From extropians-request@extropy.org Fri Dec 2 09:03:02 1994 Return-Path: extropians-request@extropy.org Received: from usc.edu (usc.edu [128.125.253.136]) by chaph.usc.edu (8.6.8.1/8.6.4) with SMTP id JAA16422 for ; Fri, 2 Dec 1994 09:02:59 -0800 Received: from news.panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA27595; Fri, 2 Dec 94 09:02:52 PST Received: (from exi@localhost) by news.panix.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) id MAA13461; Fri, 2 Dec 1994 12:02:20 -0500 Date: Fri, 2 Dec 1994 12:02:20 -0500 Message-Id: <199412021702.MAA13461@news.panix.com> To: Extropians@extropy.org From: Extropians@extropy.org Subject: Extropians Digest #94-12-66 - #94-12-71 X-Extropian-Date: December 2, 374 P.N.O. [12:01:51 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org X-Mailer: MailWeir 1.0 Status: RO Extropians Digest Fri, 2 Dec 94 Volume 94 : Issue 335 Today's Topics: BASICS: Pop. Density & Free Banking [1 msgs] BASICS: The Machinery of Friedman [1 msgs] nanotech :a molecular brake invented [1 msgs] singularity [1 msgs] The Machinery of Friedman [1 msgs] trends and singularity [1 msgs] Administrivia: Note: I have increased the frequency of the digests to four times a day. The digests used to be processed at 5am and 5pm, but this was too infrequent for the current bandwidth. Now digests are sent every six hours: Midnight, 6am, 12pm, and 6pm. If you experience delays in getting digests, try setting your digest size smaller such as 20k. You can do this by addressing a message to extropians@extropy.org with the body of the message as ::digest size 20 -Ray Approximate Size: 33024 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: timstarr@netcom.com (Tim Starr) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 21:33:17 -0800 Subject: [#94-12-66] BASICS: The Machinery of Friedman >From: fhapgood@world.std.com (Fred Hapgood) >Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 16:12:09 -0500 >Subject: [#94-12-8] The Machinery of Friedman > >...Let's say I want to live in a society that prohibits child abuse >and am willing to pay for my preferences. How do I do that under >Friedman's scheme? I assume that me and everybody who feels the >way I do -- and there are a lot of us -- hires private >investigators to go around checking up on parental behavior and >then snatching kids away from parents who are discovered trying >to burn them or whatever. I'd imagine that the first thing you'd do is move into your own proprietary community in which "child abuse" defined the way you like would be prohibited. >This raises a theoretical point, which is that Friedman >everywhere in this book defines government as 'a system of legal >coercion'... David's economic analysis is first-rate (except for his lack of appreciation for the knowledge problem). His use of philosophical concepts is a bit sloppy when it comes to "government." To be more precise, what anarchists object to is the State, defined as a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence. Anarco-capitalist political institutions can be thought of as "governments," but they aren't States. >Finally, I don't think for an instant that a system like this >would lead to a plurality of legal codes. The law is a social >operating system, except that the rewards for standardization and >intercompatability are a lot higher in social dynamics than in >computation. (Think how much easier it is to organize consortia >under a common legal environment.) I'm sure that if we had >Friedman's system one legal code would take over the globe in no >time at all. Probably be run by Microsoft. Why not? I don't >mean this critically; maybe Bill would do a great job as sheriff >of the world. There are costs to standardization, too, as well as rewards for specialization. For instance, what shall be the basis for the legal system, Anglo-American common law, Roman-Dutch common law, Le Code Napoleon, or Canon law? Many legal systems coexist peacefully with each other right now, and people can be subject to more than one at a time. Different legal systems have adapted to meet different needs under different circumstances. ------------------------------ From: Mike Chow Date: Fri, 2 Dec 1994 00:58:09 -0500 Subject: [#94-12-67] nanotech :a molecular brake invented Professor Kelly of Boston University gave a talk recently on his molecular brake invention that slows done a triptycene wheel in a solution. O O \ /__| O | O fig1. A triptycene wheel, with 30 atoms of C,N,O, and H. The brake consists of a side chain attached to the hub of the wheel. The wheel and the attached side chain consist of around 30 atoms of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. The wheel rotates along the central bond as the spokes are hit by random bombardments of molecules in the solution. The direction of rotation is not controlled, however. Adding Hg ions to turn on the brake... O \ __ O--|O / O fig2 If we add positive mercury ions to the solution the brake locks in place to jam the spokes on the wheel. The role of the mercury ions is to form a bond with two nitrogens on the side chain of the wheel. This causes the side