The population bomb goes PFFT

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, population, demographics, futuristics

As Yogi Berra (probably) said, "Prediction is hard, especially about the future." That doesn't seem to stop anyone. When I was growing up, projections of future gloom and doom, particularly about population, were periodical literature. Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb was a best-seller in 1968. The Club of Rome issued Limits to Growth in 1972.  As recently as 2015 we have The End of Plenty by Joel Bourne. Much further back, the "granddaddy of gloomy prophets" is probably Thomas Malthus, with An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, in 1798.

All of these based their predictions on the fact that population grows exponentially while agricultural productivity grows linearly. Each author called on us to expect disaster within a generation. However, 8 or 9 generations have passed since Malthus wrote, and about 2 generations since Ehrlich. Not only haven't we starved to death, the population has risen from just under a billion in 1798 to almost 7.8 billion today (late 2020), yet the proportion of that population who are starving is at a historic low, and there is actually abundant food for all, but corrupt governments and failed states are responsible for every food shortage that currently exists.

What happened to all the predictions? This chart, from The World in Data, sums up one factor nicely:

The curves after 2019 are a projection. Note the peak of the pink curve, which shows the global rate of population growth. That peak was in 1968, when Dr. Ehrlich's book was published. I wonder if he takes credit for the dramatic reduction in growth rate that followed. Had a growth rate of 2.1%/year (actually 2.08%) continued for the next 52 years, world population today would be not 7.8 billion but nearly 10.4 billion.

However, it is critical to understand that 2.1%, or any other figure on this chart, is not the birth rate, but births minus deaths. In those years, birth rate was around 3.7%/year, but that is not the criterion that economists use to calculate future population. That is fertility, or the number of births per woman, a lifetime figure. Projecting the chart above further into the future, its authors would conclude that the global population growth rate would reach zero about the year 2130, and then go into negative territory, meaning that population would begin to fall below a peak that they expect to be just above 11 billion.

The fertility of the whole world expected by the chart's authors in 2130 would be 2.1 births per woman, which is called "replacement rate". If nobody died before adulthood, a fertility of 2.0 would provide full replacement, but of course some do. In a much safer world, perhaps replacement fertility could be 2.05 or less.

The second factor is, I would say, a series of "white swans" (as opposed to "black swans", which are unpleasant surprises) in agriculture. In the Parable of the Soils (Matthew 13:1-23), Jesus speaks of the "good ground" yielding fruit 30-, 60-, or 100-fold. Thirty-fold harvests were good for the time, and 60- to 100-fold harvests must have seemed incredible to the disciples. Grain harvests today exceed 300-fold. That is just one element in the agri-revolution that can feed 8 billion right now. Another is factory farming; some hate it but you can't argue with the results. Land that once couldn't be farmed, is now arable, cranking out those huge harvests.

One final point before getting to the current book. The wiggles in the growth curve above represent generational trends. The upward burst after 1910 shows the effect of public health measures that led to safer water and less cholera and malaria; a steepening in the 1940's is the "baby boom" that affected mainly the West; the near-plateau about 1950-55 shows the "birth dearth" after decolonization and the breakup of the British, French, Portuguese and other empires; the "pop-up" that peaked in 1968 and then fell just as rapidly shows the twin effects of the X Generation's births followed by "the pill"; and then the blips in the 1980's and early 2000's are late "echoes" of the Baby Boom, which produced the Millennials (Y Generation) and the Z Generation. But the continuing trend of lower growth rate remains to be explained, and that is the job of today' authors.

Authors Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson are not economists, but they think like economists. Their book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline analyzes the data used by the authors of the above chart, and even more the data and reports published by the United Nations, on the population trends that the U.N. expects for the rest of this Century. To be blunt, Bricker and Ibbitson claim the above chart is incorrect, that the growth rate is most likely to fall to zero and below by about 2050, and that world population will barely exceed 9 billion in that year, and perhaps not even that. They expect world population in 2100 to be close to what it is today, or a little less, and that it will continue to fall.

They base their contentions on a thorough study of trends in many regions and countries. The biggest factor in fertility is education, particularly education of women. The big trend that underlies access to education is urbanization. In 2007, for the first time, more than half the world population lived in cities on in major urban areas. By 2050, this proportion could reach 2/3 (67%) or more. The US and other Western nations hit 50% in the 1920's. Quite a number of countries, mostly smaller ones, are 100% urban, which means they import all their food.

