14 ms·

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kin

by rozab 5y ago

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC. He compares this situation to the state of software development today. It's a sobering watch. https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk

hnmullany 5y ago
Same way - the extended 3rd century crisis in the Roman Empire led to a loss of sculpting expertise. No art was commissioned for so long that skills weren't passed on.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  An example closer to home, though perhaps not as stark, is the loss of expertise in various industries that have been outsourced. The US is a good example. This is one (of many) arguments against outsourcing your industry just because it's cheaper and increases the profits of the outsourcing company. The tradition and culture that allows a certain industry to flourish is interrupted and destroyed and rebuilding that is no small task.
  - jimhefferon 5y ago
    I had a summer job one year working on space stuff. I was in the clean room and the first day they took me back there, white suit and all, and took some ball bearings off a wire rack. They were maybe a foot in diameter. My job that summer was to test to see which were the least noisy. (Basically, they rotated very slowly, and there was a phono needle resting on the outside with a strip chart measuring the vibration caused when balls hit each other, etc.) The best ones were going up. They told me to be careful. These were the rejects from another project, but this project was legally required to use only US tech and the US no longer had the ability to manufacture bearings this large, since we had outsourced for some time and everyone who could do it got out of the business. So we needed these exact ones. (This was the late 70's.)
  - toss1 5y ago
    Yup, this is a massive strategic blunder of historical scale. While the US and western countries are asleep at the switch and think that they are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, the Chinese have a 100- and 500- year plan and are exploiting our myopia for short-term profits to gain manufacturing expertise and military advantage. It may not be too late to reverse, but it is close. It is really the result of not thinking ahead and letting the business lobbies have what they want today, instead of putting long-term strategic considerations first. Different incentives, different results, tragedy of the commons all over again.
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      A 100- and 500- year plan is ludicrous on it's face. They don't even credibly hit their 5 year plans a lot of the time. The idea of planning something so large and complex so far into the future seems like wishful thinking at best.
      - scrumper 5y ago
        I'm not sure I agree with that. Misses on short-term plans are a different concern to progress on a multi-century plan. Pig iron production might've missed its forecast for 2020, but it'd undeniable that China is building tremendous expertise in advanced manufacturing - and at a similar rate to that at which the west is shedding it.
        ch4s3 5y ago
        Th narrative of "the west doesn't manufacture anything" is greatly oversold. The US makes more steel than it did 40 years ago, for example. Sure, we make fewer hairs and t-shirts, but it's natural for that stuff to chase lower labor costs. We're also an agricultural powerhouse. Now, for sure we have fallen a bit behind in making chips, but that may change.
        lowbloodsugar 5y ago
        So we are the Romans. We can make swords and bread! We'll do great in WWIII!
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  I was just reading an article on a nuclear power plant built (in Norway?) recently that mentioned how it was a considerably more difficult/costly project due to the fact that there was not sufficient expertise left in the West since so few reactors had been built over the past decades....
api 5y ago
I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, and most of all WYSIWYG GUI design software that worked exceptionally well. We had this on 80286 CPUs with 1MiB of RAM and similarly tiny machines. Today's desktop UIs are a fucking disaster on both the developer side and the user side. For developers you have a choice between a hypertext language hacked endlessly into a UI and native UI tooling that's far less intuitive and much uglier than what we had back then. Compare the UI designer (not the language) in Visual Basic in the 1990s to today. You could not only design but data bind a complex app that looked decent in 30 minutes. For users you have no consistency, no keyboard shortcuts (or different ones for every app), no help or help that only works online, etc.
- sharemywin 5y ago
  I miss VB. it was really easy to use. There are tools out there but you have to pay every month for them.
  - kbr2000 5y ago
    Check Lazarus [0] for Free Pascal [1]. Another viable option would be Visual Tcl [2] for Tcl/Tk [3]. Given the event-based nature of Tcl and Tk, I find it matches well for a methodology like VB provided. And it's far from the only one I remember (although you'll need to do some research here [4]). For example, Komodo IDE used to have a Tk GUI builder that provided for the same kind of methodology, which has been split off in [5]. Enjoy! [0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [1] https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/ [2] http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/ http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/ [3] https://www.tcl-lang.org/ https://www.tcl-lang.org/ [4] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GUI+Building+Tools https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GUI+Building+Tools [5] http://spectcl.sourceforge.net/ http://spectcl.sourceforge.net/
  - pjmlp 5y ago
Balarny 5y ago
I was hoping if I asked my other half who is an academic in the Classics he'd say this is untrue and I could then reply "well ackshully...". Alas it is true.
