Tag Archives: Future

When See Solar?

By Robin Hanson · November 9, 2011 2:20 pm · Comments (22)

Paul Krugman:

Progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that … prices adjusted for inflation [have been] falling around 7 percent a year. … If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal. And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

Joshua Gans responds:

According to Ramez Naam in Scientific American, the cost of solar photovoltaic models has been falling at an exponential rate since 1980. Installation costs have been falling too. So much so, in fact, that in a decade, solar would outperform the average kilowatt energy cost in the US. A decade after that and it will be approaching the cheap baseload fuels.

Tyler Cowen responds:

If a solar breakthrough is now likely, in which market prices do we see it reflected? It is true that fossil fuel prices took a steep tumble in the last few months, but I’ve never heard anyone suggest that price plunge had to do with a forthcoming solar revolution. … Those shale oil and natural gas discoveries … will further raise the bar against solar power. … Is there a bubble in the stock prices of solar power specialists?  What’s the total market cap of companies selling solar panels?  Or is there a bubble in the share prices of companies which supply cheap and reliable power storage?  The evidence on these points seems weak to say the least.  Keep in mind that other countries can make the switch even if you think political conspiracy will prevent it here. …Is there any reason, based in industry-wide market prices, to be optimistic about the near-term or even medium-term future of solar power?  I don’t see it.

(I posted on this in March.)

When solar is cheaper than coal or oil, that will include the cost of supporting infrastructure, such as building power plants. But since we’ll still have lots of old plants and infrastructure, we’ll still use a lot of carbon. And since places vary in the relative attractiveness of using carbon or solar power, we may even build more carbon plants after that point. Solar getting cheaper than carbon would show up in a gradual fall in global investment in coal infrastructure relative to an alternative still-full-carbon history, and a gradual rise in investment in solar infrastructure.

A transition driven by price lines crossing in twenty years would have very little impact on current stock or commodity prices. At ordinary discount rates used for business investment, returns after twenty years hardly matter. And changing tech and business conditions make today’s top solar firms a poor vehicle for investing in a transition twenty years hence. Of course current stock prices would probably show signs of a price-line crossing if investors expected it to happen in five years. So that scenario can probably be excluded.

This is one of the reasons we could really use long term prediction markets, to more clearly see our distant future. They only require that enough folk care enough about that future to pay to create and subsidize such markets. Alas, few care.

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The Future Of Lies

By Robin Hanson · November 7, 2011 6:30 pm · Comments (19)

The Economist says lie-detectors bring “disaster”:

The truth of the matter—honestly—is that this would lead to disaster, for lying is at the heart of civilisation. … Homo sapiens has turned lying into an art. … The occasional untruth makes domestic life possible (“Of course your bum doesn’t look big in that”), is essential in the office (“Don’t worry, everybody’s behind you on this one”), and forms a crucial part of parenting (“It didn’t matter that you forgot your words and your costume fell off. You were wonderful”). … The truly scary prospect … speaking truth to power would no longer be brave: it would be unavoidable. (more)

Me-thinks they exaggerate. Yes, humans were designed for an environment between the extremes of complete transparency and complete opacity. Our ancestors got away with some but not all lies. But in the last few centuries humans have adapted reasonably well to more opaque environments. New transparency techs may just bring back forager levels of social visibility, levels to which humans are already quite well adapted.

In the modern world, people often interact with others about whom they know far less than their forager ancestors knew, and with far greater abilities to consciously manage appearances. For example, when firms and nations now deal with each other, they can often spend days thinking about their next response, and have large teams studying what that response should be. And yet it mostly works out ok.

Good lie detector tech might just bring us back to forager levels of social transparency. Clever gadgets which can read our micro expressions or subtle features of our tone of voice may just tell us the sorts of things that foragers could see because they studied the same few dozen folks their entire lives, and gossiped endlessly about their behavior and (poker-like) tells. For those of us now used to farmer and industry levels of social opacity, this transparency might take some getting used to. But it is likely well within the range of human adaptability.

The more interesting question to me is what happens when we have both kinds of tech, say face readers to show subtle micro expressions but also masks to block such reading. Voice readers to read subtle tones and voice modifiers to hide such tells. Which techs will we actually deploy?

On the one hand, we might expect people who are socially close, such as families or teams, to encourage internal transparency and discourage opacity aids. This might be seen as a sign of trust and a basis for close coordination. If you want to keep hiding things from me, maybe I should worry about what you are trying to hide.

