8 ms·

Has anyone ever done a society re-bootstrapping from "mechanical computation" back to working chips? As in-a planetwide em-event knocks out all computation- how

Has anyone ever done a society re-bootstrapping from "mechanical computation" back to working chips? As in-a planetwide em-event knocks out all computation- how do we get factories like TSMC back on track? How do we keep food production going? Could we recover from zero, using only this set of mechanical computers and basic instructions

deleted 2y ago
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bondarchuk 2y ago
>Has anyone ever done a society re-bootstrapping from "mechanical computation" back to working chips? Thankfully not, since it hasn't been necessary yet... At any rate I would guess mental arithmetic would be much more practical than mechanical computers, and then we could probably skip straight to vacuum tubes and punch cards.
- Teever 2y ago
  Don't forget about analog computers like mechanical integrators or the anthykra mechanism. Any device that would allow you to automate the production of devices like gears and cam shafts would greatly increase the bootstrapping rate.
  - bondarchuk 2y ago
    A mold is such a device. Doesn't have to be a mechanical computer per se.
- hypercube33 2y ago
  Reading this thread I feel like I'm alive in the Star Trek universe. yesterday an article about warp drive, now discussing rebooting society after a global event and optical computers... interesting
abound 2y ago
CollapseOS [1] comes to mind, but that's more about bootstrapping simple chips for directing power as opposed to rebooting society, but one could argue that the two go hand in hand. [1] http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/
- lawlessone 2y ago
  Interesting. I had been thinking for a while of how i could fine tune an LLM for this sort of thing. It would act as oracle of sorts for how to start farming, build machines, etc. The power and hardware requirements would kind of make it useless though.
  - burnished 2y ago
    The real deal breaker is probably the part where it would confabulate details in processes where the details are important. I'm just imagining trying to learn farming techniques from an oracle that might instruct me to make fertilizer that sounded sensible but caused nitrogen burn.
candiddevmike 2y ago
> As in-a planetwide em-event knocks out all computation This is an impossible scenario. There will always be working computers somewhere, either shielded, excluded from the disaster, or by luck. Now they may not be the easiest thing to get to, and if all you can find is an iPhone or some other trusted compute platform you're probably SOL.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > and if all you can find is an iPhone or some other trusted compute platform you're probably SOL. Good point. The computer age is already poised to become a historical dark age; increasing adoption of trusted computing is only going to make this more severe. On the other hand, some of it is necessary; on the other, security is the sworn enemy of sugar, spice and everything nice.
- RodgerTheGreat 2y ago
  A scenario where general-purpose "unlocked" computers become extremely rare and nearly every computing device is a non-user-programmable appliance designed not to function without remote servers and regularly cycled cryptographic keys seems possible, though not inevitable. It would be a very stupid kind of apocalypse to live through if a solar storm didn't destroy many actual computers but did enough damage to brick 99.999% of the computers that survived intact, and left civilization with a crippling bootstrapping problem of capital's own design.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    > left civilization with a crippling bootstrapping problem of capital's own design Sounds like the delicious irony humanity is known for.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  >if all you can find is an iPhone or some other trusted compute platform you're probably SOL This reason alone should be impetus, for national security reasons, to severely tax products containing universal machines the device owner does not have full control over (by additional purposeful actions beyond owners' simple ignorance of the technology). I say a 100% sales tax on the retail price is fair, all tax proceeds going to fund GNU-compatible competition to the likes of iPhone and Playstation (and your proprietary microwave, and car, and TV, and ...). A post collapse society having to deal with iPhones hopefully will adopt the [corporate] death penalty for proprietary shenanigans like this. It is borderline treasonous how many people will die because your product's bootloader was locked! Unforeseen consequences, Gordon.
complaintdept 2y ago
I'm not convinced society would be able to recover after a collapse. We've extracted the easy to get resources already and what's left is extracted and refined with some really advanced technology. We can recycle a bunch of stuff, but that will only get you so far. On top of that, most of our knowledge is stored digitally, much of it in proprietary formats. If we don't somehow manage to recover it before the existing expertise dies out (assuming enough of it survives the initial catastrophe) we may not get it back for a very long time, if ever.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  We would be at a huge disadvantage on the energy front. Most easily accessible fossil fuels are gone. Some countries have oil deposits that can be reasonably extracted now that the holes are made, but those places are few and far between. On the other hand there would be vast resources of refined steel, aluminum and other metals. The average home contains materials that would make a monarch from 200 years ago jealous. Not to mention invaluable machinery like precision lathes. You just need to find a way to power them. Without a readily available source for fertilizer and the supply chains necessary for modern agriculture we couldn't possibly feed more than a billion people or so. But whatever society rises from the ashes of that catastrophe could use the abundant building materials to harness water and wind energy and climb back up the technological ladder. Computing would be pretty low priority though, first we would need to get farming back on track. Without modern farming you need most of the population to work in agriculture, preventing you from making any significant progress in other fields.
  - thechao 2y ago
    Wind. Wind, by itself, without storage, isn't great for our version of civilization. However, it'd totally be workable for 19th c, at least, if not early 20th c. If there were clever storage solutions, you could run our civilization, but at a lower per capita energy budget, to begin with.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
MrsPeaches 2y ago
