http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/11/2512.html

500 Years From Now

TRX
November 12, 2012
292:
1439: just outside your 500 year limit, Johannes Gutenberg popularizes the printing press. The First Information Revolution begins.

1708: Abraham Darby's cheap iron touches off the Industrial Revolution.

1958: Jack Kilby invents the integrated circuit, boostrapping the Second Information Revolution.

Few things are invented ab initio. There were movable type, commercial iron, and electronics before then, but those dates are when they took off.

A hundred, two hundred, three hundred years from now, something else may become a world-changer. Right now, the subsidiary technologies derived from Kilby's integrated circuit is still shaking up the status quo; it's the underlying technology of the internet and most of our communication infrastructure, cheap medical diagnostic equipment, trivially cheap computers, even Charlie's self-driving cars, though I expect the lawyers will turn that into a techological dead end before it gets anywhere.

What's next? Many people assume it will have something to do with biology, but down at the gene splicing level, that's still Kilby's chips doing all the work.


TRX
November 12, 2012
294:
back-translation:
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As an aside, I have a languages book written in the 1950s by a professor who spent several hundred tedious pages decisively proving (to himself) that A) modern Romanian is practically indistinguishable from classical Latin, and B) Romanian is the language that most closely resembles English.

His educational credentials were impressive, but I failed to be persuaded...


TRX
November 12, 2012
295:
@195:
(Actually, drivers in the UK average 12,000 miles a year, to US drivers' 15,000 miles. Living in a smaller, more compact country does not correspond to less commuting.)
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In the USA, much of this is driven by city and county zoning regulations, which tend to insist that people all live in one place, shop in a different place miles away, and work in a third place even further away. The current trend is to "gate" these areas to one or two access points to the main road system, apparently for social status in the case of residences. I can't think of any sane reason for doing it to shopping areas or business parks, but it happens.

Zoning boards and their decisions are generally absolute and unquestionable, and have the force of law. Changes in zoning classifications are major politics, since large amounts of money are usually involved.

This sort of thing, played out in 30 to 30 thousand different legal and political jurisdictions, jealously guarded and righteously defended, isn' something easily fixed.


TRX
November 12, 2012
297:
196:
in the UK about 70% of adults have driving licences whereas in the US it's 88% according to some figures.
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A lot of Americans have licenses, but do not drive. In the USA, a driver's license is your default document of identification. Anything *other* than a driver's license is considered to be a special case.

There's a sign at the local motor vehicle office listing the forms of ID required in order to get a driver's license. Two or three, depending on what they are. I was interested to see that "sex change documents" and "prison records" were acceptable ID. Given the USA's incarceration rate, a good number of that 12% of non-licensed adults are probably doing time.

There's also an official state ID card you can purchase. It's a driver's license with an overstamp telling you it's not really a driver's license.


TRX
November 14, 2012
473:
@318:
(without mentioning cars) the possibility of having small interconnected sensors everywhere, and I mean everywhere, given the gradual drop in the price.
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I've written about that myself, as an example of why it makes more sense to put vehicle guidance under central control than to depend on each separate vehicle to find its own independent way.

I think people seriously underestimate the complexity of a system that's able to handle real-world driving, but assuming that is solved satisfactorily, the problem is still secondary to legal issues.

You're dealing with the laws of multiple countries and local jurisdictions within them. In the USA, the Federal government, the 50 state governments, and some of the posessions and territories are free to make their own laws, including vehicle regulation and product and personal liability.

Also, the cost of developing a vehicle control system has to be paid for, either by a government via taxes, or the manufacturer via sales.

Not all jurisdictions are going to allow the use of automated vehicles on their roads, so the cost of the system is going to have to be borne across the ones that do.


TRX
November 14, 2012
475:
@331:
What it does require is trust -- that is, you trust other scientists to understand and confirm the accuracy of yet other scientists' findings.
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The keystone of science is *repeatability*. An experiment should turn out the same no matter who performs it or what their expectations are. If you question someone's results, you can check for yourself.