ceejayoz 5y ago
One of the interesting possibilities for the Fermi Paradox is the fact that we've wiped out the readily accessible deposits of iron, coal, oil, etc. A second go at the industrial revolution would be much harder, if we regressed that far.
- gpm 5y ago
  Coal, yes. Iron, wouldn't the iron we moved to the surface be even more accessible? We didn't destroy it, just rearranged and concentrated it?
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Guess what we do most of our iron smelting with?
    - x1f604 5y ago
      Primitive iron smelting was done with charcoal, I believe. Correct me if I'm wrong.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        Yes. Being stuck at that point would be the problem.
        Robotbeat 5y ago
        Would it? Most new smelting plants today in the US (any built in the last few decades) use a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide as the reducing gases (natural gas primarily as feedstock, but no reason it couldn’t be about 90% hydrogen produced via, say, hydroelectricity or wind). Coal didn’t overtake charcoal for smelting iron in the US until the latter half of the 19th century, well after the first industrial revolution. Melting down scrap iron is one of the main sources of steel in the US, and that is done straight with electricity in arc furnaces. Coal accelerated the second industrial Revolution, but it was not essential. Far more important for enabling the first industrial Revolution was some of the early scientific knowledge about steam and pressure, such as the work of Robert Boyle, a lot of that based on a sort of reaction to the classics that had been revived in the Renaissance. The biggest argument for coal is indirectly in that it helped the viability of British society (after the island had most its tree cut down over the previous 500 years) which played an important role in the Scientific Revolution (Robert Boyle was Anglo-Irish)… although by the time Britain was playing an important role, the scientific Revolution was already underway on the mainland of Europe. As long as our books are not all destroyed, I think we’d have no problem bootstrapping from charcoal the second time around. (I think a lot about long term data storage… writing in stone or fired clay still seems like one of the best methods for writing that needs to last 10,000 years… it was, after all, preserved Greco-Roman classics that enabled the renaissance and therefore the scientific Revolution.)
chilling 5y ago
Really nice presentation. I think the bottleneck here is that developers creates tool for other developers to simplify their job and few decades later we end up with lots of handy and easy to use tools that just mask the real toughness of the problem. You can see it easily in web development with tools like React or even the CSS which is (IMHO) full of nasty hacks.
mc32 5y ago
Do we have any contemporaneous record of this mechanism, or have references to the device not survived for some reason? If such a device was considered advanced or cutting edge or of note back then then wouldn't we expect some reference to the device?
- naikrovek 5y ago
  very little from the past survives through to today. I don't think there is any record of this device existing other than the device itself, and mention of it after its discovery in the early 1900s. to some that will be proof that it is not truly an ancient device, and I think that is hogwash. most things just don't last that long, especially paper, which is where mention of the device would be found, if it ever is found.
  - mc32 5y ago
    I don’t doubt it’s ancient. I’m not skeptic from that POV. I do find it curious that such an object would be exist but not have some fanfare around it. I’m sure there’s an explanation that eludes me. Could have been developed in some secrecy for example because it have the people who used it some advantage?
    - leephillips 5y ago
      I think naikrovek explained it. We have but a few scraps of information from the ancient world. There might very well have been a fanfare; it might have been a huge deal—and we might still have no record of any mention of it.
    - naikrovek 5y ago
      or maybe it was just a fairly common thing, then? the math used in the device is not complex, nor is its construction. it is only impressive to us because of what we assume about cultures of that time: that they are dumber than we are, less intelligent. they were just as smart as us, but they were far fewer in number, and had many more limitations than we have when it comes to the library of technologies and skills they can call on to accomplish their goals.
throw0101a 5y ago
> how technology can regress Anyone interested in 'rebooting' society after a major collapse can check out: > The thirteen chapter book starts off explaining how humanity and civilization works and has come to be and how this could possibly be altered in the event of worldwide disaster — such as avian flu. Leaving us with the essential question of what knowledge would we need to rebuild civilization as we know it, which Dartnell answers by looking at the history of science and technology. > Dartnell explains and realistically details a 'grace period' in which survivors can salvage food, materials and tools from the ruins of today's society. However, after a certain point this grace period would end, and humanity would have to produce their own food, make their own tools, practice hygiene and fight infection to maintain health, and develop energy stores for a new society to survive the aftermath. > The book covers topics like agriculture, food and clothing, substances, medicine, and transport. Darnell points out that applying the scientific method to basic knowledge will enable an advanced technological society to reappear within several generations. Along with giving the history of scientific invention and how that applies to humans were they to recreate that, the book also offers anecdotal bits of information in the form of endnotes. Giving facts such as how carrots were originally white but grown orange in honour of the Dutch royal family, and how onions are the leaves of the onion plant.[3] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_Our_World_from_Scratch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_... Full bibliography available if anyone wants to dig into a particular topic: * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/
