Saturday, February 12, 2011

Decelerando?


Will the Industrial Revolution end not with tranformation but a truce?

This is a question I've considered here before, noting that the true 'accelerando' of the Industrial Revolution peaked about a century ago, and that technologies in general alternate between rapid transformations and much longer periods of maturity and incremental progress.

This subject was lately taken up by Tyler Cowen at his blog Marginal Revolution, and in expanded e-pamphlet form, and as a quick google will show, he has stirred up a hornet's nest of discussion. One reason Cowen has a 'big' blog while this is a 'small' one is that he came up with a snappy title for the phenomenon he discusses, The Great Stagnation.

In a nutshell, argues Cowen, we have already picked much of the low-hanging fruit of technical progress, making what remains harder to come by and thus more expensive. As I noted last fall, the speed of human travel increased in a rather Moore's Law fashion from about 1830 until 1960. In the 50 years since then it has stalled; our jet planes travel at the same speed as first generation jetliners.

More broadly, while we do have the Internet, we don't have household robots, or aircars, or all those other things we were supposed to have in The Future. Nor do we have substitutes or counterparts for most of them. Broadly speaking, except for the mobile phones, a middle class neighborhood of 2011 is broadly similar to one of 1973, the year Cowen picked as reference point (just before the first 'oil shock' and some other trends that made the later 1970s a rough patch).

Some important provisos. A lot more people have the industrial age basics. In 1973, as I am old enough to remember, famine was still an endemic threat to much of the world's population. Now it endangers only the poorest and most marginalized people: a dreadful exception, not a norm. At least half a billion people in China and India alone have, broadly speaking, joined the global middle class in the last decade or so, and probably a similar number in other countries. This is a stupendous increase in human material well-being. But it has to do with the spread of existing technologies, and the institutions that support them. It is an extension of the achieved, not of the possible.

Of course there is the Internet. For sheer coolness it is awesome, and of course it has made this blog possible. But is it really as economically transformative as, say, motor transportation was? In particular, the Internet economy is curiously limited. It has created nothing like the vast pool of fairly well-paying jobs that the auto industry did. It has created a few spectacular fortunes, a few thousand or tens of thousands of impressively well-paying careers, an (unpaid) opportunity for me and the commenters to hold forth to an audience, and allowed millions to either read this blog or - vastly more likely - watch pets and their people do silly things.

Turning from technology and economics to the underlying fundamentals of science, the picture is rather similar. We still don't have a Grand Unified Theory; our physics remains, broadly speaking, a mashup of relativity and quantum mechanics, as it was for most of the past century. Our cutting edge not infrequently cuts right through into metaphysics, offering conceptual possibilities such as bubble universes that we cannot test even in theory.

Space speculation and space SF show much the same trajectory. In 1861 neither one existed. By 1911 they both existed, and Tsiolkovsky had already outlined the principles of multistage, liquid fuel rockets. In 1961 Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth, and the original rocketpunk era of Realistic [TM] space speculation was already being overtaken by events. In 2011 we are still very much within that same framework; alternative techs remain nearly pure speculation.


On the flip side ... there is an oft-repeated story - alas, it seems to be apocryphal - that a mid-19th century patent official recommended closing the patent office on the grounds that everything that could be invented already had been. (The linked blog tartly observes that this involves two improbabilities: that a tech geek would believe such a thing, and that a government bureaucrat would recommend abolishing his own job.)

Inventions are very unlikely to cease, but 'big' ones might well become less common.

Presumably there is some point at which we could know, in broad outline, how the universe really works, leaving nothing truly fundamental to discover. A recent comment thread considered this question, not without some contention.

I am not suggesting anything so sweeping - only that a punctuated equilibrium may be giving way to a new equilibrium. We may have worked our way through most of the broad outlines of science-as-we-know-it, and its major technical implications.

In much the same way, the technological revolution c. 1400-1500 that gave rise to the full-rigged sailing ship gave way to a maturity of more gradual refinement. A seaman of 1400, time-shifted to 1500, would have found ships nearly unrecognizable. A seaman of 1700, shifted to 1800, would have found many improvements but few real surprises.

If so, this has some important social implications. What happens if economic growth rates in this century, at any rate in the most industrialized countries, are markedly lower than they were in the last one? Dividing up the economic pie becomes a much more fraught issue if the pie is no longer getting larger, or only at a glacial rate. 'Creative destruction' will become the exception, not the rule.

Discuss.




The image is a vintage 'muscle car,' a 1966 Pontiac GTO.

196 comments:

Geoffrey S H said...

Ironically, this cheered me up somewhat, having had to examine (long story) the role that robots will play in our future, and ultimately concluding that through their use of brute-force analysis and eventually more advanced techniques, robots will be able to do anything humans can and better, barring cultural professions (and even they might be still subject to mathematics, the 'perfect joke' being an example) and thus ultimately there is little or no room for humans in any profession or job- we are more advanced, but functionally obselete.

Case in point: a thirty year old Firebee drone outmanourving an F4 on a training excercise. Factor in 40 years of developement and the developement of robots that can think of new scientific theses (at aberystwyth University).

And I don't mean AI either- just a calculating machine, utlilisaing the fact that all the universe is comprised of mathsd (at least to us anyway). Being the ultimate calculating machine, eventually not even the most complex task imaginable will be beyond them. It is only a matter of (a very long) time.
Yes, that is a general broad statement- to but it bluntly, it was meant to be.

Having seen this post, i hope i am seriously wrong.

Maybe robots won't completely replace us afterall...

Bill said...

With respect, I think you are vastly underestimating the economic impact of the internet. You claim it has created only a few tens of thousands of well paying careers. That might be true in the United States, but it ignores the fact that the internet is responsible for an enormous shift in how work is done in this country. Further, hundreds, if not millions of jobs have been created overseas in India, China, Ireland and other countries both to support the internet and to produce the computers, routers, cell phones, etc. that make up our means of accessing the internet.

Raymond said...

Prefer the 1970 Plymouth Challenger Trans-Am (w/ 340 six-pack) myself.

There are some fields that I think could explode and reshape the industrial landscape: robotics, biotech, materials engineering, probably others I'm forgetting. Each has a certain momentum at the moment, as we finally start solving some of the problems we identified decades ago and found out just how hard they are.

Robotics in particular seems poised to ramp up massively - we've got enough computing power, and in portable enough platforms, that while we're not going to be making strong AI we have started making useful semi-general-purpose robots. There's something resembling an arms race going on in the field, focused on human-robot interaction and workable environmental navigation, which suggests moving from where's-my-jetpack distance to everyday integration.

Biotech, as well, has made enormous strides in the last decade on the research front. Ever since the Human Genome Project succeeded, we've been collecting all sorts of useful data and chipping away at meaningful modification of basic biological mechanisms (see the synthetic DNA breakthrough a couple months ago).

As for materials, we've made progress on useful nano-scale material construction, edging towards mass-production levels, and the whole field of metamaterials didn't really exist ten years ago. There might be something there.

In general, though, I suspect we're running afoul of the inherent problems with predictions of scientific progress - if we knew what we were looking for, we'd have it already.

jollyreaper said...

Ooooh, this is a good one.

Submitted for your approval...

http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

Examines the consequences of high levels of automation in the human economy. Might seem at first like woo-woo future panic but I think he raises some very interesting questions.

This also raises an interesting trope question.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeWillUseManualLaborInTheFuture

While the Cool Starship of the series has fully automated food dispensers, and artificial intelligence and nanotechnology are realities, indentured servitude and slavery of sapient beings is still widespread, and the most common slave occupation by far in The Future (TM) is the lowly miner. Why mining? Because cave sets are cheap and easily redressed to represent different planets. However, we have to ask ourselves why such technologically advanced civilizations (presumably capable of building automated robot mines) choose to be so dependent on manual labor as to indenture or enslave thousands, even millions of sapient beings instead of applying technological solutions which are cheaper, more efficient, and more humane.

This is done to keep humans in the story and relevant. But what happens if you don't do that? What if you let humans become irrelevant?

This is a story from 1909.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted but unpopular and rarely necessary. Communication is made via a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine called the speaking apparatus, with which people conduct their only activity, the sharing of ideas and knowledge. The two main characters, Vashti and her son Kuno, live on opposite sides of the world. Vashti is content with her life, which, like most inhabitants of the world, she spends producing and endlessly discussing secondhand 'ideas'. Kuno, however, is a sensualist and a rebel. He persuades a reluctant Vashti to endure the journey (and the resultant unwelcome personal interaction) to his cell. There, he tells her of his disenchantment with the sanitized, mechanical world. He confides to her that he has visited the surface of the Earth without permission, and without the life support apparatus supposedly required to endure the toxic outer air, and that he saw other humans living outside the world of the Machine. However, the Machine recaptured him, and he has been threatened with 'Homelessness', that is, expulsion from the underground environment and presumed death. Vashti, however, dismisses her son's concerns as dangerous madness and returns to her part of the world.

jollyreaper said...

Ironically, this cheered me up somewhat, having had to examine (long story) the role that robots will play in our future, and ultimately concluding that through their use of brute-force analysis and eventually more advanced techniques, robots will be able to do anything humans can and better, barring cultural professions (and even they might be still subject to mathematics, the 'perfect joke' being an example) and thus ultimately there is little or no room for humans in any profession or job- we are more advanced, but functionally obselete.

I have this same problem, not just looking into the real world future but also the fictional future. I'm having trouble imagining the occupations people might have in various speculative future scenarios. As near as I can figure it's either an automated future where everyone has a guaranteed minimum income and people are free to follow their bliss or it's 90% unemployment with the elites handing out just enough bread and circuses to prevent an Egypt-style mass uprising. It's a vastly unsatisfying life of low expectations and bitter disappointment.

For my own scifi setting, there will be a cultural prohibition against VR addiction aka holodecadence which is strong a taboo as incest and cannibalism. That keeps most of civilization out of amusing itself to death. But a few hundred years in the future, what will the average bloke be doing? I'm having trouble coming up with answers that are satisfying. 20th century ... well, at this point early 21st century living transported hundreds of years in the future feels like the only thing I can be sure we won't see.

Raymond said...

Maybe that's our McGuffinte: boredom and automation. "Earth's got nothing left to do, so let's go do something neat on Mars." (Wishful thinking, I know, but hey.)

jollyreaper said...

As a compliment to the robotic nation argument....

Super-advanced robot pr0n for y'all
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C62JSgJo39E&feature=related

The self-driving vehicles were something I never thought we'd see, too difficult to ever make practical. They're coming.

And just look at these industrial bots.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syYHTFZxU7k&feature=related

Where's the need for skilled human labor at this point? Making sandwiches?

Nope, there's a bot for that. "Sudo make me a sammich."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQOkMz3kiS0

How long until Subway workers are replaced by bots that do a better job of fixing a sub?

Geoffrey S H said...

Unless non-invasive BCI's mean that a synthesis of human and robot mean that- somhow, a human and robot working in collbration are superior to a robot or human on their own.

Pulled out of the air I know, and probably unlikely, but I have in one setting a BCI influenced world in which a factory worker can instinctively calculate distances and measurements better than a robot thanks to the BCI. The robot checks and takes over when fatigue kicks in, with the human in turn checking and correcting the robot when it has made a sub-atomically small mistake.
Pilots in aircraft that have to manouvre at robot tolerance lev4els of g are safely immersed in the highest quality acceleration tanks.

Humans work with robots in nano-forges and thing printers to manipulate matter on the sub-atomic level to bind it together in the most efficient way to form the product.
And, yes, warfare involves humans and robots together on the front-lines, as the light speed lag and reactions times prohibit a remote command centre even afew miles behind the lines.

As for cars, humans can leave it to the robots, but might drive out of sheer enjoyment (or keeping their brain active). That's what a robot does in this point in the future history, offer choice, not force humans out of a purpose other than mere/sheer existence.

Voila! far-future drama with humans and no AI needed.

:)

of coure, this will NEVER be matched in the real world. Good from a warfighting perspective, but ultimately, for other sectors I would struggle to accept this.

:(

Geoffrey S H said...

I read the article.
Author says that all jobs will be replaced (inventer, actors, all). THEN states that there will be time for more authors and inventors to be creative. A contradiction and unfairly placed hope spot.

Blaine M said...

I have to agree with the above comments on the economic impact of the internet. Sure, a lot of people just use it as another 'gee whiz' entertainment machine, but its practical impact is a very real thing. It allows the exchange of ideas from all over the globe instantaneously. Many attribute the Renaissance to the advent of the printing press and the widespread communication it enabled. The internet may very well end up allowing another such revolution of thought. Economically and personally, it's a very big step forward in globalization.

Also, another factor that will contribute to this century's economic paradigm shift is the coming population bust. I don't if you've read any of George Friedman's books -- particularly (now what amateur futurist can resist that title?). His comments on how a plateauing and (after the middle of the century) declining world population will completely alter the way we think of the global system. The population bust is probably the most under-rated future trend of this century and one that most of people are completely unaware of.

Great post as always!

Blaine M said...

Oops, lost the book title (The Next Hundred Years) in my post.

Below is a link to the book on Amazon, for those not familiar with it:

http://www.amazon.com/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/0767923057/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297563734&sr=8-1

jollyreaper said...

Regarding brain computer interfaces...

I've been playing around with the implications of that. I'm thinking the net result of that could be Charles Atlas superpowers. That's the TV trope for supremely trained normal humans like a Batman as opposed to a mutant or someone bitten by a radioactive spider or an alien from a planet with a red sun. Someone like Batman, if written with some restraint, can do things that are within the realms of possibility but remain unlikely. No one could have such precise timing, such accurate control over his own body, perfect timing, etc. But someone with the computer-assisted nervous system would operate beyond the realm of human ability and now it's simply a question of physics. We're talking Lone Ranger territory, shooting guns out of the hands of bad guys, intricate acrobatics, etc.

And beyond the realm of combat, we're talking about having access to the entirety of human knowledge sitting right there inside your skull. Terminator vision, flagging things for your attention, knowledge flooding into your mind. Do you know how to fly that shuttle? Wait a sec.. ok, now you do.

Now there's the question of where the drama comes from for someone who's that awesome. It comes down to nerves. Me as a person, I'm very risk-adverse. I hate hate hate hate hate things like gambling. Turns my stomach. And this is talking about small sums of money being on the line, not my safety and well-being. It doesn't matter if you're a brain-rigged badass if you're also still mortal. There's also the question of being able to use the BCI properly. Plenty of ways to screw up, spook yourself, get killed.

jollyreaper said...

RE the impact of the internet -- it's the gutenberg press 2.0. It makes the free dissemination of ideas even easier.

There was an interesting TED Talk where they had a speaker via skype calling in from an African slum. They have internet and are putting into practice things they're learning from it. They have access to the knowledge of the world.

You've got people claiming Egypt is the twitter revolution and you've got naysayers shooting right back saying that's the west trying to interject themselves into the story and finding the dumbest, most superficial takeaway. And the first side says no, this is more than hype. We'll have to see.

Anonymous said...

We may be at the begining of a shift in our technology; just as we shifted from wind/water/muscle power to fuel/mechanical power and electrical devices, we now could be shifting to bio-and nano-technologies. What will be the next 'accelerando' and when it will begain? It could be next year or next century. This technological platau won't last forever, but until another tech-explosion happens, things might be on the dismal side.

On the other hand, people use the internet for communication and exchanging of ideas...just look what happened in the middle east this last couple of weeks; people used the internet and other modern communications to spontaniously organise revolutions that have deposed two governments, so far. Sometimes we invent a tool, and then take quite a while to discover what it's best used for...

