy of lowering power consumption. But we keep valuing producing more cars and energy. This community seems over and over again to miss the systemic and unintended side effects. If we had clean fusion under our current values, we wouldn't live as we do today only cleaner. We would grow again until we hit more limits and had to live again under scarcity or natural calamity. Borlaug worked the second half his career to help people see the consequences of helping solve only part of our system but not the system. If we have to stop growing at some point, at least acknowledging the laws of thermodynamics, the sooner we do it, with the smaller number of people, the more abundance we can live with. The more people we have, the harder to limit ourselves. If we don't, nature will, as we all know.
- 5y ago
miltondts 5y ago
"Can we produce the required adjustments with the necessary speed? The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble. To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence." If you want to read a better exploration of the larger issues and possible answers to this question I recommend: http://gator.uhd.edu/~williams/downloads/skinner82.pdf http://gator.uhd.edu/~williams/downloads/skinner82.pdf "Most thoughtful people agree that the world is in serious trouble. A nuclear war could mean a nuclear winter that would destroy all living things; fossil fuels will not last forever, and many other critical resources are nearing exhaustion; the earth grows steadily less habitable; and all this is exacerbated by a burgeoning population that resists control. The timetable may not be clear, but the threat is real. That many people have begun to find a recital of these dangers tiresome is perhaps an even greater threat. Why is more not being done? Within a single generation, we have made extraordinary progress in the exploration of space, genetic engineering, electronic technology, and many other fields, but little has been done to solve what are certainly more serious problems. We know what could be done: We could destroy all nuclear weapons, limit family size, and adopt a much less polluting and less wasteful style of life. The mere listing of these steps is enough to show how far we are from taking them."
- toolz 5y ago
  Progress has solved every problem the human race has ever had. I see no reason to believe regression is the way to ensure a better future. I trust precedent far more than models by academics who know very well just how unreliable predictive modeling can be.
  - miltondts 5y ago
    Did you read the paper I linked to? That is precisely the entire point of "Why are we not acting to save the world?". We need to apply more science and technology in the right places.
    - 5y ago
metaprogram 5y ago
Prophetic words from John von Neumann in 1955: "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." (Page 512 / 666 / 9)
- bserge 5y ago
  If only he knew it would be used for growing digital tulips.
  - arthurcolle 5y ago
    I bet JVN would totally have a couple bitcoins if he was still around.
- d4mi3n 5y ago
  He was such a visionary and had such a way with words. This may be nostalgia talking, but I've struggled to find more contemporary writing on the level of Neumann's imagination. If anyone is aware of someone today doing similar work I'd love to hear about it.
- tim333 5y ago
  He was also the originator of the term singularity in the sense of tech: “The ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” which some people worry about.
- machinehermiter 5y ago
  He also thought we would soon be able to completely control the weather. To me, his thoughts on the weather are some of his most interesting things to read just from the fact even someone with the brain power of Von Neuman could be utterly and completely wrong. It is the ultimate lesson in the fallibility of what you believe to be true.
MichaelZuo 5y ago
A very interesting conundrum, as human reaction times, and the size of the Earth, are unchanged, and are very likely to remain fixed, human polities can only progress towards further destabilization as population and destructive power grows. The implication then is of progression from countries to blocs, from blocs to super-blocs, from super-blocs to an inevitable world state when the use, and potential use, of weapons becomes too great for even a continent size union to bear or credibly defend against.
- c9fee10d-96de 5y ago