Biggest issue is surely speed? Computers are measured in MHz and GHz. How do you even get close to that using mechanical means? Speed is also a core value proposition (to use contemporary parlance) of computers I.e computers can carry out calculations at a rate of MHz/Ghz. If you want to talk in any meaningful sense of “computation”, and the usefulness thereof, speed of computation is a key metric. I reckon cooling would be an even bigger concern than it is currently.
- richk449 2y ago
  If you have no computers, getting to kHz is a huge advantage. Eniac ran at 100kHz (I think) and it was revolutionary.
- omoikane 2y ago
  Note that mechanical computers aren't the only alternative to electric computers, biological computing is another area of active research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing Speed and cooling might be less of an issue considering the scale which biological processes operate. Although biological computing sounds a lot like just doing everything by hand: https://xkcd.com/2173/ https://xkcd.com/2173/
  - throwAGIway 2y ago
    You can't get biological computers without having very high speed computers though. This field of biology is very reliant on computer analysis.
  - denton-scratch 2y ago
    For many years I've wanted to build a digital clock out of fluid gates. The medium would be clear water; the 7-segment display would consist of transparent tubes, into which stained oil is pushed to activate a segment. I think a gate would probably be some kind of vortex. I've never tried to build it, because - I don't know anything about fluid mechanics - The 'exhaust' is water, so I could only really operate this thing in the bath
milkshakes 2y ago
not mechanical computers but http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/
retrac 2y ago
Babbage went down the wrong rabbit hole. The technology of the 1860s was sufficient to make an automatic programmable computer. If you can make (or salvage) wire, and make simple sheet metal parts (brass will do) then you can make electromagnets, which means you can make relays. And there you go. No multimedia streaming, but automatic control and communication at a distance, yes.
- nine_k 2y ago
  You would need plenty of electricity though. BTW one of my favorite crazy ideas is that by the times of the Middle Kingdom, ancient Egypt had all the material resources needed to build a phone system, or at least a telegraph system, very useful in a large country. Zinc and silver to create batteries. Plentiful copper, gold, and silver to create any kinds of wires, and techniques to finely process it. Some amounts of magnetic ferrous alloys from meteorites, and likely access to iron ores to produce more. Only very small amounts are needed for kernels of electromagnets and membranes. Paper and resin-based glues could be used to produce wire insulation. Very certainly they were able to work any available materials with good precision and sophistication. What they lacked was a good theory required to connect the pieces into a working phone system, like that of late 19th century. I sometimes think about what we are currently oblivious of, because certainly we have a plethora of resources to work with. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel))
  - roughly 2y ago
    I’m actually curious about the linguistics of something like a telegraph for ancient Egypt - I’m not particularly familiar with the Egyptian writing system from that era, but a strongly pictographic language, and one in which they seemed to regularly intersperse actual pictures and do things like manipulate symbol size to convey information doesn’t seem to immediately suggest translation to an encoding like Morse like phonetic written languages do. In other words, if the ancient Egyptians had found themselves with the technology to create something like a telegraph, I wonder what they would have done with it - what possibilities suggest themselves given the visual representation of the Egyptian language. (I could actually see something like the Incan quipu being a much easier translation, if we’re talking premodern “written” languages)
brookst 2y ago
Not exactly that, but Souls in the Great Machine explores a society that relies entirely on mechanical computers. Good book.
bee_rider 2y ago
What do you mean, done a society? Like a simulation or a thought experiment (plenty, I’m sure, with “varying” levels of rigor). Actually run the experiment? I’m sure not. Anyway it is generally impossible I’m pretty sure to do a “let’s build a society” experiment. Even if you try really hard, it always favors strategies that have a positive expected value but an unacceptably high chance of failure, right? Like you know the worst case if you actually fail is that you return to the real world and go to the hospital, so it is fine to take a risk that would give you like a 5% chance of getting an infection and dying. This has a 95% chance of working out but you’ll get a critical failure if you roll the dice over many generations.
duped 2y ago
The big problem is that modern chip manufacturing is impossible without the petrochemical industry, which itself needs the petrochemical industry to operate. The modern industrialized economy is built on industrial chemical production which stems from oil. If we lose the ability to extract or distribute oil it's going to be hard to bootstrap society. But if that happens we're all going to die from common infections and starvation before we worry about getting YouTube back online.
dudinax 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine
dekhn 2y ago
Only in science fiction, I think. See https://www.amazon.com/Souls-Great-Machine-Greatwinter-Trilogy/dp/0312872569 https://www.amazon.com/Souls-Great-Machine-Greatwinter-Trilo... in which case natural neural-based computers are used to implement digital computation. I imagine the folks who built this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Tumble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Tumble may have used computers to design/optimize the parts.
lachlan_gray 2y ago
Not the practical angle, but the book _Code_ by Charles Petzold explains how to make a “computer” out of (a large number of) telegraphs https://codehiddenlanguage.com/ https://codehiddenlanguage.com/ I love this book because it does so in such a playful and imaginative way that you might not realize you are learning exactly how a computer works. But you are..
mikepurvis 2y ago
Most post-collapse writing I've seen presumes a very long tail of salvageable computation devices not to mention batteries, LEDs, motors, solar panels, plus tools like oscilloscopes and soldering stations, etc that would all assist in the re-bootstrapping effort. Assuming a planetwide em event is a pretty major wrench in the works and definitely puts you back a lot further in terms of how to rebuild the technology ecosystem.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bondarchuk 2y ago