The two biggest countries, by population, are China and India. Chinese urbanization is 61.4% as of early 2020, and India's is 34.9; both are rising fast. Urban, educated people have low fertility; in nearly all nations with large urban populations, fertility is between 1.5 and 1.9. Even in rural areas, which show higher fertility, education is spreading such that there are few places with fertility greater than 3.

The authors write of many things, but emphasize just a few: educated women learn how to control the number of children they have and more of them aspire to a career, so they put off having children, which also reduces the number of children they might bear; and while children on a farm are a benefit—grow your own farm workers!—in a city they are unproductive mouths to feed and their post-secondary education is very costly. For urban people, small families are a survival strategy. Talk to ten millennials; it will be hard to find more than two who think they will have any children, and certainly not before age 30 or 35.

What will happen in the long run? Let us suppose that the year 2100 is ushered in by just 7 billion earthlings, and with a fertility well below replacement, in the range of 1.6, population will continue do decrease. It's not a bad picture, actually. There will be less pollution, global warming will be (or will soon be) a thing of the past, and less of the Earth will be needed for farmland.

Until then, for some countries at least, immigration can ameliorate the problems of an aging population. But eventually there will be few immigrants. However, is decreasing population a disaster, as the authors claim? The biggest problem with a decreasing population is that it is an aging population, and old people need more services, and not just medical. When there aren't enough younger folk available to perform those services, then what?

I expect a "gig economy" to arise for the semi-retired. The healthy ones can do things for those who need it (or are willing to pay for things they just don't want to do). For example, we have a neighbor, a widow in failing health, aged 81. She has a caretaker to lives with her part of the time, for a few days at a time, a woman aged 83 in robust good health! If my wife and I get too frail (or too fed up) to mow our lawn any more, we might employ a lawn care company, or we might look on Craigslist or a similar place for a retiree who likes mowing lawns for a fair price. He or she may be slower at it than the young fellow with a 48-inch riding mower, but I bet more careful. In their dotage, my parents employed a gardener who was older than they, but healthier. I could go on…

Every book I've read on these subjects is based on the premise that continued growth is a requirement for economic health. Where are the economists who are planning what is needed for a future in which the "growth rate" of a country's or planet's GDP is negative? We do have a couple of points of reference. One is the Black Death that removed a third of the population of Europe. Once the survivors got everyone buried and began to pick up the pieces, they found lots of land and "stuff" left behind for the taking, and there was an economic boom. The current Covid pandemic isn't likely to have nearly as great an effect (death rate overall is less than 1%, not 35%), and we don't expect any sudden drop in population to disrupt society the way the Black Death did. With a slower, gradual decrease we can adapt, and it is likely that we are adaptable enough to adjust and thrive.

One production value I must commend: the end notes are all references, with hardly any "extended explanations." I prefer that; if an author has something worth writing about, it is worth putting in the text. When I find that a book's end notes are full of added material, I put a second book mark there, so I can refer to an end note on-the-spot to see what else was written, and read it while the referring material is fresh in my mind. I prefer not to have to do that.

How soon would you like your future to arrive?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, futuristics, forecasting

OK, so where are the flying cars? Well, junior airmen everywhere, the first commercial one recently went on sale! For a mere $400,000 or so, you can own a brand-new Aeromobile. More upscale models range up to $1.6 million. Oh, you said, an air car for all of us? That could take some time. In the meantime, you just need two licenses, drivers' and pilots', and the financing, and an air car can be yours. I wonder where you'll be permitted to use it, with anything like the same freedom you use an automobile?

I remember a brief fad of building one's own ground-effects machine ("hovercraft"). I wanted to do so, though I was about 15, and I was doing all kinds of design and planning. But I wasn't planning on earning the money required…funny how the teen brain works. I mean, I had a spare lawnmower engine, with maybe 3 hp. A typical design found in, for example, Popular Mechanics, needed 10 hp, and used a chain saw engine. I talked to my dad about it. He had a practical point: "Why use all that energy keeping yourself off the ground, when four wheels will do it without burning any gas at all?" First nail in that coffin. More would follow.

Fast-forward half a century or so. Everything has a cost-benefit analysis associated with it. What is the benefit of a flying car? Usually, not much. If there is no road between the Point A where you are, and the Point B you want to get to, then maybe it can get you there, as long as the place has a pretty good landing strip (the Aeromobile and its kin cannot land straight down). But you can get a helicopter ride to the same place for a lot less than 400 grand, and you don't need your own pilot license. So, besides the cachet of having a really fancy toy, there isn't much benefit to the flying car. Not even if it cost a "mere" $100,000.