chain to change its configuration and jamming the wheel. (For details see the April issue of Chemical Engineer News and also the Journal of American Chemical Society 116,3657) The amazing thing about Kelly's work is that he showed that we can still apply our common sense, Newtonian mechanics in the molecular world. If I know what happens if I stick a pencil into my bicycle's wheel as it rotates, then I can also apply that knowledge to a molecular wheel made up of a few atoms. Actually, Kelly tried many times unsuccessfully to create his brake. Some of them, he said, didn't stop the triptycene wheel for the same reason as a pencil wouldn't stop my bicycle wheel from turning. Those brakes were too weak to halt the wheel. Adding positive ions to undo the brake... O |__| O / \ O O fig3. To release the brakes we remove the mercury ions by adding negative ions that bonds with Hg more readily than the nitrogens on the side chain. Thus, the side chain returns to its original position. WHAT'S NEXT? Kelly said his next goal would be heading toward a molecular motor. That means he must synthesize a rachet mechanism to control the direction of rotating wheel. As of now the triptycene wheel is rotating randomly from the random bombardments of other molecules inside the solution. He did show us one way to control rotation: time = 0 The wheel can only move clockwise ______ O| \ single bond | \ O O / \ O O time = 1 The rachet shortens as a single bond is converted to a double bond (bond lengths shortens). This allows the wheel spokes to pass for a short interval. _____ O | \ double bond is shorter than a single / O O--O | O time = 2 The rachet returns to its original state as the double bond gets converted back to a single. ______ O| \ single bond | \ O O / \ O O ... and the cycle continues. Kelly proposed to control the direction of rotation of his wheel using the scheme above. This way the wheel can only move clockwise. So, it's essentially a simple motor. I didn't catch how Kelly is going to change the single bond to double bond and back. Through temperature? Or through solution? HOW DID KELLY DESIGN HIS BRAKE? He designed it with a plastic tinker toy-like model. He showed us his donut-hole sized plastic balls of various color, representing different atoms. They were linked together by movable joints that can rotate when you turn them. It's surprising even to Kelly that his chemical implementation worked so smoothly. Usually there are complicated molecular interactions not predicted by his plastic tinker toy model. HOW LONG DID IT TAKE KELLY'S GROUP? 14 days. He mobolized his team of 5 (mostly graduate students) to work together everyday for two weeks. ``Usually,'' he says, `` it takes around 6 months for Ph.D. students to make such a large molecule.'' This is only for molecules of ~30 atoms. Kelly seemed to be baffled by Eric Drexler's 4800 atom gear because it's 100 times bigger than any molecule a chemist could synthesize. HOW COULD WE TELL THE BRAKE WAS WORKING? Currently, there is no imaging tool that let us watch as a molecule turns on its bonds. FSMs and STMs are good for viewing static atoms. For now we have to settle for indirect viewing methods such as NMR scans. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance or NMR scans detect differences when the atoms on a molecule change their positions. Using NMR Kelly showed that the triptycene wheel slows down when the brake is applied. And when the temperature is lowered to less than -30C, the wheel stopped completely. --Mike Chow ------------------------------ From: timstarr@netcom.com (Tim Starr) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 22:00:40 -0800 Subject: [#94-12-68] BASICS: Pop. Density & Free Banking >From: Phil Goetz > > "Countries with high population growth and high economic >growth include Thailand, Malaysia, Ecuador, Jordan, Brazil, Mexico, Syria, >Panama, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong."... > Higher density is associated with better rather than poorer economic >results. > Check for yourself: fly over Hong Kong... and you will marvel at >the astounding collection of modern high-rise apartments and office buildings. >Take a ride on its excellent smooth-flowing highways for an hour, and you >will realize that a very dense concentration of human beings -- 40 times the >density of China -- does not prevent comfortable existence and exciting >economic expansion." > > - Julian Simon, "Why do we still think babies cause poverty?", > _Population Matters_ > >There's more similar statements in Simon. I was simply stating my >impression of his view. I don't see how you can read his work and not >think he thinks that the world ought to have higher population density >like the places I mentioned. I read it in two ways: 1) The fact that there are places with high population density and high economic growth proves that such a thing is possible, contrary to at least some overpopulation theorists. 