Finding Better Slaves

There’s a recent blog article by Tim Worstall which has some bearing on my post about HS2 and also the one about the circular economy; it was in response to a Guardian article by Nick Cohen about the dangers of a high-tech borderless future.

Nick Cohen:

Sensible economists worry about automated manufacturing replacing factory workers, Google’s autonomous cars replacing lorry and taxi drivers, and automatic online writing and translation services taking on tasks that only humans have been able to perform since the invention of literacy.

Tim Worstall responds:

Imagine the end state: machines do everything. Machines make the machines that repair the machines that make machines….and we don’t need to iterate any further back than that I think.

What happens to living standards here?

Clearly, no one has a job. Machines quite literally do everything. The robots act for us, the software writes the scripts and the machines make the 3D holo machines that we watch them on.

What happens to living standards here? They soar, of course.

As several commentators on Tim Worstall’s blog have pointed out, this is the scenario underpinning Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, the Culture being a future civilisation in which no-one has money but everyone nevertheless enjoys the good life, as all goods and services – from basic necessities to unimaginable luxuries – are provided by self-sustaining technology. This chimes with some old-fashioned socialist ideals (such as Sylvia Pankhurst’s “great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume”) – although, I hasten to add that the socialist reality has, to put it mildly, not exactly delivered on this. Capitalism, on the other hand, has delivered, to a certain extent, although we’re not anywhere near the promised land just yet.

Commentator IanB makes some good points:

It is also quite hard for those of us living under the tyranny of scarcity (and by this, I mean me) to think about, because one tends to bring in all sorts of scarcity-based assumptions without realising it.

… in the economy as described by Tim, there is no scarcity of raw materials either. Because a robot can always build a new robot to go fetch some more. Even from the asteroid belt.

One aspect that interests me in particular is that many people presume that demand would escalate without limit. I don’t. I think there is actually a limit to human wants. There is no use me having a hundred loaves of bread. I can only eat one. But in particular, it would presumably mean the end of demand for status goods, because if anyone can have them, there is no status to be had.

It seems to me that “the tyranny of scarcity” is a good way of describing the dominant mindset among today’s political and cultural elite (not just the greens, and not just the left.) And I think IanB is right to say that without it, there would be actually less conspicuous consumption. If everyone was well-shod, why would anyone (to use Lord Skidelsky’s example in my HS2 post) want 2000 pairs of shoes?

Clearly, capitalism has delivered in a way that state-controlled collectivist methods of production haven’t, although it has been anything but a smooth or a safe ride. And technology has, of course, been the key to capitalism’s relative success. If the ancient world was run on slave labour and the medieval world was run on serf labour (and animal labour!), today’s world is powered by a modern-day slave workforce which includes ubiquitous electrical power and the dense energy sources of fossil fuels. And, increasingly, it is not necessary to be a member of society’s elite to enjoy the fruits of this labour, such as air travel or the use of personal wheeled conveyances.

There’s a very good article about this on Graham Strouts’s SkeptEco blog, entitled “Earth Hour: We will Never Give up our Energy Slaves”. Look out for the comments and a link to another article about “turnspit dogs”, a fascinating example of how child labour and then animal labour was pressed into performing a service (turning meat on a spit) which technology now provides at the touch of a button.

Another very good article is this one by Colin McInnes on the Perpetual Motion blog.

It will be interesting to see whether the trend continues. Will the “limits to growth” people and the tyranny of scarcity prevail? Or will developments like 3D printing and molecular nanotechnology start to usher in a world where, eventually – for all of us – robots build robots and machines do everything?

I hope it will be the latter. And if something like Iain M. Banks’s Culture ever came into existence, I’d probably sign up in a heartbeat.

UPDATE

While drafting this post, I heard the extremely sad news on Wednesday that Iain Banks has terminal cancer and has only months to live. A century from now – hopefully sooner – we should have full-blown molecular nanotechnology, with fleets of tiny medical slave-machines patrolling our bodies and zapping cancer cells wherever they can be found. Roll on the day.

