What will be the next big revolution?

[Student100]

Can we say that ordinary computers gave rise to the internet, cell phones, digital alarm clocks etc. ? If so then quantum computers will produce several revolutionary developments.

Failing to build a quantum computer may be more interesting than actually succeeding.

 

[Pepper Mint]

Failing to build a quantum computer may be more interesting than actually succeeding.

How and why ?

 

[Student100]

How and why ?

Because it could make for some new, interesting, physics.

How? If I knew the answer to that I'd be about a million dollars richer.

 

[splash206]

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't have high hopes for self-driven cars and especially not genetic engineering. Leave the genes alone; this is an example of naive human hubris that's going to create an abomination(s). Even if we got the engineering right, what kind of mind is going to direct how the genes are manipulated, Donald Trump? Think about it. I say we leave nature alone and work on creating intelligent machines, that's a domain we can legitimately say we own.

Edit: Ok, on further thought let me qualify this a bit. There are some legitimate reasons to pursue gene modification research. For example in treating human diseases postnatal. Plus, I wouldn't be against some sort of genetic solution to extinguish mosquitoes. So, to put it simply, I'm OK with genetic research as far as a prophylactic effort to ease human (and animal) suffering, but I'm not OK with it as a hobby for biomedic entrepreneurs playing around and trying to make a buck by outwitting nature. Does that make sense?

No more pins in the leg. No more mechanical heart valves or anything like that. What about taking a brain and putting it in multiple machines when wanted? The typical humanlike robot would get boring. I'd want the jet pack then onto the ion rocket out to another solar system. No gene mods at all needed then. I may need a few neurons reconnected again soon though. If you do something why not do it big?

 

[splash206]

Hey, there are plenty of those around. They simply just cost half of your salary! J/K ...around 40%.

Not if rented in the red light district.

 

[Kevin McHugh]

No that won't happen as it violates the laws of thermodynamics as we understand them today. There is no free lunch here.

Per PF rules we won't discuss or debate it either as its considered speculative science.

I think you missed the sarcasm in that response.

 

[jedishrfu]

I think you missed the sarcasm in that response.

How can one know the difference between sarcasm and a serious statement online without assuming the poster is knowledgeable about the subject?

PF gets its share of speculative science and personal theory posts that we must remove because not to do so confuses serious students of STEM subjects who may think its valid science which is the primary mission of this site.

 

[Kevin McHugh]

How can one know the difference between sarcasm and a serious statement online without assuming the poster is knowledgeable about the subject?

PF gets its share of speculative science and personal theory posts that we must remove because not to do so confuses serious students of STEM subjects who may think its valid science which is the primary mission of this site.

I thought the banner with the "big" crossed out and replace with "old" was a dead give away. But I see your point.

 

[aa]

My brain has been foggy of late so I will leave out
details which I might have to shore up.

I don't remember exactly which authors describe these
theories. David Deutsch. Kurzweil gave
the idea of exponential progress (an evolving, replicating
system will increase its production at an exponential
rate). Multiple neuroscientists and biologists.

The history of life is a progression from RNA ("RNA world")
to bacteria to advanced cells to multi-cell clumps to
multi-cell clumps with division of labor ("organs"
hence the clump is called an organism).
The last step was the order of magnitude improvement
from evolution occurring on the time scale of organism
lifetime (70 years) to a brain being able to "evolve"
in real time, as it moves around in the world. (order of
minutes) Although it's true that learned information in
a human brain does not pass on to the children, neverthe
less it does represent a shift from evolution iteration
only occurring every few decades, to now evolution can
make improvements every few minutes. Due to the brain
being able to save some of its progress in external
items such as books and societies.
The level after individual organism with a brain,
is a group of brained organisms in a society.

Societies represented a big shift in
productive power. A system could be one
organism or a whole society. Evolution is about the
persistence of further and further increasing in
complexity, systems. The more complex the system (meaning
the more information required to assemble it from raw atoms),
the more power it has to steam roller
its competitors and thus take primacy of persistence
through time. I.e. more complex systems eventually
replicate and eat up more of space here on Earth, because
out of all the complex systems that evolve, although most
are garbage and are less efficient than e.g. a primitive
shark, finally one arises that is a great improvement
over the shark having taken best use of its additional
complexity.