On the other hand, we expect continued aggressive use of ways to manage appearances between distant less trusting organizations. I just don’t see big firms and nations agreeing to forego their many abilities to manage their appearances. And since the folks participating in such interactions would have high status, e.g., diplomats and CEOs, then being practiced and skilled in high opacity situations would be a sign of social status. This would encourage more opacity among lesser CEO etc. wannabes.

It seems hard to tell if on the whole they’ll have more transparency or more opacity. The safest prediction, it seems to me, is more variation in social visibility. People will have to be somewhat skilled in dealing both with high transparency and high opacity. And which situations should be which may well be a matter of great dispute.

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Daniel Sarewitz, Me on BHTV

By Robin Hanson · October 29, 2011 9:15 am · Comments (7)

Daniel Sarewitz and I have a new Blogging Heads TV episode, largely on human enhancement:

I tried a different visual setting, which didn’t work at all (sorry). We agreed with each other more than I expected. If we do this again, which I’d love, I expect we’ll find more disagreements.

Listening to it again, I notice a lot of points that slipped by me at the time. For example, I should have challenged the claim that regulation isn’t what blocks automation from displacing doctors. But that’s the nature of a fast moving wide ranging conversation.

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Me On Ideas In Action

By Robin Hanson · October 27, 2011 2:00 pm · Comments (15)

In this half-hour episode, Jim Glassman interviews Martin Ford and I on Will Robots Take Our Jobs?. (I posted on Tyler and Ford here.) You might think we’d go into more argument detail in a half hour show, but alas we seem to just repeat the same top level points. This was in part due to an interview, rather than a debate, format. Glassman also seemed more interested in getting Ford to make dramatic claims than in hearing rebuttals – Ford got to say 40% more words than I.

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Kurzweil Rejects Ems

By Robin Hanson · October 23, 2011 3:00 pm · Comments (2)

I posted recently on Allen & Greaves criticizing “the whole brain emulation argument that we can simulate a brain without understanding it.” Ray Kurzweil responds that while he is far more optimistic on AI progress, he doesn’t believe in emulation without understanding either:

Allen mischaracterizes my proposal to learn about the brain from scanning the brain to understand its fine structure. It is not my proposal to simulate an entire brain “bottom up” without understanding the information processing functions. We do need to understand in detail how individual types of neurons work, and then gather information about how functional modules are connected. The functional methods that are derived from this type of analysis can then guide the development of intelligent systems. Basically, we are looking for biologically inspired methods that can accelerate work in AI.

It makes sense that since Kurzweil is so optimistic about rapid progress in so many technologies, such as life extension, he’d be optimistic about rapid progress in modeling the higher level organization of brains. Ems seem more likely to pessimists like myself — although we think emulation should be possible with far less than quantum chemistry detail, since the brain is a robust signal processing system, we estimate that the rate of progress to date suggests a long slow road to understanding brain organization.

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Impossible Is Real

By Robin Hanson · October 21, 2011 8:45 am · Comments (35)

Fermi famously argued that either aliens aren’t out there, or they can’t or don’t want to get here, since we see none around us. An undated Stephen Hawking lecture makes a similar argument about time travel:

If sometime in the future, we learn to travel in time, why hasn’t someone come back from the future, to tell us how to do it. Even if there were sound reasons for keeping us in ignorance, human nature being what it is, it is difficult to believe that someone wouldn’t show off, and tell us poor benighted peasants, the secret of time travel. … If governments were hiding something, they are doing a pretty poor job of extracting useful information from the aliens. … Once you admit that some are mistakes, or hallucinations, isn’t it more probable that they all are, than that we are being visited by people from the future, or the other side of the galaxy? If they really want to colonize the Earth, or warn us of some danger, they are being pretty ineffective.

Many people seem quite resistant to the idea that fundamental limits might apply to our descendants, limits that continue even after trillions of years of advancement. But if we have vast hordes of descendants over trillions of years, almost none of them have the ability and inclination to travel back in time to visit us now. Because almost none are visiting. Some things really are impossible.

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Limits of Imagination

By Robin Hanson · October 20, 2011 9:45 am · Comments (35)

Me:

Our finite universe simply cannot continue our exponential growth rates for a million years. For trillions of years thereafter, possibilities will be known and fixed, and for each person rather limited.

Bryan Caplan:

He’s probably right for physical goods. But why couldn’t the quality of life in virtual reality grow at 4% [per year] for ever? Serious virtual reality wouldn’t be like toothpicks; it would be a vast array of virtual goods and experiences. And since these goods and experiences would be imaginary, there’s no reason they couldn’t grow forever. Laugh if you must: Imagination really is infinite!