I just had a lot of fun reading Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Zach is the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal; Kelly is a faculty member at Rice University. They discuss ten "emerging technologies" in various states of emergence (and just a few others in an added chapter). Of the ten, the first two have to do with space, "Cheap Access to Space" and "Asteroid Mining". The cheapest way to get things off the Earth, like, a few thousand miles off the earth, is with a "space elevator", if you ignore sunk cost. The price to lift a kilo of stuff to orbit is presently around $10,000. Incremental cost could go as low as a few dollars. However, add the amortized price of the elevator, it would be a lot higher. How high? I haven't seen a credible projection, and neither have the Weinersmiths. Because (1) we don't yet have materials strong enough to build it, and (2) whenever we do have them, the construction cost will be greater than the total budget of all the nations of Earth for a century or so. That is a lot to amortize!

Hmmm. OK, suppose the cost is, in today's US dollars, 100 Trillion. If we gave everyone on Earth a joyride to geostationary orbit and back for, say, $1,000, and the population was 10 billion, that would only pay of the first 10% of it. Charge $10,000, and now you have it. Of course, 90% of the people on Earth can't afford even a $1,000 joy ride that would likely take about a week. And how many people could you run up-and-down the space elevator each week? How long would those 10 billion joy rides take? I'll leave further speculation and calculation to you. Trust me, people are being born faster than you can send them up and down any practically-sized space elevator.

The Weinersmiths take a great combination of lots of information and a stiff dose of humor to deal with their ten subjects. Augmented Reality, for example. A really good system would allow you to live in a single room some 20 feet on a side, that could appear as any room you want to be in, in the eyes of your AR system. That, and some Programmable Matter (a different chapter) to be instant furniture and various implements, and you could live almost any kind of life you like. Though it seems to me a lot like prison, just with better views and a bunch of cool "instant toys". Then there's the "outside" kind of Augmented Reality, where you can know everything about whatever you see using the heads-up displays in your contact lens or whatever: I foresee people at first being totally enamored at knowing everything there is to know about every random tree or building or animal or person they see, for, say, an hour or two. Or maybe ten minutes. Then overload kicks in, and they'd quit making whatever "hey, look this up" gesture or command they've been using and get on with life.

Precision Medicine seems a good thing. I hope it works out. You get your DNA tested and find out which things will cause what side effect, and if you are lucky, treatment Zed will have no noticeable side effects, for you. Maybe. I wonder, though, at the cost of medicine so utterly focused that a new drug has to be developed just for you, for anything that happens to you. How many people will find out they aren't really well-suited to using almost any actual treatment on the market? Of course, you probably knew that already. After all, that's why everything you try has side effects; if you can live with them, fine, you get cured or whatever, but you're scared to go through that again.

What will happen, and what won't? Who's to say? Nobody predicted that the first men to visit the Moon would do so on a color TV broadcast, watched all over the Earth. So at least some of the various ideas explored in Soonish are likely to come to pass. Whether we can afford any of them is another thing. And I had a kind of global realization: nearly none of this applies to the majority of the world outside the Euro-American sphere.

This may be who we will be

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, futuristics, technology

Yogi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yet I love to read books of projection when they are well produced. When you get the former CEO of Google together with the head of Google Ideas together, good production is a given. Good prediction? Perhaps.

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen are big thinkers, they operate on a big stage, and their book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business is appropriately wide in scope. Their topics are ourselves, our identities—and all that goes with them—, and the world's nations and their fates under galloping scrutiny. I was relieved to read their focus on people and what people do with technology, rather than a gee-whiz screed on the neat-o things technology is doing.

For a privileged few, greater technology yields a closer and closer approach to a Utopia. It is reasonable to expect increasing good for most people. An unknown proportion of humanity will instead suffer even greater repression: 1984 on steroids. It all makes me wonder whether it will remain possible to keep a low profile, when every profile passes through smart pattern-seeking software. And what patterns will it seek? That is up to the writer(s) and the agency.

People wonder why I, a power user of computers since the 1960s, would keep my "dumb" phone—it makes phone calls and texts, and I don't have a data plan—when I have a desktop supercomputer that I built myself. Well, I know better than to think I have a life as private as the norm of the 1990s or earlier. But I do take steps to mitigate the damage, and I'll leave it at that.

