4 ms·

Technological Antisolutions

31 points by panic 3y ago

yellowapple 3y ago
> The message is clear – NPR expects its readers to be passive consumers of climate change solutions. I get the opposite impression from its headlines, at least when applying Betteridge's law: NPR presupposes that the technological solutions will be insufficiently effective, and that there's nothing to passively consume. All we can do is cope and hope that the socioeconomic and political systems that created this problem in the first place will somehow fix it. > SpaceX promises perhaps the dumbest solution to climate change possible: colonizing space. Elon Musk has convinced legions of people that it will be easier (or maybe better? more desirable?) to colonize Mars to save humanity than to avoid destroying the only planet where food literally grows on trees and water falls from the sky. 1. Elon Musk is not the (only) one doing that convincing; the idea that we could and should be expanding humanity's reach into the Solar System and beyond instead of confining it to a single planet that's already straining to support us predates Elon Musk's very existence. 2. It ain't just Mars. Mars is attractive because it's close and it has some far-future hope for terraforming, but as far as sustaining human life goes it ain't that great; there's a whole asteroid belt full of worlds chock-full of both water ice and hydrocarbons (meaning they've got the raw resources for food and water without needing to rely on Earth), and beyond that are the gas giants with dozens (hundreds, maybe) of moons with similar abundances of water and hydrocarbons. 3. Keeping the entirety of humanity confined to Earth is fundamentally unsustainable without either some very dramatic decreases in quality of life or mass exterminations that make the Holocaust look like child's play; even if we can freeze the population at its current number, the cat named "industrialization" is already out of Pandora's box, and the developing world is, well, developing. Space colonization is a vital pressure relief valve; the optimal end-game is to get the entirety of human industry and the vast majority of humans off Earth, so that Earth's biosphere can heal from the damage we've done to it over the last few centuries. The fact that Earth is the only planet where food literally grows on trees and water falls from the sky is exactly why preserving it is of utmost importance; anything that can be done beyond Earth must be done beyond Earth if we expect there to be any trees or water left on it in the coming centuries.
- okasaki 3y ago
  Humans will never thrive in space, unless we turn into digital brains housed in radiation-hardened robot bodies. In which case you might as well turn everyone on earth into digital brains in normal robot bodies and skip the space shit.
  - yellowapple 3y ago
    Never say never. Just because we have to put more effort into life support doesn't mean we have to forego our fleshy meatbags entirely to thrive.
    - xnx 3y ago
      Colonization of other planets/solar systems/galaxies by human bodies is so ridiculously difficult that becoming post-human becomes the practical choice.
      - yellowapple 3y ago
        I disagree, based on the fact that we're continuing to make further and further progress on manned space exploration v. borderline zero progress on becoming post-human; it's readily apparent, given existing progress, that the former is the more practical choice in the relatively-near-term by a rather wide margin.
camgunz 3y ago
"That line there at the end is the game. Self-driving cars are just worse trains, as evidenced by the time Musk had to actually attempt to deploy his vision, or lack thereof. These cars will require physically modifying the environment to make some sort of... let’s call it a “track." Had we spent those $100 billion dollars on a massive overhaul of American public transit, we could have already built the infrastructure we need to solve this crisis. Instead, we have made a few tech entrepreneurs very rich, and we are left with the same political problem as before." This is a pretty succinct indictment of capitalism. I think it was good to grow out of feudalism/mercantilism and I think central planning was a failure, but the current problems are: - bonkers inequality - bonkers waste Weirdly I think these problems are solved by taxation. It shouldn't have been possible to burn $100B on self-driving cars. Companies and billionaires aren't good at spending this kind of money, especially when we have so many humans in poverty and a looming climate change disaster.
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  SUVs are another example of extreme private waste. I have a lot of sympathy for the individual decisions of my neighbours to purchase range rovers so they don't have to endure the discomfort of potholes. However, it'd be much more efficient if we could somehow crowdfund that same expenditure towards improving the road surface so that all vehicles feel stable. Unfortunately general taxation is quite unsuccessful at fixing these infrastructure issues because resources always get allocated to whatever stakeholders have the most political power. No matter how big a government budget gets all the money seems to get absorbed into defence, healthcare, education, pensions and general administration.
  - brokenmachine 3y ago
    >range rovers so they don't have to endure the discomfort of potholes It's not about potholes, at least where I live. Those giant dickhead mobiles in the most affluent suburbs with the best roads have never seen dirt or a pothole.
dale_glass 3y ago
I disagree with this idea self-driving cars aren't coming. Maybe later than expected, but they are. I don't see the "pogo stick" thing as an unsolvable issue. You don't need to recognize every single weird thing that could show up on a road, you just need to have a way to deal with an unexpected obstacle showing up, and defaulting to gracefully braking. If somebody decides to exploit this by randomly wandering into the road, they'll do it in front of multiple cameras per car, which can be easily used to fine such people until it stops happening with any frequency. For some reason the self-driving car discussion gets bogged down in things that don't really need realistic consideration. Eg, the Trolley Problem. There's no need for a car to make some sort of AI driven decision whether "child" or "woman" is the best thing to run over, when it can just detect a generic obstacle and brake. The big problem right now is more that Tesla is trying to do it on the cheap and trying to do the job with too few sensors.
- YawningAngel 3y ago
  The question isn't whether it's possible to constrain the road environment such that self driving cars can work, but whether it's desirable. The article is simply answering in the negative.
- cryptonym 3y ago
  > The big problem right now is more that Tesla is trying to do it on the cheap and trying to do the job with too few sensors. I think you are oversimplifying the current issues with self-driving car and a bit too optimistic on industry's capacity to build reliable software for a self-driving car.
- belter 3y ago
  Solving self driving is not a problem of using the correct sensors. Is a problem of understanding the semantics of the situation ahead of you. - Does this ball running into the road, means a child might be running behind it? - Does the pedestrian on the sidewalk with headphones and looking at the other side, not seeing my vehicle and the red light, is going to cross anyway? - Since there is crashed truck on the road ahead, does this police officer making me signs to temporarily cross to the other side of the road, wants me to drive ahead ? Do I see its Ok anyway, because his colleague on the other side is holding the traffic coming this way? - Can I go off road for 2 minutes because the hole in front of me is too big and the off road track looks good? The discussion of how sensors are better than humans, and the systems don't get tired compared to humans misses all these. You can't solve a problem you started to work on under false premises or considerations of the problem space.
ralfd 3y ago
Climate change has to be technologically solved! (Or it won’t) - The coming massive Electrification of Industries needs technological solutions, from batteries to hydrogen infrastructure and new industrial processes - We need carbon capture, because not every CO2 is done by burning fossil fuels. For example concrete is a massive CO2 emitter which is not talked enough about it (aside from Bill Gates) - Public transport surely can help and should be fixed in the US, but it won’t save us. That is like a wishful thinking antisolution. Because billions of people in Africa, in India and Asia want mobility and will use an individual vehicle for that. Technology has to provide that. We shouldn’t bank on “silver bullets” like Fusion, but we do have silver bullets like Solar and Battery tech and Electrification.

