I argue that all of our current environmental problems stem from one source: infrastructural inertia. Infrastructural inertia not only includes technical and scientific infrastructure but it also includes political, economic and social inertia as well. What are some examples of what I'm talking about?

• In the United States, people still use the British Imperial measuring system in casual speech. Road signs and speedometers are still calibrated in the old system.
• Despite many better alternatives, calander reform is still stuck. No one seems willing to bite the bullet and change all the computers and paper calanders. Dvorak keyboards are another example.
  

Those don't have anything to do with environmental matters directly but they are examples of the kind of socio-technical inertia I'm talking about.

Changing infrastructure in the digital world is easier. Y2K was about as bad as it gets. The adoption of Unicode and IPv6 are other examples.

But when people have to change business models, reform governmental policy or replace highways and power plants, things slow down to a crawl. Contrarians and apologists spring out from the woodwork to make specious arguments about why we should stay the course. But even if the contrarians (Devil's advocates do serve a good purpose. They sanity check us.) didn't exist it would still be very hard to get us all to mostly agree on a course of action.

And then there is the expense of replacing systems, system that work well enough and that are still being actively used, with newer and better systems. There are probably dozens of ways a major city could hugely improve it's sewage system but all them cost a lot of money and there will always be cost overruns from unexpected surprises. Complex and extensive change never seems to come cheap in the world of atoms.

I posted here in the forum before about this subject but it never really got a good response. I think this is an important subject to discuss because it's precisely this inertia that acts as the chief break on the rapture of the nerds Kurzweil loves to talk about it.

There is a book that came out recently by Bob Seidensticker called Future Hype that mentions this infrastructural inertia. I recently went to a lecture by him and I think he made several key points.

Once I get a copy, I think we should discuss it. I'm also planning an short essay of sorts to be cross-posted from my blog to the BH blog stream. But before all that, I'd like to hear what you have to say about this problem and why you think it is or isn't a problem.

Reforms in meatspace are slow due to humanity's inablilty to accept a complete change unless benefits can be seen instantly. Take the imperial system, to the common human a change to a newer system won't improve things, they're all just numbers afterall, they've become accoustomed to thinking in imperial measures. Changes need to be introduced gradually overtime. What is more likely to happen is a small group accepts the reform (i.e. scientists, enthusiasts) until the outsiders notices the advantages and it slowly spreads outwards.

The reasons for responsive change in virtualspace is probably due to the fact that most of the humans connected are generally the humans who welcome change quicker in meatspace, and of course results are much more quicker and obvious. 

Question is, how do we speed up reform towards improved methods in meatspace?

I beleive barring a total change in government (ideal would be a technocracy (only respected academia in power)), the only way is to let technology take it's course.

As the internet permeates through all cracks in society, information becomes more widely available. People become more knowledgeable about issues (we hope) and so they would have a better understanding on the impact of changes, and thus more likely to adopt it.  Supposedly we'll soon be able to artifically augment the intelligence of humans and this too will have the same affect. And once we are able to slowly reduce the number of physical labour workers with better tools graudually the speed and cost of development will decrease drastically. If you compare asia with the western world, the pace of change is an order of magnitude faster, in part due to the cost of development (cheap labour).

I think the only threat to change would be a totalitarian government, although it seems like certain part of the world are heading towards this path, there will still allways be places where people are free.

Resonte,

Seidensticker lists off 9 myths about technical advances and I'd like to examine these each in turn here and see if they hold water.

This inertia isn't just political or cultural, there maybe technical hitches as well and I'd like to find these.

 Expect more on this soon after I've finished his book. 

 

"Leap-frogging" may allow for growing but underdeveloped societies like China to implement more technologically advanced societal infrastructure, since they don't have to first adopt the older technologies.  Such countries may never know what a telephone line is, since they can just skip from no telephone service directly to cell phones. Starting fresh has many advantages.

AP, I agree that leap-frogging is easier for developing countries than it is for post-industrial ones. It's easier to build fresh infrastructure where none existed before than to replace existing, complex infrastructure. Anyone who's played Sim City knows this. You have to wait a long time to get enough money to be free to pause the game and plow the old city under before quickly building your model utopia.

 This is exactly one of the points I'm making. Let me finish the book and I'll start a few new threads about each of Sidensticker's points.

So I've read and re-read Seidensticker's Future Hype (And posted something about it with plans to post more.) and I want to examine his points that invalidate exponential view of technology change.

Let's start with Seidensticker's alternative to Vinge and Kurzweil's exponentialism: the spotlight model.