These authors repeatedly state that what humanity does with technology is up to them and thus uncertain, for better or for worse. Yet they go into some detail about just how a repressive state can go into total control freak mode, such as by practically giving smart phones to all, but phones that are preloaded with apps that track and surveil the owner. Yet surveillance can work both ways. Fully half the book delves into the consequences of state failure and chances of reconstruction, after making it clear that better communications make revolution easier, but following up on a revolution even harder.

The loud and clear message is that, particularly in a disruption, communication is primary. One might think you need to first get food and water to refugees in a disaster. You do, but how do you know where they are, and how to make sure the supplies go where they ought? Communication. So the authors recommend erecting cell towers in stage one of any rescue or reconstruction effort. Then it occurred to me: Why not make every Red Cross (or whomever) truck a mini-cell tower or satellite hot spot? Use it to "light up" the few square miles around its location with good communications.

Human ingenuity always transcends the vision of an inventor. No technology is fail-safe, and fail-soft is pretty hard to achieve. New uses are always discovered, and new abuses even more so.

The apocryphal Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times" will now apply more than ever.

Can we still call it a job?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, work, futuristics

Three trends of twenty:

• CEO's job description will include "avid blogger".
• Lifelong learning will be a requirement to get and keep a job.
• You will elect your leader(s).

Five generations of workers:

• Traditionalists: Those old enough to be a WW2 veteran.
• Boomers: Their children.
• X Generation: Those who came of age after Woodstock.
• Millennials: Graduated high school in 2000 or after.
• 2020 Generation: That's when they'll be entering the work force.
  

By the year 2020, there will still be a few Traditionalists at work; they'll be age 75 or older. My father finally retired at age 75, so people like him who stay healthy into advanced age, and enjoy their work, will have little desire to enter the rocking-chair brigades.

Every day, about 10,000 Boomers reach age 65. This number will grow. Every day, about 7,000 Boomers retire. This number may not grow much. The gap between these numbers shows that some Boomers will work even longer than their elders.

Generation X is in mid-career now: settled enough to be putting kids through college or trade school, lots of them own homes. They are becoming "in charge" as Boomers retire.

Millennials have hit the job market like a ton of bricks. Their preferences drive companies like Google and W.L. Gore. The job market needs to absorb tens of millions of them in the next decade.

The youngest generation, 2020, is composed of those in Middle School (Jr Hi) or younger. Those that take up a trade will begin working in 5-8 years, and those who attend college will begin graduating in large numbers by 2018.

The message of The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today, by Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd, brings all these ingredients together to advise companies large and small about the kinds of people they'll have working for them by the end of the decade, and what they'll need to do to stay competitive, both as a company and as an employer.

A few trends are evident:

• The younger the worker, the more he or she lives amidst technology, but the smaller physical footprint that technology takes up. For many of the very young, a smart phone may be the only device they feel a need for.
• Older workers tend to be more loyal to a company, a particular manager, or a brand. Each successive generation is more likely to job shop and hop.
• Younger workers are more likely to "put their money where their mouth is" about the integrity and morality of the company they work for, and pass up lucrative "Enron" opportunities for lower-paying but more sustainably-based enterprises.
  

The book uses a definition of the five generations listed above based on Bureau of Labor Statistics publications, but to me they are fatally flawed. Cutoffs of 1945, 1964, 1976, and 1997 produce three middle "generations" that cover 19, 12, and 21 years. That produces a skewed view of the Millennials, which it seems to me, ought to cover more than twelve years. I prefer cutoffs of 1945, 1964, 1982, and 2000, for generations of 19, 18, and 18 years. This accords better with the population pyramid, such that the X Generation is smaller than both the Boomers and the Millennials; the 2020 Generation started with a few years of lower numbers, but promises to outnumber the Millennials.

It is not only our under-30 set that is highly tech-savvy or über-connected. The lady in the next office has a father like mine: both men are about 90, both love using Skype to video chat with their offspring and friends both near and far, both read a few blogs and news feeds, both use lots of e-mail and know how to manage their Spam filters, and at least my father has asked me to show him how to start a blog. They aren't on FaceBook, but I am, as is my manager and his manager. I am 63, and the managers are late 40s, on the cusp between Boomer and Gen X. We are also all three on LinkedIn.

What is the fastest-growing tool for recruiting new employees? Second Life, closely followed by Twitter. My son got his most recent job from Craigslist. I'm on the search committee for a nonprofit looking for a new director; I've put out a call for suggestions on FaceBook and LinkedIn. I don't Tweet, 'cause I haven't the time. All my cousins do, though, plus their children and a grandchild or two.