A society is a group of humans plus some extra information
gluing them together. For example, a set of laws or a
library of books or a bunch of tents. (Not to mention the
engrams of the relationships/interactions/histories between
the humans residing in the humans' brains. Karma is a
statistical phenomenon. Karma is the sum of the engrams
located in all other people's brains that record things that
happened that are seen as being due to you.)
Some societies used their additional information better.
That's why the most recent
society of humans has out-powered the rest of all the other
societies put together.* The Founding Fathers put in
a lot of work to make their country the best they could, using
all previous hard-gained knowledge from previous humans and
attempts at government. Silicon Valley is to the U.S. as
the U.S. is to the rest of the world.

*and the other societies had centuries head start

Production is "creation
of organization* that conduces to replicating the
originator of said organization". A
"computer" like a human being is the most productive piece
of material available (when used right). Biotechnology is
the branch of
industry that most directly improves the productivity of said
computer, thus it is where the next revolution lies.

*organization meaning anti-entropy

 

[aa]

The U.S., like a real-time
learning brain, also allows itself to self-modify in a
short time span. Due to things like cycling of presidents
and lawful encouragement of modifications to the governmental
system itself, the U.S. embarked on a rate of evolution
order of magnitude bigger than previous societies.

 

[splash206]

The U.S., like a real-time
learning brain, also allows itself to self-modify in a
short time spanas Due to things like cycling of presidents
and lawful encouragement of modifications to the governmental
system itself, the U.S. embarked on a rate of evolution
order of magnitude bigger than previous societies.

I would like to not get political but do you believe modifications to government today are moving forward? Should we have as many lawyers as we do today? Do you believe suffer or sacrifice plays a major roll in moving forward such as poverty or the casualties of war. Do you believe suffering and sacrificing is a necessity to modifying the previous societies? Hey, my brain on society has been foggy as of late also. You brought up some good points and inspired these questions in the fog I see.

 

[aa]

"Do we need so many lawyers?"

There are inefficiencies in every branch of industry.
Capitalism let's people choose their
vocation and encourages people to work hard
by dangling the carrot of money. (It was
supposed to dangle the carrot of all the things you could
buy with the coupons you got by working hard and producing
something useful that someone else would want to trade for.)
Letting people choose their
vocation increases production because generally
people select occupations that enable them to produce
the most, whether because they are interested in it or
good at it. But with this freedom, people get seduced by
money which leads them to pursue it without taking time
to think about what it is all for. The end all of life is
to be happy. That means creating something that brings
you happiness. (Bringing oneself happiness has a lot to
do with making other people happy.)
Health is required to be happy.

Henry
Ford: "[People need to] overcome the habit of grabbing at
the nearest dollar as though it were the only dollar in the
world." People take the first
job that will accept them, out of a spray of
job applications. Or they
see their friends or parents doing it.
Or someone tells them it's a good idea to work at a
tobacco company because "it's a stable career."
(I guess people don't say that any more but
they say it about companies like Coke which amounts to
the same thing. Those companies are on the way out.
Any branch of industry
that is negative production is destined, by the same laws
of "thermodynamics" that promote the replication of
productive endeavors, to be made extinct, ironed out as
the inefficiency it is, soon.)

Wall Street* is another perversion. A quintessential example
of zero order production. Its cousin is
real estate. Both just move money around, from hand to
hand, sometimes collecting it in the bosom of one
particular individual who siphons all the money away
from other people around him. But both create nothing.
These two branches of
industry will also become extinct.
Their foothold is already
shrinking as their power, like the old power masses
all through history always watch and see, the more tech
nologically advanced descendants that arrive
start eating into their pie and when the old guard tries
to resist, not understanding why they are being pushed
aside, they are surprised by how effective the
new guns wielded by the technologically superior are.

*I mean the seamy side of Wall Street. The stock market
and index funds, for example, are needed and useful.

