From: Robin Hanson (hanson@econ.berkeley.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 02 1999 - 14:30:51 MST
On 2/27/99, Hal Finney wrote:
>With the entire story taking place in the Slow Zone, technology is capped
>at a level not too far above our own. Super-intelligence and even human
>level AI is impossible; software projects inevitably bog down in their
>own complexity before something as complex as human AI can be reached.
>Medical science allows people to live perhaps 300-500 years at most
>(although with cryonic suspension their lives can extend over much
>longer periods). Nanotech remains a dream which was never fulfilled.
>
>Most civilizations are trapped in a cycle of boom and collapse, similar
>to Niven and Pournelle's Moties. The Qeng Ho help to moderate this
>effect somewhat as they carry technology between star systems in their
>ramscoop powered vessels. ... All in all I found it a depressingly
>limited future. ... if you're looking for the kind of grand-scale
>ideas which Vinge provided in Fire, I don't think you'll find them here.
I just finished the book moments ago. It was a fun read, if a bit long.
I find the idea of exploring a "depressingly limited future" very
interesting and relevant. If one could paint a detailed enough
picture of just how things could be so limiting, that could help
us better evaluate our chances of being slowed down by such limits,
and perhaps help us avoid such scenarios.
So does Vinge present a plausible detailed picture? I'm not sure.
Limits to software complexity were plausibly presented, and so I
could buy the lack of AI or advanced automation. Though the story
doesn't say so, I suppose complexity limits could also explain the
life extension limits described. The failure to make substantial
progress in physics seemed more arbitrary, though I suppose very
subtle effects might remain hidden for millennia until the right
clues were presented.
More puzzling was the failure to achieve anything like nanotech.
I suppose complexity limits could be behind this. In one case,
a system with "a technology as high as Humankind ever attained"
achieved something close to nanotech, and the dust our hero
bought from them became a core element of all trader's starships,
and the key to our hero's power. But I don't recall that system
being noted for any other abilities to handle complexity. (It
was particularly bad at life extension.)
Perhaps most puzzling is the failure to use any significant
fraction of the resources at each solar system. Human populations
around a star are never more than "billions", and we see nothing
like wholesale conversion of asteroids and comets. "Sooner or later
[each system] ossified and politics carried it into a fall."
These falls are very severe, often requiring re colonization from
the outside, and otherwise seem to require rebuilding from
scratch. This is much more severe than the fall of the Roman
Empire, for example. Powerful weapons of war might explain
this, but the worst weapons we see in the story are nukes. Are
nuke wars really enough to destroy civilizations so thoroughly?
Also the numbers don't seem to add up. One big meeting described
had ships traveling from 300 star systems, each traveling between
100 and 1000 years, and "perhaps a third ... would have fallen
from civilization in the time it took for voyage and return."
This suggests an expected civilization lifetime of 500 to 5000 yrs
(exponentially distributed) after achieving starflight. But at
current population growth rates even a 500 year lifetime gives a
median population growth factor of 1000 between initial starflight
and fall population. And at current economic growth rates the
economy would grow by a factor of 10 billion.
Now maybe growth rates were slower, though folks in the story
didn't bother to note any dramatic differences in growth rates
between places they'd traveled. And even if the economy only
had a doubling time of one tenth the expected lifetime, then
in a thousand human systems more than half of human economic
power should reside in the single most advanced systems among
them. Yet such a vast concentration of power was not noted
in the story.
The frustrating thing about using science fiction to think
about these issues is not knowing whether the author thought
they had good reasons to expect things described, whether they
were just choices to make the story easier to tell, or whether
the author just didn't even notice them. I suspect one big
problem is that Vinge doesn't really believe in these limits.
Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar FAX: 510-643-8614
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 510-643-1884
after 8/99: Assist. Prof. Economics, George Mason Univ.
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