paxcoder 5y ago
>most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC. [citation needed]
duxup 5y ago
We had a solution to scurvy in the late 1400s. And yet it was “lost” (for a variety of reasons) and was still killing people as late as 1911. https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Not sure if it is a myth, but hadn't we forgotten to build Saturn V engines?
- ihattendorf 5y ago
  IIRC we have (at least most of) the drawings, but they don't specify tolerances like modern drawings do and were more for reference as parts were developed at specific factories with existing molds. It's more the fabrication knowledge that would need to be rebuilt.
  - 0x138d5 5y ago
    In addition to that, a lot of stuff was crafted by hand with little or no documentation as to what was changed (no 'as-builts'). e: How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life (https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...)
- m4rtink 5y ago
  Not to mention there being a substantial advancements in engineering that make the F1 engines used by Saturn V basically obsolete. The Space X Merlins have a much better thrust-to-weight ratio in the same gas generator cycle class, the Russian RD-180 powering the Atlas V is using oxygen rich staged combustion and is much more efficient. And the current trend seems to be clearly liquid methane and liquid oxygen, covered by the phenomenal Raptor engine from Space X, the BE-4 from Blue origin and many smaller ones. So hardly any regression on the chemical rocket engine front - pretty much the opposite, thankfully! On the nuclear thermal rocket front on the other hand - yeah, we really did regress there. :P From almost flight ready NERVA examples in the 60s/70s to basically nothing even remotely flight ready today...
qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
Technology can regress by idiotic initiatives like banning advanced math https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke-equity-calculus/ https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke...
justinzollars 5y ago
Thank you for this talk, this is fantastic
bcrosby95 5y ago
I've seen that talk but it feels like putting the cart before the horse. The risk isn't in programming, it's in the CPUs themselves. C and ASM are still some of the most popular languages in the world. But for a modern CPU, there are machines in the production process that only a single company in the world can make. We're infinitely more likely to lose the capability to make a modern CPU than lose the capability to know how to code in C.
- bmn__ 5y ago
  > We're infinitely more likely to lose the capability to make a modern CPU than lose the capability to know how to code in C. I agree with this. I want to add that I think if the knowledge of modern CPUs is somehow lost, it won't be catastrophic, merely crippling, since there are literally tens of thousands of CS students every year learning how to build a CPU from electronic circuits. We will revert to slow and bulky CPUs, be able to run C on them, and in due time rediscover and reëngineer miniaturisation, superscalar multithreading, etc.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  The machines at the very top are the only ones at the very top, yes. But there are dozens of manufacturers and fabs building useful ICs slightly shy of the bleeding edge. Lots of microcontrollers, general-purpose ICs, and special purpose ICs are still very frequently made on 22nm and 45nm scales. And most of the hard trial-and-error discovery and experimentation has been done already, so it should not take 50 years to recover 50 years of historical progress. A process from 1970 can be done in the garage with 'just' a microscope and projector (and a lot of skill and hard work!): http://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/ http://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/
Conlectus 5y ago
I found this to be a compelling counterargument to Blow's alarmism about forgotten knowledge in tech https://www.datagubbe.se/endofciv/ https://www.datagubbe.se/endofciv/ A related point: numerically there are far more low level developers now than there were in past he idealizes. No such knowledge is being forgotten, it is used and innovated upon regularly. It may be in less frequent use, but is still there if needed.
- Vetch 5y ago
  Yeah, there is necessarily more specialization because there is vastly more knowledge than ever before. As a fraction of expertise, low level knowledge might be less but low level experts are more numerous than ever before. Rather than forgetting, the real risk might be knowledge production extending beyond our collective capacity to keep up and make sense of it.
scj 5y ago
I'd add to his argument, that the problem with software and uptime is that every time we add a layer of abstraction or library, the five 9s factor may apply. Math.pow(.99999, 1) - One dependency. Math.pow(.99999, 2) - Two dependencies. ... Math.pow(.99999, N) - N dependencies. And that assumes everyone is aiming for 99.999% uptime. Which isn't true. There's other factors, but that's the one I'd point out.
zuj 5y ago
Also, I, pencil comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
stopglobalism 5y ago
Holy cow, this is absolutely fascinating. Figured it deserves more than just an upvote-- This speaker you linked mentions another fascinating talk within his lecture: "1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed | Eric Cline" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4LRHJlijVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4LRHJlijVU

