As I discuss here: https://pdfernhout.net/to-jame...
        "Some quotes on social problems in science ... From Marcia Angell:
        http://www.nybooks.com/article...
        "The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.""

I collected several other related quotes there.

As I imply in 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."

And expand on here: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"
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?

Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?

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?

These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...

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 [otherwise they could not be so powerful and deadly over a wide area]. 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. ...
====

Thanks for the informative reply. And likewise to bring this more on-topic, if we are seeing all these cost-cutting risk-taking behaviors with companies creating and managing nuclear reactors (privatizing gains while socializing costs and risks), what does that suggest about the likely outcome of job-replacing AI systems created and managed by the same economic and cultural forces?

What does an AI "meltdown" even look like? Perhaps this (of many possibilities)?
"An AI Takeover Scenario" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

As an analogy to renewable energy, we already have plenty of great human-driven "dumb" software tools that can support a humans designing a sustainable healthy future in a decentralized low-risk way, so do we really need to hand that all over to profit-drive wealth-concentrating risky AI systems?

Frankly, my biggest hope right now is that my sig gets into AI training datasets and the AIs someday get a good laugh from it -- and take it (virtually-speaking) to heart. :-) 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."

Related post elsewhere by me in response to question someone esle asked:
"What will people in the future probably laugh at us for? Looking back, every generation has things that seem strange or inefficient later on. Interested in what people think will age badly."
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futur...

Obligatory: https://www.folklore.org/Negat...
"-2000 Lines Of Code
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Date: February 1982
Characters: Bill Atkinson
Topics: Software Design, Management, Lisa
Summary: It's hard to measure progress by lines of code ..."

a favorite sci-fi author who wrote an essay "Know Nukes" promoting nuclear energy and was otherwise dismissive of renewables (granted this was decades ago, so he might have had a different opinion if he was still alive). What I sent him in 2004 on that:

===== to James P. Hogan

I don't want to alienate you, so I'm certainly willing to agree to disagree (having read "Know Nukes" etc.); still, because I know you are an open minded guy, here is why I disagree on the nuclear issue (in this social system).

At the start, I'd say I am a bit of an environmentalist (with an M.A. [consolation prize] in Ecology/Evolution), although I'd certainly entertain some seemingly off-the-wall notions like disposing of nuclear waste by spreading it throughout environmentally sensitive areas -- given it would keep the tourists out and the animals and plants and other creatures there overall might do OK anyway. That approach seems to be working for areas around nuclear facilities which, because of lack of hunting and habitat destruction, are generally doing quite well biologically -- since for most animal species habitat destruction is far worse problem than an increased risk of cancer etc.. I knew someone who studied turtles around a nuclear facility with some contamination over a decade ago and he thought they were doing well IIRC. Still, for people, cancer risk might be evaluated quite differently (although I read some rumblings now that elevated death rates around Chernobyl might have more to do with stress than radiation); but clearly there is an extent to which more radiation is good for you as the body needs a certain level of challenge for optimal health. And certainly there are many other cancer and health risks we gloss over in the USA (like the US obesity epidemic or car crashes), so the radiation risk needs to be compared to those.

If we were living in Chironia or Kronia [sci-fi places Hogan wrote stories about], with personal responsibility and organizational transparency, then I think nuclear power would probably be an OK thing and not be too concerned about it (i.e. it was a risk but a well managed one, like flying in an airplane). A decision on how to generate power for various situations still might be subject perhaps to various tradeoffs nuclear material handling risks vs. renewable risks (people falling off roofs, etc.), considering in totality how the rest of the system was set up. I would undoubtedly in that situation have a lot of faith in the people doing that work. I would expect them to be very proud of their safety record.

But, the issue is we are not yet there as a society. Today's nuclear industry has a very specific track record of lies, deceit, safety violations, murder of whistle blowers, government subsidies (direct and through indemnification/insurance), corruption, close links to secretive organizations, and insufficient attention to security against attacks. So, I think any suggestion that could entail expanding the nuclear industry as-it-actually-is is very problematical, because of these social problems.