  Which breaks down the second there are civilians in space. Everyone who has control over a rocket engine has to a very good approximation a nuclear weapon. I imagine that a future with a substantial space population will look very much like the past when the Steppe nomads could destroy more advanced civilization by just deciding they should. The difference is that repopulating 10 billion people takes rather longer than the tens of millions that were usually killed in the past.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    I imagine for that reason all space activities involving any significant amount of mass will be conducted under the strict control of a military, or pseudo-military hierarchy. And also as part of a world polity as such control proliferates since even one crazed defector out of say a 1000 such ‘rocket engine controllers’ could destroy civilization on Earth, preventing any possibility of defection would override all other goals. A future where the equivalents of ‘Steppe nomads’ could throw around significant of mass would be a future where every habitable planet and fixed space facility would be slagged in short order, i.e. even more unstable and untenable.
beckingz 5y ago
"Nothing human makes it out of the near-future" - Nick Land
ArtWomb 5y ago
The one theme many of the prognosticators of the post Cold War boom failed to see was the democratization of tech. "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. Part of the fear wasn't just of a high priesthood that controlled knowledge, language and thought itself as everyday work and modern life became more machine-like. But of a New Religion: where Science becomes the last true God. One measure of the progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas can be communicated. And the crux of what von Neumann perceives as danger is "runaway" technology. We attempt to solve one problem, like controlling the weather, by introducing remedies according to our current state of the art capabilities. And accidentally introduce cataclysms that cannot be reversed. Now that capability is accelerating, the same fears arise anew. But it's a different world today. Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore. Its too pricey. The culture has shifted as well. From ICBMs to private space enterprises. And it's that cultural feedback loop, that civilizing progress as ideas are shared instantly about the globe, that very few were able to foresee.
- nicoffeine 5y ago
  > Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore. Real technology (advancement of science vs software+marketing) is still very much developed by governments, because they are the only entities willing to spend billions on possible dead ends. Fusion reactors, CERN, nuclear technology, and those are the ones we know about because we're allowed to know. The US alone spends about 80-90 billion per year on "Special Access Programs." [1] > From ICBMs to private space enterprises. "China is building more than 100 new missile silos in its western desert, analysts say" [1] I'm also trying to be an optimist about the future, but part of that is understanding where we actually are. Technology is still firmly in the control of governments and a handful of corporations. [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29092/special-access-programs-and-the-pentagons-ecosystem-of-secrecy https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29092/special-access-p... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-nuclear-missile-silos/2021/06/30/0fa8debc-d9c2-11eb-bb9e-70fda8c37057_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-nucle...
  - blfr 5y ago
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Further discussion: 2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724363
eternalban 5y ago
The actual question is can we survive technologists and their paymasters. It is interesting the JvN starts off on a political-economy note and proceeds to geopolitics considerations, yet doesn't really address the drivers of "industrial revolution" or "empire". He opines that "[a] much more satisfactory solution than technological prohibition would be eliminating war as "a means of national policy."" There are alternatives, John. Maybe we should work on technology to temper the desire -- construed as "divine right" -- of the few to lord it over the many. That's one alternative. War is rarely a "national" concern. Historically it is the means employed by "princes" and "kings" and "queens" to assert dominance over other egomaniacs. "Technology" of course is used to whip up the masses to serve as canon fodder. Another alternative is developing robust ethical systems that drill into the heads of budding technologists that their humanity is not worth a paycheck.
dang 5y ago
One past thread: Can we survive technology? (1955) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724363 - Aug 2019 (48 comments)
mudlus 5y ago
Trash that will age as poorly, as long as people keep solving problems. There is no perpetual motion machine, so the answer to this shitty rhetorical question is: We die when we stop making new technology. Welcome to the beginning of Infinity.
TeeMassive 5y ago
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.". ― Frank Herbert, Dune