by rozab 5y ago

hnmullany 5y ago

Same way - the extended 3rd century crisis in the Roman Empire led to a loss of sculpting expertise. No art was commissioned for so long that skills weren't passed on.

bobthechef 5y ago
An example closer to home, though perhaps not as stark, is the loss of expertise in various industries that have been outsourced. The US is a good example. This is one (of many) arguments against outsourcing your industry just because it's cheaper and increases the profits of the outsourcing company. The tradition and culture that allows a certain industry to flourish is interrupted and destroyed and rebuilding that is no small task.
- jimhefferon 5y ago
  I had a summer job one year working on space stuff. I was in the clean room and the first day they took me back there, white suit and all, and took some ball bearings off a wire rack. They were maybe a foot in diameter. My job that summer was to test to see which were the least noisy. (Basically, they rotated very slowly, and there was a phono needle resting on the outside with a strip chart measuring the vibration caused when balls hit each other, etc.) The best ones were going up. They told me to be careful. These were the rejects from another project, but this project was legally required to use only US tech and the US no longer had the ability to manufacture bearings this large, since we had outsourced for some time and everyone who could do it got out of the business. So we needed these exact ones. (This was the late 70's.)
- toss1 5y ago
  Yup, this is a massive strategic blunder of historical scale. While the US and western countries are asleep at the switch and think that they are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, the Chinese have a 100- and 500- year plan and are exploiting our myopia for short-term profits to gain manufacturing expertise and military advantage. It may not be too late to reverse, but it is close. It is really the result of not thinking ahead and letting the business lobbies have what they want today, instead of putting long-term strategic considerations first. Different incentives, different results, tragedy of the commons all over again.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    A 100- and 500- year plan is ludicrous on it's face. They don't even credibly hit their 5 year plans a lot of the time. The idea of planning something so large and complex so far into the future seems like wishful thinking at best.
    - scrumper 5y ago
      I'm not sure I agree with that. Misses on short-term plans are a different concern to progress on a multi-century plan. Pig iron production might've missed its forecast for 2020, but it'd undeniable that China is building tremendous expertise in advanced manufacturing - and at a similar rate to that at which the west is shedding it.
      - ch4s3 5y ago
        Th narrative of "the west doesn't manufacture anything" is greatly oversold. The US makes more steel than it did 40 years ago, for example. Sure, we make fewer hairs and t-shirts, but it's natural for that stuff to chase lower labor costs. We're also an agricultural powerhouse. Now, for sure we have fallen a bit behind in making chips, but that may change.
        lowbloodsugar 5y ago
        So we are the Romans. We can make swords and bread! We'll do great in WWIII!
jlkuester7 5y ago
I was just reading an article on a nuclear power plant built (in Norway?) recently that mentioned how it was a considerably more difficult/costly project due to the fact that there was not sufficient expertise left in the West since so few reactors had been built over the past decades....