Ferrell

Raymond said...

jollyreaper:

Brain-computer interfaces don't really work that way. They're more a mechanism to provide input to a computer than to produce computer-aided output to the human body.

Other bodies, though - whole different kettle of fish. Where BCIs lead, eventually, is not optimized bodies but extensible bodies. Hot-swappable brains. Vehicles (and robots!) as extensions of self. Maybe that fabled cyberspace we've been expecting all this time.

Certainly would be a sea change from our current technological plateau.

Raymond said...

Blaine M:

I always make sure to take a tablespoon of salt when reading anything by Friedman. He's terribly earnest in his insistence on the supremacy of a narrow economic model, despite plenty of evidence the world doesn't actually work that way.

jollyreaper said...

Well, brain computer interfaces would work however they're designed to work. I suppose one would make a distinction between whether it's simply a means of replacing spoken and typed instructions to a computer rather than a nervous system upgrade.

But yeah, with tech like this, humans would appear psionic. You'd effectively have telepathy, telekinesis (for objects with internal means of locomotion), ESP since data streams from all over the place could be fed directly into your skull...

Depending upon the mythology, sometimes gods have total omniscience where they know what you're doing even if you're completely alone but other mythologies have the gods depend upon spies, often times animals. But the general idea is something living has to observe something and then report back. Well, that's pretty much what you'd have with literal spy bugs. You can search all you want but you can never be sure you've caught all of the other guy's spies.

Raymond said...

jollyreaper:

No, I mean that taking input from the nervous system is a different problem than directing coherent output to it. We may be able to do both, but the first is what we're already starting to do now.

When we have the second, there are no such things as paraplegics anymore...

Tony said...

The internet has changed what a lot of people do, and some have become very rich in the transitional confusion. Some have also lost a lot, some the shirts off their backs. But, like every previous change in how people do commerce, things will settle out. Then the next change will happen, and fortunes will be made, and livelihoods lost again.

Peste said...

Off-topic now, but...

"To assist the pilot, the landing [Lockheed] U-2 is paced by a chase car (usually a 'souped-up' performance model including a Ford Mustang SSP, Chevrolet Camaro B4C, Pontiac GTO, and the Pontiac G8) with an assistant (another U-2 pilot) who 'talks' the pilot down by calling off the declining height of the aircraft in feet as it decreases in airspeed." (from Wikipedia)

Possible? Of course. Achieved? With great difficulty. Practical? Give me a break.

Anonymous said...

Even without BCIs, technologies such as augmented/virtual reality and gesture recognition (involving wii remote-like devices, haptic interfaces, or lasers detecting eye movement) could be used for many of the applications that people have been suggesting. Reaction times might be slightly longer, since a person would have to move their eyes or hand to give an instruction rather than simply thinking it. However, human-robot cooperation in factory work, remote control of interchangable robot bodies for leisure, tourism or dangerous activities, and control of high-g aircraft from acceleration tanks would all still be possible.

R.C.

Chris said...

I think I can agree with what Jollyreaper's saying on the evolution of the internet, coupled with the integration with humanity. I personally consider the Ghost in the Shell anime series (not the films, they are more speculative) to be an excellent vision of this integration.

In Ghost in the Shell, Charles Atlas Superpowers are basically possible with artificial bodies and external memories for our brains. Regardless the implementation of such technology in real life, the series is very good at imagining what it means for the characters (and, by extension, society). Also, they did a beautiful job of visualizing the interface. Not that it would look like that in real life, but thanks to the visualization, they made it imaginable.

I also agree with those that said the internet was extremely influential. If you read up on "Medium Theory", as propounded by J. Meyrowitz and others, it becomes very tempting to frame the evolution of human societies as the evolution of mediums of communication. From pure verbal transmission, to carving in stone, to the invention of books, then print, after that television and radio, and currently the internet, "Medium Theory" provides an excellent method of combining that with the course of human history, and the influences of those on one another.

In that respect, yes, I do think the internet is doing a bloody good job of transforming human society. As one of the characters from Ghost in the Shell put it, it's possible to consider the internet as part of a new Basis on which a Superstructure can be built.

On the notion of Accelerando/deccelerando, I think the whole idea of BCI is a trend that we can already see happening. Look at the current generation of devices being released. Cell phones, netbooks, notepads, mp3-players and laptops are increasingly merging. The various devices are no longer distinct machines, but rather various iterations of the same machine: one which is a media player (in the broadest sense) a communication device (what with things like Facebook, Twitter, msn, telephonic communications and skype increasingly being just facets of one another, and increasingly merging together), and most importantly, hooked up to the internet to enable all that.

This merger of media, machines and modes of communication is the current trend. Who knows what direction it will take? Ghost in the Shell-style cyberbrains and BCI looks to be a distinct possibility, however it may be a little too "linear" = an extension of current trends, and not taking into account the merger of, say, biotechnology.

Anyway, I'll stop rambling ^_^

Geoffrey S H said...

From the point of view of the bic/macguffin wearer, they would not be superpowered mrotals however, as everyoen would have access to this sort of technology- to avoid information overload however (I'm assuming brains can't alwyas instantly download knowledge from an external source) traditional learning and visualisation of the downloaded knowledge.

Almost all necessary work has been replaced by automation, but humans are beginning to intrude on that realm, using their macguffin devices to imrpove the efficiency of the robots and making things even better for themselves and the economy.
Capabilities to think extra fast (in effect slowing down time) for short periods and enter one vast virtual reality (a developement of the internet) for research and communication also factor.

The human body does nevertheless have limits. For the time being, I'm avoiding "brains in jars" in robots and the like- some consciousnes transference might occur.

The one thing I WILL avoid is some culture/Federation copy where humans are in a utopia and all cared for by robots with unlimited resources. There will be flaws apparent to the characters in the setting.

Chris said...

Re Geoffry S H: "everyone would have access to this sort of technology": only if everyone could afford it. Economic viability seems like a very important factor. We all know the standard scenario of a tiny upper class that can afford the benefits of it all, with a lower class that can't. Personally, I think that scenario is a hyperbolic simplification, if only because the middle class got left out for convenience.

Nevertheless, today already we can see that, despite the huge growth of the internet, it's still factually limited to those that can afford a computer with a connection. The segment of the world's population which is disenfranchised in this way is much bigger than the enfranchised. And it's painful that despite the incredible innovations the internet has brought us, this means that a majority has a voice that cannot be heard this way.

On the growing role of robots in the economy, it must have been noticed that they primarily replace humans in industry, right? The segment of the economy that provides services (like attending a shop, taking care of people in the medical sector, or even ordinary postmen) still require people.

Could it be possible to divide the areas where humans work up into distinct "sectors" (such as the industry vs. the service-sector), ordered by a scale of likely automation, to unlikely? We could then say "Robots will be present first in sector A of the economy, but only in sector B or C at a much later time, after many advance".

You'd then have an incremental decrease in the value of human presence in various segments/"sectors" of the economy. Depening on the time scale, you could easily write SF set at a certain point where you will see people working at B, but not at A, for example.

I don't think I'm explaining this right, does anyone understand what I'm trying to say?

Raymond said...

Geoffrey:

Given the substantial (I'd say nigh-impossible) technological barriers to consciousness transfer, I would bet a lot of money that we'll see brains in jars longs before we see uploading.

Chris:

I don't think we can construct a neat and tidy progression of roboticized industries. That sort of thing is too heavily dependent on the specifics.

Chris said...

Yeah, but still it's easy to see how heavy industry got roboticized first, since the various jobs on the assembly line are easy to compartmentalize and hand over to relatively simple robots doing monotonous task. I brought it up because I read a proposal somewhere that in the near future, it simply will be far more common in the West to find jobs in the services-sector rather than in the industrial sector of the economy. If this isn't already true today.

So therefore I figured you should be able to map this: first heavy industry got roboticized, and not the services (again, think postmen, clerks at stores, etc). We're also seeing elements of warfare being tasked to robots, but I don't think they really "count", since UAVs are not really autonomous, but are primarily controlled via remote.

However, if consensus here is that UAV's do count, then my theory goes to ***, because roboticizing industry, then warfare, but not services is at least less intuitive as a linear progression.

I propose that the progression of robotics would be this:

First the secondary sector, which is the industry. The car industry, but also textile or chemical and engineering seems to be easiest to automate.

Secondly the primary sector (farming, fishing, animal husbandry) comes up for automation. I can easily imagine combine harvesters getting the "UAV treatment", as it were, with the farmer controlling the machines from the comfort of a desk, with a personal computer enabling him to do so.

But if we can automate combine harvesters and remove the need for manual labor on the land, the Tertiary industry will be third to get roboticized: sales (retail and wholesale), transportation and distribution, and entertainment have already been automated in fiction to death (robot trucks and CGI porno are both becoming quite real already).

Lastly, the quarternary sector will be roboticized. This sector deals with intellectual endeavours, and would mark the point where human affairs in the economy are truly no longer needed.

Obviously, the flaw in this neat little scheme is that I had to swap the secondary and primary sectors in the grand scale of things to fit real-life developments we've seen so far... Farming definately didn't get automated before the car industry within the context of this discussion.

However, if we alter the conditions on "automation" or roboticization for the sake of argument... but that would probably be a trivial discussion

Geoffrey S H said...

"Given the substantial (I'd say nigh-impossible) technological barriers to consciousness transfer, I would bet a lot of money that we'll see brains in jars longs before we see uploading."

Technologically speaking, most definately. Culturally speaking....
I wouldn't say itsd certain.

So if/when robots replace humanity in everything... what then?

Remember, we're not talking about AI's ala- the Culture that care for humans like pets and use them when needed. We are talking about unthinking machines that would be VERY difficult to write about drama-wise. If robots can even manage all creative aspects of our culture as well... what then? yes, for the foreseeable future it is unlikely, but if a robot could even write poetry through its application of mathematics, and ultimately do it better than a human, and then criticise and analyse that work (thus removing our role even as spectators), are merely drones whose thoughts are ultimately substandared and unwelcome?

Geoffrey S H said...

Sorry, that was meant to say "Are WE merely drones..."

Thucydides said...

One possible aspect of the decelerando that hasn't been mentioned so far is the increasing amount of resources which are diverted to support bureaucracy rather than being reinvested in the productive sectors of the economy.

In Canada, the single largest houshold expense is taxation, once you factor in Federal, Provincial and municipal taxes, fees levies etc. Depending on your income bracket, you can expect to see at least 1/2 of your income going to taxes; yet most of the things taxes are supposed to be paying for are rather second rate at best (we have a tiny military, crumbling Infrastructure and escalating waiting times for health care, to name the most prominent examples).

Even programs which are supposed to "help" are overtaken by politicization; there are still plenty of poor people despite almost half a century of expanded State welfare, and our education system is something of a joke when we compare standardized test scores against other nations (to use a metric which allows comparison).

Economics also plays a big role, I have seen old copies of National Geographic from the 1970's advertising new Cadillac sedans for $3000, now it is difficult to purchase a working used car for that amount of money. Debasing the currency through inflation negatively affects investor behaviour as well.

So maybe what happened to the "low hanging fruit" is the bureaucrats ate it...

Milo said...

Geoffrey S H:

"We are talking about unthinking machines that would be VERY difficult to write about drama-wise."

"Unthinking" machines? Unthinking machines would be insufficiently intelligent to maintain a working global infrastructure without human assistance/supervision.

Now if you mean Tony's super-intelligent but unfeeling machines, then that's different. Those are difficult to write for because they have a very different worldview from humans (which the author, presumably, is), but they are still "characters".


"If robots can even manage all creative aspects of our culture as well... what then? yes, for the foreseeable future it is unlikely, but if a robot could even write poetry through its application of mathematics, and ultimately do it better than a human, and then criticise and analyse that work (thus removing our role even as spectators), are merely drones whose thoughts are ultimately substandared and unwelcome?"

So I'm going to say something really radical here: is this a bad thing?

If they can do everything humans can, including feeling human emotions, enjoying human art, and so on, then they might as well be "humans Mk. II". I personally wasn't expecting to live forever anyway, but humans feel that it is important that someone inherits our culture and that we continue to be remembered. While it will be difficult for robots to be sufficiently humanlike that we accept them as our heirs, it is not in principle impossible, nor incompatible with them having features such as heightened intelligence or immortal lifespan.

There needn't even be a genocide of any sort. If humans increasingly like interacting with robots more than other humans, we might simply fade away within a few generations.

Blaine M said...

I have to agree with the assessment in the difficulty of consciousness uploading. Considering that scientists and philosophers are still debating what exactly defines consciousness, that sort of technology is most likely generations away. The internet may be somewhat limited at this time, but more and more people are gaining access to it. You really don't have to necessarily have your own computer. In many countries, people regularly operate out of internet cafes, libraries and other such organizations. In addition computer prices are getting cheaper and many nations are looking at opening up significant portions of the EM spectrum for wifi making it even more available.

Raymond:
Mr. Friedman definitely has his blind-spots and flaws in his thinking and I disagree with many of his assessments, but he does have a respectable track record and his 'population bust' assertion is backed up by the numbers -- although, once again, not many realize it.

Z said...

don't seem to see much discussion on the actual guts of the point, so I'll jump in. As often as not the "stabilists" are carrying some sort of civilization-was-an-error flag (or are just blind crumudgeons) and the "progressivists" are crazy-eyed egomanical Onjectivist Singularians convinced their knowledge of server farms will deliver them eternal life with the bulging muscles and buxom conquests of their WoW character.

To answer the question in its most basic form- is it possible that the human relationship with technology, which was stable after a fashion (or several differing fashions) for most of the history of the species, could be, after a few centuries of playing with the ramifications of sussing out most of the interesting human-scale physical phenomenon, be entering some manner of stability again? Sure, it's possible- and indeed a statistical argument no more rigorous than that would suggest that at any given moment in human history, the good money is on it resembling most of the rest of human history. The problem is of course that arguments with no more rigor than that tend to choke in the face of evidence that this is indeed not a mediocre time.

I think the call-out to punctuated equilibrium can be explored a little further- both life and tech involve the replication, trial, and recombination of sets of instructions for making stuff to do jobs, and that's enough to do some graphs-on-a-chalkboard abstract comparison.

We see that most diversification happens quickly relative to longer periods of relative stasis, following a logistic function, which is what you would expect- at least *within closely related clades.*

That part is important, because the other thing that we notice from the fossil and molecular records is that the total diversity of the ecosphere, with some caveats that apply to the specific weirdnesses of marine life, has been in hyperbolic growth since the dawn of multicellular life. (It's a somewhat messier function than that, since it combines a positive feedback system- the increase in the number of selection pressure/energy/gene exchange links between the nodes of species versus the negative feedback of the declining exploitable energy of the system, with most of the hairyness coming from the second part being subject to rescaling as evolution finds new energy sources...)A lot of that change happens in parts of the graphs one might be tempted to call more "complex"- longer biochemical cascades, more complicated armatures, whatever- not because evolution is a great chain of being towards the complicated, but because there is always room on the open-ended side of the graph.

Which brings me to the final one- that since selection is a sort of white-cane tapping around a house of ecological niches, it is unpredictable when some of those logistic-function explosions will happen, since they generally depend on selection pressure suddenly being applied to bits of genome that weren't terribly relevant before. To extend the metaphor, some very big rooms have very small and hard to feel doors- that might be opened by that forgotten gum wrapper in your pocket. Larger doors can have solid confidence brackets placed around the time of their discovery, very small doors cannot.