Circular Economy

Twenty years ago I owned a pretty good portable TV set, which worked perfectly until one day something went wrong with the colour balance and the picture started to take on a sort of weird pink tinge. Taking it to an electrical goods shop which also did repairs, I was dismayed to learn that my TV was basically uneconomical to fix and I’d be better off buying a new one.

It was a shame as I’d become rather attached to my little TV, and wasn’t keen on having to buy another. However, cold logic dictated that I had to get rid of it – either that, or to settle for viewing everything in TV-world through a permanent rose-tinted filter. Luckily, someone then left me their old telly and VCR, as they were leaving the country, so I got what turned out to be a free upgrade (and ended up using the “new” TV for another decade and a half, only parting with it when they finally switched off the analogue signal in the UK last year and the set became unusable.) You can tell that I’m not what you’d call an early adopter.

But I was quite put out to learn that people weren’t repairing old televisions any more. It seemed rather wasteful to me, as it meant throwing away a device that was perfectly good except, maybe, for one small component. Why not, I thought, make things easier to fix? Perhaps these items could be made in modular form, so it would be easier (and cheaper) to remove and replace a faulty part, in the same way that we get new toner cartridges for a printer instead of having to buy a new printer.

That’s why I was interested to listen to an item about washing machines on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, earlier this month – the audio has probably vanished by now, but there’s a transcript of it here. The item was about returning, in a way, to the days when things were fixed rather than junked, and could be more easily rented, as opposed to owned outright.

It’s something that would have been right up my street, twenty years ago, and even now I find the idea appealing. I hate waste, as do most people, which is also why the idea of recycling can be attractive even when we might know or suspect that it is uneconomical. And if it is cheaper in the long run to rent a washing machine, for example, than buy one – as calculated by one Today programme interviewee’s “eco-nazi” daughter – then fair enough.

However, if we did have a “circular economy”, more or less, and consumer goods were built to be far more durable than they are now, what would happen to innovation? If you were renting a washing machine, and if it broke down and was efficiently replaced by the leasing company, would you have the incentive to look around and ask for a more advanced model? Would the leasing company really have an incentive to upgrade their stock (maybe, if they were competing with other similar companies.) If everyone had CRT televisions that were expensive but lasted for twenty years, would this slow down the adoption of more efficient and innovative technology such as LED TVs?

There’s another aspect to this, of course, which is resources; the programme mentions metal, and steel specifically. But steel is not about to run out, and is one of the most recycled materials we have, which means that really, they’re talking about energy (the master resource) – the energy to produce a new washing machine, which would be saved by continuing to use an existing one.

Energy is pretty abundant – we have plenty of coal, and they’re discovering new stores of unconventional oil and gas all the time. But the use of these abundant energy sources is, we’re told, causing dangerous climate change.

So this is really a climate change story, after all. Without the perceived urgency of the planetary crisis, there would be no need to restrict anyone’s use of cheap, fossil-fuelled energy, and so whether we continued to use our old washing machines or scrapped them and bought new ones would be a non-issue.

Well, I’m sceptical about the planetary crisis. I don’t like waste, and tend to recycle and reuse things all the time – it seems to be a personal preference. But I also dislike the thought that the CO2 scare is being used to, in effect, nudge us all into abandoning the idea of abundance.

The (very small) starship Voyager

Just a brief trip to outer space, before I post links to the next lengthy climate transcript. In the news this week, the people at NASA JPL announced (actually not – see my update!) that they believe Voyager 1 is about to leave the solar system, 35 years after its launch in 1977, and after having had thrilling close encounters with Jupiter and Saturn along the way. This being the vast wilderness of space, there is no obvious frontier which marks out the limits of the solar system, but the JPL people have picked up an increase in the amount of cosmic rays hitting the probe, which suggest it is crossing the borderland or “Heliosheath”, where the solar wind pushes up against the cosmic radiation from the rest of the universe, about 16 – 18 billion kilometres away.