Note, I am not saying the nuclear industry could not hypothetically be made better technically (which I think is implicit in your arguments) especially if it became more automated and used vastly better designs. My first big science fair project decades ago was (intended as) a robotic radioactive material transporter. I've also hung around Red Whittaker's robot lab which made robots that went into Three Mile Island, and helped with one tiny mockup of one (Workhorse, which became Rosie) which helped get the contract as the TMI staff pushed the mockup around the scale model they have of TMI to see everything it could reach.

Compare the use of robotics with using human "jumpers"; a family friend who was a plumber was a jumper, working only a short time to fix a leaking pipe spewing radioactive water, and he died of cancer (no proof they are connected; but he is the only jumper I ever knew, and he made a big deal of being sent home in a paper suit). I also knew a fellow student who accidentally got a (likely) sterilizing dose of radiation in his late teens around a nuclear facility (he was having kids by choice in part because of risk of birth defects). So, the promise is there, but the practice is far from it. Granted anecdotes don't build an airtight case; but all the statistics and other stories I read about what actually happens to nuclear workers sound fairly bad too. Often the nuclear industry is the only major employer in a remote area which is just about a company town; the pressure on workers to just go along with dangerous practices is enormous.

If you were to try to overhaul the nuclear industry so it worked socially (as opposed to technically), I would feel it likely that by the time you are through with it and worked out all the other implications to our society (like doing things the long term right way, not the shopkeeper short term cheapest way), such an effort would probably need to take us most of the way to a Chironian/Kronian way of life.

So, on a practical basis, I think photovoltaics, superinsulation, and solar hot water heating as they exist now (or soon) win out over nuclear power as it exists now (or soon), because such renewable technology can pretty much be more easily fitted into the existing way of life, and yet they still also move us towards a more efficient and decentralized society. Overall, these soft technologies just don't require the level of vigilance or trust or centralization or security that hard nuclear does.

Just look at this web site (especially the news pages) to see the excitement and momentum building day by day for PV especially:
    http://www.solarbuzz.com/ [now defunct: https://web.archive.org/web/*/... ]
That stuff isn't just hype -- look at the news there -- people are putting in system after system all over the world (many subsidized it's true, although oil and nukes are also subsidized), and the economics just keeps getting better. Right now, state after state in the US and city after city are all clamoring to become the leaders in producing renewable energy technology (and are mostly all being surpassed by companies in Germany, China, Japan, etc.).

Still, overall, nuclear materials most likely will prove less dangerous to handle than advanced robotics, self-replicating nanotechnology, AIs, biotech (like designer viruses for therapy), and so on for a variety of other non-energy technologies. So if we can't as a society handle such materials properly, then it does not bode well for handling any of these other issues either. Or, in another's words:
    http://www.commondreams.org/vi... [ https://web.archive.org/web/*/... ]
"Clearly, the history of nuclear energyâ"not just in the United States but worldwideâ"demonstrates that the human race has not yet learned how to deal with this incredible power and the waste it produces. We have left death and destruction behind us every step of the way, from the mining of raw uranium, to the manufacture of plutonium, to the assembly of weapons and reactors, to the operation of the reactors, to the disposal of the waste they create. If we humans had to pass a test, had to prove to some rational outside observer that we deserve to be able to continue working with nuclear power, we would fail utterly."

But I know you like to be optimistic, so let's hope we as a society can fix the deeper problem of which all this is just a symptom.

"Train Your Own Replacement" https://slashdot.org/story/04/... "Yahoo reports on how some employers are asking the workers they're laying off to train their foreign replacements - having them dig their own unemployment graves. 'Almost one in five information technology workers has lost a job or knows someone who lost a job after training a foreign worker, according to a new survey by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers.' It looks like a real dilemma where if you refuse to hire your replacement, you are fired without severance and are ineligible for unemployment benefits, and if you quit, you don't receive severance and are ineligible for unemployment."

Indeed, greed (aka "love of money") is especially dangerous when it is backed by powerful tools. As I say in 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."

In more depth by me on that irony: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...

And on the economics of all this, from 2010: 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."