31 points by panic 3y ago

> The message is clear – NPR expects its readers to be passive consumers of climate change solutions. I get the opposite impression from its headlines, at least when applying Betteridge's law: NPR presupposes that the technological solutions will be insufficiently effective, and that there's nothing to passively consume. All we can do is cope and hope that the socioeconomic and political systems that created this problem in the first place will somehow fix it. > SpaceX promises perhaps the dumbest solution to climate change possible: colonizing space. Elon Musk has convinced legions of people that it will be easier (or maybe better? more desirable?) to colonize Mars to save humanity than to avoid destroying the only planet where food literally grows on trees and water falls from the sky. 1. Elon Musk is not the (only) one doing that convincing; the idea that we could and should be expanding humanity's reach into the Solar System and beyond instead of confining it to a single planet that's already straining to support us predates Elon Musk's very existence. 2. It ain't just Mars. Mars is attractive because it's close and it has some far-future hope for terraforming, but as far as sustaining human life goes it ain't that great; there's a whole asteroid belt full of worlds chock-full of both water ice and hydrocarbons (meaning they've got the raw resources for food and water without needing to rely on Earth), and beyond that are the gas giants with dozens (hundreds, maybe) of moons with similar abundances of water and hydrocarbons. 3. Keeping the entirety of humanity confined to Earth is fundamentally unsustainable without either some very dramatic decreases in quality of life or mass exterminations that make the Holocaust look like child's play; even if we can freeze the population at its current number, the cat named "industrialization" is already out of Pandora's box, and the developing world is, well, developing. Space colonization is a vital pressure relief valve; the optimal end-game is to get the entirety of human industry and the vast majority of humans off Earth, so that Earth's biosphere can heal from the damage we've done to it over the last few centuries. The fact that Earth is the only planet where food literally grows on trees and water falls from the sky is exactly why preserving it is of utmost importance; anything that can be done beyond Earth must be done beyond Earth if we expect there to be any trees or water left on it in the coming centuries.