What will happen to it now? And how long will we be able to keep in touch with it? The answer to the second question hinges on how much electrical power Voyager has access to, as it crosses the deep, dark gulf between worlds. The probe is powered by three RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) fuelled by plutonium-238, which of course is in limited supply and must be husbanded very carefully. And what it’s doing is gradually shutting down some of its more power-intensive activities in order to maintain others for as long as possible. That will last until about 2025, after which time the spacecraft will no longer be able to power any single instrument and Voyager will be drifting, inert and basically, dead.

I was curious to find out where it is heading. Anywhere famous, perhaps? There are actually two Voyagers, as you will know, and according to NASA Voyager 2 will pass within about 4.3 light years of Sirius, which is, of course, a very prominent and bright local star, well known to us from prehistoric times. This will take place around 296,000 years from now. Voyager 1, on the other hand, is heading towards AC+79 3888, otherwise known as Gliese 445, a very dim and unremarkable red dwarf in the unfashionable constellation of Cameleopardalis. It will pass by Gliese 445 in about 40,000 years, but what also might be surprising is that Gliese 445 itself is approaching the solar system much faster than Voyager 1 is moving in the other direction – it’s 17.6 light years away, at present, but will be only about 3.45 light years away from us, 400 centuries from now. Such is the unnervingly dynamic nature of stars, as they buzz like bees around the galactic hive.

So, what will happen to Voyagers 1 and 2, after that? Maybe they will drift forever in the dark spaces of the galaxy, until the end of time. Maybe one day humans will go out and retrieve them (or, even better, send a robot) and they will be exhibited in a museum, if they still have these in the 40th century (and I hope they will, as I think museums are a very good thing in any epoch.)

In the 1979 movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager probe has been discovered by sentient machines, who transform it into a gigantic and threatening spacecraft (renamed “V’ger”), which then starts to make its way back towards Earth and is only stopped by the brave people aboard the Enterprise, armed with their superior wits and sparkly late-1970s special effects. However, Trekkies will be aware that the probe in question was actually Voyager 6, and so the events of the movie clearly take place in an alternative timeline and dimension to this one, where I am writing this blog and where Voyagers 3, 4 5 and 6 were never built.

But maybe the basic premise of the film is correct, and someone – or something – else will find our little metal emissaries to the stars. And if they do, will it be good or bad news for Earth? I wonder.

Some interesting links:
NASA JPL’s main Voyager page: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
Interstellar mission overview: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar.html
Spacecraft lifetime: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html

UPDATE

After all that, I just realised that the NASA people haven’t actually made any official announcements yet. But they will, soon. Or they might do. Or something like that.

New Transcript – Prof. Richard Muller at Climate One

Richard Muller, Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley in the United States, is an interesting and controversial figure in the climate debate, and has been in the news quite a lot, in recent years. On this YouTube video, he is being interviewed by Greg Dalton of Climate One, and I’ve transcribed the entire session here.

In some sections of the activist press, such as MSNBC, Prof. Muller is framed, simplistically, as a “climate change denier” who was funded by the evil Koch Brothers to study the Earth’s surface temperature records, and as a result recently underwent a Damascene conversion when he realised that the planet has actually warmed, renouncing his earlier denierhood (is that a real word?) and joining the forces of light and reason. A triumph!

The reality – to anyone who has been following the debate closely, and has more than an ounce of native intelligence – is rather more nuanced.

In the Climate One interview and Q&A, Richard Muller has plenty to say, and not much of it sounds very encouraging for those who are calling (in effect) for the West’s economies to be sacrificed on the altar of CO2 mitigation.

On the infamous Hockey Stick Graph, Michael Mann and the Medieval Warm Period:

What was compelling about what he had done was that he had argued that the signal went back a thousand years. That was shown invalid by the National Academy study. And that it was evident in a wide range of world data. In fact, what had been discovered was that the Hockey Stick that Michael Mann did was derived almost entirely from a few tree ring datasets that were from North America. So, basically, the end of the National Academy study – although it was kind on Mr. Mann – it said that none of the new things that he had come up with his papers in 1998, 1999 – none of them proved out to be correct.