So, there are people working who produce
nothing or even produce negative production, all over
the U.S. The
most efficient way to remedy this is education. But
health is the fundamental underlying education (it
underlies everything). That's why Bill Gates, who
wished to find the "most efficient
bang for the buck for lives saved or benefit produced"
(paraphrase), decided upon health and
education. Education is like preventive care. By
nipping problems in the bud, or planting seeds and
letting them grow, then moving on to the next patch
and planting more seeds, thus leaving a trail of forest
in your wake, produces more in the end than trying to
nail together a bunch of branches and leaves
until they look like a tree.

By educating
people about how to be happy and what the purpose of
work is, it should help people steer away from fruitless
endeavors.

 

[SW VandeCarr]

"Do we need so many lawyers?"Wall Street* is another perversion. A quintessential example
of zero order production. Its cousin is
real estate. Both just move money around, from hand to
hand,

We certainly don't need any more lawyers. Your take on Wall Street and real estate is interesting. You do allow that markets are important, such as the stock market. But real estate is also a market. Why do you feel this is a perversion? Any market can be corrupted, so it's a matter of regulation. A real estate market will exist as long as people wish to buy or sell real property.

 

[aa]

SW VandeCarr,

You're correct that real estate, like the stock market,
is necessary and useful. In place of "real estate" I should
have said unnecessary real estate transferring and
gaming.
I apologize for denigrating some people, who are not doing
anything wrong, when I made use of a too-broad brush.

Thank you for the astute pointing out of this inclarity in my
post.

 

[splash206]

We certainly don't need any more lawyers. Your take on Wall Street and real estate is interesting. You do allow that markets are important, such as the stock market. But real estate is also a market. Why do you feel this is a perversion? Any market can be corrupted, so it's a matter of regulation. A real estate market will exist as long as people wish to buy or sell real property.

What do you define as work today? I think it is humorous when I hear a rich man in most fields, such as described, saying how poor people just do not want to work while they skew the definition of work as they let their money "work for them". Those lazy poor people are something else. It's a bit hypocritical don't you think? There is a way that we could all be rich in life without the suffering and sacrifices which is going on today. I doubt this but I hope I will live to see the day money is obsolete and that should be our next big revolution.

 

[aa]

"Is suffering and sacrifice necessary for progress?"

You bring up a good point.

I said Silicon Valley is to the U.S. as the U.S. is to the rest
of the world, but the U.S. had the benefit of geographic and
legal blank slates.
Knowledge is replacing the importance of actual
physical objects in importance, and communication and transport
ation are becoming more insignificant in burden, so the geographic
hurdle is lesser.

There is no real barrier
to creating new systems without stepping on anyone's toes.
The crimes are usually mostly perpetrated by the less educated,
the less enlightened. The more
advanced humans know better.
Morality is the
set of rules that most greatly fosters productivity, given the
evolutionary hold-overs from the base drives of sex and status
seeking (I have been reading Loretta Graziano Breuning).

Institutions also have a set of rules geared toward fostering
their productivity (for people productivity is replication of the
person's genes. For institutions productivity is preservance of the
institution as a recognizable entity through time.): law.

There is a clash between the law of the courts
and the law of each individual person's
conscience. Two examples are drunk driving and "dont rat on your
friends." U.S.law is forgiving to drunk drivers. They only get
a mark on their record and some jail time. If U.S.law
sentenced people to death for crashing their car
into a pole and killing their passenger, this would cause many
people to forego driving drunk and thus save the lives of many
innocents. The reason U.S.law fights for the rights of
the criminal (the drunk driver) over the innocent in this case
is that in sum, this policy encourages preservation
of the U.S.state entity by creating an atmosphere of forgivingness,
lenience, and beneficence. The U.S.law system tries
to foster a sense
that the Law and the courts are forgiving and that accidents will
be treated lightly. This removes fears people might have about
trying new things,
which gives you things like Thomas Edison and Bill Gates. This
psychological sense in the brains of the citizens
also means that stress is minimized. Stress diverts the body's
energy, mindset, and activity to defensive activity, activity
that has no productive value. Zebras have transient stress; humans
have chronic stress, so stress also globally decreases a person's
health, destroying productivity. (Sapolsky)

Our conscience tells us, "Dont rat on your friends."
If your friend asks to copy your chemistry homework, while it is
morally incorrect to let them do so, it is morally correct to
if the teacher asks you why does your friend's homework look
similar to yours (they got a glimpse)
say "I have nothing to say." Reciprocity, being protective of your
friends, promotes sociality, and sociality promotes the replication
of one's genes. The preservation of the U.S. is promoted by
requiring that people tell the whole truth in court,
because for
the U.S. to survive it must have justice. When justice disappears
the people will revolt and the U.S. will disappear.