Z said...

(cont.)I think that outlines a general pattern that, at least to my eyes, technology seems to follow and might be expected to follow into the future. The fact that technologies can be cut apart and pasted with other technologies to form discrete entities which can in turn be cut apart and put together means that we can probably expect the total number of technologies human beings have at their theoretical disposal to grow at some rate as far as the eye can see. We can expect that any given individual technology will optimize like gangbusters for a while, and the length of time it will do so is probably a function of how closely related it is to other tech (the less related, the longer) and how wide the brackets are around "one technology." And we should probably give up on trying to pin down the arrival of the truly bizarre, because it is, essentially by definition, contingent on factors you aren't aware matter yet.

All of this is even more complicated by the fact that one of those little doors that all these blind, replicating technologies swarming through the house has to stumble through is the perceptual threshholds of ape brains, which have certain affinities for size, speed, distance,shape, and number and distinctly less for efficiency, construction ease, and the like. That aforementioned airliner plugging along at the same 500mph of its granddaddy may look like a big Tylenol with shitty seats still, but its probably burns half the gas, trashes half the parts, and can land in a snowstorm thanks to a larger computational budget than the entire moonshot, all of which are just as hard to do as making it fly at Mach 2 but nowhere near as sexy.

Discussion (especially regarding the Singularity) often talk about how different our lives are from our pre-industrial forebears, or their lives from that of hunter-gatherers, with the implied subtext that there is no way to cross those bridges, but that's an exercise that gets mired in varying values of "different" and "understand." I know how to flint knap, Inuits learned to drive pickup trucks, and we both like pretty girls, eat fish from the sea and can understand the dramatic forces at work in Shakespeare- so how much difference is there? I don't see having sex with people you like to make most babies and growing plants for food going anywhere, and everything else is just details- for certain values of "details" of course. :-)

So, back to the point, I think a midfuture that is *mostly* populated with recognizable, even well-aged, technologies, professions, lifestyles, and social mores is probable- just so long as you include the possibility that rumbling underground and off-screen are devices and phenomena that are truly bizarre. I've spoken before of my love for the BSG/Caprica universe before, and it was their embrace of that notion that was part of the nerd appeal. So you invented an FTL drive- it's probably still gonna be put together with nuts and bolts turned by grumpy deckhands.

Rick said...

Welcome to a couple of new commenters!

A small disclaimer that I am not necessarily asserting or predicting a decelerando, only pointing out the possibility.

Other than that, I will let this discussion continue to bubble along for now ...

Thucydides said...

Evolutionary counterparts to "real" history could occur, since economics and technology could be considered forms of ecosystems and the market provides mechanisms to move money and ideas around somewhat analogous to the transfer of genes in the natural environment, favouring some technologies and ideas when conditions are right, and allowing new technologies and systems to "evolve" when political and economic conditions change.

We can perhaps even see counterparts to Ediacaran biota; technologies or social/economic systems which vanished with no obvious modern descendants. A more accurate analogy might be the organisms of the Burgess Shale; there are relationships to modern life forms, but they are very obscure (the Ediacaran biota don't seem to have any relationships with modern animals).

There are several major differences between these "ecosystems" and the natural environment, particularly the speed at which conditions can change and the ability to bring back long forgotten ideas (kind of like bringing back dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, only faster and easier).

Chris said...

I'm a bit wary of statements that suggest a similarity between the economic or political process, and genetic diversification.

Correlation does not imply causation, and while the similarities may seem striking at times, we fallible humans are still projecting the evolutionary process onto something which isn't... evolutionary.

The economic and political process can, however, sometimes be called mimetic. Still not genetic, though, however closely related these concepts originally were.

Thucydides said...

The economic, political and cultural landscapes can be considered "ecosystems", and the idea of competing ideas adapting and flourishing or decaying in particular environments is relatively well established with the idea of "memes".

This way of looking at these "environments" allow many more degrees of freedom and interaction than the highly simplified and stylized models like political "left" and "right", "rational economic man" and so on. This allows modeling to correspond much more closely to the real world, and hence has much better predictive or descriptive utility.

I recall learning introductory economics and being taught the various Keynesian operators in 1980. Outside the window, we had just come through a period of "stagflation", something which cannot exist in the Keynesian universe, and were seeing the effects of the Reagan revolution, which were not conforming with the predictions of academics in school or the chattering classes in the news. Keynesian economics ignores or depreciates so many factors that it was not able to explain what was happening (alternatively, you could say it is based on false premises, but that isn't an argument that I'm willing to take on).

Until we have fairly detailed models which can incorporate many degrees of freedom, we will have difficulty understanding what is happening or determining why.

Chris said...

A fair point, Thucydides. And we seem to agree that, in any case, the process appears to be memetic, rather than genetic.

I've heard of the shortcomings of traditional Keynesian mechanics, but I know far too little on economics to be able (or allowed, methinks) to judge on it.

As for the relation with accelerando/decelerando, does the ecosystem of economics and this subject involve the whole "primary adaptors" and such? You know the scale on when and how new technologies enter society. Would, then, consumer behaviour influence the choice between ac- and decelerado, or is this purely a production- not consumption - mechanic?

jollyreaper said...

Discussion (especially regarding the Singularity) often talk about how different our lives are from our pre-industrial forebears, or their lives from that of hunter-gatherers, with the implied subtext that there is no way to cross those bridges, but that's an exercise that gets mired in varying values of "different" and "understand." I know how to flint knap, Inuits learned to drive pickup trucks, and we both like pretty girls, eat fish from the sea and can understand the dramatic forces at work in Shakespeare- so how much difference is there? I don't see having sex with people you like to make most babies and growing plants for food going anywhere, and everything else is just details- for certain values of "details" of course. :-)

I think this holds true to a certain point. One of the criticisms made of scifi futures like Trek where we're talking baseline humans is that they're imagining human nature is changed without any change to the human meatware. No. If humans from 3000 years ago have the same passions, fears, and desires as modern man, future man shouldn't be any different.

But that's until we factor in bio-engineering. Just how weird could human beings get if desires are able to be made real? Just think of all the weird internet fetishists you've read about and imagine if they were able to actually act on those ideas. The Heaven's Gate cult had some male members volunteer to castrate themselves because of sexual hangups. Imagine if a cult decides to settle on parthenogenetic reproduction. Imagine if you've got people with body dysmoprhia and decide to engineer non-human forms. Religious types had hangups about masturbation and spent a lot of time trying to kill the human sex drive through drugs and diet. Imagine if they could edit behavior through the brain. And you don't have to imagine it working out well, just imagine the consequences if the results of those experiments didn't die on the table but continued to live and continued this society. You can no longer really look at human nature and consider it a baseline for us to meet and greet other cultures. These beings whose ancestors were human would be pretty damn alien.

jollyreaper said...

So, back to the point, I think a midfuture that is *mostly* populated with recognizable, even well-aged, technologies, professions, lifestyles, and social mores is probable- just so long as you include the possibility that rumbling underground and off-screen are devices and phenomena that are truly bizarre. I've spoken before of my love for the BSG/Caprica universe before, and it was their embrace of that notion that was part of the nerd appeal. So you invented an FTL drive- it's probably still gonna be put together with nuts and bolts turned by grumpy deckhands.

I think for at least the next hundred years everything will appear recognizable. It all depends on just how disruptive things get. Certainly WWII reshaped what downtown looked like in many cities.

I think the biggest potential change might come from a shift in engineering. I live in Florida. The old conch houses were built with an eye towards living with the land. There was no AC so you had to build mutli-level houses with an eye towards catching the wind.

The AC meant that buildings could become simpler boxes without working windows because hey, electricity's as cheap as water and we can just use HVAC to regulate everything. Ugh. What a nightmare.

If electricity costs go up four or five times, now there's going to be a huge incentive to be more efficient with building designs. And consider our freakin' car culture where you drive ten minutes to get anywhere. Take away the cheap oil and there's going to be a huge premium placed on livable communities. Call it sprawl fail.

Those are the near-term changes as I see it. But yeah, people will still sleep on beds. Houses will still have roofs and doors. I think we'd have to talk about hundreds of years out for things to become unrecognizable and that would really depend on the culture we're talking about. People who insist on living in what we would consider recognizable human environments could be the neo-amish.

Tony said...

Re: memetics

Memetics makes mountains out of molehills. Ideas gain or lose currency based on their ability to satisfy a need or fashion? Really? Wow.

Re: accelerando/decelerando

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The universe of fundamental knowledge is not unlimited. Therefore, the process of discovering that knowledge is logistic in nature, not quadratic. Therefore, the singularity lies along the Y axis, not the X axis. The ultimate decelerando will come.

Having said that, nobody can know when or how drastic that decelerando may be. Additionally, whatever the overall process does, there is also the affect of morel imited logistics-shaped processes associated with individual technologies or related technological toolkits. Those come and go. Wires played out just as microwaves became practical. microwaves seem to have plateaued, but there still seems to be some room to grow with fiber. Etc., etc., etc...

Re: telecommunications specifically

The interwebs may seem to be something totally new, but e-commerce and e-mail and texting and whatever are really just the final penetration into everyday life of a commercial process begun over 150 years ago. Railroads, telegraph, and the telephone made it possible to do almost everything we do today. Long before there was email, there were telegrams. Then there was the telephone, which made talking to somebody anywhere in the country a matter of picking up the handset and diallg a few digits. Long before e-commerce, there was the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs. Long before airliners, there was scheduled rail service to within a few miles of where most people wanted to go, and to within no more than 100 miles of where almost anybody could go. (Scheduled airline service isn't nearly that good, in some ways. Pennsylvania station is right downtown, a couple of blocks from the Empire State Building; you have to go to Long Island or New Jersey to catch a plane anywhere.)

The internet, combined with air and interstate highway transport, is faster and cheaper. But it's not really doing anything fundamentally new.

jollyreaper said...

One thought I'm having about a setting I'm working on, I'm going to avoid some of these possible outcomes via simple author fiat.

The idea I'd originally come up with is that the whole human sphere is post-singularity, but nobody knows it. I'd had the idea in an embryonic form and then Stross went and did it and I said "oh, that's almost like what I was doing. There are no original ideas!" lol Anyway, in his setting the singularity comes, the AI god resulting from it has clarketech and -- from human perspective -- instantly terraforms thousands of worlds and scatters the majority of Earth's population amongst them. All of the tech directly leading to the creation of a singularity event is walled off and humans are left to their own devices. All of the new worlds to be discovered might seem "alien" to us but are human. It's up to human events as to whether those worlds will be more or less advanced than us, us being the earthers going out there to have a look.

The idea I had is that there's a singularity and a collection of all human minds into a gestalt entity and, for whatever reason, they see this attempt at transcendence is flawed. Humans could attempt it but weren't ready for it. They decided to give it another go.

This is unknown to humanity. According to their history records, they have everything from the dawn of time up to the 21st century and things get kinda fuzzy/hazy and then records resume on their homeworlds. The general assumption is that the standard scifi first empire happened. Humanity goes to the stars, fights a big war, now there's the scattered colonies getting back in touch with each other. Everyone knows and accept this except for the people who said "Wait a second, things don't add up here!"

What you end up with is thousands of Earth-type worlds and by Earth-type I don't mean close enough, I mean with plants and animals and everything that's very similar to Earth. Some planets seem 100% identical, some are a bit more varied. If you consider how different things were on Australia, you can identify plants and animals and figure out how they fit in based on European animals but you have marsupials filling the niches placentals fill on the mainland. Some planets are exploring extinct branches of life like that, almost as if someone were experimenting. And any attempt at gene sequencing shows there's a common divergence. But major authorities handwave it away as "Our ancestors brought everything here and terraformed the planet. Don't question it."

The goal of the gestalt mind was to create many new experiments to see if humans could get it right. Instead of the one go that happened on Earth there's now thousands of tries. Some planets were left at 21st century tech from right before you could trace the run-up to singularity, some were put back to the stone age, some were left at stages in between. The singularity consciousness broke itself up into separate parts so that it would not bias the experiment -- it's gone now.

As for the true timeline, I'd put the singularity originally happening around the 23rd century with the events leading up to it starting in the 21st. Post-singularity history starts around the 26th century with the assumption that the gap between 21st and 26th represent knowledge lost in the war everyone knows was fought, even though there's no real evidence for it. I'm thinking that there will be a big of religious certainty tied up in how things are assumed to have gone and questioning the Official Story is likely to cause as much controversy as teaching evolution in Texas.

The other author intervention I think I'll take is that AI's remain expert systems only. They can perform amazing feats of computation and analysis but have no will of their own, if left to their own devices do nothing. This precludes AI wank.

jollyreaper said...

One other thought -- our current economic system is based on unlimited growth. Investments have to pay interest and the only way you get interest is by making more money and you have to find new things to do, new markets, grow grow grow. It's considered a tragedy if you can't increase the business. Steady-state? That's for losers. Coffee's for closers! Having enough is never enough.

That's a HUGE rethinking that will require restructuring of the entire way we do business. Is interest and the investment culture compatible with a steady-state economy?

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"That's a HUGE rethinking that will require restructuring of the entire way we do business. Is interest and the investment culture compatible with a steady-state economy?"

There are alway inefficiencies that can be taken advantage of. The futures market is a perfect example. The problem is that investment in that kind of market is speculative and limited by the availability of people willing to play the game.

The bigger problem with a totally built-out economy is that it leads to a zero-sum strategic environment. The only way to make more money is to steal it.

jollyreaper said...


The bigger problem with a totally built-out economy is that it leads to a zero-sum strategic environment. The only way to make more money is to steal it.


Goldman Sachs... looks like they're jumping the gun.

That's the real problem, though, isn't it? There's enough to live reasonably but never enough to live outlandishly. How do we account for greed and containing it?

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Goldman Sachs... looks like they're jumping the gun.

That's the real problem, though, isn't it? There's enough to live reasonably but never enough to live outlandishly. How do we account for greed and containing it?"


Funny thing is, Goldman Sachs was really just dealing in market inefficiencies. The disaster came when bankers stopped acting like bankers and more like sailors with too much money on a 48 hour liberty.

How do you regulate greed? Autocracy of truly just men. Think of the Judge system in Judge Dredd, just with near perfect integrity. It would probably be the worst tyranny ever experienced by man, since a truly just man might order anything that makes logical sense within a defined system of justice, even if it killed millions.

jollyreaper said...

Actually, that's the Instrumentality of Mankind.

Though the Instrumentality does not directly administer every planet, it claims ultimate guardianship over the destiny of the human race. For example, it strictly bans the export of religion from planet to planet. Its members, the Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality, are collectively all-powerful and often somewhat callously arbitrary. Although their motives are genuinely benign, they act with utmost brutality when survival is at stake.
Here is an explanation from the story "Drunkboat":
"The Instrumentality was a self-perpetuating body of men with enormous powers and a strict code. Each was a plenum of the low, the middle, and the high justice. Each could do anything he found necessary or proper to maintain the Instrumentality and keep the peace between the worlds. But if he made a mistake or committed a wrong—ah, then, it was suddenly different. Any Lord could put another Lord to death in an emergency, but he was assured of death and disgrace himself if he assumed this responsibility. The only difference between ratification and repudiation came in the fact that Lords who killed in an emergency and were proved wrong were marked down on a very shameful list, while those who killed other Lords rightly (as later examination might prove) were listed on a very honorable list, but still killed. With three Lords, the situation was different. Three Lords made an emergency court; if they acted together, acted in good faith, and reported to the computers of the Instrumentality, they were exempt from punishment, though not from blame or even reduction to civilian status. Seven Lords, or all the Lords on a given planet at a given moment, were beyond any criticism except that of a dignified reversal of their actions should a later ruling prove them wrong.
"This was all the business of the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality had the perpetual slogan 'Watch, but do not govern; stop war, but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!'"