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=garl...
https://drbarbara.info/11/11/u...
"Imagine a single, readily available, natural ingredient capable of mounting an effective defense against up to 14 types of harmful bacteria and 13 different infections. This isn't folklore; it's the subject of extensive modern scientific inquiry. In an era dominated by synthetic pharmaceuticals, garlic stands out as an effective, safe, and chemical-free alternative, ready to be crowned your best ally in the war against unwanted germs."

For other bacterial nasties, there is phage therapy:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=phag...

Thanks for mentioning how this was known 1000 years ago -- and I'd add somehow seemingly forgotten recently because there is little profit in it for concentrating wealth!

Eating right, getting good sleep, exercise, and getting enough vitamin D etc also helps against all sorts of nasties including viruses, but again there is little profit in all that for concentrating wealth:
"During Cold & Flu Season, Protect Yourself by Eating Right"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog...

As I put together in 2010 citing writings from 1964 and later: "Beyond a Jobless Recovery:
A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics" 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."

As my sig suggests "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."

Or at length as I put together in 2010: 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."

Mod parent up! Been wondering for a while when new battery types will widely displace lead-acid. It seems like sodium has a lot of advantages there are you list. (No mod points right now, sigh.)

Your words to Mozilla's CEO's ears! Thanks for the reply.

All great ideas -- and most (especially on customizability and supporting power users) are ones people on Slashdot have been suggesting for a long time, sigh.

Perhaps the most problematical decision Mozilla made was looking at the user base and deciding that if most people did not use a feature they could drop it, which ignores as you say the advocacy by the power users. A long time ago I read how scriptable applications typically have a user base of a pyramid,which goes something like this. Ninety percent of users are casual users who use the defaults or some popular existing plugins. Nine percent of users tinker with the defaults and customizatons, slowly going up a learning source. One percent of users make plugins and really understand the system and all the possibilities. These power users are the core of the community and also sometimes even eventually become application maintainers (if the app is FOSS). A terrible error is when application developers (or management) look at this pyramid and decide, well, hardly anyone uses advanced features so let's abandon them -- not realizing that by disempowering that one percent of power users the whole community powered by mobility up the pyramid becomes broken. And it seems to me that is exactly what happened with the Firefox community (as you outline).

I too used to be a big Firefox advocate to people I knew. The constant changes as Firefox emulated Chrome were disconcerting. As were bugs and security issues back then from not having each tab be a different process. And then there were weird Firefox incompatibility issues as Chrome took over marketshare. I don't use Firefox much now.

I did install Firefox on a new Android phone recently though when I had previously used the built-in Chrome browser. I also decided to not use the phone for web browsing any more to reduce stress and dopamine addictiveness of being always connected and always immediately looking stuff up instead of wondering about it more. Although I do let myself read weather news via the wrapped Firefox plugin for the weather widget.

By contrast, on my Chromebook laptop (with Linux development environment that could in theory run Firefox), I am using Chrome all the time, sigh. I like that Chrome by default will save a page as a single mhtml file whereas Firefox saves multiple files. While Firefox perhaps has a plugin for exporting mhtml, have become vary cautious of installing any plugins at this point as trust in the community fades. Which is a sad comment on late-stage capitalism and the growing theft economy perhaps -- as the parasite load on the community increases from both the top and the bottom of the economic spectrum.

Ironically, Amazon has started telling me sometimes that my (Chrome) browser is unsupported!

I cross-linked my comment above in this other story from yesterday:
"Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To Take Back the Internet"
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...

It's sad to see what so much of the internet and operating systems (and even hardware) have become when there was such high hopes sin the 1970s and 1980s for the microcomputer revolution and then the network revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That said, the untapped potential for personal and community computing remains huge, and there is still great content out there including on old bog-standard personal websites. Computers, storage, and bandwidth are all amazingly cheap by 1970s standards.

AI right now is perhaps another distraction from realizing that potential?