Repeatability was what exposed a lot of "scientists" as plain old grant whores during the big cold fusion flap a couple of decades ago.


TRX
November 14, 2012
476:
@342:
There was a lot of crap housing built in the US 1945 to about 1955. Much of it 1000 sf or less. Just a step above WWII army barracks standards. Size wasn't the issue. Just an indicator. And most of that is now gone and good ... Once folks realized they had enough money they wanted better
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Before WWII the USA was primarily a rural country. During the war a lot of people moved to the cities to fill the labor shortage. After the war, many stayed, and when the soldiers were demobilized, they often stayed in the last sizeable town on their route home, rather than going back to plowing dirt in Hooterville. There was a major housing shortage after WWII, and you can read many articles about it in the magazines of the day.

Something similar happened in Britain; Churchill's memoirs said new housing for returning soldiers was a major issue in Parliament for a while.


TRX
November 14, 2012
480:
@350:
Catholic Church
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I expect it'll still be around. It is working with the Anglicans and the rapidly-expanding Greek Orthodox Church to hammer out some of their differences. While the Catholics and derivatives have been losing ground in the English-speaking world, they're still strong in many places.

Probably, all of the existing established religions will be around in some form. Religions seldom die out on their own; they're usually quashed by invasion and suppression.

Of the newer ones:

The Scientologists... I think their survival depends entirely on what Miscavige's successor does. Their rigid doctrine hasn't dealt well with modern information technology and media. Their organization is strictly top-down and seems rather fragile.

The Moonies just might make it. They're probably not as wealthy overall as the Scientologists, but instead of depending on tithes and donations from their membership for their primary funding, the Moonies are part of a small international corporate conglomerate, with ownership or control of organizations running from football teams to universities to gun manufacturers. Plus they're aggressively expansionist outside the West.

I also think we might see the rise of a successful neopagan/Gaian religion in the not-too-distant future. Wicca already has legal status as a religion in the USA, though regrettably the courts still haven't ruled on the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The Church of Elvis, alas, may not survive over the long term. Future network administrators may wonder why every nontrivial network has a node called elvis...

> ping elvis
elvis is alive


TRX
November 16, 2012
618:
@479:
Explain how any of the above can exists in a world so full of automation and robots that "human skills are worthless". And what exactly are REASONS for warfare in such world?
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Eh? Universal prosperity isn't going to solve that kind of problem. People in general have no problem killing each other due to race, religion, language, national boundaries, political affiliation... humans seem to like finding differences so they can create groups of "us" vs. "them." Nations break up over differences imperceptible to outsiders; city-dwellers go cross-eyed with outrage against suburbanites, all people supporting that other party obviously have brain damage and should be reprogrammed.


TRX
November 22, 2012
791:
@625:
So why aren't we colonizing the Gobi Desert?
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Because another "we" owns that land.

Same problem people are faced with when they get upset over how a different country handles its land or resources.

Colonizing Mars doesn't look so difficult by comparison.


TRX
November 22, 2012
792:
Asimov's collections often have little historical or autobiographical notes preceding the individual stories. I had noticed what a wide variety of places he managed to sell a story to - technical journals, back when they still paid for articles; private-circulation magazines, "fluff" magazines, commissions of various sorts.

I learned an awful lot of history from Asimov... and that knowledge is a process, not an absolute. Both have done me very well over the years.

I had a very interesting conversation with a Bulgarian physicist in the late 1980s. Somehow the subject moved to Asimov and the guy went nonlinear; Asimov was a charlatan and a faker, and probably mutilated puppies. Turned out he'd never even read anything by Asimov; he was just regurgitating the Party line he'd learned in college. I always wondered what Asimov might have said to have got them so riled up. It was worse than the Babdeez reaction to "Asimov's Guide to the Bible."