One trend discussed by the authors that really resonated with me is that "reputation capital" will become increasingly important, and a big facet of that will be the quality, more than the quantity, of one's FaceBook Friend list.

But now it is wet-blanket time. Much small retailing, skilled and semi-skilled trades, and factory floors seem to be exempt from all this. Yeah, when my plumber shows up, he (or she) prints the estimate or receipt from a laptop, only getting out a pen for my signature. But recruiting for the job continues as it has since the apprentice-journeyman system was set up about the time piping was invented. One of my good friends works in a steel-making plant. He has about as much need for a smart phone in his workplace as the average giraffe. The only concession to 2010-era technology is that the plant recruits via a web site (last updated in 2006) when "putting out the word" among the workers fails to scare up any job seekers.

Not everyone goes to college. In my son's high school class, 65% of freshmen went on to graduate, about 60% of the graduates started college, and about 40% of those graduated. That is just over 15%, or less than 60 out of 380+ who started with him. The advice in 2020 Workplace is directed an those 60 and the companies that will seek to employ them. What do we do for the rest? How will they make a living? My brother in California informed me that the state has closed all the public vocational schools. They simply dropped support for programs that helped more than half their young people qualify for non-college jobs.

When my son graduated from Rutgers a few months ago, we heard Toni Morrison, the keynote speaker, say, "100 years from now … will people ask, 'Is it true that you had to pay your own way through the process of becoming a skilled, useful citizen?'?" She asked when people would realize that an educated populace is a productive populace, and that supporting education at every level ensures the prosperity of society. Of course, for that to happen, we'll have to end the practice of paying a "tenured" professor a quarter million dollars a year to teach one class per semester. If you want to know why college tuition is growing at five times the inflation rate, look no further, but that's grist for another rant.

The central theme of the book is clear, however: the expectations of the generation now growing up are going to drive the way companies do business, recruit workers, and care for their careers throughout their working life. When continuous education becomes the requirement for keeping a job, it will soon become "company supported life-long learning", for workers will flock to the companies that first adopt this as a perk. By 2020 this may be no perk, but an expected benefit, even if company-paid health care has been given over to a Federal program.

My generation and the next need to keep our wits about us! The Millennials and their children are coming!! The slogan of the 80's was Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way. Retro!

Black holes and bursters and flares, Oh my!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astronomy, futuristics

The Sun is a middle-aged, normal star. It is about halfway through a long existence as a "yellow-white" star. Some day, sunrise on Earth or Mars will look something like this [Image credit, Dirk Terrell].

There are a number of astronomical events that could end civilization or even all of life on Earth. Some of them could happen at any time. This one is certain to happen, at a time about six billion years in the future.

All of the plausible means by which the uncaring Universe could wipe us out are canvassed by astronomer Philip Plait in Death From the Skies! : These are the Ways the World Will End. His thesis? The world will most definitely end. When? It could be a very long time…but it might not. How? There are a number of candidates.

Long gone are the days of a cozy little Universe benevolently designed for our comfort and edification. When it behaves itself, Earth is still a rather cozy little planet that has managed to hang on to its biosphere for about four billion years. This in spite of the steady warming of the Sun, which is 40% hotter now than it was when life began. Also in spite of an early crisis or two, when plants first sucked most of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, precipitating a disastrous cooling that led to a million years or more of "snowball Earth", which ended only when heat built up under the global glacier and a lot of volcanoes popped together, putting back lots of CO₂.

But Dr. Plait's interest is not in what Earth might do to itself, or even what we, its most dangerous occupants, might do to ourselves and our Earth. He sets his sights on everything else, the 99.9999999999 percent of the Universe that is not Earth (You know, I think I need another dozen nines there).