I wonder how long we'll go without another nuclear explosion used in war. I think the armageddon scenario is quite unlikely, simply because so few people have access to the needed amount of nukes to pull it off. It's only a couple of states which can do it. One of those states even survived a regime change without those nukes being triggered. However, there has been a trend of smaller states obtaining nuclear weapon capabilities. The more states you have, the more likely it is that one of them is willing to use the bomb. So I think rather talking about whether these small states will use nukes, we should talk about when this will happen. 30 years? 50? 100? 500?

RobertoG 5y ago
Even if you assign a low probability to an Armageddon, why you assume that a more "tactic" explosion will come from a small state instead of the states that have the vast majority of weapons in the planet?
DaedPsyker 5y ago
There is a few points that make it worrying but certainly not guaranteed. MAD policy appears to be effectively over, or at least there is no longer any mention publicly, perhaps it is just assumed. While it can appear crazy, hence the name, it was a rather ingenious way to solve the problem, albeit we know now we have come dangerously close at times, at least we knew the risks and the lines that had to be crossed. The next point and somewhat related is the change in nature of nuclear weapons. The variable ability of tactical nukes to change their explosive size, has resulted in a modern range of weapons that aren't as destructive as their elder brethren. It may seem like a good idea but the issue is it also opens the possibility of their more active use. A state may consider it acceptable. This could result in the reverting to an older policy of nuclear weapons. The MacArthur plans to use them in active combat, it becomes too easy to dial the Nuke down, target a military base and say "sure it's ok it's a legitimate military target". That to me is the danger in the modern world. Attitudes, at least Western are still as a weapon of last resort but I can't predict the future and say that will always be the case or that other nations will share the same sentiment.
- DaedPsyker 5y ago
  I should also say that nuclear weapons in dictatorships (more so than oligarchies like Soviet Union) is dangerous. Hopefully there will be those that can prevent its usage but dictatorships are fragile things. A dictator may consider their removal an existential threat.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    This hasn't born out in practice. Dictators want to live - that's why they're dictators. They ubiquitously loot their countries widely enough to be able to retire to safer waters but don't. Nuclear weapons in the modern world are useful deterrants, and that's it: a dictator with nuclear weapons has no external enemies they could consider targeting without guaranteeing total annihilation in response. The one exception here is that using a nuclear weapon on your own country and people might be a useful exercise of power...but even then, it's abundantly clear that the most likely outcome is still total annihilation - the world won't tolerate a nation lighting off nukes against targets in it's own borders much either.
    - DaedPsyker 5y ago
      That's very true, I'm usually careful not to fall into the assumption of the 'mad man' since it's usually just an illusion to appear dangerous.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      > the world won't tolerate a nation lighting off nukes against targets in it's own borders much either. Why do you think so? Famines seem to work just fine within borders.
      - XorNot 5y ago
        Famines don't blow fallout into the air, or have indistinguishable targets when a ballistic launch is detected.
  - zingplex 5y ago
PicassoCTs 5y ago
We said a similar proliferation sentence once on communication technology and biology - and here we are. Everybody can build and wield information-technology weapons and very soon everyone will be able to craft his/her own bio-weapon in a sink. Exponential tech and social peace of a basically unaltered species do not go well together. Atomic capabilities are basically just one of the thousands of facets of this problem. Imagine air-borne-electric taxis being prevalent in a future city. A 9/11 event might just look like a hack into traffic control and rerouting a thousand flying batteries to smash into buildings. With great power, comes great incapability for responsibility.
- vharuck 5y ago