api 5y ago

I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, and most of all WYSIWYG GUI design software that worked exceptionally well. We had this on 80286 CPUs with 1MiB of RAM and similarly tiny machines. Today's desktop UIs are a fucking disaster on both the developer side and the user side. For developers you have a choice between a hypertext language hacked endlessly into a UI and native UI tooling that's far less intuitive and much uglier than what we had back then. Compare the UI designer (not the language) in Visual Basic in the 1990s to today. You could not only design but data bind a complex app that looked decent in 30 minutes. For users you have no consistency, no keyboard shortcuts (or different ones for every app), no help or help that only works online, etc.

sharemywin 5y ago
I miss VB. it was really easy to use. There are tools out there but you have to pay every month for them.
- kbr2000 5y ago
  Check Lazarus [0] for Free Pascal [1]. Another viable option would be Visual Tcl [2] for Tcl/Tk [3]. Given the event-based nature of Tcl and Tk, I find it matches well for a methodology like VB provided. And it's far from the only one I remember (although you'll need to do some research here [4]). For example, Komodo IDE used to have a Tk GUI builder that provided for the same kind of methodology, which has been split off in [5]. Enjoy! [0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [1] https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/ [2] http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/ http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/ [3] https://www.tcl-lang.org/ https://www.tcl-lang.org/ [4] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GUI+Building+Tools https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GUI+Building+Tools [5] http://spectcl.sourceforge.net/ http://spectcl.sourceforge.net/
- pjmlp 5y ago

Balarny 5y ago

I was hoping if I asked my other half who is an academic in the Classics he'd say this is untrue and I could then reply "well ackshully...". Alas it is true.

ceejayoz 5y ago

One of the interesting possibilities for the Fermi Paradox is the fact that we've wiped out the readily accessible deposits of iron, coal, oil, etc. A second go at the industrial revolution would be much harder, if we regressed that far.

gpm 5y ago
Coal, yes. Iron, wouldn't the iron we moved to the surface be even more accessible? We didn't destroy it, just rearranged and concentrated it?
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Guess what we do most of our iron smelting with?
  - x1f604 5y ago
    Primitive iron smelting was done with charcoal, I believe. Correct me if I'm wrong.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Yes. Being stuck at that point would be the problem.
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        Would it? Most new smelting plants today in the US (any built in the last few decades) use a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide as the reducing gases (natural gas primarily as feedstock, but no reason it couldn’t be about 90% hydrogen produced via, say, hydroelectricity or wind). Coal didn’t overtake charcoal for smelting iron in the US until the latter half of the 19th century, well after the first industrial revolution. Melting down scrap iron is one of the main sources of steel in the US, and that is done straight with electricity in arc furnaces. Coal accelerated the second industrial Revolution, but it was not essential. Far more important for enabling the first industrial Revolution was some of the early scientific knowledge about steam and pressure, such as the work of Robert Boyle, a lot of that based on a sort of reaction to the classics that had been revived in the Renaissance. The biggest argument for coal is indirectly in that it helped the viability of British society (after the island had most its tree cut down over the previous 500 years) which played an important role in the Scientific Revolution (Robert Boyle was Anglo-Irish)… although by the time Britain was playing an important role, the scientific Revolution was already underway on the mainland of Europe. As long as our books are not all destroyed, I think we’d have no problem bootstrapping from charcoal the second time around. (I think a lot about long term data storage… writing in stone or fired clay still seems like one of the best methods for writing that needs to last 10,000 years… it was, after all, preserved Greco-Roman classics that enabled the renaissance and therefore the scientific Revolution.)