He takes a few swipes at electric cars:

A typical automobile in the United States costs 10 cents per mile to drive, mostly gasoline. The electric cars – the Volt, the Chevrolet Volt, the Nissan Leaf – they cost between 50 cents and 70 cents per mile to drive, when you include the fact that the batteries are only good for 500 recharges. So you don’t save any money.

We have to take actions that will be meaningful in China. Building Tesla automobiles is not a leadership step. They will never be adopted in China.

And at Al Gore:

Back when I first saw An Inconvenient Truth, I predicted that people would discover that most of what is in that movie is either misleading or wrong. And when they discover that, people are deeply offended, and they overreact. I mean, the fact is climate change is a serious problem, but they were oversold with distortions and exaggerations.

And at the insurance industry, who know which side their bread is buttered on (both sides, actually!), and have positioned themselves to benefit handsomely, whatever happens to the climate:

Not that climate change is good but that the perception of climate change is good. You get people to insure against climate change, and then they make more money. That’s certainly true, whether or not – if the climate actually does change, they’ll make more money anyway, because they’re more things to insure. And if it doesn’t change, they make a whole lot more money.

There’s also a statement about winning over CAGW sceptics, which I find somewhat ironic:

So let’s agree on the science, but we don’t do that by consensus, we don’t do this by vote. We do this by addressing the issues raised by other people, and when you’ve addressed those issues, I find myself remarkably capable of convincing sceptics that global warming is real. Then they say “Well okay, I always accepted that. The question is how much it’s caused by humans”.

Actually, there are huge numbers of us who have always accepted that “global warming is real” but think that the important (and unanswered) question is how much it’s caused by humans. That’s been my position from about 2006 and it hasn’t been changed by BEST and their press releases.

Professor Muller’s stance is that the only meaningful action that could halt dangerous future global warming, is if China could be persuaded to convert from coal to natural gas. And when a woman in the audience asks him what the average individual could do, to alleviate global warming, his response is, basically:

In the end – no. You can’t do anything. I’m sorry – you can’t.

To sum up, here’s a bona fide physics professor, whose position is that man-made global warming will be a future danger to us all, but who also believes that:

* The famous Hockey Stick Graph is based on flawed studies.
* The IPCC produces a “policy report, affected by science” but which “doesn’t follow the standards of peer review.”
* The scientists implicated in Climategate behaved in an underhand way.
* Al Gore and others have been guilty of distortions and exaggerations.
* Electric cars may be neat, but they do nothing to mitigate climate change.
* The only thing that would make a difference is if China was converted to natural gas (which is a development that I think most CAGW sceptics would be comfortable with – or indifferent to – anyway.)
* Nothing that ordinary individuals could do would have an impact on climate change.

My summary doesn’t really do the interview justice, and I recommend that you watch the video (and read the transcript) to get the true sense of what he is saying. Then decide whether or not he is an asset to the proponents of CO2 mitigation!

But one thing I think both sides in the climate debate can agree on, whatever their feelings about the man; Professor Richard Muller is certainly not dull.

Great Balls of Steel

I haven’t watched all of Roland Emmerich’s movie 2012, about the end of the world, but I have seen some of the scarier highlights on YouTube, and the scariest of those, in my opinion, has to be the moment when a gigantic super-tsunami threatens to engulf the very peaks of the Himalayas. How would you ever escape from something like that? You’d need, of course, some sort of ship or ark – which is indeed what the people in the movie actually have, hoping to ride out the catastrophe in a number of strongly-built vessels, each large enough to hold many thousands of refugees.

Despite the summer’s latest doom-laden news about fires, heat waves, melting icecaps and now Hurricane Isaac, there’s nothing remotely as awful as Emmerich’s world-engulfing disaster on the horizon. Which is just as well, because no-one – to my knowledge, anyway – has built the sort of huge vessel that you would need in order to survive it.

However, people are building arks. Just – on a smaller scale. The latest of these to hit the news is a giant steel ball – 13 feet in diameter and painted bright yellow – built by Chinese inventor Yang Zongfu. It contains a year’s worth of food and water, three weeks’ worth of oxygen, and has room for up to three people (Adam And Eve, plus one spare?) Here on YouTube, you can witness the moment when the giant ball was rolled down a hill and into a small lake with the inventor inside. He survived unhurt (bar a slight mishap with a safety belt), although the ball itself appears to have picked up a rather impressive dent, on its way down.