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentality_of_Mankind

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Actually, that's the Instrumentality of Mankind."

Or anything else you want to call it. The nature of a government of truly just men is one of those intellectual games that keeps popping up all of the time. Starting with the premise that a truly honest man is a menace, one can just imagine what a government of men who can be implicitly trusted to execute the law fairly would be like. It is perhaps a blessing that no such thing is ever likely to actually occur.

Raymond said...

Tony:

Re: telecom

Nothing we haven't done before in some fashion or another, but don't dismiss the vast increases in speed and availability as contributors to a new stable equilibrium.

Which, ultimately, is the result of an accelerando - a new, higher equilibrium. If we're accepting the thesis from a few threads back, that the real accelerando was the first half of the century, then it would make sense that we're currently in a consolidation phase. The internet is merely a part of that, I think; it's the culmination and combination of a whole host of technologies developed in the previous acceleration phase, and now it's a matter of making them ubiquitous.

"The only way to make more money is to steal it."

Or use the mechanism already in place: taking market share. I'm sure the regulatory environment would have to be somewhat different if we were to prioritize dividends over capital growth in established markets, but it's certainly doable.

jollyreaper:

"Investments have to pay interest and the only way you get interest is by making more money and you have to find new things to do, new markets, grow grow grow."

Not necessarily. A few years ago, here in Canada, the income trust was gaining momentum as an alternative to incorporation. That was largely due to tax laws (well, loopholes), and the government decided to remove the favorable tax situation. If/when we get to such a point, there are certainly ways to do it.

"The Instrumentality of Mankind..."

...was heavily influenced by Imperial China, given Cordwainer Smith's childhood experiences there, and subsequent fascination. It's certainly nice to have in the canon, as opposed to the overwhelmingly Western structures of government frequently assumed in SF.

I'm not sure how well it'd actually work, though, and I'm with Tony in being less than eager to find out.

Scott said...

Note that in the Ghost in the Shell universe, there are still different 'classes' of people.

The employees of Public Security Section 9 are in the upper class as far as body-prosthesis technology goes, since their body upkeep is funded by the government. Most other people don't have anywhere near that level of performance in their prostheses, but the cyberbrain/external memory systems are low-cost enough to be equivalent to personal computers today.

One main character (Togusa) started the series with only a cyberbrain/external memory system, and I think that Aramaki (the boss) is also a 'mere mortal'. Only a couple characters are full-body prosthetics.

There are still some people who do not have any cybernetics, but they are the poorest of the poor.

Note that this is in Japan proper. Other countries don't have anywhere near the cyberization percentages that Japan does.

[/GitS geekiness]

I don't see that level of technology happening by 2029, though. 2059, maybe. Not early prototypes in 2015 (Supposedly, the Major went full-prosthetic about 20 years before the GitS storylines!) or earlier.

=====

Considering how many companies are not paying dividends right now, the profits v dividends discussion seems to be a bit more complex than we have been assuming.

Tony said...

Raymond:

"Or use the mechanism already in place: taking market share. I'm sure the regulatory environment would have to be somewhat different if we were to prioritize dividends over capital growth in established markets, but it's certainly doable."

How does one legitimately increase market share when there is no capacity for innovation?

"I'm not sure how well it'd actually work, though, and I'm with Tony in being less than eager to find out."

Civil War historian Shelby Foote once told the story of a private brought before General Lee on some charges. Noting the soldier's obvious distress, Lee tells him not to worry, he'll receive justice. The soldier replies that that is what he's afraid of.

The vast majority of people want to see justice when their feet aren't being held to the fire. Vanishingly few, I think, would be happy to see justice done to themselves for their various iniquities, no matter how minor.

Also, an issue that plagues any system of justice is the availability of datao n which to make judgments, and that data's quality. A lords of justice system would be just as vulnerable as any other to deliberate concealment of evidence, perjury, witness intimidation, and plain lack of reliable evidence due to circumstances. Of course, one could imagine that the lords might make obstruction of justice a capital crime, in the interest of protecting the competence and reliability of their judgments. The normal pretrial maneuvering would be replaced by a Lord (or Lady) of Justice rolling up with his (her) posse, demanding at gunpoint, "Tell me all. Tell me now." One wouldn't even need to deliver an oath to the witnesses or the officers of the court. If the Lord/Lady didn't buy what was on sale, people would start dying.

jollyreaper said...

Oh, I'm not advocating for the Instrumentality, just pointing out someone's already explored the idea. Also interested to see it's related to Evangelion's Human Instrumentality Project, though a bit more in name than in detail. Evangelion is one head-trippy anime.

Raymond said...

Scott:

My main problem with the various incarnations of GitS (and bear in mind I rather like them) was the obsession with cyberbrains and ineffable ghosts, as opposed to playing around more with the social consequences of extensive body modification and replacement. Cyberbrains always had an element of uploading, which as far as the discussion here is concerned, will be out of reach for a considerable time.

"Considering how many companies are not paying dividends right now, the profits v dividends discussion seems to be a bit more complex than we have been assuming."

It's always been complex, and is very much a question of larger economic priorities. The appeal of income trusts in Canada was that profits were taxed only once, as personal income of the recipient. Profit realized by the sale of corporate stock was taxed twice - once as income at the corporate level, then again as captial gains tax on the individual seller. Even though both of these rates were lower, the net taxes on profits were higher for many companies compared to trusts in the same industry.

And it's not like it's impossible to do something similar with stocks; bank stocks frequently pay high dividends compared to other industries, since banks which aren't involved in massive pyramid schemes (here's looking at you, JP Morgan) or flashy, questionable foreign acquisitions (Royal Bank of Scotland) tend to have fundamentally stable, relatively fixed-size markets.

Tony:

"How does one legitimately increase market share when there is no capacity for innovation?"

A) I'm tacitly agreeing with your previous statement about always having some room for innovation.

B) Like states, no market is ever fully stable. Populations fluctuate, available resources come and go, and even minor advancements in technology allow for the possibility of newer ventures usurping incumbents. A relatively steady-state economy would be one which deemphasized the constant creation of new markets and reigned in the expectation of constant growth.

Chris:

Any accelerando is fundamentally something of a positive feedback loop between the production and consumption sides. A decelerando, then, would be similar, but a negative feedback loop instead. Advancements are deemed too expensive by the consumers, which then slows research and product development, which acclimates consumers to a slower release cycle, et cetera.

Raymond said...

Addendum (to Chris & jollyreaper):

Income trusts were neutralized (by lowering the capital gains tax) over concerns about removing incentives for growth. Publicly traded equity is a useful mechanism for encouraging growth, after all. However, despite the trust structure's suitability for established, low-growth sectors, it was feared that the tax benefits were too great a temptation for companies in earlier stages of growth, and overall competitiveness would suffer.

Tony said...

Raymond:

"A) I'm tacitly agreeing with your previous statement about always having some room for innovation."

The problem is how much innovation, at what cost? As the rate of knowledge acquisition flattens out, innovation will slow to a crawl, and come at higher and higher marginal cost per innovar (my just-coined term for unit of innovation; currently dimensionless, I see a PhD thesis out there for somebody willing to define its value in real terms).

"B) Like states, no market is ever fully stable. Populations fluctuate, available resources come and go, and even minor advancements in technology allow for the possibility of newer ventures usurping incumbents. A relatively steady-state economy would be one which deemphasized the constant creation of new markets and reigned in the expectation of constant growth."

Personally, I don't see how an economy could stabilize, over a historically meaningful length of time. It will either grow or contract, availability of resources and the size of the population. The only way to reach equilibrium would be to artificially limit the supply of resources to match the population exactly, or to exactly tailor the population to the supply of resources. In either case, it would take one of those strong, absolutely ruthless governments we all love so dearly.

Having said that, I was addressing the purely theoretical case of a perfectly stable economy. In that case, it's hard to see how legitimate business means could lead to anything other than static market shares.

All of this raises another phenomenon which will have to be considered. When ol' Jack Welch revealed the secret of his success to be staying out of markets where he couldn't be #1 or #2, he created a paradigm in which oligarchic markets could -- and to some degree have -- become the norm. If innovation slows down, and market incumbents become less and less vulnerable to displacement through new product competitive advantage, market sectors will become fiefs of whichever companies took the last innovations the furthest.

I'm not saying this would be good or bad. It would just be a feature of the economy. It could be interesting fodder for plot coimplications/devices/resolutions.

Anonymous said...

While we tend to think of new technology as what drives cultural change, that isn't always true. Cultural change can and does occur in responce to purely cultural forces; changes in forms of government, fashions, music, lititure, financial systems, all have changed due to non-technological influances (not to say that there have not been changes due to technology; there have been plenty). While some of the most influencial cultural changes in the recent past have been sparked or enabled by new tech, it was what people did with that tech: you can use a hammer to pound a nail, knock down a fence, or sove in someones head; it depends on what the user's intentions are.

I think that in the next couple of centuries, we will see accelerating waves of social change, even as the pace of most technologies slows in advance of increasing interest in technologies that are now considered "out there" (i.e. biotech, nanotech, and man/machine interfaces, among others), as well as huge changes in the demographics of the human race; the reduction and platauing of global population, universal industrialization, the increased leveling of relitive levels of wealth paired with a balance of source and manufacture among regions and nations. While I don't belive that this will ever reach a 'perfect' level, I do believe that it will reach levels much more balanced then in the past. While I'm sure that there will be "Earth-shaking" discoveries or inventions in the next couple of centuries, the cultural changes will be the ones that will be the most drastic, the most world changing.
The culture of the West in the 1950's was radically different than in the late 1960's; now, in 2011, someone from 1970 would have major culture shock; someone from 1960 would find things both shockingly different and disappointingly familer.

Ferrell

Tony said...

Re: technology and social/cultural change

I think an honest appraisal would find that any non-trivial change in society or culture has a technological connection. Remember, a technology isn't a machine. It's a manner of doing things, along with an associated toolbox. (And the tools need not be unique to one technology -- as pointed out, a hammer can do more than drive nails.) Social and cultural changes happen when people change how they do things.

Scott said...

@Raymond: It doesn't help that the GitS movies were done by a guy who's artistic bent is to explore what it means to be human. For that matter, Shirow himself wanders down some strange rabbit-holes wondering what it means to be human. The 'ghost' is merely a shorthand for what it means to be human or sapient. I suppose you could call it a soul, but that word doesn't carry the same meaning in Japanese that it does in English. After all, everything has a soul in Shinto.

If you've read some of the novels, the Major doesn't even see her prosthetic body as anything other than an extra-fancy set of clothes. The phrase 'my ghost whispers it to me' is, to me, nothing more than a poetic comment about intuition. It's nothing more complex or significant than Briscoe's comments on Law&Order about a gut feeling.

I find it more interesting to note the extent of the datalinked society portrayed in GitS. If you drop the cyberbrain down to an iPhone or equivalent (note that a cyberbrain has comparable abilities to an iPhone or a small laptop computer, just with a very different I/O system), you have a society that is an extrapolation of today. Things happen faster, and are usually decided much more quickly, but it's still recognizable, with motives that people find believable. That's a good thing for a story. Whether it's a good representation of the Plausible Mid-future(tm) or not remains to be seen!

Raymond said...

Tony:

"The problem is how much innovation, at what cost? As the rate of knowledge acquisition flattens out, innovation will slow to a crawl, and come at higher and higher marginal cost per innovar."

(I like the term "innovar". Totally stealing that one.)

The problem with judging the rate of knowledge acquisition is assumptions underlying the knowledge model. In terms of what can be discovered and comprehended by a single person, yes, I'm pretty sure the low-hanging fruit has been devoured. What comes next is understanding and mastering much more complex systems (especially dynamical systems) which are currently out of reach for Mark I Mod I humans.

"Personally, I don't see how an economy could stabilize, over a historically meaningful length of time. It will either grow or contract, availability of resources and the size of the population."

Here I'm implicitly defining a steady-state economy as stable once the above factors have been controlled for. Room for change alongside the underlying factors (which would be a prerequisite for any stable equilibrium) but lacking the fold catastrophes of more dynamic examples.

Re: incumbents

Oligopolies are pretty much the norm in most consumer markets, varying in size according to entry barriers and interchangeability. Some, though, are more suited to geographic monopolies or duopolies (most utilities, for example). And yes, to a certain extent these would become relatively fixed if the economy went to a steady-state configuration. I think, however, that there would always be a certain wiggle room for new entrants, given the difference in optimal price/demand points between a monopoly/duopoly and more competitive markets.

Scott:

I considered the concept of the ghost to be Shirow's answer to the "Ship of Theseus" problem as applied to human existence - a label for the continuity central to the idea of subjective experience.

I only lament he didn't get a jump on the "embodied cognition" school when he had the chance.

Also, dropping the cyberbrain down to the equivalent of a laptop with a brain-computer interface is exactly what I had in mind upthread.

Tony said...

Scott:

"After all, everything has a soul in Shinto."

It's more correct to think of the kami of a natural object as its spirit, not its soul. In Zen Buddhism, one might in fact be more interested in a kami as an expression of a thing's nature, and not so much its behaviors.

Rick said...

I am loving this discussion ...

Ferrell, I think you switched a couple of numbers - surely you meant that someone from 1960 would experience far more culture shock than someone from 1970, regarding things like the sexual revolution.

Though - again! - if you look at self-consciously 'modern' and sophisticated social groups around the 1920s, they would understand our social world in a way that practically no one from the 1870s would.

In a slow-growth economy I think the tendency toward oligopoly would be stronger and more problematic. Changing fashion trends could abruptly bring down a dominant fashion house that missed the trend, but there'd be very few of the technology changes that ended the dominance of a Southern Pacific or Microsoft.

But politically I don't think it is necessary to either throw up hands and accept an oligarchic ruling class on the one hand, or trust ourselves to an Instrumentality on the other.

Nick Machiavelli lived long before the industrial revolution, and James Madison so early on as to have little if any awareness of it. Both accepted social conflict as realities, and believed that robust republican institutions could channel it into nonviolent paths of change and reform.

Of course, for story purposes 'nonviolent paths of change and reform' may not be what we want. :->

Scott said...

You know, the Infinity setting is largely non-violent (as far as the general public is concerned), but military conflicts between the powers still happen almost continuously. It's just that any given military conflict is a minimum number of troops (ie, less than a platoon per side, often less than a squad per side!)

10-20 people can get 'lost' pretty easy, especially when you still have the usual accidents, etc happening to disguise the military events.

Frankly, the world of infinity may be too far in the future (it's officially 175 years from now)...

Clark said...

Two things:

1 - Computing power has been growing exponentially since the introduction of the integrated circuit. Innovation in computing and medicine has basically drowned out all other advancement.

2 - In many areas of the world, today's standard of living is little different than it was 100 or even 1000 years ago. The technological advances we enjoy in the first world haven't penetrated the "fourth world" yet. It isn't entirely representative to just look at the very leading edge of technological development when it is used mostly by a small fraction of the world's population.

Scott said...

@Clark:

Yes and no. It is true that say, the Masai(sp?) tribe in africa live pretty much the same way they did a thousand years ago. But every one of them has a cellphone, and can check in with their friends (or see where the best pasturage is, or...)

In some cases, the fourth world is leapfrogging past some levels of development entirely.