  >We said a similar proliferation sentence once on communication technology and biology - and here we are. Everybody can build and wield information-technology weapons and very soon everyone will be able to craft his/her own bio-weapon in a sink. I wonder if there isn't a massive difference of likelihood between remote (IT) and physically deployed terrorism. For example, it may be easy to mess with smart cars by tampering with electronic billboards or leaving devices by the road to "fake out" cameras. But it's always been easy to leave dangerous things on a hidden part of a road (over a hill, around a sharp turn). It doesn't happen because very few people want to hurt random people, and those that might do it impulsively have plenty of time to rethink while going to the location, waiting for a chance, and then placing the trap. So I'm not worried the future will have more location-based terrorism or dangerous pranks. Even biological. I'm worried about easy and remote terrorism. Where people don't have to see or even think about the victims, and there's little time for reconsideration between planning and acting. Needs citation: I wonder if the need to be sneaky in a location is itself a guard rail. It requires the would-be terrorist to imagine how other people might catch them and react, which maybe triggers the social part of our nature. And maybe it only works if they imagine people being present and with faces, instead of disembodied actors on a network.
- bserge 5y ago
  Everyone could craft their own bombs at home for a century, and have them detonated remotely for decades. Very few actually did it.
fulafel 5y ago
Besides states, an intresting question is how soon it'll become cheap enough for underground orgs or religious fanatics to do it privately.
mellavora 5y ago
Minor point, not brought up by other posters. The armageddon scenario might be much easier to trigger than von Neumann believed. Even 'just a few' 'small' nukes could kick up enough dust to the stratosphere to severely disrupt sunlight and weather, where 'severely disrupt' means (probable) total global social collapse.
- wobbegongz 5y ago
  We have detonated 2000 bombs in testing. So "just a few small nukes" is not enough to start any atomic winter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing
  - sgt101 5y ago
    But not over forests or cities - which burn.
    - wobbegongz 5y ago
      We have tested that also. During 1945 we burned down 69 cites and killed 800 000 in Japan. The two small nukes was only 5% of the smoke. The result was at most an cooling of the global temperature of 0.1-0.2 Celsius. But the "multiple uncertainties mean we cannot say for sure". https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-did-bombing-during-second-world-war-cool-global-temperature https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-did-bombing-during-se... So we need about 5-10 times larger bombings when ww2 to cool the global temperature with one degree. But we have increased the global temperature with one degree thanks to global warming. So you need at least 10-20 times larger bombings then ww2 to get a tiny atomic winter. And probably a lot larger to get any catastrophic cooling.
    - throwaway316943 5y ago
      Well we’ve done 2 over cities closely spaced with each other and also following a firebombing campaign that burned a lot more cities. If a burning city or forest was all that was required for a nuclear winter we’d have had one long ago. Forests burn without the aid of nuclear weapons. To get to nuclear winter levels of ash and dust you probably need dozens to hundreds of detonations and burning cities.
narrator 5y ago
Gain of function research is a lot cheaper than nuclear weapons. It also doesn't radiologically pollute the world, can, theoretically, be genetically tailored, and can even be denied. These factors will make it the preferred means of waging world war scale war in the future if it's not already being used for that presently.
arminiusreturns 5y ago
Its much more complicated and dangerous than you seem to imagine though. There all all kinds of ways nuclear weapons could still be used (including accidentally), and a lot more instability there (Samson option from a non NPT signing Israel, who by the way, used a Hollywood mogul with ties to Epstein to steal timing devices for use in manufacture, or what about an inceasingly unstable Pakistan, etc) These days the threat model is broken because its preciously not needed to be a nation state to develops some major biological/chemical/drone etc attack with new technologies that on the battlefield would be called force multipliers. So for those of you who also care about surveillance, I try to explain this is part of the reason for its increases... now when the threat model has evolved but you havent caught up, the rational response is (not saying right, but it makes logical sense on the surface to MICCIMAC) to surveil everything. I have a great book on the post nuclear world I keep picking up to reread sections of that talks about the political transitions that will happen because of this that is worth a look: "The Shield of Achilles" tldr - corporations are going to take over the gaps left by increasingly ineffective government.