If your budget won’t stretch that far – or if you only need to survive a modest catastrophe – the Japanese company Cosmopower has designed a much smaller and more basic capsule, called Noah. It’s – again – spherical and bright yellow in colour, with a diameter of 4 feet. You won’t be able to escape with much in the way of provisions – maybe a small bottle of water and a Snickers bar, if you’re lucky – and there’s no room for loved ones, pets, livestock, etc., or really anything else than just yourself. Basically, the Noah capsule would provide a very temporary refuge for one person during the sort of tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 or South-East Asia in 2004, but after a few hours that person would still be in urgent need of rescue.

There’s evidently a lot of room for development, then, in the field of spherical personal survival capsules. By the time I become a billionaire and establish my Bond-villain style mansion on a volcanic island somewhere, no doubt Mr Yang Zongfu will have perfected his Noah’s Ark Mk.10 and I’ll be in a position to order a dozen of them for myself and my entourage. We will then be able to weather the catastrophe in style, and perhaps repopulate the Earth later, if we feel like it.

Mind you, if the world is going to end in 2012, we’ve all clearly left it a bit too late to be planning anything like that.

The Spaceplane – Still Early Days

One of my childhood treasures is a slim book called Inside Information on Space Travel, which was published in 1970 and has cutaway diagrams of various spacecraft, from Sputnik 1 forward in time – via Black Arrow, communications satellites and Apollo – to the Space Shuttle (or a rather oddly-shaped Shuttle as it was envisaged in those days, before it became a reality.) The final page has a picture of a futuristic, sleek-looking spacecraft, accompanied by the following text:

WHAT OF THE FUTURE? A space liner like this will shuttle passengers between earth and orbiting space stations in the late 1970′s. It will be a combination of aircraft and space ship and will be able to take-off and return to land-based space ports.

Maybe there is an alternative dimension where space liners actually did start to operate in the late 1970s, but not in this particular universe, sadly. However, spaceplanes are on the drawing board and a technology that might power them was tested to destruction again last week. A scramjet could propel a vehicle up into Earth orbit, as an air-breathing engine of this kind is theoretically capable of providing the sheer power needed to climb up and out of the planet’s gravity well, and the U.S. military carried out its latest attempt to fly a prototype, over the sea off Southern California last Tuesday.

This trial, like the others before it, ended in failure, when the machine – the hypersonic X-51A “Waverider” – crashed into the ocean, due to a faulty control fin, before the scramjet engine could even be ignited. So it’s really still early days, and we won’t be able to ride in comfort up to space or across to a distant continent in one of those, to the music of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz (one of my favourite moments from 2001: A Space Odyssey) for some years yet.

Spaceplanes are taking shape, though – on paper and on computer screens. One promising (and British!) example is the Skylon, which is a hydrogen powered spaceplane that could take off from a conventional runway; the SABRE engine powering this vehicle would be an air-breather, technically not a scramjet but a kind of jet/rocket combination.

The Skylon remains a wonderful idea, but at the moment only the military appear to be actually building and testing anything similar, and their motivation, as you’d imagine, has to do with war and the capability of delivering some sort of explosive payload anywhere on the planet within minutes of launching.

However, military technology has a habit of trickling down to the rest of us, given time. The jet engine is an example of this, of course – swiftly developed during World War II (although the concept and early development of the jet engine pre-dates the war), but now powering civilian airliners across the globe, 24/7. And so is the internet. Eventually, something of the sort will be available for the likes of you and me – and even if there is no space station for us to rendezvous with, there’s always the promise of being able to hop from London over to Sydney, or Tokyo or Honolulu in a couple of hours. It would probably be very expensive but you might even be able to commute!