Thucydides said...

I would tend to argue that the cultural is far more important than the technological.

It is a fact that the Ancient Greeks invented a form of steam engine several hundred years before Christ (as well as mechanical computers to predict astronomical events), yet they were considered curiosities or toys. The most common devices were used to open temple doors automatically in order to amaze the public, which shows a remarkable blind spot to thinking through the implications and possibilities of these devices.

Obviously *we* have the same problem looking at our own systems and tools. People in the 24th or 34th century will shake their heads about how we missed some easy [insert name here].

One thing which makes me think slowing or stopping innovation is impossible is to simply look at how so many old technologies are being repurposed in the real world to meet new needs. Since this is Rocketpunk; I will simply point to the various gaslight era technologies being dusted off to create fuel and pure materials in space. Mars Direct is built around creating Methane and LOx from Martian resource using tools and techniques any well educated man from the late 19th century would understand...

Tony said...

Clark:

"1 - Computing power has been growing exponentially since the introduction of the integrated circuit. Innovation in computing and medicine has basically drowned out all other advancement."

Hmmm...I would say innovation in the uses of computing has been a huge component in technological advancement. It is in fact the single biggest reasons for the improvements in medical technology, from diagnostic imaging (ultrasound, MRI, and CAT scans are all heavily computing dependent), to bioinformatics in pharmaceuticals research, to
health informatics in treatment and practice analysis. But, while computing resources have quantitatively changed over time, qualitatively, we're using the same algorithms and data structures that we have been for the last 40 years, at least. It's a triumph of miniaturization and brute force.

"2 - In many areas of the world, today's standard of living is little different than it was 100 or even 1000 years ago. The technological advances we enjoy in the first world haven't penetrated the "fourth world" yet. It isn't entirely representative to just look at the very leading edge of technological development when it is used mostly by a small fraction of the world's population."

"[S]tandard of living" is a very slippery concept. As already mentioned, cell phones have become common in places where nutrition, shelter, health, and mechanization are of a relatively low standard. Internet is becoming more widespread in the unindustrialized world, as is satellite TV. Electrification is proceeding as well, in order to support telecom services, if nothing else. What do ubiquitous instant communication, TV, and electric lighting mean to a standard of living, compared to those things? A lot? A little? Something orthogonal?

Tony said...

Thucydides:

"It is a fact that the Ancient Greeks invented a form of steam engine several hundred years before Christ..."

That's actually not a fact. Hero's aeolipile would not have been capable of doing useful work, no matter how modified within the contemproary technological context. The temple mechanisms suffered from the same problem. They were all things that could be made to work with the technology of the day, but they were developmental dead ends without all of the technolgies necessary to actually make a working steam engine.

People that assert Greek mechanical curiosities represent roads not taken simply don't understand that they are working from a hindsight informed by a knowledge base the Greeks simply didn't have and couldn't have developed. They look at the aeolipile, for example, and see something with some dynamic affinities with a steam turbine. They forget that steam turbines are fed by high pressure boilers using high energy fuels (coal or oil, not wood), have condensers downstream to use working fluid efficiency (instead of just blowing off steam), require cooling systems (instead of ambient air cooling), and rely on an intimate knowledge of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics to operate efficiently. When and how were the Greeks going to invent all of that?

"One thing which makes me think slowing or stopping innovation is impossible is to simply look at how so many old technologies are being repurposed in the real world to meet new needs. Since this is Rocketpunk; I will simply point to the various gaslight era technologies being dusted off to create fuel and pure materials in space. Mars Direct is built around creating Methane and LOx from Martian resource using tools and techniques any well educated man from the late 19th century would understand..."

If I repurpose a baseball bat as a proverbial "blunt instrument", am I innovating, or just finding a new use for a preexisting tool?

Thucydides said...

The cultural blind spot for the Greeks was to say "temple curiosity", full stop. While they did not have many of the tools and techniques that were developed in the 1800's, many if not all of these tools and techniques were developed in response to the steam engine, not in advance of them.

Of course once people are tinkering with steam engines and finding new applications, and new theories are showing what is possible, you get a positive feedback loop. Since the Greeks never seem to have done the tinkering and exploring of possibilities, there was no feedback loop.

Using a baseball bat to provide impulse is not exactly repurposing, unless you could suggest you are using the impulse to trigger something else. This is the sort of thing I was thinking of (you could also use the baseball bat as a piece of structure, burn it for fuel etc.)

Tony said...

Thucydides:

"The cultural blind spot for the Greeks was to say "temple curiosity", full stop. While they did not have many of the tools and techniques that were developed in the 1800's, many if not all of these tools and techniques were developed in response to the steam engine, not in advance of them."

Kind of ignoring necessary material technologies, aren't we, T? I may have named machines developed in parallel with steam power, but what I was getting at was the fact that the whole technological toolbox that contributed to the development of steam power was simply beyond the Greeks. Asserting that they would have developed those things as they needed them totally ignores the fact that it took over 2,000 years of global technological development to actually get from here to there.

"Using a baseball bat to provide impulse is not exactly repurposing..."

With all due respect, that relies on a ridiculously narrow definition of "purpose". A baseball bat's purpose is to hit a ball in a game. Asserting that that is the same purpose as caving in somebody's skull, because it relies on similar physics, is preposterous. That's like saying using explosive to move earth and using explosives in IEDs is using them for the same purpose.

Raymond said...

Tony:

"They look at the aeolipile, for example, and see something with some dynamic affinities with a steam turbine. They forget that steam turbines are fed by high pressure boilers using high energy fuels (coal or oil, not wood), have condensers downstream to use working fluid efficiency (instead of just blowing off steam), require cooling systems (instead of ambient air cooling), and rely on an intimate knowledge of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics to operate efficiently. When and how were the Greeks going to invent all of that?"

"I may have named machines developed in parallel with steam power, but what I was getting at was the fact that the whole technological toolbox that contributed to the development of steam power was simply beyond the Greeks. Asserting that they would have developed those things as they needed them totally ignores the fact that it took over 2,000 years of global technological development to actually get from here to there."

You're leapfrogging a bit, actually. We had the steam piston engine in some form as far back as the 1690s, but it took until the 1880s for steam turbines to be developed.

Looking through the work of Hero of Alexandria, I think his understanding of both the aeolipile and the force pump (and a decent mathematical knowledge of pneumatics) demonstrate enough of the principles of the steam engine that, had he not lived in a time where Greek influence was waning (10-70 AD, well into the Roman Principate), something could've emerged.

What continues to mystify me is not why the Greeks or Romans never developed it, but why the Arabs didn't, given their fairly continual advancements as the western empire fell.

Anonymous said...

Rick: you're right, I got 1970 and 1960 mixed up; I realy need to proofread better when I'm tired! Anyway, while technology might give people new tools to do something new, how those tools are used are entirely up to those people who would make social or cultural changes. While you can point at the birth control pill as having a profound effect (some even say sparked) the sexual revolution; however, I don't really think you can point to any one new technology that spured or sparked the civil rights movement. The recent events in the middle east used the internet (Facebook, Twitter, ect), to organize their demonstrations, but there had to be social issues that spured them to organize in the first place; they found a useful and effective tool to help them achive their goal, but the tool didn't create the uprisings. New technology might make a certain social change more practical, but it has to be human desire to make the change in the first place, otherwise no amount of new tech will start a revolution.

Ferrell

Rick said...

On the Greeks and the aeolipile, I disagree somewhat with both arguments. I doubt that the Newcomen engine was much more technically demanding, if at all.

What strikes me is that 18th century England had a useful niche for even a horribly limited and inefficient steam engine, namely pumping out coal mines, and that was enough for them to spread and in time be improved. There was no similarly utilitarian job that the aeolipile could perform.

But on clockwork technology there is perhaps a more interesting contrast. Medieval Westerners seem never have used clockwork as 'magic,' but only as something cool, but acknowledged as a creation of ordinary human ingenuity.

And weren't those jousting knights and dancing milkmaids in a way the first robots?

Albert said...

My personal theory is that we are reaching our own limits, the human body and mind's inherent limits.

You can see it by how specialized certain professions have become. A century ago we had only medical doctors, now there are cardiologists, neurologists, and cadres of other medical doctors that are also specialized in a few specific fields.

The same for most other sciences like physics and chemistry.

The closer we get to our limits, the more people with different specializations must work together, and the higher the cost becomes.

And just as with lightspeed, there is a point where you cannot do better.

There is also the point that most revolutionary inventions got funded enough to become practical only in times of dire need.
Like rocketry, nuclear energy and computers, that were all heavily researched during WWII.

And again lots of money was dumped in researching them during Cold War times due to more or less the same reasons.

Today, globalization linked so strongly all the richest nation's economies that war between equals is close to impossible.
So there is little reason to invest loads of money in research.

And private billionaires can only do so much. (although are doing pretty well so far)


The only way to get out of this "decelerando" situation is understanding ourselves and then breaking the limits.
And I'm not talking of mystical stuff, but of massively teaching and employing advanced learning techniques, and improve them. And then, when the limit of that is reached again, bioengineering may be the only way.

I tend to frown on creating too sapient machines, but that's another good way.

Another Cold War situation could help, but only so much. After it ends, the money stops flowing and we stop in the mud again.

-Albert

Tony said...

Re: steam engines

Obviously I've made my point very poorly. What I was getting at was that steam engine technology relies on manufacturing quality and precision that the Classical world could never have developed, no matter what the incentive. The steam engine exists at a pinacle of technological development. Though thought of as fundamental to industry, it's really one of industry's highest developments, incorporating the best of engineering for the period it exists in. (I know this really irks you, Rick, but it's true -- external combustion engines may be old in principle, but they're still high tech in application.)

jollyreaper said...

Obviously steam engines were developed. And obviously human beings sussed everything out for themselves. I think the real question is of how much work it would have taken to bring about useful steam engines in classical times. As an oddball comparison, a caesar salad could have been eaten in Caesar's time, more or less, but nobody had thrown the ingredients together in the appropriate fashion until modern times.

So, how much historical change would it really require to bring the steam engine? It seems like we'd be talking about inventing new fields of science and new crafts. There's not much prior experience to borrow from the way that, say, carriage makers could branch into horseless carriages. It'd be like coming up with the idea for Facebook before the microchip was invented.

Raymond said...

Tony:

"What I was getting at was that steam engine technology relies on manufacturing quality and precision that the Classical world could never have developed, no matter what the incentive."

I'd quibble somewhat with that, on a couple levels:

- The first (piston) steam engines developed by Savery and Newcomen essentially only required a pressure vessel which, given cannons had been around for the previous three or four centuries, was well within reach. Whether the Greeks or Romans could have constructed them is an open question.

- Given what we now know about the Antikythera mechanism, I think we should give more respect to the precision of Greek engineering.

Tony said...

Raymond:

"The first (piston) steam engines developed by Savery and Newcomen essentially only required a pressure vessel which, given cannons had been around for the previous three or four centuries, was well within reach. Whether the Greeks or Romans could have constructed them is an open question."

Remember, IMO steam engines represent a sophisticated expression of technology, not a mechanical commonplace. The fact that Newcomen engines were actually developed through an empirical process, using whatever technologies were to hand, just reinforces this view.

IOW, steam engines happened when they could happen, not by accident. They were built from existing technologies when those technolgies were ready to serve; nobody pursued them specifically. The aeolipile => steam engine gets the technology process precisely backwards.

"Given what we now know about the Antikythera mechanism, I think we should give more respect to the precision of Greek engineering."

The Antikythera mechanism was probably the life work of a single philosopher, possibly supported by a craftsman or two. Certainly such focussed work can produce interesting devices, but it can't make them an applicable technology, for the same reason that you can't proceed from an abstract idea or even a concrete model to something you've never seen before and have no use for.

tkinias said...

Albert:

You can see it by how specialized certain professions have become. A century ago we had only medical doctors, now there are cardiologists, neurologists, and cadres of other medical doctors that are also specialized in a few specific fields.

This is an interesting point. Intense specialization is one of the characteristics of modern intellectual work – much to my frustration, I was born a couple or three centuries too late to be an intellectual generalist. But there was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when an educated man could be a true polymath – perhaps even an omnimath, as it were. We’ve gone from where a single career could include making important contributions to (for example) theology, biology, astronomy, and history, to where the various branches of physics can barely communicate with each other, much less with the chemists.

It hardly seems possible that ultraspecialization can proceed any further... yet it must, if we continue to advance. Maybe this is one of the negative feedback mechanisms that contributes to decelerando?

Thucydides said...

Tony

I know we are talking a bit past each other WRT steam engines, so I will try to clarify my point.

We know that various sophisticated mechanisms existed in classical times, such things as water wheels and torsion catapults. There are indications that waterwheels were harnessed to power saws for cutting stone (based on tool marks and recent reconstructions of some stonemason's workshops) as well as milling wheat. We also know that steam engines did exist as curiosities, and at about the same level of sophistication as the first "modern" ones in the late 16 early 1700's .

We also know classical metallurgy was fairly sophisticated, based on the ability to turn out mass quantities of decent quality weapons and armour, so there was a technical background from which to begin (and a better one than would exist again until at least the 1500's). So *in theory* there was nothing to stop classical people from exploring these devices and developing them further. While it is true they would not have resembled modern steam engines (probably they would more closely resemble Stirling engines optimized to run on minimal temperature differences), there were no obvious show stoppers in the technology department. The economy was large and sophisticated, and communications were also good enough to run trade networks across the classical world from England to the Black sea.

Yet it is a fact there are no low pressure bronze steam engines from the classical period running mills or powering ships, so the question I'm interested in is "why not?" The Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs and the Byzantine Empire had access to either the devices or texts describing them (as did the Italians after the fall of the Byzantine Empire), but the information sat as mostly forgotten curiosities.

Perhaps the answer lies in finding a niche, as Rick points out, steam engines in England were used to pump water out of mines, a useful enough niche that allowed engines and engine technology to spread. Perhaps the answer is cultural, which is where I am leaning, so people didn't even imagine uses for these things beyond opening temple doors and otherwise impressing people with stunts.

WRT the baseball bat example, I reread what you wrote and realized I had misunderstood what you were getting at

jollyreaper said...

The other thought is that perhaps AI can be used as an augmentation. I think the term "knowledge worker" is annoying but our dumb computers have driven huge productivity gains over the years. Imagine what they can do for us as they get smarter -- or at least less dumb. If you consider the job of an accountant, one man now with a desktop computer can perform the work of an entire office of humans in the 19th century, back when computer was an actual title for a human being.

We scoff at the unrealistic scenes in Star Trek where the ship's doctor cures a previously unknown viral disease over the course of one episode and say "Yeah, and how long has AIDS taken us?" While there's a degree of Hollywood medicine to it, we are talking about computer tech hundreds of years in advance of our own. I saw a TED Talk where they combined MRI and haptic feedback so a doctor could take a stylus and poke it into a visualization of a living patient's beating heart, not only feel the motion of the muscle but feel the texture. They can see potential problems now that would have only shown up in the autopsy after the surprise death.

But I am going to run with the decelerando for one of my ideas. There's not just one human society but a number of them widely scattered among the stars, all at vastly different levels of tech development. The starfarers represent the highest level of development and it's remained somewhat static because there's only so far you can push the tech. The refinements now come in terms of the artistry of how the tech was put together, a true craftsman giving you the extra 10% edge over the bog standard model.

Rick said...

I don't really hate on steam engines! Though I'm just too young to have any memory of steam locomotives in regular rail hauling service.