dsign 5y ago

I have a huge respect for this guy, but the irony of this is not lost on me: > Since most time scales are fixed by human re- action times, habits, and other physiological and psycho- logical factors, the effect of the increased speed of technological processes was to enlarge the size of units— political, organizational, economic, and cultural — affected by technological operations. That is, instead of performing the same operations as before in less time, now larger-scale operations were performed in the same time. We call von Neumann architectures to the very devices that have allowed to operate--by proxy, so far--in different timescales. And we do tons of stuff these days in less time, thanks in part to von Neumann. Had he lived today, I would imagine he would be still concerned with timescales and sizes of physical places, but from an entirely different perspective.

solarist 5y ago
That’s the essence of both Parkinson‘s and Gustafson's laws, but apparently even earlier than both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Man I didn't know about Parkinson's law even though Ive been obsessed by that topic
MichaelZuo 5y ago
I would say once multi core processors became the norm we moved away from what can be strictly considered ‘von Neumann architecture’.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  In the general case, how is multi core different than saying “complicated CPU”, you still have computation in a separate box from data and move bits back and forth. And if we’re being precise, aren’t we all on modified Harvard systems these days? :P (I am not a computer scientist)

spodek 5y ago

Regarding the environment and humans decreasing the Earth's ability to sustain life, the tech community doesn't seem to pick up on the pattern that technology augments the users' goals and values. As long as our culture values growth, extraction, externalizing costs, comfort, and convenience, technology that makes that system more efficient may decrease pollution in one element, but it makes the system more efficient. That is, we pollute and decrease Earth's ability to sustain life more efficiently. When Watt made his steam engine, coal use went up. Uber was supposed to lower congestion and miles driven but they went up. We repeat the pattern over and over. The "father" of the Green Revolution, on winning the Nobel Prize said > "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only. > Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the “Population Monster”. . . Since man is potentially a rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth…" He understood the value of technology as well as anyone in theory and practice. He recognized that we have to change our values from growth to enjoying what we have, from externalizing costs to responsibility, and so on or technology will keep exacerbating and augmenting our problems. That pattern includes nuclear, electric vehicles, and space travel. They may solve local problems, but they exacerbate the systemic effect. Electric vehicles, for example, make sense as a tactic under the strategy of reducing vehicles. Nuclear makes sense only as a tactic under the strategy of lowering power consumption. But we keep valuing producing more cars and energy. This community seems over and over again to miss the systemic and unintended side effects. If we had clean fusion under our current values, we wouldn't live as we do today only cleaner. We would grow again until we hit more limits and had to live again under scarcity or natural calamity. Borlaug worked the second half his career to help people see the consequences of helping solve only part of our system but not the system. If we have to stop growing at some point, at least acknowledging the laws of thermodynamics, the sooner we do it, with the smaller number of people, the more abundance we can live with. The more people we have, the harder to limit ourselves. If we don't, nature will, as we all know.

5y ago

miltondts 5y ago

"Can we produce the required adjustments with the necessary speed? The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble. To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence." If you want to read a better exploration of the larger issues and possible answers to this question I recommend: http://gator.uhd.edu/~williams/downloads/skinner82.pdf http://gator.uhd.edu/~williams/downloads/skinner82.pdf "Most thoughtful people agree that the world is in serious trouble. A nuclear war could mean a nuclear winter that would destroy all living things; fossil fuels will not last forever, and many other critical resources are nearing exhaustion; the earth grows steadily less habitable; and all this is exacerbated by a burgeoning population that resists control. The timetable may not be clear, but the threat is real. That many people have begun to find a recital of these dangers tiresome is perhaps an even greater threat. Why is more not being done? Within a single generation, we have made extraordinary progress in the exploration of space, genetic engineering, electronic technology, and many other fields, but little has been done to solve what are certainly more serious problems. We know what could be done: We could destroy all nuclear weapons, limit family size, and adopt a much less polluting and less wasteful style of life. The mere listing of these steps is enough to show how far we are from taking them."

toolz 5y ago
Progress has solved every problem the human race has ever had. I see no reason to believe regression is the way to ensure a better future. I trust precedent far more than models by academics who know very well just how unreliable predictive modeling can be.
- miltondts 5y ago
  Did you read the paper I linked to? That is precisely the entire point of "Why are we not acting to save the world?". We need to apply more science and technology in the right places.
  - 5y ago

metaprogram 5y ago

Prophetic words from John von Neumann in 1955: "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." (Page 512 / 666 / 9)

bserge 5y ago
If only he knew it would be used for growing digital tulips.
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  I bet JVN would totally have a couple bitcoins if he was still around.
d4mi3n 5y ago
He was such a visionary and had such a way with words. This may be nostalgia talking, but I've struggled to find more contemporary writing on the level of Neumann's imagination. If anyone is aware of someone today doing similar work I'd love to hear about it.
tim333 5y ago
He was also the originator of the term singularity in the sense of tech: “The ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” which some people worry about.
machinehermiter 5y ago
He also thought we would soon be able to completely control the weather. To me, his thoughts on the weather are some of his most interesting things to read just from the fact even someone with the brain power of Von Neuman could be utterly and completely wrong. It is the ultimate lesson in the fallibility of what you believe to be true.