In a methodical way, the author surveys things from the smallest astronomical threats to the largest and longest-enduring:

• Asteroids: Now that we know about half of the Earth-crossing asteroids, we are likely to have a year of more to anticipate the fall of one that we find is on a collision course. We just have to decide what we'll do when that happens. This is one threat we could do something about, though it is unlikely we'll muster up the political will to do so.
• Comets: A harder issue, because the ones most likely to be a threat appear once, with no regularity. The great comet of 1996, Hale-Bopp, has a nucleus four times the diameter (probably 50 times the mass) of the asteroid or comet that did in the dinosaurs. It came rather close, which is why we could see it so well. Great, spectacular comets are close-passing comets.
• Things the Sun could do: flares and coronal mass ejections top the list. Every eleven years we pass through a risky period—three or four years—during which solar shenanigans damage a few satellites, and cause postponement of space flights so astronauts won't be fried. Even near-Earth orbit is a risky place to be when the Sun is active.
• Supernovas: There are two kinds, the largest stars at the end of their "ordinary" development, and binary giants that become gamma-ray bursters. The first kind are dangerous to earth if one goes off closer than fifty light-years. The book includes an Appendix that lists the 24 stars that will become supernovas some day, that are within 1,000 light-years. None is closer than 260 light-years. But the second kind, watch out. Because their energy is focused into a beam, one could blast life right off of Earth from a distance as great as several thousand light-years.
• Black Holes: Every galaxy has one, a million Suns' mass or more, at its center. We are comfortably far away (25,000 light years) from the Milky Way's central black hole. Some supernovas also produce black holes, with masses of three Suns to about ten. The thing to remember about "stellar" black hole: its gravity is the same as the star that created it. But it can get lots closer to you, so the close-in gravity is much more intense. Fall into one that comes dead-center , and all of us, plus Earth, will be spaghettified by the tidal forces of that intensified central gravity. But the chances of any star passing close to the Solar system are very, very small. Black holes are thought to be fewer in number, perhaps a thousandth of a percent, of all stars.
• Aliens: The history of "alien" invasions, in which peoples such as the "civilized" Europeans located new peoples, makes me pessimistic about how nice and kind any space aliens will be. Most likely they'll want to exterminate us, preferably without any communication at all. The fact that we are still here indicates there aren't any close neighbors out there.
• The death of the Sun: This event, depicted above, is discussed in step-by-step manner. It will unfold beginning several billion years in the future, by which time any intelligent folk still around might have developed a technology that can move Earth, or at least themselves, out of harm's way. The Sun probably won't swallow Earth, but will simply heat it to the melting point.
• Galactic collision: The nearest big spiral galaxy, Andromeda, will get close enough to cause trouble in a half billion years or so. Stars won't likely collide, but gas clouds will, leading to lots of new star formation and a flurry of supernovas. A lot depends on whether a near-miss by large stars changes the galactic orbit of the Solar system.
• Deep, deep time and the end of everything: Let's leave that for the kicker.
  

I do have one point to bring up about the "end of everything". The author's analysis depends on the accelerating expansion of the Universe. I happen to think that the effect of metallicity on Type 1a supernovas has been underestimated. I do hope some astronomers are working on this aspect, which is a simple explanation for the evidence presented, compared to positing a kind of "dark energy" that makes up 75% of the Universe but is not observable. Extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence, and we just don't have it.

But we do have eight categories of things, some of which might happen, at almost any time, and several of which are sure to happen, just not yet.

Do machines really need emotions?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, futuristics

Item: Moore's Law for many attributes of electronic devices, exemplified as a straight line drawn on log-log charts, changed its trend in about 1980. Prior to that, number of devices per cm² of chip doubled almost yearly; since then, it has doubled each 18 months. It shows signs of tipping further.

Item: The fastest, densest microprocessor chips as of mid-2007 ran at nearly 5 GHz speed and had transistor-gate widths of about 50 nm. Feature size is shrinking by half each 4 years, and maximum speed increases by 1.5x each 4 years.

Put these together, and what do you get? The size of a silicon or other semimetal atom is about half a nanometer. "It takes two to tango", so we can deduce that device features can be no smaller than one nm. From 50 to 1 is 5½ halvings; times 4 is 22 years. Moore's law must end by 2029, or be modified in slope before that time, but 1 nm is where it will end, at any speed. Also, 1.5^5.5=9.3, so the fastest switching speed possible is 45-50 GHz.

Now, IBM, Intel, AMD and others are putting multiple processors one one chip, as many as sixteen at last count. Many recent PCs have dual-core processors. Assuming appropriate software can take full account of such parallelism (a huge assumption), we get effective single-CPU speeds in the range of 0.5-1 THz. If 512-core CPUs become the norm in the 2020s, a device would have the power of a 25-THz processor. Not bad.

Consider the brain. The cortex of a mammalian brain is organized into "cortical columns" consisting of about a thousand neurons each. On page 214 of Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine, Dr. J. Storrs Hall estimates that a cortical column has processing power equivalent to 10 GHz and functional memory of around 1 GByte (A PC made with the "fastest 2007 chip" mentioned above would be about half the speed, but with equal or more data storage).