chilling 5y ago

Really nice presentation. I think the bottleneck here is that developers creates tool for other developers to simplify their job and few decades later we end up with lots of handy and easy to use tools that just mask the real toughness of the problem. You can see it easily in web development with tools like React or even the CSS which is (IMHO) full of nasty hacks.

mc32 5y ago

Do we have any contemporaneous record of this mechanism, or have references to the device not survived for some reason? If such a device was considered advanced or cutting edge or of note back then then wouldn't we expect some reference to the device?

naikrovek 5y ago
very little from the past survives through to today. I don't think there is any record of this device existing other than the device itself, and mention of it after its discovery in the early 1900s. to some that will be proof that it is not truly an ancient device, and I think that is hogwash. most things just don't last that long, especially paper, which is where mention of the device would be found, if it ever is found.
- mc32 5y ago
  I don’t doubt it’s ancient. I’m not skeptic from that POV. I do find it curious that such an object would be exist but not have some fanfare around it. I’m sure there’s an explanation that eludes me. Could have been developed in some secrecy for example because it have the people who used it some advantage?
  - leephillips 5y ago
    I think naikrovek explained it. We have but a few scraps of information from the ancient world. There might very well have been a fanfare; it might have been a huge deal—and we might still have no record of any mention of it.
  - naikrovek 5y ago
    or maybe it was just a fairly common thing, then? the math used in the device is not complex, nor is its construction. it is only impressive to us because of what we assume about cultures of that time: that they are dumber than we are, less intelligent. they were just as smart as us, but they were far fewer in number, and had many more limitations than we have when it comes to the library of technologies and skills they can call on to accomplish their goals.

throw0101a 5y ago

> how technology can regress Anyone interested in 'rebooting' society after a major collapse can check out: > The thirteen chapter book starts off explaining how humanity and civilization works and has come to be and how this could possibly be altered in the event of worldwide disaster — such as avian flu. Leaving us with the essential question of what knowledge would we need to rebuild civilization as we know it, which Dartnell answers by looking at the history of science and technology. > Dartnell explains and realistically details a 'grace period' in which survivors can salvage food, materials and tools from the ruins of today's society. However, after a certain point this grace period would end, and humanity would have to produce their own food, make their own tools, practice hygiene and fight infection to maintain health, and develop energy stores for a new society to survive the aftermath. > The book covers topics like agriculture, food and clothing, substances, medicine, and transport. Darnell points out that applying the scientific method to basic knowledge will enable an advanced technological society to reappear within several generations. Along with giving the history of scientific invention and how that applies to humans were they to recreate that, the book also offers anecdotal bits of information in the form of endnotes. Giving facts such as how carrots were originally white but grown orange in honour of the Dutch royal family, and how onions are the leaves of the onion plant.[3] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_Our_World_from_Scratch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_... Full bibliography available if anyone wants to dig into a particular topic: * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/

paxcoder 5y ago

>most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC. [citation needed]

duxup 5y ago

We had a solution to scurvy in the late 1400s. And yet it was “lost” (for a variety of reasons) and was still killing people as late as 1911. https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Not sure if it is a myth, but hadn't we forgotten to build Saturn V engines?

