https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki...
Multivac was eventually a single unified globe-spanning AI computer complex (which then was expanded across the galaxy).
Let's hope we don't burden it too much?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
To take your insights a step further, consider, as I explain here: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
Nice. As a comment there says: "This actually the correct solution to the trolley problem: Reject the premise."
As I wrote a dozen years ago: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working").
As I wrote a dozen years ago:
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military [or commercial] uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."
This is similar to comments on Slashdot years ago related to 3D printing suggesting that if we ever got food replicators there would be mass starvation due to politics.
While it is always possible there will be a rogue AI someday who can't be stopped, the more immediate issue is humans wielding AI to concentrate wealth and political power -- trying to succeed in a social paradigm (including to get access to the most desirable mates) that no longer makes much sense.
Contrast with, say, James P. Hogan's novel "Voyage from Yesteryear" where people move to a social model of earning respect by accomplishment (when raised in a post-scarcity environment with a lot of AI and robotics):
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?
The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!"
Something I wrote a dozen years ago: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working").""
As with my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Yes, there may still be some exchange transactions. But the balance in the whole system will shift, especially towards more subsistence, gift, and planned transactions (since most human labor will no longer have much value given AI-powered robot slaves). And also sadly there may be more theft transactions if deeper issues about social equity are not addressed.
See also this document I put together over a decade ago:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
What you speculated about is essentially a plot point of Marshall Brains' Manna story (previously linked) where most humans in the USA end up warehoused in "Terrafoam" public housing with the expectation they will soon be killed off.
And while not exactly what you outline, here is a video parable I made in 2011 on a related theme of the long-term perils of excessive wealth concentration (satirically taken to the ultimate extreme):
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"I set the story forty years into the next century, by which time an integrated global system is managing much of the world's affairs. However, proposals for a major upgrade involving new software that learns are causing serious questions to be asked about the degree of decision-making that it can be entrusted with. The trouble is that while the solutions that it comes up with are logically flawless, they are unconstrained by the kind of common sense that humans acquire through a lifetime of real-world experience--which on several occasions has almost resulted in catastrophe. One school of opinion argues that the only way to go is forward, accepting the risks and allowing the system to learn from experience in the same way that people did. "Besides, if anything really bad starts happening, we can always downgrade again or pull the plug." "How can you guarantee that it will always let you?" the opponents reply.
The answer eventually agreed is to run a test on a world-in-miniature. One of the new space habitats is taken over for the experiment and equipped with a supersystem containing all the advanced capabilities proposed for incorporation into the global net. The system is programmed for self-preservation as its highest goal, introducing deliberately the faculty of a "survival instinct" that the critics have speculated could arise spontaneously. The scientists then begin "attacking" it in a series of escalating tests to find out what it's capable of. It's far from Earth, so anything unexpected will be isolated and contained. A strong military presence is included in the mini-world's population--just in case things should take a nasty turn. And if it gets out of hand, we can always evacuate the whole place and nuke it. But the System, of course, doesn't quite see things that way."
A deeper issue is also those discussed by Langon Winner in his contemporaneous 1977 book "Autonomous Technology":
https://www.langdonwinner.com/...
"You [Winner] draw on Ellul to formulate what is at the same time a philosophical challenge and a profound anxiety: ÂThere can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomyÂ."
Related to that point see also "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon 1956:
https://archive.org/details/pr...
"He remembered something Tanyne had said once, casually, about men and their devices: "Ever since there were human beings, there has been conflict between Man and his machines. They will run him or he them; it's hard to say which is the less disastrous way. But a culture which is composed primarily of men has to destroy one made mostly of machines, or be destroyed. It was always that way. We lost a culture once on Xanadu. Didn't you ever wonder, Bril, why there are so few of us here? And why almost all of us have red hair?"
That was the story that inspired Ted Nelson of Hypertext fame and others (and so indirectly the World Wide Web).
As with my sig, "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
See also this document I put together a decade ago:
https://www.pdfernhout.net/bey...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
That was inspired in part by Marshall Brain's writing:
https://marshallbrain.com/mann...
https://marshallbrain.com/robo...
An essay I wrote twenty years ago (informed in part from Slashdot discussions long ago): https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Self-dealing is the conduct of a trustee, attorney, corporate officer, or other fiduciary that consists of taking advantage of their position in a transaction and acting in their own interests rather than in the interests of the beneficiaries of the trust, corporate shareholders, or their clients.
Thanks. Great insight: "Having to use your military gets expensive fast. Having a military so powerful that nobody challenges it is less expensive than a cheaper military that gets challenged, thus having to be used."
Neat idea about the personal rapid transit system! Might work for packages too.
Yo're right about oil and electricity. Other than fuel for cars, oil vs. energy efficiency is (or was) a bigger issue for home heating. With enough insulation of the right kind (and air-to-air heat exchangers), you don't need a furnace at all.
"No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in âPassive Housesâ(TM)
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/1...
Again, if people paid the true cost of oil, people would have switched away from home oil heat a long time ago.
Thanks for the reply. Totally agree this is a shifting situation and I am linking to older data. And the essay I linked to I wrote was from 2009. And also totally agree that the US military has many missions (arguably too many) all over the place so it can be hard to allocate costs to a specific mission (especially the costs of creating and maintaining military infrastructure like an aircraft carrier or submarine or various bases or training costs and so on).