MichaelZuo 5y ago

A very interesting conundrum, as human reaction times, and the size of the Earth, are unchanged, and are very likely to remain fixed, human polities can only progress towards further destabilization as population and destructive power grows. The implication then is of progression from countries to blocs, from blocs to super-blocs, from super-blocs to an inevitable world state when the use, and potential use, of weapons becomes too great for even a continent size union to bear or credibly defend against.

c9fee10d-96de 5y ago
Which breaks down the second there are civilians in space. Everyone who has control over a rocket engine has to a very good approximation a nuclear weapon. I imagine that a future with a substantial space population will look very much like the past when the Steppe nomads could destroy more advanced civilization by just deciding they should. The difference is that repopulating 10 billion people takes rather longer than the tens of millions that were usually killed in the past.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  I imagine for that reason all space activities involving any significant amount of mass will be conducted under the strict control of a military, or pseudo-military hierarchy. And also as part of a world polity as such control proliferates since even one crazed defector out of say a 1000 such ‘rocket engine controllers’ could destroy civilization on Earth, preventing any possibility of defection would override all other goals. A future where the equivalents of ‘Steppe nomads’ could throw around significant of mass would be a future where every habitable planet and fixed space facility would be slagged in short order, i.e. even more unstable and untenable.

beckingz 5y ago

"Nothing human makes it out of the near-future" - Nick Land

ArtWomb 5y ago

The one theme many of the prognosticators of the post Cold War boom failed to see was the democratization of tech. "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. Part of the fear wasn't just of a high priesthood that controlled knowledge, language and thought itself as everyday work and modern life became more machine-like. But of a New Religion: where Science becomes the last true God. One measure of the progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas can be communicated. And the crux of what von Neumann perceives as danger is "runaway" technology. We attempt to solve one problem, like controlling the weather, by introducing remedies according to our current state of the art capabilities. And accidentally introduce cataclysms that cannot be reversed. Now that capability is accelerating, the same fears arise anew. But it's a different world today. Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore. Its too pricey. The culture has shifted as well. From ICBMs to private space enterprises. And it's that cultural feedback loop, that civilizing progress as ideas are shared instantly about the globe, that very few were able to foresee.

nicoffeine 5y ago
> Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore. Real technology (advancement of science vs software+marketing) is still very much developed by governments, because they are the only entities willing to spend billions on possible dead ends. Fusion reactors, CERN, nuclear technology, and those are the ones we know about because we're allowed to know. The US alone spends about 80-90 billion per year on "Special Access Programs." [1] > From ICBMs to private space enterprises. "China is building more than 100 new missile silos in its western desert, analysts say" [1] I'm also trying to be an optimist about the future, but part of that is understanding where we actually are. Technology is still firmly in the control of governments and a handful of corporations. [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29092/special-access-programs-and-the-pentagons-ecosystem-of-secrecy https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29092/special-access-p... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-nuclear-missile-silos/2021/06/30/0fa8debc-d9c2-11eb-bb9e-70fda8c37057_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-nucle...
- blfr 5y ago

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Further discussion: 2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724363

eternalban 5y ago

The actual question is can we survive technologists and their paymasters. It is interesting the JvN starts off on a political-economy note and proceeds to geopolitics considerations, yet doesn't really address the drivers of "industrial revolution" or "empire". He opines that "[a] much more satisfactory solution than technological prohibition would be eliminating war as "a means of national policy."" There are alternatives, John. Maybe we should work on technology to temper the desire -- construed as "divine right" -- of the few to lord it over the many. That's one alternative. War is rarely a "national" concern. Historically it is the means employed by "princes" and "kings" and "queens" to assert dominance over other egomaniacs. "Technology" of course is used to whip up the masses to serve as canon fodder. Another alternative is developing robust ethical systems that drill into the heads of budding technologists that their humanity is not worth a paycheck.

dang 5y ago

One past thread: Can we survive technology? (1955) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724363 - Aug 2019 (48 comments)

mudlus 5y ago

Trash that will age as poorly, as long as people keep solving problems. There is no perpetual motion machine, so the answer to this shitty rhetorical question is: We die when we stop making new technology. Welcome to the beginning of Infinity.

TeeMassive 5y ago

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.". ― Frank Herbert, Dune