ihattendorf 5y ago
IIRC we have (at least most of) the drawings, but they don't specify tolerances like modern drawings do and were more for reference as parts were developed at specific factories with existing molds. It's more the fabrication knowledge that would need to be rebuilt.
- 0x138d5 5y ago
  In addition to that, a lot of stuff was crafted by hand with little or no documentation as to what was changed (no 'as-builts'). e: How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life (https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...)
m4rtink 5y ago
Not to mention there being a substantial advancements in engineering that make the F1 engines used by Saturn V basically obsolete. The Space X Merlins have a much better thrust-to-weight ratio in the same gas generator cycle class, the Russian RD-180 powering the Atlas V is using oxygen rich staged combustion and is much more efficient. And the current trend seems to be clearly liquid methane and liquid oxygen, covered by the phenomenal Raptor engine from Space X, the BE-4 from Blue origin and many smaller ones. So hardly any regression on the chemical rocket engine front - pretty much the opposite, thankfully! On the nuclear thermal rocket front on the other hand - yeah, we really did regress there. :P From almost flight ready NERVA examples in the 60s/70s to basically nothing even remotely flight ready today...

qwertyuiop_ 5y ago

Technology can regress by idiotic initiatives like banning advanced math https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke-equity-calculus/ https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke...

justinzollars 5y ago

Thank you for this talk, this is fantastic

bcrosby95 5y ago

I've seen that talk but it feels like putting the cart before the horse. The risk isn't in programming, it's in the CPUs themselves. C and ASM are still some of the most popular languages in the world. But for a modern CPU, there are machines in the production process that only a single company in the world can make. We're infinitely more likely to lose the capability to make a modern CPU than lose the capability to know how to code in C.

bmn__ 5y ago
> We're infinitely more likely to lose the capability to make a modern CPU than lose the capability to know how to code in C. I agree with this. I want to add that I think if the knowledge of modern CPUs is somehow lost, it won't be catastrophic, merely crippling, since there are literally tens of thousands of CS students every year learning how to build a CPU from electronic circuits. We will revert to slow and bulky CPUs, be able to run C on them, and in due time rediscover and reëngineer miniaturisation, superscalar multithreading, etc.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
The machines at the very top are the only ones at the very top, yes. But there are dozens of manufacturers and fabs building useful ICs slightly shy of the bleeding edge. Lots of microcontrollers, general-purpose ICs, and special purpose ICs are still very frequently made on 22nm and 45nm scales. And most of the hard trial-and-error discovery and experimentation has been done already, so it should not take 50 years to recover 50 years of historical progress. A process from 1970 can be done in the garage with 'just' a microscope and projector (and a lot of skill and hard work!): http://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/ http://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/

Conlectus 5y ago

I found this to be a compelling counterargument to Blow's alarmism about forgotten knowledge in tech https://www.datagubbe.se/endofciv/ https://www.datagubbe.se/endofciv/ A related point: numerically there are far more low level developers now than there were in past he idealizes. No such knowledge is being forgotten, it is used and innovated upon regularly. It may be in less frequent use, but is still there if needed.

Vetch 5y ago
Yeah, there is necessarily more specialization because there is vastly more knowledge than ever before. As a fraction of expertise, low level knowledge might be less but low level experts are more numerous than ever before. Rather than forgetting, the real risk might be knowledge production extending beyond our collective capacity to keep up and make sense of it.

scj 5y ago

I'd add to his argument, that the problem with software and uptime is that every time we add a layer of abstraction or library, the five 9s factor may apply. Math.pow(.99999, 1) - One dependency. Math.pow(.99999, 2) - Two dependencies. ... Math.pow(.99999, N) - N dependencies. And that assumes everyone is aiming for 99.999% uptime. Which isn't true. There's other factors, but that's the one I'd point out.

zuj 5y ago

Also, I, pencil comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil

stopglobalism 5y ago

Holy cow, this is absolutely fascinating. Figured it deserves more than just an upvote-- This speaker you linked mentions another fascinating talk within his lecture: "1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed | Eric Cline" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4LRHJlijVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4LRHJlijVU