No AI/No Supercomputers: Complexity Limits?

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by whswhs

And yet, though biology is in one sense reducible to physics, for human purposes it's a largely independent discipline and one that's likely to be just as important to us. It's already made some changes that affect the texture of life; for example, when I read last night of Hawking's death I thought, "76? That seems a bit young, but given his health problems I suppose it's not." A century ago, dying at 76 would have been considered a full life and maybe a bit extra. The big older population is having a massive impact on human societies.

Fifty five years ago Hawking was given two years to live. Medicine just managed to stay ahead of that for a long time.

[Flyndaran]

And his ALS was a slower form than was commonly known back then. That's an important fact too. It's not the miracle that some imply.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

And his ALS was a slower form than was commonly known back then. That's an important fact too. It's not the miracle that some imply.

That said, I still wouldn't bet on making it to 76 with ALS if limited to 1960s medical tech.

[Flyndaran]

I wouldn't bet on making it to 76 now.
But I would say modern medicine helped to keep him from getting lethal secondary issues from decades long paralysis.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by VonKatzen

A major point of technical advancement is economics. No matter what you know and can do in theory you actually need a massive supply chain to produce it. Making a modern handgun in the middle ages might be technically possible but it would require so much precision, effort, time and money that you could produce hundreds or thousands of crossbows for the same cost. Even assuming they knew how, therefor, no one in the middle ages would bother with making an HK USP, because you could equip an army for the same price.

This is a big problem with a lot of Science! predictions as they currently stand. Making microscopic machines out of supercarbon is entirely possible, but it's also entirely impractical. A lot of the sci-fi community extrapolates based on technical data without adequately considering the resources, division of labor and supply chains required to make such advancements actually useful.

Unquestionably. One of the tropes of SF that is 90% nonsense is that technological developments determine everything else about a society. In reality, there are complicated feedback loops in place, technology shapes society but so do many many other things. Two different societies might be reshaped by the same technology in totally different directions, depending on religion, culture, history, etc.

The Apollo Project is arguably comparable to the 'handgun in the Middle Ages' example. It worked, but it worked in a way that isn't really a practical bridge to further developments. It was useful, but it was an example of an accomplishment literally ahead of its time.

Another example: Europe 'discovered' the Americas at least once before Columbus, probably twice, quietly likely many times. In the previous instances, nothing much came of it because the circumstances were not right for anything to come of it. Everything came together in the 1500s.

Likewise for future-tech is that consequent advances in the technical arts and economic productive capacities in some areas may not lead to existing technology being replaced at all. Handguns are a perfect example. Lasers have been used for decades, but so far no laser weapon has ever been used in battlefield conditions - even the far less impressive 'dazzler' type of laser. And while ten or twenty years down the road may make a man-portable-flesh-boiler sufficiently rugged and effective to be used one can likewise infer that many of those same advancements could be used to produce virtually indestructible rifles with a hundred rounds of ammunition that only weigh as much as modern guns. Since the accuracy of firearms already exceeds the visual and coordination capabilities of 99% of soldiers the technical improvements in lasers may be completely irrelevant.

More likely, lasers will be used for specific applications where they are superior to 'conventional' weapons. They do have advantages, and if the downsides could be eliminated for some purposes they would likely be very useful. OTOH, I'm not sure the classic SFnal 'laser sidearm' makes sense in most situations, though its lack of need for ammunition would have its uses.

Modern ships utilize very similar overall designs to sailing ships and longships. The materials are different and so are the engines, but the basic idea is to make a boat that doesn't sink in high seas.

True, but the application of steam power was a genuine technological revolution at sea. It's an improvement big enough to be called something profoundly new, a steamship is orders of magnitude better than a sailing ship for most purposes, esp. military ones, enough better that it relegates sailing ships to niche applications.

Most subsequent marine tech has been refinements, though fission power for submarines was the key ingredient to make them come into their own.

Need to defend yourself? Well, you could build a rail gun or a laser onto it, but it seems like cannons and missiles are still the preferred option.

A rail gun, broadly speaking, can be classified as a kind of cannon. It may eventually have advantages big enough to be a practical weapon, but it's not a revolution in the same sense the initial cannon was.

Lasers might be different. It's too soon to say.

Another point: earlier today I was reading a post where someone said that Dyson Spheres are definitely possible. Well, they may be logically consistent mechanical designs but they may be totally impossible from a physical point of view. It may be impossible to ever actually acquire the sheer mass and type of materials required to build one (even a Ringworld would require multiple solar systems of matter). If the curmudgeons are right space is mostly useless because it's too inhospitable and everything is too far apart.