The metaphor is that technology and science advance in a way similar to the way a tree grows new and old limbs. Even as media and public attention focuses on furious activity at the tips of new limbs, the old limbs continue to grow quietly and slowly. Sometimes the spotlight of attention shifts back to sudden, surprising activity in old limbs as some new unexpect breaktrough is made. But at some point, each period of furious activity and rapid advance quiets and slows as various barriers are met and the media spotlight shifts away to new areas.

Technology doesn't advance exponentially. It advances in a sigmoid or S-curve. It starts slowly and then some breakthrough, conceptial, economic or otherwise, is made and there is rapid advance. This quickly ends as diminishing returns set in or barriers to further progress emerge.  Technology doesn't advance in endless, increasing, accelerating change, it moves in endless fits and starts and the spotlight of public attention always shifts to new areas of sudden advances and sometimes returns to old areas that have a new burst of life.

These days it's the Internet (But that is nearly over.) and stem cells. In the late 80s it was high temperature superconductors. Iin the 50s it was jets and the public highway system. In the 60s it was rocketry. Tomorrow it might be tissue engineering, aging cures, nanotechnology.
But none of these areas stay in a state of endless, relentless accelerating advance. We don't have jets that fly at 700 times the speed of sound as you'd think we would if we naively applied exponential thinking to jet technology.

In fact technology can sometimes regress. The Concorde was retired as uneconomical. Nuclear power in the United States has long fallen into a slump. It may take us longer now to return humans to the Moon than it took us to go the first time. We still unable to understand how to make room temperature superconductors.

Moore's Law continues to hold true but that doesn't necessary mean that rising tide will lift all the other boats of technology. Eventually Moore's Law will run into the fundamental limits imposed by physics, still some distance away but it will eventually happen.

Anyway, Seidensticker examines serveral damping mechanisms on accelerating change. I hope to say more about these in my blog postings and here in this thread.

Comments so far? 

Mr Farlops,

I think that technology is increasing somewhat exponentially because it is just common sense that technological advancement often (but not always) facilitates further technological advancement. I think it is pretty apparent that there was more advancement in the 20th century than the 19th century, and more in the 19th than the 18th, going back to the fall of the Roman Empire.

I do agree though that every technology doesn't simultaneously advance exponentially. That is just ridiculous. However, there are very few areas in which little or no progress is being made.

One point that you did not consider though in this last post is that many remarkably intelligent transhumanists/singularitarians have accepted the "Hard Takeoff" scenario, and they really don't care about the details of whether technological advancement is exponential or not. They are positive that recursively self-improving AGI will be developed sometime mid century. This is the wrench in all extrapolations and predictions about the future. If such a time comes, it will be inherently unpredictable to current human beings. I am pretty certain that AGI is possible, but just because something is possible doesn't mean our society won't have collective writer's block on the issue for multiple decades. I do think it is likely that AGI will be developed this century though.

Still, considering the unpredictable nature of the Singularity, I am surprised that so many promote the idea of the "Hard Takeoff" scenario. So far, I haven't seen any convincing reasons why AGI would relatively instantaneously transform society to a posthuman one. The society would have to rally around the AI for it to have real power. If it was pumping out awesome designs for new technology all the time, it would ultimately have to be humans implementing them until such time as the AGI can create multitudes of highly functional robots. Even if the AGI had access to electronics manufacturing facilities complete with industrial robots, eventually there would come a point where the robots would no longer be able to fulfill the needs of the AGI, and it would have to be humans who have to upgrade the robots because it is us who are manifested in reality, and not the AGI.

So really, in my opinion, for an AGI to have significant impact on the world, it would have to have strong cooperation and partnership with humanity.

(Edit: I just had one thought that might support the "Hard Takeoff" scenario. I suppose if the AGI were to pretty quickly create self-replicating nanotechnology that could be used as molecular assemblers, it could build whatever manifestations in the real world that it requires. Although I am guessing that even this would require the aid of humans.)

AggressiveProgressive:

I think that technology is increasing somewhat exponentially because it is just common sense that technological advancement often (but not always) facilitates further technological advancement. I think it is pretty apparent that there was more advancement in the 20th century than the 19th century, and more in the 19th than the 18th, going back to the fall of the Roman Empire.

After reading Seidensticker's book I'm not so sure of that. His point is that the overall rate of discovery and advance has been fairly constant since the start of the Industrial Revolution. He says the huge leap was made with the rise of the scientific method and cheap printing in the Enlightenment before that, he'd agree with you, things went very slowly. But after the 19th century kicked the Industrial Revolution into high gear, things have been fairly constant overall since then.