Let me try to explain (again).

Imagine that in a million years, our descendants occupy all the 1070 atoms in our galaxy and its surrounding volume, and that it will take another million years to grow that number by a factor of ten, to 1071. They’ve spend a million years searching the space of possible physical devices: signal senders & processors, radiators, nuke & black hole power plants, etc. They’ve found some very good designs, and in another million years of searching don’t expect to find designs that are overall a hundred times more efficient. Even if computational capacity grew as the square of available mass (such as might be possible with black holes), for the next million years they expect their total computational capacity to grow by less than a factor of ten thousand, or 0.001% per year.

Over the last million years they’ve also been searching the space of enjoyable virtual reality designs. From the very beginning they had designs offering people vast galaxies of fascinating exotic places to visit, and vast numbers of subjects to command. (Of course most of that wasn’t computed in much detail until the person interacted with related things.) For a million years they have searched for possible story lines to create engaging and satisfying experiences in such vast places, without requiring more computational resources behind the scenes to manage.

Now in this context, imagine what it means for “imagination” to improve by 4% per year. That is a factor of a billion every 529 years. If we are talking about utility gains, this means that you’d be indifferent between keeping a current virtual reality design, or taking a one in a two billion chance to get a virtual reality design from 529 years later. If you lose this gamble, you have to take a half-utility design, which gives you only half of the utility of the design you started with.

If you spend all your time in virtual reality, and if your utility were your years of life times the virtual reality design quality, then you’d be indifferent between a 310 year life in your current design or a ten second life in the 529 year future design.

And 529 years is tiny on a cosmological scale. Over a million years 4% annual growth produces a factor of 1017,000. Could you really be indifferent between taking that infinitesimally small a chance of moving to a million year future virtual reality, where if you lose the gamble you have to accept a half-utility virtual reality? Would you really keep repeating this gamble as your utility fell to zero? And the universe will survive for many trillions of years — in a trillion years 4% annual growth gives a factor of over 101010.

It may be possible to create creatures who have such strong preferences for subtle differences, differences that can only be found after a million or trillion years of a vast galactic or larger civilization searching the space of possible designs. But humans do not seem remotely like such creatures. We like stories, to be sure, but most of us are pretty satisfied with simple variations on standard story lines – we just don’t get billions of times more value from the very best stories, over pretty good stories.

It is also very hard to see how creatures with such subtle preferences would have adaptive advantages in a competitive future scenario. And in a non-competitive scenario I for one don’t see much point in trying to populate our universe with such extremely picky creatures.

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The Future Of Cities

By Robin Hanson · October 18, 2011 11:10 pm · Comments (20)

What sets city size? That is, what determines how many people all cluster together in an urban area? On the one hand, city size increases with feasible building height and with the gains to people and businesses from interacting closely with many others. On the other hand, city size decreases with how much space folks want, and with costs to transport people and goods within a city and from outlying regions. City size increases with more and cheaper nearby non-city economic activity.

Policy also matters; poor governance and positive externalities of density reduce city size, while being the center of government for a surrounding area increases city size. The size of big cities should be limited by the reluctance of nations to let their city activity be absorbed into big nearby foreign cities. And sunk costs and coordination failures can long delay the adaptation of city sizes and locations to changing circumstances.

In the farming era, cities held only a small fraction of the population, and so their size and locations were determined mainly by nearby farming activity. However, when most folks live in cities, then nearby non-city activity matters less, and decreasing transport costs make bigger cities more economical.

So how well have today’s city size and locations adapted to industry era tradeoffs? That is, how well do cities today trade the gains from more interaction in bigger cities for the added costs of transport and reduced personal space? While we expect optimal industry era cities to be more concentrated, i.e., fewer and larger, we also expect inertia, coordination failures, density externalities, and city mismanagement to slow the transition from an ideal farming era distribution of cities to an ideal industry era distribution. So cities today are probably too many and small. But how far off are they?

One clue – alas one that that is hard to interpret – is that today (log) city size follows a normal distribution, and (log) size changes follow a random walk. Another more informative clue is that in many large nations, a big (but not too big) fraction of the urban population is in the largest city. For example: South Korea 53%, Japan 44%, Egypt 43%, Argentina 37%, Bangladesh 34%, Philippines 28%, Mexico 24% (sources here, here). This weakly suggests that such cities might be running up against a political limit – the reluctance of neighboring nations to let these cities absorb their city activity.