Which is a little like a group of Bronze Age Egyptian soldiers of the Pharaoh debating between the optimists and the pessimists as they discuss the viability of skyscrapers. Dyson Spheres and Ringworlds are Kardashev II level technology, which is to us as we are to the Bronze Age. Anything we say on the subject, optimist or curmudgeon, is a WAG. We probably don't even have the necessary knowledge to frame the discussion correctly. Even theh comparison 'to us as we are to the Bronze Age' is probably too ignorant to be accurate.

For the resources it would require to mine asteroids or build a settlement on Mars you could build an entire city with super maglev trains that would hold thousands or millions of times as many people in a far more accessible and comfortable location. Literally everything is already on Earth, which is better than any space station that could ever be built. Thus even with super-levels of tech there may be virtually no space infrastructure outside of NEO because it's simply not worth doing.

That same logic disproves the European colonization of North America. Yet it happened. Ditto Australia.

'Humanity' doesn't exist. There are only humans, and they do things for individual and group reasons that undercut that sort of analysis. For ex, Earth is more liveable than Mars, unquestionably. Therefore why would anyone live on Mars?

What? Your neighbors on Earth own all the nice good land and resources and won't share, and some of them would like to eviscerate you? Well, Mars might be second-best territory, but at least you're a long way away from the crazies next door...

It made no logical sense, in economic terms, for the Puritans to travel across 3000 miles of ocean to settle Massachusetts Bay. There were endless reasons not to do it...except of course that the cultural and religious disputes of the time turned those reasons inside out.

And no, Antarctica is not a counter-example, because it's no longer far enough away in technological terms for the comparisons to even apply under current conditions. Future conditions might change that, of course.

The point is that even a very high tech society might resemble ours in most ways. I think that, ideological and centralization differences aside, ancient Rome was a lot closer to modern societies than people might think.

But you cannot put ideological, cultural, religious, social, etc. differences aside, without invalidating the comparison. Yes, there are parallels between the Empire and today, and even more parallels between the first century B.C. Roman Republic and today, some of them unnervingly close. But Western Christendom and Classical Civilization are still very different.

Likewise with warfare - if you can open a hole in space time you can destroy the entire solar system with one attack. In fact the sheer energy concentration required to do so would probably destroy the solar system even if that wasn't your intent.

Non sequitur. We don't have the slightest idea what would be required to open portals across space time, out grasp of physics on such matters is so limited that even if it's possible, we can't stay much about what it could or could not do. We can do some speculative guesswork based on our grasp of physics, but that's all it really is. We don't even know what a 'hole in space time' would be.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I wouldn't bet on making it to 76 now.
But I would say modern medicine helped to keep him from getting lethal secondary issues from decades long paralysis.

And modern electronics enabled him to use his intellect and communicate and operate in ways that would have been quite impossible, or impractical, for a person in the same medical state not so long before.

[Boomerang]

I like the idea of a TL10 society without AI for game based reasons even if it isn't realistic. I want the PC humans to be the space explorers of the future even though it makes far more sense to send robots. I think the Dune universe for example would make for a very interesting gurps setting.

[Crystalline_Entity]

I think for me, the key requirement for a game at high TL would be that you couldn't just ask a computer to fix the problem for you. You need to keep the agency of the characters, and that might mean limiting AI - there's no reason you can't play an AI, of course, but whatever sort of characters you're thinking of, they need to have something to do. If it's just "oh, I ask my AI to sort that out while my PC continues to live in a post-scarcity utopia", that's probably going to get dull quickly (though if you find that fun, go for it!).

[VonKatzen]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

More likely, lasers will be used for specific applications where they are superior to 'conventional' weapons. They do have advantages, and if the downsides could be eliminated for some purposes they would likely be very useful. OTOH, I'm not sure the classic SFnal 'laser sidearm' makes sense in most situations, though its lack of need for ammunition would have its uses.

Lasers make quite a bit of sense in space, where you don't need to use oxygen for gunpowder explosions and the recoil of magnetic cannons might be undesirable from a maneuver point of view. And the fact that space is a superbly clean tactical environment means you can get good images out to thousands of kilometers and land shots with virtually perfect accuracy before the enemy even knows you've fired. Ships would also probably have fission plants, as submarines do, which means that power is a lot cheaper than chemical explosives or slugs. But that is supposing that there are enough people in space and enough worthwhile material to bother fighting over.

Which is a little like a group of Bronze Age Egyptian soldiers of the Pharaoh debating between the optimists and the pessimists as they discuss the viability of skyscrapers.