That said, the link you supplied has a title "Saudi Arabia has paid $500M toward the cost of US troops in country". That's probably like a week or less of fuel costs for the US military overall? Don't know specific to that deployment.
Granted, this is from 2010, but consider the magnitude of the numbers here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
"This paper presents the first estimate of United States military cost for Persian Gulf force (CPGfp) derived entirely by a quantitative method. An activity-based cost (ABC) model uses geographic distribution of aircraft carriers as a proxy allocator of Department of Defense (DoD) baseline cost to regional operations. Allocation follows simply from DoD data that since 1990 no less than one aircraft carrier has been continuously on-station in the Persian Gulf; that eight are required to keep one on-station there; that the Navy has had eleven-fifteen carriers since 1990; and that Army and Air Force units are virtually never deployed to combat operations without Navy units. For 1976-2007 CPGfp is estimated to be $6.8Ã--10^12 and for 2007 $0.5Ã--10^12 (2008$). This substantial military investment is not a remedy for the market failure at the heart of regional security problem, which is oil market power. When CPGfp is added to economic losses attributed to market power in another recent study (Greene, 2010), the severity of this market failure becomes more apparent."
Those values are $6.8 trillion dollars over that 1976-2007 time period and then $0.5 trillion in one year. $500 million from Saudi Arabia is 1/1000 of $500 billion. Just a token amount. Even if that deployment cost was now just 10% of what it was, it would still be a huge number. (And of course, that is just the monetary costs, not the personal costs.)
As the authors suggest, and others like Amory Lovins in Brittle Power, using fossil fuels without including the cost of defense in the up-front at-the-pump cost leads to a market failure. Capitalism can't work well unless purchases reflect the true costs.
In the book Brittle Power (or was it a related book like Energy, Vulnerability, and War?) it was suggested that the cost of just one year or so of the Persian Gulf Deployment Force in the 1980s would have been enough if invested in energy efficiency and renewables to eliminate the need for foreign oil.
And that is part of why Amory Lovins and others essentially argue locally-produced renewables and energy efficiency have been cheaper than fossil fuels -- all things considered -- since the 1970s. It's just a market failure that benefits some special interests and costs the US taxpayer.
That situation is shifting, agreed, but where are the apologies for the decades of bad policy? Or at least, where is the discussion and learning about such things so it does not happen again? The shift to renewables like solar PV seems more to do with a bunch of dedicated people chipping away for decades at making renewables cheaper than fossil fuels even given a tilted playing vastly in favor of fossil fuels.
I am all for spending money on national security. The questions is how to spend our money effectively to achieve real security? As I suggest here:
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working")."
Of course, a major reason why the Ukraine issue is such a big deal is that Europe is (or was) dependent on Russia for fossil fuel energy. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that the U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, whether by accident or malice, often even more so than US technology is vulnerable to disruption of the imported oil supply. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, and is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."
Granted, some policies have been shifting over the past twenty years. But still relatively little when you consider how much of the US military is involved with defending oil supply lines and what a huge costs that is every year. One estimate (which includes some other overly high numbers):
https://www.energyandcapital.c...
"Due to the enormous military cost of protecting Persian Gulf imports, the hidden cost of oil from that region amounts to $7.41 per gallon of gasoline. The cheapest gas out in my part of the Bay Area is $3.11 a gallon for regular. Add them together, and the true cost of my gas is probably around $10.52 a gallon."
And also from there:
"One 1998 study by the International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA) looked at petroleum industry subsidies, including the percentage depletion allowance and tax-funded programs that directly subsidize oil production and consumption, among other things.
It assessed up to $17.8 billion per year in tax subsidies, plus government program subsidies (such as vehicle R&D programs, highway construction, and environmental cleanup) of between $38 billion and $114.6 billion per year.
They pegged health and social costs at an additional $231.7 billion to $942.9 billion per year, counting factors such as health issues due to pollution, loss of crop yields, and so on.
As for related costs, such as the direct and indirect costs of traffic delays, traffic accidents, subsidized parking and the like, they counted another $191.4 billion to $474.1 billion per year.
Adjusting the estimates to 2006 dollars and rounding, that makes a total of between $68 and $161 billion in government subsidies, between $283 billion and $1,152 billion in health and social costs, and between $233 billion and $579 billion in related costs.
All told, $584 billion on the low side, $1.9 trillion on the high side."
So there is a lot of money to be saved if even a fraction of that estimate is true. And presumably some of those savings would end up going back to the individual tax payer and insurance payer.
Air pollution presumably must drive up insurance premiums for everyone, but granted that is a different issue than insurance savings from less car accidents.
And it would be a fair criticism to suggest that even if defense of oil supplies was a non-issue that some people would invent other justifications for a huge US military budget.
Thanks for the reply. And a valid criticism of my point to support your rebuttal includes that in our current economic system, it one good is made free people tend to waste it and also resell it for parts or repurpose it to meet other needs that cost money. An example of that is how in the USA "free" (to the poor user on Medicaid, paid for by tax dollars) emergency rooms are pushed into service for shelter, meals, and primary care. The biggest thing that might derail my suggestion then could be, say, people reselling parts from such "free" cars to use in making other expensive paid-for devices -- or people welding cars together to build housing, or people pulling out the batteries to use in home solar power systems, or stuff like that. But arguably this anomaly (it is costing taxpayers more that such cars are not free, even given second order effects) suggests a need to revise many economic and political assumptions in an age of abundant technology.
Don't panic.