I'll still cut the classical world slack on the grounds that they had no niche where terribly lame steam engines would be effective enough to make their further development worthwhile even before they reached the point of broader usefulness.

That said, Toynbee - and before him, I believe, Spengler - argued that the West had a distinctive interest in gadgets from very early on. That seems at least superficially plausible - whether it stands up to serious critical evaluation could be another matter.

Also, a fairly 'big' blogger further discusses the e-book linked in my original post.

Geoffrey S H said...

"But I am going to run with the decelerando for one of my ideas. There's not just one human society but a number of them widely scattered among the stars, all at vastly different levels of tech development. The starfarers represent the highest level of development and it's remained somewhat static because there's only so far you can push the tech. The refinements now come in terms of the artistry of how the tech was put together, a true craftsman giving you the extra 10% edge over the bog standard model."


Interesting, sounds quite like Alastair Reynold's House of Suns to me.

jollyreaper said...

Everything's been done before. All I can do is knowingly and unknowingly borrow, steal, and hope I put enough of my own flavor on it so that it's worth reading. :)

It's so hard to guess what's likely to happen, it really seems all that you can do is just declare "This is how the rules of of the universe work," make sure they're self-consistent, hunker down and see where the muse takes you. Undoubtably, I'll get most everything wrong when compared with future history but it'll be fun while it lasts!

What's so interesting about Dune is that he's able to push it far enough into the future and use odd enough tech that it doesn't seem dated. The spacer's edition of the Orange Catholic Bible is the only thing that seemed a bit cumbersome. Much less jarring, though, than the Star Trek communicator that can broadcast a signal across a star system but doesn't have any kind of display.

Tony said...

Rick:

"That said, Toynbee - and before him, I believe, Spengler - argued that the West had a distinctive interest in gadgets from very early on. That seems at least superficially plausible - whether it stands up to serious critical evaluation could be another matter."

Given what they knew, and their general prejudices, it probably seemed so to them. But the East was interested in mechanical technologies to the degree that they served the State -- and suppressed them when they didn't. So it's probably more accurate to say that the West had less interest in controlling gadgeteering than the East did.

Japan first widely adopting the gun, then widely suppressing it when political conditions changed, is perhaps the most instructive example. When there was widespread interstate and religious conflict, Japan welcomed martial innovation. They went kookoo for cocoa puffs over the gun. (As a personal arm; Japan's fortress culture was such that artillery was not as valuable as it was in Europe.) When the superstate had been established under the Shogun, innovation of any kind was a liability. So it was stopped and, in the case of the gun, even reversed.

Tony said...

Rick:

"I don't really hate on steam engines! Though I'm just too young to have any memory of steam locomotives in regular rail hauling service."

I know -- just a little bit of good-natured leg pulling.

However, I do find it kind of amusing that heat engines are considered primitive in some circles. Unless you're talking about photovoltaic technology*, the whole point of any engine, from wood-burning to nuclear, is to generate (or capture**) a heat gradient from which work can be extracted.

*Before anybody goes there, fuel cells are really energy storage systems, not engines.

**Wind and wave power farms rely on capturing energy generated by atmospheric and oceanic heat gradients. Hydroelectric dams rely on evaporation moving water uphill in order to capture the release of potential energy as it flows back down to sea level. All are driven by solar energy heating a working fluid, however directly or indirectly the energy is extracted from the fluid.

Rick said...

This is as good a place as any to specify my actual grumps about nuke electric space drive:

1) Using any separate heat engine to power the drive means lots of inboard waste heat that you have to get rid of - it can't just be carried off in the exhaust, etc.

2) Fission fuel is nasty stuff, before and after burning, and refueling basically means dismantling the reactor, not just pumping fuel in and out.


Having said all this, nuke electric is my drive of choice in Realistic [TM] settings, since it has pretty decent performance with minimal magitech.

Jim Baerg said...

Hi Rick:
"... and refueling basically means dismantling the reactor, not just pumping fuel in and out."

That depends on the reactor design. While many naval reactors are designed to run for decades on one fuel load, CANDUs change a small fraction of the fuel every day or two while the reactor is running.

If easy refueling is desirable for your spaceship reactor it should be easy to design in.

Tony said...

Rick:

"1) Using any separate heat engine to power the drive means lots of inboard waste heat that you have to get rid of - it can't just be carried off in the exhaust, etc."

Well, if the waste heat flux is big enough, you can use it for cogeneration. Which I gess is to say that any useful amount of heat will be used by a properly designed heat engine, and the waste heat will be as little as possible (and the radiating equipment as small as possible). At the risk of gratuitously abusing the cliche, it's a feature...

"2) Fission fuel is nasty stuff, before and after burning, and refueling basically means dismantling the reactor, not just pumping fuel in and out."

With space nuclear power systems, the reactor, electrical generation, and cooling gear will probably come as a package, to be disposed of after some nominal level of use. The only interfaces will be mounting hardware, power out, and control circuits. After a while, part of any outbound ship's cargo will be a power package for disposal, which will be jettisoned at some time when the ship is above solar escape velocity.

"Having said all this, nuke electric is my drive of choice in Realistic [TM] settings, since it has pretty decent performance with minimal magitech."

Of note, in that context, most recent academic research and commercial use of ion propulsion has been focused on Hall effect thrusters. Only NASA seems committed to grid type thrusters, probably because they have an NIH problem with them. If you want some Real World[tm] verisimilitude, using ganged Hall thrusters, possibly with 2 or 3 concentrically nested thrust chambers apiece, like the University of Michigan's X2 thruster. The neat thing about these is that you have a throttleable drive packageusing the simplest possible technology. With two concentric chambers, for example, you can get three thust levels (small chamber alone, large chamber alone, small plus large chamber together). Even with single chamber thrusters, you have a number of different thrust levels equal to n/2, where "n" is the number fo thrusters, and you turn thrusters on and off in groups of two in order to maintain dynamic balance. With nested chamber thrusters, you have m(n/2) thrust levels, where "m" is the number of thrust modes per thruster (m = 3 with 2 chambers; m = 7 with three chambers).

jollyreaper said...

Understanding the rise of China
http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_jacques_understanding_the_rise_of_china.html

Post-nation-state thinking, talking more about a culture-state. I think the best western example of this way of thinking was the hellenization that swept through the med, people of different ethnicities all sharing a culture and way of thinking. Certainly will have an impact on the mid-future!

Thucydides said...

My only real gripe about "steam engines" and heat engines in general is the low efficiency in converting the chemical/nuclear energy of their fuel into useful work.

Sadly, the laws of physics and thermodynamics are rigorously enforced in this universe, so for most practical applications, heat engines are the only choice.

I would certainly like to see Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC) come to technical maturity, since they can convert hydrocarbon fuels into electrical energy with at least double the efficiency of IC engines (and have no moving parts, which is a big plus and pretty cool to boot). The promise of Aneutronic fusion lies in this area as well (direct conversion of the fusion energy into high quality electric current), which keeps lights on in labs despite the known difficulties, and I am sure most readers of this post have their own favorite candidate technologies as well.

Rick said...

Sadly, the laws of physics and thermodynamics are rigorously enforced in this universe

Bummer, isn't it?

Scott said...

@Jollyreaper: considering that significant parts of the world haven't managed to wrap their brain around the concept of a Nation-State yet (most of africa and the 'Stans), I'm not sure how valid a concept the culture-state is.

After all, the Hellenized world still warred with itself, and the roman-catholic culture didn't stop the internal warring, either.

@Rick: Why not a nuke-thermal? nuke-electrics don't make enough thrust for planetary liftoff anyway, so wouldn't NTRs be less complicated?

Thucydides said...

Especially when the physics police pull you over....

Tony said...

Scott:

"@Rick: Why not a nuke-thermal? nuke-electrics don't make enough thrust for planetary liftoff anyway, so wouldn't NTRs be less complicated?"

Can't run nuke-thermal in the Earth's atmosphere. Once you get in orbit, a sufficiently efficient and powerful nuke electric drive has some definite advantages. Given recent advances in solar technology, solar-electric may actually become viable for manned flight anywhere inside the asteroid belt (inclusive).

Geoffrey S H said...

"@Jollyreaper: considering that significant parts of the world haven't managed to wrap their brain around the concept of a Nation-State yet (most of africa and the 'Stans), I'm not sure how valid a concept the culture-state is."

I couldn't disagree more, with respect. Most of Africa? Maybe inter ethnic conflict across biorders, but the basic running ofinstitutions isn't beyond all of them. This cropped up afew weeks ago- some guy in a paper stated explicitely that he was fed up of state on state wars being automatically labled as "genocide" by the international community.

Running a nation state to the high standards of the West... now there I'd agree. Some, like the Congo and Somalia really can't gfunction as a nation state at the moment (we'll see what happens to Sudan). I just would generalise such a complex continent of states and almost-states in such terms.

Geoffrey S H said...

Sorry, I just would'nt generalise... was meant to be said in that last sentance.

tkinias said...

jollyreaper:

Post-nation-state thinking, talking more about a culture-state. I think the best western example of this way of thinking was the hellenization that swept through the med, people of different ethnicities all sharing a culture and way of thinking.

Thanks for the link to the Jacques lecture; interesting stuff.

I don't think, though, that the Hellenistic world is the best analogy for a "culture-state". In Western terms, that would be the Roman Empire. (I think Jacques mentioned the Holy Roman Empire but actually meant the classical (Unholy?) one.)

Alexander's state -- to the extent it ever really was a state at all -- didn't survive his lifetime. OTOH, even though the Qin Dynasty which unified China only lasted 15 years (221-206 BCE), the state they built lasted several centuries under the Han Dynasty. Alexander's legacy was a semi-universal Hellenistic culture but no state. And, I would argue, Hellenistic culture never penetrated much below the level of the cultural élites -- hence Iranians today speaking Persian not Greek, Egyptian Orthodox Christians using Coptic not Greek in their liturgy, and there being little trace of Greek influence left in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

In today's world, the European Union and India are the closest analogues to the "culture-state" Jacques describes, but neither (unlike China) have been largely unified for most of the last two millenia -- indeed, they almost never were.

Rick said...

Is the nation-state something people 'wrap their head around?' It emerged in somewhat recognizable form in Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, where some dynastic kingdoms happened to coincide more or less with local linguistic-cultural zones.

In some places it was has been self-reinforcing, as governments developed ministries of education as well as armies. In other places, notably the Balkans in very recent times, the relationship of nation states to facts on the ground remains quite shaky and 'artificial.'

I don't know the history of India well enough for an informed sense of how Indians have regarded the various imperial episodes. But certainly in Western Europe the Roman Empire persisted as an idea through most of the 1500 years since the western empire broke up. Less than 150 years separate the end of the HRE from the beginning of the EU.

Rick said...

Nuke thermal, IMHO, somewhat falls between stools. It doesn't have enough thrust for Earth liftoff (plus other problems), and doesn't have the specific impulse for fast orbits.

And yes, solar electric could be VERY nice out to the asteroid belt, though beyond that it kind of sputters and stalls.

Anonymous said...

Hello everyone

First of all sorry that I write in this topic but I have some technical problem with the use of this forum. When I'm trying to enter in the appropriate topic, I received a 404 error It's about the only topic in which I was able to enter. Do you have the same problems? What's going on?

CrisisEraDynamo said...

I can foresee a decelerando due to nuclear war between China and the US.

Yes, you heard that right. Generational Dynamics (http://www.generationaldynamics.com) predicts a major war between China and the US. The current trade relations and economic interdependence do not matter -- the prelude to World War I was the same, and the actual war itself came as a shock to everyone.

Xenakis also predicts a Singularity, but I predict a decelerando because both sides will use EMP against one another, destroying all technological infrastructure. Nations that don't get nuked will not have the know-how to restore everything and accelerate technological development again, and most of the First World populations that have such know-how would be dead.

Rick said...

Welcome to another new commenter!

A nuclear war between major powers would very likely trigger a decelerando - certainly for the countries involved.

I don't know that WW I was really that much a shock, though - stalemate in the trenches was, but an upcoming great power war was rather widely anticipated, I think.

Rick said...

Anon @ 10:12 AM - What post were you attempting to reply to when you got a 404 error?

Tony said...

Xenakis has a self-published book and no Wikipedia entry. Relevance usually includes a real publisher and, if not fame, at least enough notoriety that somebody would want to include you in the standard online reference.

A fight with China might involve the use of nukes, maybe, but not to the point that civilization is set back. The Chinese have just enough nukes for regime survival insurance. Actually using them against the US might kill a few millions, but it would lead to the end of China as anything other than a disaster area.

As for WWI being a surprise...hardly. There were self-deceivers and optimists that believed that economic interdependence would render war impossible, or at least quick. Nobody paid attention to them. Governments and peoples knew that a general European war could come. In their efforts to improve their own positions in case of such a war, the nations made a war almost inevitable.

CrisisEraDynamo said...

@ Tony

Here's the thing, though -- Xenakis's "Generational Dynamics" predictions have never been wrong. Also, a single EMP can completely destroy any technologically-advanced country, since the starving people will kill each other.

Xenakis posts on Andrew Breitbart's Big Peace (google it) as well, and he has received an award from Computer Sciences Corporation (http://bigpeace.com/jxenakis/2010/10/04/computer-sciences-corp-csc-presents-award-for-generational-dynamics/), so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss him.

Scott said...

Can't run nuke-thermal in the Earth's atmosphere.
Granted, for most versions. IF (big if at that) you can keep the fission byproducts inside the reactor vessel, they might actually be usable for liftoff. Some designs do have the power-to-weight for that. You'd need to get the general public to not go into anaphalactic shock every time they heard the word 'nuclear reactor', though.

Once you get in orbit, a sufficiently efficient and powerful nuke electric drive has some definite advantages.
Also has some big disadvantages, like dumping about as much waste heat through the radiators as you get drive thrust...

Generational Dynamics (http://www.generationaldynamics.com) predicts a major war between China and the US.
What's he smoking and where can I get some? China is very good at long-term planning, and picking a fight with the country that can and will destroy them as a country is not in their long-term interests.

I will grant a nuclear (or HEMP) exchange as being a perfectly valid cause for a decelerando, however. Thing is, EMPing the US would cause a lot of cascade effects. GPS would go screwy, which would screw up everyone. Everyone's favorite investment location would abruptly be of no value, and all the investment information held electronically would be down to the optical backups. I think the US could recover, but the results of even a HEMP event would take a couple decades or more. I don't think it would be as catastrophic as the Black Death (ie, 25% die-off). After all, most military stuff is diesel powered and largely mechanically regulated, and the admin is largely on dead trees. Both of those are immune to EMPs.

You'd see a lot of reserve and national guard units standing up and breaking out the MRE 'foodstuffs,' but a smart man would fire up the barbecues to cook all the cold stored food he could.

And if you don't think various agencies are already planning for events like this, you need to lay off the stuff Generational Dynamics is smoking.

CrisisEraDynamo said...

@ Scott

This report (http://ow.ly/3ZR1B) states what damage nuclear EMP can do. Couple that with actual nuclear attacks on cities and you destroy the US as a country. The same can be done to Japan, India, and Russia.

A US-China war will cause a worldwide decelerando as those with the technical know-how are killed, contrary even to Xenakis's predictions about technology.

CrisisEraDynamo said...

@ Scott

Also, what agencies are preparing for this? I haven't heard of them. Also, I heard that much of the military tech can't take an EMP and keep running.

CrisisEraDynamo said...

My bad! Here's the correct link to the nuke report:

http://ow.ly/3ZR1b

Anonymous said...