2) There may be such a thing as underpopulation as well as overpopulation. The way I'd put it is that there will tend to be an optimum level of population density approached so long as the price system functions sans coercive interven- tion. Given the fact that we have both places with lots of coercion, we have suprt- or sub-optimal population density in those places. >>Actually, where it was really tried it did pretty well. Scottish free >>banking did fairly well, and was ended only because it embarassed the Bank >>of England so much. There are a number of interesting works on this topic >>by Lawrence White and George Selgin, among others. Kurt Schuler gave a >>paper on the history of free banking in South America (not discouraging) at >>a seminar I attended, but I'm not sure whether it's in print anywhere. > >Scotland is a special case because it's so small, and most of the notes >were probably issued by the Bank of Edinburgh. In the US, under free banking, >forgery was easy, and notes from a bank in California probably wouldn't be >accepted in Kansas. People were uncertain of the value of notes. Perhaps >these problems could be solved with modern technologies, but it hasn't >been demonstrated. I would rather see the experiment tried with some >country that I cared less about than the US. What "Bank of Edinburgh"? The only ones I can find in my references are the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland, which engaged in note- duelling against each other - so they both issued lots of banknotes. As I understand it, the limited circulation of banknotes during the U.S. "free banking" period was due to branching restrictions, not to the risk of forgery. Canada didn't have those branching restrictions, and apparently didn't have that problem: "Branch banking was just one of the typical features of free banking that the Canadian system spontaneously evolved in its early years. Another was mutual note and cheque acceptance. Banks that refused to accept notes and cheques from rivals found such a policy self-defeating, because if the rivals accepted their notes, they had no offsetting claims to present when rivals demanded redemption in gold or silver. 'Note dueling' tactics also proved unfruitful, because they increased the reserves that all note duelling banks needed to hold without giving any particular bank a strong competitive advantage. Note duelling by rivals never made any Canadian bank fail. Routine acceptance and regular exchange of notes and cheques issued by rival banks in the same province quickly became the rule (Shortt 1986; 279, 312, 320; Shortt 1990: 11- 12). Correspondent banking arrangements between banks in different provinces, plus the interprovincial network of the Bank of British North America, tied all the banks of Canada into a loose system by the late 1830s. Formal clearing-houses did not arise until 1887, because bilateral clearing was satisfactory until then. It was the opinion of the writer of a manual for Canadian bankers that economies of scale sufficient to justify establishing a clearing-house did not exist until there were at least seven banks in a city (Knight 1908: 137)." - Kurt Schuler, "Free Banking in Canada," _The_Experience_ _of_Free_Banking_, Routledge, 1992, p. 81. Did the Canadian banks have some other technological protection against forgery which the U.S. banks lacked? Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Think Universally, Act Selfishly Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL, The International Society for Individual Liberty, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com Liberty is the Best Policy - timstarr@netcom.com ------------------------------ From: dasher@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 22:50:13 -0800 Subject: [#94-12-69] trends and singularity Jordan Sparks writes: > Lately, I've been questioning the possibility of a singularity happening > at all. I cannot see how there can be a sharp distinction between "now" > and "afterwards." If intelligence is increasing exponentially, then it > is not approaching an asymptote and should go on increasing forever. > . . . . Is there someone out there who can explain to me why there > should ever come a moment when "all the rules change?" Because the trend lines are not expontential: they're hyperbolic. A hyperbolic trend, f(t) = a/(t-t0), has a simple pole at t=t0. Extrapolation beyond that point diverges. Therefore, either we cannot project beyond t0, or the trends break at (or before) t0 -- which amounts to the same. t0 is near the end of my expected lifetime. Coincidence? Who suggested "phase change" as a name for the Singularity? Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DASher@netcom.com Hey, I just saw our friends at Alcor on cable! (Know Zone, Discovery) ------------------------------ From: John K Clark Date: Fri, 2 Dec 1994 00:42:03 -0800 Subject: [#94-12-70] The Machinery of Friedman -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- fhapgood@world.std.com (Fred Hapgood) Wrote : > Friedman everywhere in this book defines government as 'a >system of legal coercion' A much better definition would be " A government is an organization the claims rights and powers that individuals or corporations do not have .I see nothing wrong with "legal coercion" indeed you can't have law without implicit or explicit coercion .If you break into my house I can coerce you to leave (with my 12 gage). I DO see something wrong in using my 12 gage to make you give me your wallet just because I need the money but government thinks they have the perfect right to do this. > I don't think for an instant that a system like >this would lead to a plurality of legal codes. We have a plurality of codes now, they vary considerably from town to town, state to state, country to country. In Friedman's world their would be an economic incentive to keep the codes similar and simple, if you wanted something nonstandard you'd have to pay more. More important than the number of legal codes, which would be smaller and much simpler than today's, would be the number of private protection agencies enforcing the laws, which would be very large. >The point here is that any society, including Friedman's, has >its coercions. Absolutely true, I don't know of anyone who says otherwise but the point is to keep it to a minimum. Everybody can't have total control over what laws they want to live by but we can have a lot more control than we have now. >Friedman seems to think [...] people won't be willing >to pay to restrain the behavior of others. We must live on >different planets. People won't by willing to pay to restrain the private behavior of others in most areas, child abuse and perhaps a few others excepted. Friedman talks more about Anarchy ( lack of government) than Libertarianism, there is reason to think that one will encourage the other but there separate concepts. If everybody except me thinks it's important to ware funny hats on Tuesdays and are willing to pay big bucks to enforce it then I'm just going to have to ware a funny hat. johnkc@well.sf.ca.us John K Clark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.i iQCzAgUBLt7b4303wfSpid95AQEvBgTvaxiqW2hI7j8PmxICbPnUb0FIM9gtx2A1 WNBVXLNaBQRAD3oeX7dT13IvOTsDXM8ri3DaoKfNS8OwrCF8fRaZNwVj8RJwXgPT Ryo6f28CnNMZi67ILCRyK2IYQEsUlQHdIghFiAv3Eo344D514e9LFn7mLOq3DoGr twrcD3rcts1zO356jxa1hmZ+hZWzS2ivjKrK3YsSK1xeoEoCm9s= =TUIR -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------ From: Godshatter Date: Fri, 2 Dec 1994 10:49:16 +0500 (EST) Subject: [#94-12-71] singularity On Wed, 30 Nov 1994, Jordan Sparks wrote: > Lately, I've been questioning the possibility of a singularity happening > at all. I cannot see how there can be a sharp distinction between "now" > and "afterwards." If intelligence is increasing exponentially, then it > is not approaching an asymptote and should go on increasing forever. > Most of the world is already beyond the understanding of any individual. > As I see it, the world will simply be increasingly beyond our > understanding. The singularity smacks of the religious afterlife. Is > there someone out there who can explain to me why there should ever come > a moment when "all the rules change?" I saved this post when I was on this list in a previous incarnation; it gives a pretty good feel for the subject. It was written by Perry Metzger - where is he anyway? I hope it is not a violation of some rule or other to repost it here. But since it was posted here to begin with, that seems unlikely. >From pmetzger@lehman.com Sat Apr 24 02:50:40 1993 Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 18:02:11 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Reply to: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: The Singularity Periodically, this topic comes up. This is a copy of an old (very old) post of mine that a couple of people told me was particularly good. I thought I'd post it again since it pretty much sums up what I think about the topic. Perry Date: Wed, 25 Mar 92 21:54:14 EST From: pmetzger@shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger) Message-Id: <9203260254.AA00924@newsu.shearson.com> To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: Singularity: getting a precise meaning Reply-To: pmetzger@shearson.com from atrapp@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (Andrew Trapp) One important factor of when we'll hit the Singularity is how you define it. If memory serves me right, Vernor Vinge defines it in "Across Realtime" as that point in history when progress no longer remains expo- nential, and new models are needed to describe it. I've also seen it defined as that point where some distance in the future becomes inconceivable. I like this definition better than Vinge's, but it is much more vague. Our definitions may be vague, but that is unimportant. See below... For one thing, what timespan are we talking about? [...] Personally, I would feel comfortable defining this timespan at about 1 month. What does this matter? The definitions, almost no matter how they are set, will point to approximately the same few year period in our future. Consider: once we can replace our neurons with nanomachines, we will be able to speed up our thought processes by at least 100 Million times. (I personally feel the possibility of accelerating it by hundreds of billions of times is well within the realm of possibility, but lets