okasaki 3y ago
Humans will never thrive in space, unless we turn into digital brains housed in radiation-hardened robot bodies. In which case you might as well turn everyone on earth into digital brains in normal robot bodies and skip the space shit.
- yellowapple 3y ago
  Never say never. Just because we have to put more effort into life support doesn't mean we have to forego our fleshy meatbags entirely to thrive.
  - xnx 3y ago
    Colonization of other planets/solar systems/galaxies by human bodies is so ridiculously difficult that becoming post-human becomes the practical choice.
    - yellowapple 3y ago
      I disagree, based on the fact that we're continuing to make further and further progress on manned space exploration v. borderline zero progress on becoming post-human; it's readily apparent, given existing progress, that the former is the more practical choice in the relatively-near-term by a rather wide margin.

camgunz 3y ago

"That line there at the end is the game. Self-driving cars are just worse trains, as evidenced by the time Musk had to actually attempt to deploy his vision, or lack thereof. These cars will require physically modifying the environment to make some sort of... let’s call it a “track." Had we spent those $100 billion dollars on a massive overhaul of American public transit, we could have already built the infrastructure we need to solve this crisis. Instead, we have made a few tech entrepreneurs very rich, and we are left with the same political problem as before." This is a pretty succinct indictment of capitalism. I think it was good to grow out of feudalism/mercantilism and I think central planning was a failure, but the current problems are: - bonkers inequality - bonkers waste Weirdly I think these problems are solved by taxation. It shouldn't have been possible to burn $100B on self-driving cars. Companies and billionaires aren't good at spending this kind of money, especially when we have so many humans in poverty and a looming climate change disaster.

spacebanana7 3y ago
SUVs are another example of extreme private waste. I have a lot of sympathy for the individual decisions of my neighbours to purchase range rovers so they don't have to endure the discomfort of potholes. However, it'd be much more efficient if we could somehow crowdfund that same expenditure towards improving the road surface so that all vehicles feel stable. Unfortunately general taxation is quite unsuccessful at fixing these infrastructure issues because resources always get allocated to whatever stakeholders have the most political power. No matter how big a government budget gets all the money seems to get absorbed into defence, healthcare, education, pensions and general administration.
- brokenmachine 3y ago
  >range rovers so they don't have to endure the discomfort of potholes It's not about potholes, at least where I live. Those giant dickhead mobiles in the most affluent suburbs with the best roads have never seen dirt or a pothole.

dale_glass 3y ago

I disagree with this idea self-driving cars aren't coming. Maybe later than expected, but they are. I don't see the "pogo stick" thing as an unsolvable issue. You don't need to recognize every single weird thing that could show up on a road, you just need to have a way to deal with an unexpected obstacle showing up, and defaulting to gracefully braking. If somebody decides to exploit this by randomly wandering into the road, they'll do it in front of multiple cameras per car, which can be easily used to fine such people until it stops happening with any frequency. For some reason the self-driving car discussion gets bogged down in things that don't really need realistic consideration. Eg, the Trolley Problem. There's no need for a car to make some sort of AI driven decision whether "child" or "woman" is the best thing to run over, when it can just detect a generic obstacle and brake. The big problem right now is more that Tesla is trying to do it on the cheap and trying to do the job with too few sensors.

YawningAngel 3y ago
The question isn't whether it's possible to constrain the road environment such that self driving cars can work, but whether it's desirable. The article is simply answering in the negative.
cryptonym 3y ago
> The big problem right now is more that Tesla is trying to do it on the cheap and trying to do the job with too few sensors. I think you are oversimplifying the current issues with self-driving car and a bit too optimistic on industry's capacity to build reliable software for a self-driving car.
belter 3y ago
Solving self driving is not a problem of using the correct sensors. Is a problem of understanding the semantics of the situation ahead of you. - Does this ball running into the road, means a child might be running behind it? - Does the pedestrian on the sidewalk with headphones and looking at the other side, not seeing my vehicle and the red light, is going to cross anyway? - Since there is crashed truck on the road ahead, does this police officer making me signs to temporarily cross to the other side of the road, wants me to drive ahead ? Do I see its Ok anyway, because his colleague on the other side is holding the traffic coming this way? - Can I go off road for 2 minutes because the hole in front of me is too big and the off road track looks good? The discussion of how sensors are better than humans, and the systems don't get tired compared to humans misses all these. You can't solve a problem you started to work on under false premises or considerations of the problem space.

ralfd 3y ago

Climate change has to be technologically solved! (Or it won’t) - The coming massive Electrification of Industries needs technological solutions, from batteries to hydrogen infrastructure and new industrial processes - We need carbon capture, because not every CO2 is done by burning fossil fuels. For example concrete is a massive CO2 emitter which is not talked enough about it (aside from Bill Gates) - Public transport surely can help and should be fixed in the US, but it won’t save us. That is like a wishful thinking antisolution. Because billions of people in Africa, in India and Asia want mobility and will use an individual vehicle for that. Technology has to provide that. We shouldn’t bank on “silver bullets” like Fusion, but we do have silver bullets like Solar and Battery tech and Electrification.