A human brain contains about ten million cortical columns. I think it safe to say that the reason Deep Blue could beat Gary Kasparov at chess was not processing power but memory, and the fact that its processing power was focused on a single task. It could remember "advantage scores" for 50 billion board positions, and he could not. The "ten percent" of his brain that folklore claims we use consciously has a million times the calculating power of Deep Blue. But even human "lightning calculators" are millions of times slower than current machinery, so Kasparov had no way to pre-calculate more than a few dozen board positions.

Dr. Hall optimistically outlines the likelihood that artificially intelligent machines will outstrip humans in every way in the mid-21^st Century. While this just might be true, such a device will be a networked collection of processing centers rather than any single center. Let's see: 10 GHz times ten million is 100,000 THz...a 2030's era 512-core processor could achieve 25 THz, so you need at least 4,000 of them with very, very good communication amongst them.

That communication may be more possible than it appears at first. The brain is only 15-20 cm across, but neuron signals travel only about 50 m/s. Between-device signals speed through copper wires at ²/₃ the speed of light, or 200 million m/s; that is four million times as fast, so millions or billions of processors of almost any 21^st Century technology could be coupled together, as long as they are within a 400-km sphere.

Getting that much hardware into a mobile robot is another story. Using Dr. Hall's terminology, an epihuman or hyperhuman intelligence would be pretty large: A quarter million processors of postage-stamp size, even if you can stack them two to the millimeter, occupies 3 liters, and you need room for communication interconnections, power supply wiring, and cooling..say you need 10 liters of total volume, and possibly much, much more. A human brain, which includes all this stuff, is about 1 liter.

Though the bulk of Beyond AI is occupied with the history of AI and estimates/speculations about what is needed to approximate human brain power, the author's aim is ethics. In several portions, he likens an advanced AI to a modern corporation. Run well, a corporation can do much more than an independent businessman. They are, in a sense, artificial intellgences, built of natural intelligences. In particular, they answer some of the questions of how an AI might feel about being owned by "lesser minds". He particularly notes that "Corporations are owned, and no one thinks of a corporation as resenting that fact." (p 249)

Of course, in my experience, corporations become bureaucracies, and a bureaucracy is the prime example of a whole that is less, much less, than the sum of its parts. This I see as the real problem with collective-mind AI architecture. If we can't figure out how to prevent creeping bureaucratism in our institutions, how can we ever teach our "children of the mind" to do so?

Dr. Hall, of course, thinks that at some point they will gain the ability to do it for themselves, that they could become our moral teachers. This might be so if morals can be reduced to cost/benefit analyses where the "cost" of harming another is set very high...but who'd do so?

I don't want machines that do my thinking for me, not even my ethical thinking. I am a "power user" of computers, and have been for forty years. I have built a career on correctly discerning the appropriate divide of tasks between human and computer.

I think it was Jerry Pournelle who wrote, at least fifteen years ago when Byte Magazine was still being published, that a computer is a difference detector, while a mind is a similarity detector. Neither is very good at the other task.

Machine memory is so perfect that a single-bit difference between two photographs will be instantly detected, but would require a human days or weeks of work to find unaided. This is why Jpeg compression makes pictures that look so good, even though we're seeing only a twentieth or less of what we think we see. The "recognition engine" in my brain is so good I can recognize a familiar face when a person is so far off their whole body only "lands" on a hundred retinal cone cells. It takes a ton of expensive machinery to do one-thousandth as well.

So I don't want a machine that recognizes my wife at a distance; I can do that for myself (maybe blind folks would feel differently, though). I don't need machines that tell me my conscience is bothered, either. I have a rather keen one. And a psychopath would disable the machine so it was as inactive as his own conscience, just as some folks kill police officers who "get in their way". I am not just being cute to say that; it is a fact of life in Philadelphia, for example.

I need machines that remember for me, and help me find what's in there. I need them to calculate rapidly and accurately. I need them to find stuff; I am a huge user of Google™.

If I become disabled, an inexpensive, reliable helper would be a big boon; it would have to be cheaper and more reliable than a trained monkey, which some people use, and if a monkey can do such tasks, a one monkey-power AI, without the monkey's emotions to distract it, should do nicely. And I reckon that means 5% of a monkey's total brain power is enough.