I tend to think that the 'FTL travel is not possible' arguments are pretty solid, as solid as literally any physical theory so far developed. It's better understood than gravity, which everyone seems to take for granted. If so then the unimaginable gulfs between large stellar objects would make even starting such a project virtually impossible, and then you'd have to move all that stuff around, etc. I can't see it ever being viable unless you're talking something so god-like that a localized habitat would seem entirely superfluous.

It made no logical sense, in economic terms, for the Puritans to travel across 3000 miles of ocean to settle Massachusetts Bay.

I don't think that's quite true. For one thing, the technology to develop the Americas was quite similar to what was used to develop Europe. And lots of farmers made quite a good living, even in the early days. Poorer than Europe, yes - but it wasn't like it cost a billion dollars to get to North America or the West Indies.

The scale of distances is also not remotely comparable. The distance between the continents and the distance between planets are several orders of magnitude greater.

I agree with basically every word of this blog post from cybereconomics on why interstellar travel is impossible. Solar system colonization is a far less spectacular engineering feat, but suffers from most of the same problems. I not only think it's technically unfeasible I also think it's basically pointless. Eventually there may be some people further out into the solar system - as massive supply chains and gradually built up - but it won't be remotely like 'going to America'. America is not an uninhabitable Hellscape, which every single extraterrestrial body is. America was possible to colonize by siberian primitives on foot. Modern humans would die instantly anywhere else in the solar system, or in a few hours/days with the most advanced technology possible. And unlike the already sophisticated ship fleets and technology that had been developed for traveling across oceans (of which American colonization was merely an application) there exists no comparable technology to survive in and resupply over the much, much greater gaps in local space. Interstellar space travel is, I believe, basically a religious fad.

I also tend to believe that any society sufficiently advanced to overcome these difficulties would no longer be inhabited by human beings, and would probably not bother. Perhaps there may be robots spreading across the solar system like a steel cancer, but people? Nah. Really, if the Science! futurologists were accurate they ought to consider more than biological mankind is going to be extinct, and not just because 'evil robots destroy us' but because hyper-advanced AI replaces humans in all functions and we become nothing but pets incapable of competing from them and have all our agency and material resources stripped away. I think simple Darwinism would lead to that. It's also possible that many people would convert themselves into cyborgs indistinguishable from super-machines. If biological human beings exist into the higher 'TL' it will because a lot of stuff like nanomachines, super power sources, etc. are not possible or too expensive to bother with. I am by no means a convinced transhumanist, but if a lot of the science fiction technologies are possible then I think they lead there invariably.

But you cannot put ideological, cultural, religious, social, etc. differences aside, without invalidating the comparison.

These things certainly matter in terms of the contours of society, but there are physical and economic laws that don't change, regardless of where you go and who you are. There are a lot of differences, of course - for example, compared to modern bureaucratic states the ancient empires were virtually in a state of anarchy. It was simply physically impossible to support that large of a population of people who don't actually produce things, even if everyone had been willing to do so.

Non sequitur. We don't have the slightest idea what would be required to open portals across space time, out grasp of physics on such matters is so limited that even if it's possible, we can't stay much about what it could or could not do. We can do some speculative guesswork based on our grasp of physics, but that's all it really is. We don't even know what a 'hole in space time' would be.

We have some pretty good ideas about the tension of space, as well as certain laws like thermodynamics. While it is in principle possible that some unknown force could bridge these gaps it's still likely to have the exact effects I mentioned - releasing huge masses of heat energy merely as a side effect of being turned on. Also, any potential imaginary force that powerful would also have to coincide with all the other historical events ever recorded which conform to the standard model of particle physics in almost every way we can test. I'm not ruling out an X-Force, I'm just saying that it's pretty unlikely and if it exists it's still probably going to play with the same parameters of things like mass-energy. Despite some claims in Quantum Woo the actual observable parameters of quantum mechanics do actually have results that are pretty strongly parallel to classical mathematics and Newtonian mechanics. Thus any new X-Force, like quantum mechanics, is going to almost certainly end up giving you results which almost exactly match particle physics in almost all metrics. And as thermodynamics is more fundamental than any of the others you can pretty well count on anything being able to accomplish cosmological distortions of space involving cosmological levels of energy, and since all energy has waste heat (there is a mechanical minimum amount of waste heat for even the most efficient possible machine) that is going to be more than enough to flash-burn the Earth to a cinder.

Someone more knowledgeable than I calculated that warping space (as the Star Trek ships do) would require two entire galaxies worth of antimatter to use once.

Originally Posted by Boomerang

I like the idea of a TL10 society without AI for game based reasons even if it isn't realistic. I want the PC humans to be the space explorers of the future even though it makes far more sense to send robots. I think the Dune universe for example would make for a very interesting gurps setting.