be conservative for the moment.) The individual who does this will suddenly find that for every day that passes to other people, 27 THOUSAND years have passed in subjective time to him. Consider what that means: in the time it takes you to say "hello", several YEARS will have passed to that individual. Once we launch our first few people over the edge with that sort of speedup, by the next afternoon more will have happened than has happened in five times our recorded history, and that is assuming that no further speedups occur during that day, an exceptionally unlikely possibility. Indeed, it is likely that whatever the maximum possible speed for neural replacement switches is will be achieved long before that day has finished, and by the time 24 hours has passed the race will probably be racing along at hundreds of billions of times our current speed. Tens of millions of years of subjective time will be passing every day. Several thousand years will be "passing" every second. Before the first DAY after speedup is achieved, assuming our sped up humans are equiped with high-speed assemblers to do their bidding, the human race will not merely be unrecognisable, but quite likely much of the nearby solar system will be unrecognisable. Humans would likely be only a vague memory even to those of us who once were humans. The tools needed to accomplish this radical transformation are likely to be only slightly more complicated than those needed to raise cryonics patients from their frigid slumbers. They are, indeed, scarcely more complicated than any tools you can think of for performing any sort of ordinary work on neural repair. My presumption, then, is that once nanomachines capable of performing delicate biological work are available, the time to fall over the edge (i.e. the time to the end of the human race) will likely be less than a year, and at most two to five. We can still, more or less, understand what the lives of human beings capable of designing the first biorepair nanobots will be like. Within a couple of years, however, things will no longer be comprehensable. Regardless of what methodology you use, our capacity to predict anything ten years afterwards, or, more likely, two years afterwards, is nil. We don't know anything about what things will be like, PERIOD. Surely modern western society would be quite incomprehensible to someone living in the Bronze age, and probably to someone living a mere century ago. (Try explaining a scramjet engine, parallel processors, or even microwave ovens to the likes of Jesse James.) I think you could manage to show Jesse James how to use a microwave oven. You could probably teach Jesse James most of the basics of how to use the everyday instruments of our society in a matter of weeks. What happens, though, when the human race has evolved so far that Jesse James is literally as incapable of thinking the thoughts of the new beings as an ant is of thinking about integral calculus? Jesse James could probably be taught how to use an elevator, but what would he (or we?) understand about creatures that don't even look like human beings and probably evolve more in the space of a human breath than our whole species has in the last million years? The next thing that needs clarification is the type of progress being made: technological, cultural, some aspect of economy such as growth or personal wealth, or some other measure. I don't think we can even take a stab at what the culture of the transhumans will be like, not that it would necessarily be like anything for more than a split second. As for personal wealth, I don't think we can really comprehend the wealth of beings that can transform whole solar systems in a day or so. I think we can probably decide on technology. But again, this needs to be clarified even further. Tech- nology in general, or certain industries? Do we look at the state of the art, or only that technology generally available? (E.g. the alleged 50GHz chip, or the 486's available now?) Does it matter? It would be a good idea (futures, anyone? ;-) to get a more precise meaning of "Singularity" before we discuss how far away it is, otherwise we may as well be discussing apples & oranges. The easiest way to get a close grasp of the singularity, I think, is to read a good SF novel about it. Vinge invented the idea but never tried to actually broach the problem directly. My suggestion is that you try to read "Blood Music" by Greg Bear. That book doesn't really attempt to show you what the lives of the transhumans would really be like, but it does give a fairly plausible senario for a singularity-type event. My only problem with the book is I doubt things would happen as slowly as he predicts (weeks) once things "kicked off". Having read that book, I think you might have a closer idea of why the precise definition of the singularity is unimportant. No matter what definition you choose, within reason, things will likely fall within a couple of years of any other reasonable definition you might give. Perry Metzger ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V94 #335 *********************************