He says we have to be careful not to misconstrue rapid advances in specific areas with overall progress or lack thereof. For a while airplane technology was advancing very rapidly. Now it's not. (Let's ignore avionics for a moment, that's really computers, right?) Cars advanced pretty rapidly for a while, but aside from us cramming more electronics inside them, progress is not so fast now.

Much of the hybrid car technology that's being touted in the media is based on technology that's over a hundred years old. It's taken us that long to make it economical in comparison to the high efficiency in IC motors we achieved around the turn of the 20th century (with a boost from microprocessor controlled fuel injection and transmissions.). And there is stuff that's notoriously resistant to improvement, batteries being the chief example of this.

Note that he's not saying there isn't any startling advances and progress. It's just that this jumps and flits from narrow area to narrow area on our vast tree of technologies. Hence his spotlight model.

The key question is are these bursts of activity coming faster and faster and spreading over wider and wider areas of the tree? Are the spotlights growing more numerous, persisting longer and appearing more frequently? Seidensticker would probably argue no.

Or maybe a better question is, and one I hope to pose here, is there anything we can do to make the spotlights more numerous and persist longer? The Internet is slowly helping scientists in the developing world to participate and contribute to our growing edifice, something they couldn't do very cheaply before. That's one thing that might help. Maybe you can think of others. How do we find the damping mechanisms and compensate for them?

AggressiveProgressive:

I do agree though that every technology doesn't simultaneously advance exponentially. That is just ridiculous. However, there are very few areas in which little or no progress is being made.

And I think Seidensticker would agree with you. Even in the areas that we ignore as "low tech" (They were very high tech once. We need to remember that.) still advance however slowly. We can even be surprised when serendipitous discoveries in some unrelated area starts a burst of activity in an area we thought as mostly quiescent. Computers improving IC engines for example.

AggressiveProgressive:

One point that you did not consider though in this last post is that many remarkably intelligent transhumanists/singularitarians have accepted the "Hard Takeoff" scenario, and they really don't care about the details of whether technological advancement is exponential or not.... I do think it is likely that AGI will be developed this century though.

Yeah, I have similar feelings about it. It's not just AGI; it's the massive improvements allowable by molecular manufacting. Advanced nanotechnology will enormously speed up many engineering experiments because:

1. Materials will be largely flawless and built to atomic accuracy. Less stress testing needed, mathematical stress models are simpler, etc.
   
2. Microscopic chemistry and biology labs can work in parallel at molecular speeds. Drugs, catylists, alloys, etc. can be tested much faster.

But a lot of the hard takeoff seems to really hinge on these two developments, advanced nano and AGI. This is why a lot of this thinking looks like handwaving to skeptics on the outside. Seidensticker is one of those skeptics. He'd probably tell us to ignore the two miracles for a moment and understand how science and technology really work.

Seidensticker doesn't really explore nano or AGI but in looking in the directions he does, I think he does us a service by pointing out the handwaving that's going on. He saying, in effect, "Let's make certain we understand how the current state of the art really works before we talk about leaping into future. We have to get to there from here and if we don't where we actually are we can't get anywhere."

There are many more scientists and engineers now then there have ever been and this number is growing as developing countries join the fray. Patent offices and professional publications can barely keep up. (Although I think it's disingenous to use the rough quantative measure of number of patents granted as measure of progress. We grant a lot of stupid patents now. I'm sorry Amazon's "One Click Purchase" doesn't count as a civilization changing advance! Seidensticker talks about this. More later.)  The point is how come this doesn't seem to be cascading for us?

AggressiveProgressive:

If it was pumping out awesome designs for new technology all the time, it would ultimately have to be humans implementing them until such time as the AGI can create multitudes of highly functional robots.

Right. And the there is all this old, yet vital, infrastructure we've got to replace. Tunneling technology has steadily advanced but it still costs the Big Dig billions to uproot Boston to put a viaduct in. Robots both giant and microscopic could do this better for us but this takes us back to the nano/robotics miracle.

Not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying it's damn tricky.

AggressiveProgressive:

I just had one thought that might support the "Hard Takeoff" scenario. I suppose if the AGI were to pretty quickly create self-replicating nanotechnology that could be used as molecular assemblers, it could build whatever manifestations in the real world that it requires. Although I am guessing that even this would require the aid of humans.

Or if nano helps us rapidly advance neurology so as to reverse engineer vertabrate brains thus leading to rapid advances in AGI. One miracle enables the other.

But let's put those two utterly, utterly plastic technologies aside for the moment since they aren't here yet. Let's focus specifically on Seidenstickers stuff. Expect another, more specific, post tomorrow or thereabouts.

Like I say, I view Seidensticker's book as much needed sanity checking. This will be beneficial to us transhumans in the end even if shatters some simplifications.