I was mainly going at computer AI. AI may be entirely realistic built on other principles, I just don't think spinning plates and gears are the way to do it. If I thought AI was realistic through simple improvements in computer technology, and I thought computer technology was heading in that direction, then I'd be inclined to include it in a hard science fiction game. But in either case I believe it would be a very alien intelligence, unless it was simply a brain in a jar.

Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity

I think for me, the key requirement for a game at high TL would be that you couldn't just ask a computer to fix the problem for you. You need to keep the agency of the characters, and that might mean limiting AI - there's no reason you can't play an AI, of course, but whatever sort of characters you're thinking of, they need to have something to do. If it's just "oh, I ask my AI to sort that out while my PC continues to live in a post-scarcity utopia", that's probably going to get dull quickly (though if you find that fun, go for it!).

Though that's part of the reason a lot of sci-fi doesn't use technology consistently and rationally, it doesn't bother me so much. It's just a matter of making sure the story isn't something that can be brute forced by that approach. The same can be said of Superman stories. He's one of my favorite characters, but when the 'challenge' of the issue is for him to beat some guy up I just roll my eyes. Of course Superman can beat him up.
The more resources the characters have - and for humans technology is the trump resource, with influential friends coming in a close second - the harder it is to create plausible challenges for them. But I prefer to tough it out by spending more effort creating challenges than to 'cheat' by simply ruling out perfectly logical uses of resources and abilities.

[VonKatzen]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

It is actually much easier to make a pencil from basic materials than to program directly from binary (I learned how to do the former as a boy scout when I was 12). I will never make a pencil though because it takes two or three hours to make a pencil by hand, assuming you have the parts, mostly due to the time that it takes the glue to dry, and it is just easier to buy a mechanical pencil. It would probably take weeks for each pencil if you had to make the materials without modern technology.

Making a pencil by hand is basically impossible. First you have to build a graphite mine with your bare hands, refine it, then you have to cut down a redwood, mill the wood. Then you have to get a gum tree, drain its sap and refine it in special boiling pits, etc. Of course, building a computer from hand is even harder - ever tried to make a silicon micro-circuit with a rock and your hands?

That's really what Reed's essay and my point on economics was getting at. There are extremely advanced processes of material acquisition and processing that would be virtually impossible in ancient times, and would be too worthless to ever be started because the return on investment would be billions of dinars in the negative even if you pulled it off. Some ancient greeks built miniature steam-powered toys, but nobody ever bothered to even try and make a dreadnought - not because they were stupid, but because it simply couldn't be done.

To continue with the above post (ran out of characters) it is of course possible to ignore some of these likely physical limits for the purpose of setting or whatever. Though, personally, I like it when the author at least follows through on the implications. IE if you have cheap and easily available power sources so that anyone can have a planet hopping space ship then everyone can also have a nuclear bomb. If you have autonomous superintelligent AI it becomes hard to justify it not being ubiquitous - some people may have their Butlerian Jihad but they're going to be overwhelmed and replaced by people who don't have such hesitancy in using super-AI. Trying to be a space-conservative is like trying to be an Amazon forest tribe - you're basically at the mercy of anyone who feels like giving you a hard time. Darwinism on a biological and social level are extremely powerful, as humanity has learned quite well in the past few hundred years - no matter what merits your civilization may have if it can't compete materially it just plain can't compete. And if the people with super technology are very friendly and restrained it becomes hard to imagine why there isn't a eutopia.

That is actually something I'd like to see in more speculative fiction - eutopia. While fighting and primitive apeling hu-mans with laser-sticks have a primal appeal to us, it's also interesting to consider what a really well-adjusted, hyper-advanced civilization would actually be like instead of treating it as WW2 in Spaaace! as Star Wars does.

This is one of the things that I like about role playing games and consistency/realism in them - it can be an interesting tool to explore how people might actually behave if they had super-powers or teleporters, instead of confining oneself to TVTropes as most authors do. Personally I find the idea of what a world with random godlike superhumans might actually be like to be far more interesting than mainstream comic books, even though it does present some challenges for people writing traditional stories (of course, there's no law that says all stories ought to follow such formats). On the sci-fi side it's interesting to think about how people might deal with the challenges of space and the existence of super-technology instead of using them as mere prop dressing for what might as well be a Greek play for all the difference it makes in them. Space travel and technological advancement has a much more complex and frankly strange set of implications than Firefly would have us believe. And that's perhaps the biggest problem with Futurism as it's practiced - it's very linear, and projects modern society and modern man into a setting where it may not really have a place. The future is going to be much weirder than anything Mitchio Kaku daydreams up. I have no claim to know what it would be like in detail, but I do like to explore some avenues typically neglected by him and the authors of science fiction novels.