>Has anyone ever done a society re-bootstrapping from "mechanical computation" back to working chips? Thankfully not, since it hasn't been necessary yet... At any rate I would guess mental arithmetic would be much more practical than mechanical computers, and then we could probably skip straight to vacuum tubes and punch cards.

Teever 2y ago
Don't forget about analog computers like mechanical integrators or the anthykra mechanism. Any device that would allow you to automate the production of devices like gears and cam shafts would greatly increase the bootstrapping rate.
- bondarchuk 2y ago
  A mold is such a device. Doesn't have to be a mechanical computer per se.
hypercube33 2y ago
Reading this thread I feel like I'm alive in the Star Trek universe. yesterday an article about warp drive, now discussing rebooting society after a global event and optical computers... interesting

abound 2y ago

CollapseOS [1] comes to mind, but that's more about bootstrapping simple chips for directing power as opposed to rebooting society, but one could argue that the two go hand in hand. [1] http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/

lawlessone 2y ago
Interesting. I had been thinking for a while of how i could fine tune an LLM for this sort of thing. It would act as oracle of sorts for how to start farming, build machines, etc. The power and hardware requirements would kind of make it useless though.
- burnished 2y ago
  The real deal breaker is probably the part where it would confabulate details in processes where the details are important. I'm just imagining trying to learn farming techniques from an oracle that might instruct me to make fertilizer that sounded sensible but caused nitrogen burn.