CrisisEraDynamo; While the EMP damage you imagined would be devistating, it was recognized as a threat several decades ago; most high-value military and civilian electronic nodes are EMP-hardened. Most of those agencies and organizations will not advertise these security precausions. An Emp attact aginst the U.S. would result in damage to the country, the effects would last years, but would also result in the attacking country being nuked. While China has expressed a desire to become a superpower for several decades and getting into a nuclear war is not in their long-range plans.

Ferrell

jollyreaper said...

Do you have evidence of the hardening? I know the military is supposed to be hardened but I've always understood that the civilian side has not been hardened mainly due to the high cost. Critical infrastructure still remains vulnerable to nuclear EMP or to highly strong solar flares. There was that flare fromt the 19th century that blew up telegraph equipment it was so strong. A major flare doing the same to our modern infrastructre is on the shortlist of doomsday scenarios.

jollyreaper said...

I don't know that WW I was really that much a shock, though - stalemate in the trenches was, but an upcoming great power war was rather widely anticipated, I think.

According to the histories I've read of the time the original idea was that the nations of Europe were too interconnected and "the bankers would never allow it." So the thinking man thought war hysteria was just alarmist claptrap. Then later when war became more likely, both sides went off to war convinced that it would be a great national holiday and over in a month or two. The pre-war thinking was that modern technology would make it a war of sweeping maneuver and trench warfare was entirely unlikely given the speed of transport. Military tech always moves back and forth as to whether offense or defense is favored. The machine gun put defense in ascendancy once more.

jollyreaper said...

@CrisisDynamo

I've not yet found the China v. America part of that website. It's pretty hideous -- is he using Frontpage 97?

The basic thesis of generational dynamics seems reasonable enough -- the people who learned the lesson of a big mistake won't likely repeat it but people who didn't learn it the hard way are likely to make the same mistake. I believe an excellent example of that is looking at all of the regulations for Wall Street that were rolled back. A lot of these rules came about in the 30's and were a direct response to the crash of '29. We think we're so smart, we think those rules are no longer relevant, and we screw ourselves right back into the same kind of crisis and for the same reason.

But that still seems within the realm of conventional wisdom like saying teenagers will do stupid things and people who survive their teenage years will look back from their 40's and say "Damn, I don't know how I even made it here." And there's a long history of things we assume being reasonable hypotheses being dead wrong.

What's his specific argument for a war with China? I could spin a few scenarios myself but none I'd thump my fist on the table over declaring dead certainty.

jollyreaper said...

Actually using them against the US might kill a few millions, but it would lead to the end of China as anything other than a disaster area.

Don't bet against stupid. History is full of nations doing stupid things that even contemporary observers knew were terrible ideas. While I don't see a war with China as likely in the near-future, I would never bet against stupid. The real questions are 1) who would likely start the war, the US or China and 2) what sort of rationalization would they use to convince themselves its a good idea?

As for our powers to predict future events, I'm struck by how US intel agencies were blindsided by the fall of communism while economic observers had been saying for years that the fall was inevitable. The intel agencies weren't just surprised by the timing of the fall, they were surprised that there was even a potential for it happening.

CrisisEraDynamo said...

@ jollyreaper

Here are two articles referencing the prediction:

http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?xct=gd.e060501#e060501

and

http://bigpeace.com/jxenakis/2010/07/26/u-s-and-china-are-headed-for-a-generational-crisis-war/

Both are written by Xenakis.

Scott said...

Crisis Era Dynamo, I used to work in the field. Most of the internet data is carried on fiber optics. EMP doesn't affect that, period.

Secure buildings have metal enclosures (faraday cages), which are moderately-effective EMP shields. The backup generators are inside metal boxes.

Yes, my poor Android phone would fry, as would the computer I'm typing on right now. The stuff you absolutely *have* to keep running is on much tougher and more expensive hardware.

And you've seriously never heard of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Guard, or the US Army Reserve?

We get solar flares all the time. Why haven't we had another catastrophic flare like the one you mention? Maybe because we've figured out how to semi-safely handle the EM flux?

CrisisEraDynamo said...

@ Scott

Did you read the report?

jollyreaper said...

http://science.howstuffworks.com/solar-flare-electronics.htm/printable

Provides a little info on the damage that could be caused by a big flare.

In 1859, an enormous CME caused massive magnetic fluctuations in the Earth's magnetosphere -- the magnetic field surrounding the planet. People living as far south as Cuba witnessed the northern lights phenomenon. Compasses and telegraph systems failed. Scientists and academics debated the cause of all the commotion. We now know it was due to a CME. The CME was so massive that it caused what we call a solar superstorm.

Today, we depend much more heavily upon electronics and electricity than we did in 1859. If a similar solar superstorm were to hit us now, we'd be in trouble. The magnetic forces would induce electricity in any large conductor. That includes power transformers and the power grid itself.

That's not the end of the bad news. The power grid in North America operates at near capacity. It wouldn't be able to handle the increased electrical load from a solar superstorm. Power lines could sag and even snap as a result. Massive power outages could affect much of the continent. The magnetic fluctuations would interfere with radio signals, and communication and satellite systems would collapse as well.

Thucydides said...

Unless the opponent is going to use a huge thermonuclear device detonated at the edge of the atmosphere, it is going to be difficult to put any nation out of action with a single EMP attack.

EMP attacks using multiple weapons are possible, of course, but much harder to coordinate across large areas of time and distance.

The massive solar flare of the late 1800's hasn't been repeated since; or at least not on the side of the Sun facing the Earth. I don't think the grid is hardened against such an event, and as for the Internet, while data pipes might be optical, are the server farms, electro-optical switching equipment hardened to the same extent? This will be very disruptive, to say the least.

Scott said...

Crisis Era Dynamo, I read both articles you linked.

I don't know how to say this politely, but Mr. Xenakis is agitating with no sense of what he's talking about, much like Rush Limbaugh does.

Of course Admiral Mullen is making noise about the chinese buildup. That's how he gets money for more ships!

The social contract between the Chinese Communist Party and the people of China is that the people have traded western-style freedoms for political stability. Picking any kind of fight with the US is not conducive to the stability the PRC desires.

Remember when China said that they would reduce the number of dollars they held? What they really said, based on international economic theories, was that they were going to allow the yuan to float higher against the dollar. It's too bad the talking heads don't understand that, but it explains why the US government actually seemed happy about that statement!

Scott said...

Jollyreaper, I lived through the Great Blackout of 1996. No power across most of the American West for 3 days in the middle of summer.

No rioting, no major panic.

Remember what I said about secure buildings having built-in faraday cages? You can do the same thing with your wiring, and certain particularly important computer systems are shielded to that extent. It's called TEMPEST, Transient Electromagntic Pulse Emission Standard. True, it is mostly government systems, but EM shielding works both ways.

Sadly, you don't really need a big nuclear explosion to make a HEMP. The US tested several back in 1962's Operation Fishbowl, and the smallest blasts (Bluegill Triple Prime and Kingfish that gave EMPs were in the 200-400kt range. That's the size of currently-deployed US Strategic weapons. Starfish Prime, 1.4mt at 400km, did nasty things to the electrical systems in Hawaii, however, but I don't think there are any still-deployed warheads that large.

The good news is that you need to use a big rocket to get a 500+lb load up to 75km or so. That is a *very* obvious technology piece, which pretty much limits HEMP attacks to a nation. While the US has said 'never again will we be the first to use WMD', a single HEMP attack would result in *second-use* of a lot of the US strategic reserve. Needless to say, that would be very hard on whoever launched the HEMP, and the command links for the strategic forces were designed to work even if there were nuclear explosions happening when the orders were being given. We'd have about 30 minutes to prepare for the event, too.

jollyreaper said...

I could not confidence in my eyes that I gave up so with both hands tied behind one's back deceived. When we arrived at the place it turned tangential prostrate that nothing in the bill was no direction to reality. All of the rooms, and ordered them together seven, were in disarray.

Still not passing the turing test there, buddy.

Rick said...

Just for clarification, jollyreaper is referring to a spam comment, which naturally I did not parole from spam jail.

Tony said...

Scott:

"You'd need to get the general public to not go into anaphalactic shock every time they heard the word 'nuclear reactor', though."

We've been through this here at least once already. Some nuclear risks are too great to justify the perceived benefits. Flying fission reactors around is one of them. A sober analysis of nuclear electric rocketry may find that it's too risky to send reactors on a one way trip to a high orbit. I hope that's not the case, but nuclear contamination, once you strip away all of the hysteria, is still serious business. You of all people should know that.

"Also has some big disadvantages, like dumping about as much waste heat through the radiators as you get drive thrust..."

Nuclear reactors generate so much energy per second of operation that it's not a problem, for practical purposes. (Caveat: the reactor has to be made with a high enough power density for spaceflight.) It may upset somebody's sense of elegance, but that's how the cookie crumbles.

Tony said...

Scott:

"Sadly, you don't really need a big nuclear explosion to make a HEMP. The US tested several back in 1962's Operation Fishbowl, and the smallest blasts (Bluegill Triple Prime and Kingfish that gave EMPs were in the 200-400kt range. That's the size of currently-deployed US Strategic weapons. Starfish Prime, 1.4mt at 400km, did nasty things to the electrical systems in Hawaii, however, but I don't think there are any still-deployed warheads that large."

One of the things that Starfish Prime demonstrated was that the effects of EMP are pretty random. There were some problems with electrical system malfunction in the Hawaiian Islands, but there were numerous US military vessels, aircraft, and installation (and maybe a Soviet spy ship or two) much closer to the event. Some may have had rudimentary electromagnetic shielding, but all seem to have come through without significant incident.

EMP has been a boogeyman for China threat mongers for at least two decades (that I can remember, but possibly longer). Both the questionable effectiveness of an EMP attack, and the Chinese not being insanely stupid enough to invite nuclear retaliation makes it highly unlikely that they'd ever seriously consider such a strategem, much less implement it.

Thucydides said...

I don't think the Chinese "traded" liberty for stability. A friend of mine who is well versed in China and Chinese culture points out the current "Red Dynasty" maintains the "Mandate of Heaven" by providing stability, food and jobs. Should the State falter, the masses will turn against the current "Dynasty". The names change, but many of the forms of traditional Chinese imperial governance and culture still exist.

Just yesterday, I read about calls for a "Jasmine Revolution" in China, which may be spurred by recent food price inflation. Economic growth is also slowing down, which may lead to increasing unemployment and other stresses. These stresses inside China (as well as longer term demographic changes) could lead to internal or external troubles, so the idea that fear or stupidity could spur a war or conflict in the future is quite plausible.

Jim Baerg said...

Tony "A sober analysis of nuclear electric rocketry may find that it's too risky to send reactors on a one way trip to a high orbit."

Before the reactor has been started, the radioactivity of the unfissioned fuel is negligible. It would be safer to send fission reactors to orbit than the radioisotope thermal generators that have already been launched.

Using a nuclear thermal rocket of some sort for surface to orbit travel may well be unreasonably risky, but starting the reactor in orbit is not.

Rick said...

Nuclear reactors generate so much energy per second of operation that it's not a problem, for practical purposes.

Well, it's a problem to the extent that big radiators and their associated plumbing are one more friggin heavy and expensive requirement of nuke electric propulsion.

But it can achieve an Isp of several thousand seconds, with acceleration of a decent fraction of a milligee, making it the 'least worst' available solution for outer system human travel.

ElAntonius said...

The thing I wonder is why would any nation use an EMP attack at all? If you're going through the trouble of deploying nuclear weapons (and with nukes, if you're going to fire one, you might as well fire them all), you might as well go with the sure option of incinerating the target instead of hoping to disable.

When self defense using guns is taught, the overwhelming point is always: "shoot for center of mass. Yes, that is shoot to kill. If you don't want to kill the guy, don't shoot him."

There are a number of reasons for this, but chiefly because dickering about trying to shoot in the leg or arm is either going to kill the person anyway, or runs the massive risk of being ineffective (shot misses, doesn't hit anything important, etc.). Additionally, it's less defensible in court...at least in the jurisdictions I'm aware of, self defense is only applicable for "us or them" situations, and if you had time and wherewithal to "shoot to wound", you probably didn't need the gun at all.

EMP weapons are the nuclear equivalent of "shoot to wound", and really they're silly for much the same reason...anything they can hit, a conventional nuke can hit with much more certainty, and firing your EMPs will guarantee a nuclear reprisal anyway.

This discounts terrrrrrrrist actions, of course, but even then, I suspect they'd be more apt to light a (dirty) nuclear bomb than try to optimize for EMP.



In either case, I think people forget that people are in it for the experiences. Handcrafted goods still carry a premium over oftentimes higher quality mass produced goods, for example. And while mass transit may become automated, many humans still quite enjoy operating motor vehicles...we've seen a huge uptick in the popularity of sporty models in the last few years, for example.

We can put a hundred robots on Mars, but no one will care until we put 2 boots there.

Thucydides said...

A link to an article about how people might react to more severe forms of downturn:

Personal Responses To Large Scale Collapse

The term "collapse" covers a wide range of possible future scenarios, each with varying degrees of severity. For example, we could go thru a period of higher inflation all the way up to Weimar-style hyper-inflation. Or declining oil production could cause economic collapse, perhaps with revivals as part of a long descent. Or a massive coronal mass ejection from the Sun could cause a Carrington Event like in 1859. Such an event today could cause most of the electric grid transformers to melt (though we could mitigate much of that risk) and cities to become uninhabitable for months or years due to lack of electric power. Or a VEI 7 volcano like Tambora in 1815 would cause crop failures for a year or two combined with very cold weather with resulting food and energy shortages. Or a VEI 8 volcano like Toba of 74,000 years ago would cause collapse at a level that makes Weimar hyper-inflation a walk in the park in comparison. Still other civilization-threatening scenarios can be imagined.

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/007920.html

You might also want to check out links like this:

Packing for the Apocalypse

http://forums.army.ca/forums/index.php/topic,82673.0.html

Geoffrey S H said...

Robots can make goods that are infinitely superior to handcrafted examples- or will one day.

"Human creativity" is just one big handwave.

Thucydides said...

Right now robots make cars, but you still pay a huge premium for handcrafted ones (ever price out an Austin Martin?)

A lot of this differential is also a function of supply and demand; in theory you could robotize the Austin Martin factory and churn out DB-7's like Volkswagens; but what is the fun in that?

I can see future handcrafting or low rate production as a deliberate attempt to manipulate markets and maintain high market rents

Tony said...

Geoffrey S H:

"Robots can make goods that are infinitely superior to handcrafted examples- or will one day.

'Human creativity' is just one big handwave."


It takes human creativity to give the robots the designs that they manufacture, to design the procudtion floor, and program the production process. Robot quality is a function of the repeatability and reliability of their functioning.

But robot quality is a feature of cheap goods. People will always pay a premium for hand-crafted items, precisely because they represent human effort beyond creative thought. Presumably someday in the future you could program a robot factory to turn out a thousand precise Davids a year. Each one would fetch the price of the marble + "labor" + overhead + profit. Michelangelo's David would still be priceless.

Human creativity a handwave? Sure, whatever you say...

Scott said...

Yeah, radioactive contamination is a horrible thing. Let's start with the uranium dust all over Iraq and Kosovo.

Fact is, as soon as anyone says the words 'nuclear reactor' in a media report, the NIMBY brigade breaks out the China Syndrome paraphernalia and starts having mass coronarys. I've gone over it here before, but NOT A SINGLE PERSON died due to Three Mile Island. The total radioactivity released at the edge of the fence was comparable to a month at the beach in Hawaii.