Returning to suffering and sacrifice.
The solution is education and the most efficient
way to start is to fix health.
"Criminals are not bad people. They are just unhealthy."
The most efficient health to fix (also the most
morally incumbent because children cannot fight for themselves)
is that of infants and fetuses and children.
Blaming a focus on academic or life achievement for kids jumping
in front of trains in Palo Alto is wrong. The brain collapse that
causes a kid to jump in front of a train was grown all the kid's
life by their not getting enough love of the face and touch
time variety from their parents.

If I were mayor, I would uproot half the restaurants* and use the
land to quadruple** the size of the schools.
(My experience is with the mainstream schools around here.)
Half the new area should be trees and
grass. Following the prescience of Maria
Montessori, animals should be included on the grounds, inte
grated with the curriculum. A healthy amount of time, including
study time (if it's not too noisy or full of visual distractions),
should be outdoors. Exercise is critical and
we look to the animal kingdom for guidelines. Cars should be held
at least a block away from the school grounds.

*we can come up with a better target than restaurants
**Ideally, even more

Children stay in small rooms 8+ hours
a day and get less space per person than prisoners. They also get
less outdoor time than prisoners.
Ventilation needs to be remedied with the aim that the air
in the school room will be the same as the air outside, except
filtered.
Nutrition laws are pretty good but you can't be too
careful and considerate of children's bodies.

Noise pollution
harms health by creating stress and decreases productivity
by interruption.
Leaf blowers should be taxed. They also damage the health of
the person carrying the leaf blower and emit pollution.
Two legitimate reasons to use leaf blowers are if the leaves lying
would foster mold growth and if the leaves are covering street
markers that to have covered up would be a hazard. Please tell
your gardeners to not use the leaf blower.
When cities were less dense, old-fashioned sirens and car alarms
did not need legal management, but population levels
have reached a critical mass.

ScienceDaily, October 5th: "Family leisure at home may
satisfy families more than fun together elsewhere."
You have to overcome a lot of overhead, when you take the kids
out, to make the stress and time worthwhile. 30
minutes packing them in the car, 30 minutes unpacking them and
everything when you get home. 30 minutes driving to
the place, and 30 minutes driving back. You interrupt whatever
the kids were doing; perhaps they had just gotten really into
building a new type of tower and at the height of their
rate of learning they are jerked away. They are
strapped into a physical lock
state worse than that which causes pulmonary embolisms on
airline flights. (The trip needs to be
abolished not the seat.)
All the family breathes smog and high levels of
CO2 while crying kids stress the parents out which causes
back-stress on the kids. When commuting and at an event, the
level of personal control is decreased, and certain
things need to be done at a certain time, putting more stress
on the parents. Whenever I get back from a big
outing, I crash out and sleep for an hour (some is admittedly
catch up) but it takes me
an hour to recuperate before I can get
back to doing something else. Outings often occur
in places that are less healthy than the home. It is
better to take the kids to the closest park and
enjoy the greenery, fresh air,
open space, and sun.

--

edit to previous post: "Bill Gates" should be
"Bill and Melinda Gates". I apologize.

 

[cosmik debris]

I don't think anyone has pointed out that the next big revolution is ours around the galactic centre.

 

[splash206]

You got that wrong my friend, its our galaxy around the universe. If you going to think big than think real big. ;-)

 

[cosmik debris]

You got that wrong my friend, its our galaxy around the universe. If you going to think big than think real big. ;-)

That's the next big thing after the next big thing isn't it?

 

[fresh_42]

That's the next big thing after the next big thing isn't it?

If it goes on in this tune, I will have to mention, that we just had a really big revolution on Dec. 2012!