Curiosity

Next Monday – with a bit of luck – the latest Mars rover mission will land on the red planet without mishap and begin its battery of scientific experiments. NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, otherwise known as Curiosity, is due to touch down inside the giant Gale crater, which lies on the Martian equator, and once the rover gets itself into gear, it will trundle off to investigate a great mountain of debris in the crater which was named Mount Sharp but is now officially called Aeolis Mons.

Walter Frederick Gale, by the way, was a 19th century Australian astronomer and Mars observer, who like Percival Lowell thought he was able to see canals on the planet’s surface. Robert P Sharp was a geologist who worked for NASA, and the Aeolis quadrangle is one of the 30 subdivisions of the Martian surface, named after Aeolia, the floating island home of Aeolus, the ancient Greek god of the winds.

I find Curiosity a very pleasing and apt name for this mission. I hope that Aeolus will smile on this latest venture, and that the rover will survive the landing and set out, like a nuclear-powered robotic Mini Cooper, to solve a few more of the red planet’s mysteries – CosmOnline has a good article about the mission here.

Perhaps in future centuries they will build a museum for all the brave little machines we have sent to explore the deserts of Mars – they could call it the Hall of the Rovers. Or maybe each one will remain at its last resting place when the batteries finally ran out, and become the centre of its own miniature museum – each one a shrine to the perpetually ingenious and inquisitive human spirit.

Mystery Space Vehicle Returns

In another piece of space news, a mysterious US military shuttle returned from orbit at the weekend, after having been up there for about 15 months, without many people being aware of it! It’s an unmanned Boeing X-37B robotic vehicle and has a compact and appropriately rather sinister, drone-like appearance. And nobody outside the US military knows much more than that. What was it doing up in space for a whole year? Dunno. What was its payload? No idea. What sort of mission was this? Classified. And that’s about it, really.

UPDATE

Here’s an article which has a useful summary of recent space shuttle activity.

Things not looking too good in 3991 AD…

I heard on the radio this morning that committed computer gamer James Moore has spent the last decade playing Civilisation 2 (not continuously, it has to be said) and has now reached the virtual year of 3991 AD. Things have taken a somewhat nasty turn over the millennia – the world has been stuck in a vicious, Orwellian three-nation standoff for centuries, and has been through a generally rather tough time, what with famine, nuclear war, mass population die-off and also runaway global warming (the ice caps have somehow melted over twenty times – which is interesting in itself, as logically one would assume they’d need to grow back, in between melts.)

Daniel Knowles from the Telegraph explained, over the radio, that the game had certain assumptions build into it, which he deemed reasonable and not particularly outlandish. He mentioned nuclear war and a stop to the production of green technology as scenarios which would have certain consequences; for example, stopping green technology – in the universe of this game, at any rate – would of course lead to dangerous global warming.

What I find interesting is that James Moore has now become mired in something of an impasse – his nation (the Celts) is stuck in a permanent stalemate and nothing seems likely to change it – indeed, there’s a possibility that the game has now reached some kind of terminal state. And this, I think, speaks volumes about the limits of any kind of simulation, whether it be a humble game or the sort of computer models used to try and predict what the economy or the climate will do. There are always fixed assumptions and a finite number of possibilities. If the assumptions are incorrect, and if stuff happens that hasn’t been accounted for when the model was designed, then the simulation will be wrong, although it might be quite useful (and also entertaining, if it’s in the form of a game.) And the longer it runs, the wronger it will get.

In the real world, the unexpected can always happen. And often does! And in unexpected ways, too! And just when you thought it wouldn’t!

Thumbs Up

An encouraging article in Popular Mechanics by veteran astronaut Tom Jones, with some positive feedback for SpaceX and Dragon.

ISS astronauts were impressed with Dragon as a potential transport ship, finding its roomy interior clean and inviting. The mission’s success may build support in Congress for NASA’s dual approach to human spaceflight: fly cargo and crew to low Earth orbit on commercial rockets, built and operated privately, and with those savings focus on deep-space travel with the government’s Orion spacecraft, intended to reach the Moon, lunar orbit outposts, and nearby asteroids. Orion’s first unmanned test flight is planned for 2014.