How should we expect cities to change in a future em era, where trillions of human emulations live in virtual reality or in tiny android bodies? Since ems are easier to transport, require less space, and interact less with rural areas, optimal em cities should be even more concentrated than industry cities. Especially if ems learn to better subsidize density, to internalize today’s density externality. And since ems require quite different infrastructure from humans, and need large and rapid changes that most cities will initially be unwilling to allow, existing industry era cities may less constrain the size and location of em cities.

Together these suggest that em cities might be quite a bit more concentrated than our industry cities. Most ems might live within a half dozen or fewer really huge cities. Which would imply that only a half dozen nations would have substantial political power, allowing for easier global coordination.

If optimal em city concentration is really high, most ems might even live in just one biggest city. An analogy in the history of brains seems apt. Some of the first brains were spread out all over animal bodies, but then brains evolved to concentrate in one small region, to minimize signal delays within the brain.

Of course one big em city could be vulnerable to bad governance, so perhaps the biggest city would change as biggest cities became badly managed. Especially if ems had better ways (e.g. prediction markets) to coordinate their city switching activities. Creates an interesting picture of a competitive world government – at any one time most world economic activity might be under a single central city government, and yet cities might compete to offer the best world governance.

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The End of Possibility

By Robin Hanson · October 16, 2011 4:45 pm · Comments (60)

Once upon a time, down on the farm, ordinary lives had few options. Only a few neighbors were available as friends or lovers, only a few careers were possible, and most careers had rather predictable daily schedules. (Forager work varied only a bit more.) By contrast, cities, travel, and even war offered many exciting possibilities. Fiction celebrated these things, and fiction itself offered even more possibile experiences.

Our modern world is chock full of cities and travel, and many career and leisure options. Our diverse fiction celebrates this expansion of possibility. In fact, endless expanding possibility seems central to our modern view. We all “know” that new techs expand our possibilities, and an endless series of new techs lie ahead, each more unpredictable than the last. Science fiction emphasizes a blizzard of strange futures, from which most folks take the lesson that the future is so unpredictable that there is little point thinking about it. Most think we can’t even count on basic physics, as new paradigms could change everything.

But in the long run, this faith in endless possibility is completely wrong. Yes our dreamtime era is fantastically rich with change and possibility, but on cosmological time scales this simply cannot last. And not only is it possible for foresee outlines of the future, it is important that we do so.

Yes, our physics isn’t the last word, for but for most practical purposes it is damn close. New physics will only make a difference in incredibly unusual cases. Our understanding of basic economics is also hardly the last word, but we still understand enough for it to give useful insights into future societies.

Yes, new tech have recently given us each more options, but this is mainly because new tech tends to make us each richer. Wealth gives options. If our descendants are, as I suspect, much poorer than we, they may well have fewer options than us. And eventually economic growth and tech innovation must slow to a crawl. Our finite universe simply cannot continue our exponential growth rates for a million years. For trillions of years thereafter, possibilities will be known and fixed, and for each person rather limited.

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Science Fiction Isn’t About Understanding The Future

By Robin Hanson · October 11, 2011 9:00 am · Comments (35)

Why do people read (or watch) science fiction? Yes, motives are mixed – they usually are. But what are the main motives?

Perhaps science fiction readers are eager to understand the future. After all, the future is extremely far, in a near-far sense, and science fiction offers a near-experience that can complement abstract far descriptions.

Consider, however, the extremely low demand for abstract analysis of the future. Not only are books devoted to future analysis in far less demand than science fiction books, it is possible to turn science fiction stories into abstract contributions, yet this is almost never done. Let me explain.

The main contribution of a science fiction story to our abstract understanding of the future is its setting – the situation in which its characters enact its plot. What techs are used how, what jobs and liesure activities are common, etc. Yet one could take most any science fiction story, and summarize its setting in a far shorter space, and with far less effort, than the author took for the story.  I’d guess that setting summaries could be read in ~5% of the time it takes to read the story, and written with even less than 5% of the effort.

Yet almost no such summaries are written, presumably because writers and publishers anticipate that almost no one wants to read them. So the fraction of folks who read science fiction primarily to better understand the future must be very small. Alas, because I would love to just read setting summaries, especially with compare and contrast commentary, and educated critiques of their plausibility.

Added 2p: I should also mention that most science fiction settings seem clearly to have compromised realism for story benefits. The fraction that can be considered mostly good faith efforts to forecast a future is quite small.

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