candiddevmike 2y ago

> As in-a planetwide em-event knocks out all computation This is an impossible scenario. There will always be working computers somewhere, either shielded, excluded from the disaster, or by luck. Now they may not be the easiest thing to get to, and if all you can find is an iPhone or some other trusted compute platform you're probably SOL.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
> and if all you can find is an iPhone or some other trusted compute platform you're probably SOL. Good point. The computer age is already poised to become a historical dark age; increasing adoption of trusted computing is only going to make this more severe. On the other hand, some of it is necessary; on the other, security is the sworn enemy of sugar, spice and everything nice.
RodgerTheGreat 2y ago
A scenario where general-purpose "unlocked" computers become extremely rare and nearly every computing device is a non-user-programmable appliance designed not to function without remote servers and regularly cycled cryptographic keys seems possible, though not inevitable. It would be a very stupid kind of apocalypse to live through if a solar storm didn't destroy many actual computers but did enough damage to brick 99.999% of the computers that survived intact, and left civilization with a crippling bootstrapping problem of capital's own design.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  > left civilization with a crippling bootstrapping problem of capital's own design Sounds like the delicious irony humanity is known for.
rustcleaner 2y ago
>if all you can find is an iPhone or some other trusted compute platform you're probably SOL This reason alone should be impetus, for national security reasons, to severely tax products containing universal machines the device owner does not have full control over (by additional purposeful actions beyond owners' simple ignorance of the technology). I say a 100% sales tax on the retail price is fair, all tax proceeds going to fund GNU-compatible competition to the likes of iPhone and Playstation (and your proprietary microwave, and car, and TV, and ...). A post collapse society having to deal with iPhones hopefully will adopt the [corporate] death penalty for proprietary shenanigans like this. It is borderline treasonous how many people will die because your product's bootloader was locked! Unforeseen consequences, Gordon.

complaintdept 2y ago

I'm not convinced society would be able to recover after a collapse. We've extracted the easy to get resources already and what's left is extracted and refined with some really advanced technology. We can recycle a bunch of stuff, but that will only get you so far. On top of that, most of our knowledge is stored digitally, much of it in proprietary formats. If we don't somehow manage to recover it before the existing expertise dies out (assuming enough of it survives the initial catastrophe) we may not get it back for a very long time, if ever.

wongarsu 2y ago
We would be at a huge disadvantage on the energy front. Most easily accessible fossil fuels are gone. Some countries have oil deposits that can be reasonably extracted now that the holes are made, but those places are few and far between. On the other hand there would be vast resources of refined steel, aluminum and other metals. The average home contains materials that would make a monarch from 200 years ago jealous. Not to mention invaluable machinery like precision lathes. You just need to find a way to power them. Without a readily available source for fertilizer and the supply chains necessary for modern agriculture we couldn't possibly feed more than a billion people or so. But whatever society rises from the ashes of that catastrophe could use the abundant building materials to harness water and wind energy and climb back up the technological ladder. Computing would be pretty low priority though, first we would need to get farming back on track. Without modern farming you need most of the population to work in agriculture, preventing you from making any significant progress in other fields.
- thechao 2y ago
  Wind. Wind, by itself, without storage, isn't great for our version of civilization. However, it'd totally be workable for 19th c, at least, if not early 20th c. If there were clever storage solutions, you could run our civilization, but at a lower per capita energy budget, to begin with.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago

MrsPeaches 2y ago

Biggest issue is surely speed? Computers are measured in MHz and GHz. How do you even get close to that using mechanical means? Speed is also a core value proposition (to use contemporary parlance) of computers I.e computers can carry out calculations at a rate of MHz/Ghz. If you want to talk in any meaningful sense of “computation”, and the usefulness thereof, speed of computation is a key metric. I reckon cooling would be an even bigger concern than it is currently.

richk449 2y ago
If you have no computers, getting to kHz is a huge advantage. Eniac ran at 100kHz (I think) and it was revolutionary.
omoikane 2y ago
Note that mechanical computers aren't the only alternative to electric computers, biological computing is another area of active research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing Speed and cooling might be less of an issue considering the scale which biological processes operate. Although biological computing sounds a lot like just doing everything by hand: https://xkcd.com/2173/ https://xkcd.com/2173/
- throwAGIway 2y ago
  You can't get biological computers without having very high speed computers though. This field of biology is very reliant on computer analysis.
- denton-scratch 2y ago
  For many years I've wanted to build a digital clock out of fluid gates. The medium would be clear water; the 7-segment display would consist of transparent tubes, into which stained oil is pushed to activate a segment. I think a gate would probably be some kind of vortex. I've never tried to build it, because - I don't know anything about fluid mechanics - The 'exhaust' is water, so I could only really operate this thing in the bath

milkshakes 2y ago

not mechanical computers but http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/

retrac 2y ago

Babbage went down the wrong rabbit hole. The technology of the 1860s was sufficient to make an automatic programmable computer. If you can make (or salvage) wire, and make simple sheet metal parts (brass will do) then you can make electromagnets, which means you can make relays. And there you go. No multimedia streaming, but automatic control and communication at a distance, yes.