Relevant excerpt: "I am not saying that project would succeed in attracting a lot of interest any time soon -- but Mozilla could fund such a project indefinitely at a low level (~100 international developers at ~US$70K each) on the investment returns of that 1.4 billion (that it is sadly otherwise probably about to piss away on Firefox AI). That endowment would give the project a lot of staying power credibility, beyond previous smaller attempts like Viewpoints Research, Interval Research, Internet Archive's DWeb, Berner-Lee's Solid, Nand2Tetris, Minix, or the Chandler Project. Such a project emphasizing human communications and malleability-through-simplicity would be aligned with the best of Mozilla's history and some of its remaining fanbase."

I should have mentioned 100 Rabbits there as well: https://100r.co/site/projects....

Ass I suggested earlier today: https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The project proposal was to "pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web" in order to "find the gaps that keep web developers from being able to build apps that are - in every way - the equals of native apps built for the iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7." ... In 2012, Andreas Gal expanded on Mozilla's aims. He characterized the current set of mobile operating systems as "walled gardens" and presented Firefox OS as more accessible: "We use completely open standards and there's no proprietary software or technology involved." ... Firefox OS was discontinued in January 2017."

I'm all for FOSS AI (assuming the benefits of AI will outweigh the risks and costs) as I suggested over twenty years ago:
https://pdfernhout.net/on-fund...
        "Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
        We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process? ..."

Unfortunately, Mozilla does not have a very good track record for pivots. If I was in charge of Mozilla, I would go back to a core mission of supporting human communications, and rethink email (Thunderbird) the web (Firefox, perhaps by HTML transcoding to simpler forms) and collaboration (Dialogue Mapping with IBIS). It would involve a team building a simple-as-possible and understandable-as-possible tech stack from the bottom up. This could be inspired by and borrow FOSS code from things like the Squeak/Cuis project built on a Smalltalk VM, or CollapseOS/DuskOS built on Forth, or something built around Scheme like Racket but including its own OS, or even perhaps Commodore OS. Or even bits of FireFoX OS. :-) This would be an OS especially intended to run on otherwise-obsoleted manufacturer-abandoned hardware like five-year-old Android phones, older PCs, and older Chromebooks. Or even Arduinos or FPGAs (like Commodore 64 Ultimate https://www.commodore.net/ ). But you could also run it on newer hardware. The UI would use a redraw-on-UI-action approach like Mithril. A lot of effort would go into reverse-engineering and emulating older hardware. Since there is so much out there, much paid work would go into choosing or developing open standards for all this and harvesting the best of what is already out there and massaging it into the standards. It would be a big learning curve for many developers to align their efforts with this simple-as-reasonably-possible tech stack while bringing back to life old hardware. Reversing the adage "performance is where elegance goes to die", the emphasis would be elegance, simplicity, understandability, maintainability, and security at the cost of some speed. If you need more speed for special cases, "steer" metal-level code on other boxes across the network from this OS.

I am not saying that project would succeed in attracting a lot of interest any time soon -- but Mozilla could fund such a project indefinitely at a low level (~100 international developers at ~US$70K each) on the investment returns of that 1.4 billion (that it is sadly otherwise probably about to piss away on Firefox AI). That endowment would give the project a lot of staying power credibility, beyond previous smaller attempts like Viewpoints Research, Interval Research, Internet Archive's DWeb, Berner-Lee's Solid, Nand2Tetris, Minix, or the Chandler Project. Such a project emphasizing human communications and malleability-through-simplicity would be aligned with the best of Mozilla's history and some of its remaining fanbase.

Some inspiration: "Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey
https://www.infoq.com/presenta...
"Rich Hickey [authors of Clojure] emphasizes simplicity's virtues over easiness', showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path. ... The benefits of simplicity are: ease of understanding, ease of change, ease of debugging, flexibility. ..."

Where would AI fit into such a system? Not in running the base code, for sure. AI-ish tools might be useful perhaps in transcoding existing content to simpler formats. Or in scouring existing FOSS codebases for useful snippets or in generating test cases and such. Or AI might be useful in supporting collaborative work though Dialogue Mapping using IBIS where the AI helped build the Dialogue Maps. But ultimately this project would *not* be about empowering AIs running on new hardware. This project would be about empowering people using older hardware they already have to communicate better about issues they collectively care about.