But one other thing about "personal service" machinery, a very important thing. Safeguards to their operation must be built into their hardware, not just programmed in there with the rest of the logic. It was a single entry in a table, after all, that allowed an advanced X-ray machine to occasionally blast people with unfiltered electron beams 1,000 times too strong, and burn holes in them!

It was a logic state the programmer never thought of that led to the "sudden acceleration" problem some cars were having a few years back. When they replaced the chip with a corrected model, the problem didn't reoccur; but in cars that were properly engineered, the problem isn't possible, no matter how bad the programming.

We need computing machinery to things we don't do well, and leave us the work we are better at, that we enjoy. I have no problems with robot arms doing the welding and riveting of cars and trucks. The work is stultifying. Just read Rivethead by Ben Hamper, about the problems such work causes its human victims. I do have a problem with machinery that replaces every useful function I might engage in.

Well, this has been long on rant, short on actual review. Dr. Hall may be over-optimistic, but I can't fault him for that. I'm a perennial black hat. There is a lot to fear when we consider, as he does, that large corporations and the military will be the first to develop really advanced AI. Neither entity is inclined to produce a "gentlemanly" machine. The army wants efficient killers, and a corporation wants efficient competition-killers.

What keeps corporations and armies from making Earth a living hell for everyone except a tiny oligarchy? Beginning with Teddy Roosevelt, we've had 100 years of "trust busting" and other anti-monopoly action in the US, and a much longer history thereof in Europe, particularly England. To Dr. Hall, this is a hopeful indicator, and I tend to agree.

My motto for the purveyors of AI devices in the future: Never build a computer that controls its own power supply.

Zero has no reciprocal...that doesn't mean they won't stop trying

kw: book reviews, science fiction, futuristics

A couple of chapters into the book, I nearly set it aside. A sex scene was way too explicit. But I skipped ahead a little, and continued. Another scene followed, much less explicit, then smoother sailing for the rest of the book. I know why the author did it. It is quite predictable that by the mid 2010s, the continuing epidemic of AIDS and other drug-resistant STDs will make "ordinary" sex unpopular...you know, the kind that involves bodily contact, skin to skin. There must be a way to get that point across that doesn't leave me with such sleazy memes.

Accelerando by Charles Stross has more ideas per kilo-word than any other book I've seen. Basic premise: Moore's law continues, and accelerates once manufactured computing power exceeds the natural-born kind. Then a Singularity occurs, an acceleration that tilts up to infinite, or tries to. Hence the title.

The author likes Avogadro's Number (6.02x10²³), the number of nucleons in a gram of matter. An avabit is that number of bits, or nearly 10²³ bytes. He also uses this as the number of MIPS of processing power present in six or eight billion human brains. He doesn't use the word (I wonder why not), but this could be called an avaMIP.

[Let's see: The highest-density "concept" memory chips using 45-nm technology have memory cells measuring 588 nm (0.346 square microns per cell). The minimum cell size for gamma-radiation stability is about 100 Si atoms, maybe 5x5x4 atoms, or a cell size of 1.36nm x 1.36nm (1.84 square nm), and 1.08nm thick. An avabit of such memory cells would weigh 2.8 kg. Further: a 2005 Pentium 4 at 3.3 Ghz runs about 1000 MIPS. There're 100 million of these in use right now, so their composite computing power is 10¹¹ MIPS. About a trillionth of an avaMIP. If aggregate power doubles yearly, we are about forty years away from the first artificial avaMIP.]

Whether computation is carried out in silicon or some other material, if it isn't biological, the author calls it Computronium. Once computronium becomes independent (we're close), it grows without limit, eventually turning all the planets into a haze of heat-engine-powered processors that become a fuzzy Dyson sphere about the Sun. The lives and survival of "meat people", with this process as a backdrop, over a century or few, are the structure of Accelerando.

Stross's universe is one only an MBA could love. I have no mind for business, so I found all the talk of predatory business plans involving hundreds of interlocked, virtual corporations quite hard slogging. Seems to me, business is warfare with primarily economic and legal weapons. Seldom any need for actual blood to be shed (it isn't ruled out...).

The people and computronium grade into one another over time. People move more and more of themselves, first memories, then intelligence, outside their brains (the process began with books, and continues with PDAs). Then they load into computronium for various amounts of time, load back to flesh...death becomes optional. A robot cat that takes over its own upgrade process becomes a demigod. Eventually there is little room in the Galaxy for entities with less than an avaMIP of processing power...each.

Bleak? Certainly. Likely? No. Fun to consider alternatives, though.