nine_k 2y ago
You would need plenty of electricity though. BTW one of my favorite crazy ideas is that by the times of the Middle Kingdom, ancient Egypt had all the material resources needed to build a phone system, or at least a telegraph system, very useful in a large country. Zinc and silver to create batteries. Plentiful copper, gold, and silver to create any kinds of wires, and techniques to finely process it. Some amounts of magnetic ferrous alloys from meteorites, and likely access to iron ores to produce more. Only very small amounts are needed for kernels of electromagnets and membranes. Paper and resin-based glues could be used to produce wire insulation. Very certainly they were able to work any available materials with good precision and sophistication. What they lacked was a good theory required to connect the pieces into a working phone system, like that of late 19th century. I sometimes think about what we are currently oblivious of, because certainly we have a plethora of resources to work with. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel))
- roughly 2y ago
  I’m actually curious about the linguistics of something like a telegraph for ancient Egypt - I’m not particularly familiar with the Egyptian writing system from that era, but a strongly pictographic language, and one in which they seemed to regularly intersperse actual pictures and do things like manipulate symbol size to convey information doesn’t seem to immediately suggest translation to an encoding like Morse like phonetic written languages do. In other words, if the ancient Egyptians had found themselves with the technology to create something like a telegraph, I wonder what they would have done with it - what possibilities suggest themselves given the visual representation of the Egyptian language. (I could actually see something like the Incan quipu being a much easier translation, if we’re talking premodern “written” languages)

brookst 2y ago

Not exactly that, but Souls in the Great Machine explores a society that relies entirely on mechanical computers. Good book.

bee_rider 2y ago

What do you mean, done a society? Like a simulation or a thought experiment (plenty, I’m sure, with “varying” levels of rigor). Actually run the experiment? I’m sure not. Anyway it is generally impossible I’m pretty sure to do a “let’s build a society” experiment. Even if you try really hard, it always favors strategies that have a positive expected value but an unacceptably high chance of failure, right? Like you know the worst case if you actually fail is that you return to the real world and go to the hospital, so it is fine to take a risk that would give you like a 5% chance of getting an infection and dying. This has a 95% chance of working out but you’ll get a critical failure if you roll the dice over many generations.

duped 2y ago

The big problem is that modern chip manufacturing is impossible without the petrochemical industry, which itself needs the petrochemical industry to operate. The modern industrialized economy is built on industrial chemical production which stems from oil. If we lose the ability to extract or distribute oil it's going to be hard to bootstrap society. But if that happens we're all going to die from common infections and starvation before we worry about getting YouTube back online.

dudinax 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine

dekhn 2y ago

Only in science fiction, I think. See https://www.amazon.com/Souls-Great-Machine-Greatwinter-Trilogy/dp/0312872569 https://www.amazon.com/Souls-Great-Machine-Greatwinter-Trilo... in which case natural neural-based computers are used to implement digital computation. I imagine the folks who built this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Tumble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Tumble may have used computers to design/optimize the parts.

lachlan_gray 2y ago

Not the practical angle, but the book _Code_ by Charles Petzold explains how to make a “computer” out of (a large number of) telegraphs https://codehiddenlanguage.com/ https://codehiddenlanguage.com/ I love this book because it does so in such a playful and imaginative way that you might not realize you are learning exactly how a computer works. But you are..

mikepurvis 2y ago

Most post-collapse writing I've seen presumes a very long tail of salvageable computation devices not to mention batteries, LEDs, motors, solar panels, plus tools like oscilloscopes and soldering stations, etc that would all assist in the re-bootstrapping effort. Assuming a planetwide em event is a pretty major wrench in the works and definitely puts you back a lot further in terms of how to rebuild the technology ecosystem.