Enough flogging of that zombie horse, however.

Thucydides, that is a fair point, especially considering the effectiveness of the "Twitter revolutions" in the middle east. I don't know enough about Chinese politics to even hazard a guess about that, but *usually* when a country implodes it stays focussed on the internal stuff for about a decade. See also Weimar Republic.

ElAntonius: It's not easy to build both the nuclear device and the rocket to make it a viable High-altitude EMP (the only kind that matters for this discussion). Bluntly, any terrist getting an ICBM *will* result in the hosting country getting some 'rapid urban renewal' and a lot of glass self-lighting parking lots about 30 minutes after the launch of said weapon.

An EMP is a head-shot (or a Taser), to continue your self-defense analogy. In theory, it disrupts all the signals your enemy needs to send in order to attack you.

Tony said...

Scott:

"Fact is, as soon as anyone says the words 'nuclear reactor' in a media report, the NIMBY brigade breaks out the China Syndrome paraphernalia and starts having mass coronarys."

Nobody like that here that I am aware of -- just varying degrees of seriousness about the real risks of radioactive contamination.

"An EMP is a head-shot (or a Taser), to continue your self-defense analogy. In theory, it disrupts all the signals your enemy needs to send in order to attack you."

It may be intended to be a headshot in theory, but there's no evidence it would actually work that way. It certainly won't affect fiber optic networks, or edge systems behind protection. Since that happen to be a description of moder strategic and operational comm systems and their peripherals, it just ain't gonna work in a military sense. The target of an EMP attack may be in sad economic shape for a decade after it is over, but the initiator is going to be on the ashheap of history.

Scott said...

You must not live in the American West, then, Tony. Around here, nuclear power is da debbil! There was a company talking about building a power plant in my state, and the first response at the public meeting wasn't "where," it was "horrible radioactivity, TMI&Chernobyl!!"

ie, people who think that ANY radiation is too much, and who can't be bothered to read the documentation. Stupid bothers me, but you can teach them. The only cure for willful ignorance is death, unfortunately.

ElAntonius said...

Tony: Any terrorist organization that gets their hands on a nuke won't bother with ICBMs, they'll just rig it up in the most portable framework they can and park it in the middle of a city.

The response to a nuclear terrorist action would be wholly different, but I still don't see them bothering much with it. EMPs are tricky business, and either way you're still setting off a nuke. Even if the nuke they get their hands on is primarily an EMP device, setting it off in a city via a parked van is going to be measured in Hiroshimas.


With regard to nations using EMPs:
EMPs aren't really a headshot attempt, though a taser attempt I'll buy. The problem is, it's like loading a gun with taser bullets, and then pointing the gun at someone who is armed. They WILL shoot back, and their gun will have real bullets.

But in either case: what country would want to cause widespread economic devastation in an opponent that ALSO wouldn't want to just vaporize that same opponent?

In the case of China, their economy is so dependent on the US that any hostile action crippling the economy would likely cripple them as well.

If anything, one has to wonder if scientists/strategists aren't trying to find a way to cripple a country's power structure but leave the economy happily humming along.

Tony said...

Re: Scott

I live in Southwestern Utah, and by "here" I of course meant this blog. I was trying to tactfully say that the level of discussion about nuclear power in these comment sections should be above the de rigeur "you just can't talk to them" complaints.

Re: ElAntonius

Since we were talking about the Chinese initiating an EMP sneak attack, what do terrorists have to do with it?

ElAntonius said...

Tony: oops, think I read more than intended into one of your comments. You mentioned nuclear retaliation against the host country, which I agree would happen if ICBMs of any stripe were involved.

But if we're limiting discussion to sovereign powers, we're back to the glassed earth scenario...any nuclear weapon deployment by a nation will just invite overwhelming nuclear response.

Using an EMP just strikes me as pulling a knife while surrounded by a nervous SWAT team...not particularly a good idea.

My whole point is that EMPs _ARE_ part of the nuclear option, and I just don't see them being deployed in any context outside of Armageddon.

Tony said...

ElAntonius:

I wouldn't be so quick to think of nuclear weapons as being inflexible. It is certainly possible that in a strategic crisis nuclear powers might play an enormous game of chicken, trading shots to see who blinks first. Herman Kahn had a lot to say about that during the Cold War. He figured that no matter what a national leader's ideology might be, he would most likely be rational, and not initiate an all-out nuclear attack gratuitously, or before he had tried other options.

On a similar note, it has been more recently suggested that US nucelar weapons' greatest value is in making the world safe for US conventional superiority. Nobody can hope to trump the US hi-tech military by nuking it in the field or by attacking the US homeland with nuclear weapons. The retaliation would not be worth any imaginable benefit.

Finally, since we've been talking about the Chinese, it's not entirely out of the question for them to use nuclear weapons against US naval forces at sea. They could then go on the diplomatic offensive and claim that such an attack was a tactical act, limited to military forces alone, and that retaliation against the Chinese homeland would not be proportional. In such a situation, it's not at all clear that US nuclear retaliation could be initiated. Even if a Chnese military facility was attacked, it would be in or near a large civilian community, which would cause colateral damage that the Chinese intentionally and publicly avoided by targetting US forces on the open ocean.

Scott said...

Man, the level of stupid at school must be contagious... Either that, or they've found a new strain of foot-in-mouth disease. *shakes head*

Tony, I don't think I discount the risks of radioactive contamination, but you seem to consider the risks to be much higher than I do.

ElAntonius: What I was trying to say was that nations, even ones that support terrorist fruitcakes, have an interest in keeping terrist activities down to a certain level. No country wants to be the launching site for an 'acquired' Minuteman or equivalent, so every country is working to make sure that delivery methods stay in government hands.

It would be a safe guess that there are less-than-total nuclear strike packages and keyword orders to STOP, but everyone I served with considered that *any* use was going to quickly escalate to scorched planet.

I don't think the Chinese are likely to throw a nuke at even a US carrier group traveling in international waters. That just became a freedom-of-navigation issue, and the entire rest of the world just had a brown-pants moment. While there is a possibility that the US would limit itself to conventional strategic weapons, the political repercussions would be immense, as would the physical damage to China.

Tony said...

Scott:

"Tony, I don't think I discount the risks of radioactive contamination, but you seem to consider the risks to be much higher than I do."

Yes, but that's not a good enough reason to keep bringing up the antics of the hysterically anti-nuclear. That's not me, bra.

My approach towards nuclear contamination is strictly conservationist. Radiological contamination is not bio or chemo degradable. If we keep introducing contaminants faster than they decay, the higher the contamination level will rise. There is probably some maximum of contamination beyond which we should not go, or beyond which we would not want to go. Projects that use radioactive materials need to be evaluated IMO, not only for routine levels of release, but for the consequences of a worst case release. If the worst case could lead to too much contamination in the environment, or even to slimming down the margin too much in too short a time, then we need to think really hard about whether we really need to embark on the project.

"I don't think the Chinese are likely to throw a nuke at even a US carrier group traveling in international waters. That just became a freedom-of-navigation issue, and the entire rest of the world just had a brown-pants moment. While there is a possibility that the US would limit itself to conventional strategic weapons, the political repercussions would be immense, as would the physical damage to China."

Since when has freedom of navigation been a consideration in wartime? You're a former US submariner, right? What is your service's tradition WRT enemy shipping in wartime, military or civilian? Subs and targets, right?

WRT what the US could do to China with conventional weapons, I think your sense of scale is a bit off. China is a big place with a lot of economic nodes. In a few days or weeks, with conventional weapons only, it's not likley we could do much to impress the Chinese.

Thucydides said...

Although the sheer scale of a nation makes attacking with conventional weapons seem somewhat pointless, remember the Chinese actually claimed the threshold for their release of nuclear weapons would be the use of US "smart" weapons against Chinese targets. (I don't remember when this was exactly, but it was during the Bush Administration and I *think* it happened around the time the ruckus over downing a US surveillance plane off the coast of China occurred. Someone with strong Google-Fu should look this up).

Waves of "smart" weapons taking out fixed targets like transport and energy nodes could do a crippling amount of damage to China or any other nation. The Chinese government would feel forced to respond with maximum force, since crippling the energy and transport nodes would effectively dismember China and prevent the Government from feeding the population or keeping the economy going, which would probably lead to mass uprisings against the government and the rise of warlord states within the borders of China, meaning the end of the current "Red Dynasty".

Scott said...

Tony, fair point, but I will blame the crazy locals for my reactions and try really hard to not continue to drag them onto this board.

WRT China, please note that I said conventional *strategic* weapons. That would be the equivalent loading a Minuteman with training shapes (same flight characteristics as Mk4 RBAs but no radioactives at all), and putting eight 500lb bricks at near orbital velocities onto several someones' front porch. Nuclear-scale boom, no contamination.

After all, we gave the unclassified description of missile accuracy as follows: 1st generation missiles would hit within the parking lot of the Kingdome, 2nd generation missiles would hit within the stadium, 3rd generation would hit within the infield, and 4th generation would hit on any corner of the pitcher's rubber block you chose.

My point about freedom of navigation was that China attacking an American warship wouldn't just be an act of war against America. All the other maritime powers, and those nations that depend on the sea for trade
(ie, all the developed nations) would likely be compelled to do something about that attack. If they didn't, then how soon before China destroyed one of their (civilian) ships?

ElAntonius said...

Scott, Tony: What I'm more trying to say is that an EMP attack just IS a nuclear attack, at least for the foreseeable future. (There are non-nuclear EMP weapons, but they are MUCH smaller scale and unlikely to be nation crippling unless launched in masses that might as well be considered Armageddon level warfare)

I'm given to understand that an EMP attack is for the most part a conventional nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude. That means that the only truly effective delivery mechanism is an ICBM.

The ramifications of even a single missile are enormous: a sovereign nation has launched a nuclear ICBM at the US...and frankly, if a single missile is capable of damaging US infrastructure to the point of existential threat to the nation, those reprisal missiles are going up regardless of whether the Chinese assure us it'll detonate 400 miles above the surface.

I just fail to see a scenario where EMPs might be strategically employed to cripple the US that do not result in a total nuclear exchange...I suppose if the offending country saw the incoming US retaliation and allowed their destruction without reprisal, but I'm a bit more cynical about human nature than to think that.

I honestly don't even think China (or any sovereign nation) could get away with nuking a carrier group. Let's be honest...if the two superpowers of today get to the point that China feels the need to nuke a carrier group...yeah, the world is toast.

Tony said...

Jeepers!

Okay...

It was the Russians that claimed the use of US smart weapons against strategic targets (either wepaons or sensor systems) would constitute a valid provocation for nuclear retaliation.

As for "waves" of smart weapons, what constitutes a wave in the context of Afghanistan or Iraq would hardly be a ripple in the context of China. The US and allied conventional weapons arsenals just aren't big enough to put even a respectable dent in China's economy. As always, amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics.

A single nuclear weapon, regardless of how delivered, is not a sufficient provocation for massive retaliation. It's a catastrophe for the city that gets hit, but on a national scale it's just not sufficient to trigger Doomsday. As long as no large scale strikes are attempted, leaders would be constrained by numerous factors and values to respond cautiously.

Going back to the nuclear strike against a carrier group at sea...

An attack against a military target at sea is simply not a freedom of navigation issue. If one want to invoke history, The Firt contact at Jutland was caused by opposing scouting forces investigating a neutral Danish steamer blowing off steam. Even a world war and a known war zone were not enough to stop neutral trade. Likewise, if there was a war at sea between China nad the US, neutrals might proceed cautiously, or even stay away. But they wouldn't become directly involved. I seriously doubt the Chinese would refrain from using whatever weapons they thought best, simply because trade would be upset for a time.

As for the idea that a nuclear strike against a US fleet would cause an all-out exchange, one simply can't credit that. The Chinese could (quite correctly) characterize it as a strictly tactical act that threatened nothing but military targets. (The US would help in this in that US carrier groups tendto clear the seas around them when operating in a war zone.) Nuclear retaliation against Chinese homeland targets, even military ones, would kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of civilians. The US National Command Authority would think long and hard about that, and probably conclude that it would be best to suck it up and at most hit the single remotest Chinese naval installation or air base that's still plausibly in the war zone.

Finally, there is very little possibility that a nuclear exchange between the US and China would be the end of civilization. The Chiese would be able to target maybe a few dozen weapons to the continental US, while the US would attack with scores, or maybe a few hundred. China would probably be devastated, but the US would just be set back economically a decade or so, maybe less, depending on how reliable the Chinese delivery systems were, how accurately they attacked their targets, and what they chose to target. Say, for example, they targetted two weapons at downtown Los Angeles. One missile might not work and the second might miss and blow up Pasadena. Tough for the San Gabriel Valley, no big deal for the US economy as a whole.

ElAntonius said...

Tony: Well yes, presumably a nuclear engagement requires rough parity to cause total nuclear annihilation.

But I disagree that a single nuked city wouldn't invite tenfold retaliation. An ICBM launched at a major population center would get ugly, fast, presuming the target has any capacity to return the disfavor.

For better or for worse, international politics are not governed by "eye for an eye". Look at the US's response to 9/11...we're still fighting multiple wars a decade later, and have demolished and installed two governments using that as a pretense. Regardless of anyone's individual stance on the US's actions in the past decade, I think we can all agree that the forcible removal of two governments is not at all the same thing as a terrorist attack on a pair of civilian buildings.

Regardless, this is all in context of decelerando, and specifically, EMP weapons doing significant damage to the US.

An EMP attack is either a WMD and a significant existential threat to the US, at which point MAD applies, or it isn't, at which point one wonders why anyone would bother at all, and thus it's just an existential threat to the launching nation and unlikely to cause global decelerando.

And again, why would China even bother? What could they hope to gain by disrupting the US so? We're their biggest customer.

Or, to put it another way:

"Owe your banker £1000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1 million and the position is reversed."

Tony said...

Re: ElAntonius

The Chinese nuclear arsenal simply isn't big or deliverable enough for MAD to apply between the US and China. The Chinese arsenal is strictly regime survival insurance and (maybe) sufficient to dominate in a war between China and India. It couldn't be used to threaten the US with anihilation or even crippling damage. At best, it could be used by a really gutsy leader to bluff the US into nonintervention in Chinese initiatives, by threatening more pain than the US would want to accept.

As for the idea that one nuke equals totally nuclear war, please read Herman Kahn: Thinking about the Unthinkable in the 1980s. There are many sets of circumstances where trading punch for punch would be countenanced long before all-out attack.

Scott said...

I'm just relaying that all my shipmates considered that any order for us to launch meant that the world was already in the hurt locker.

A absolute minimal deployment is a single Minuteman (1-3 warheads), and those don't have the range to hit anybody but Russia. Land-based missiles generally don't have the range to hit most of china, which limits us to Bombers or Subs.

The next step up is a single Trident (max 8 warheads), but a single launch would likely result in the destruction of that submarine, and the remaining 23 birds. This makes single-launches unlikely.

Bombers have to get to their target, so there will be 'blast a path' attacks before the actual intended target, and 16+ warheads per plane times 3 or 4 planes per attack (based on the Linebacker raids, which used SIOP tactics).

The nature of the packaging needed to get one bomb to the target makes it very hard to deliver a 'limited' response for any delivery method. Even a single B52 could wipe out most of the cities on the coast of China, and we're operating in groups of 3?

That's why I consider any nuclear weapon the camel's nose under the tentflap. Sure, it might stop after a hundred warheads or so each direction, but even that is catastrophic damage.

And since an EMP requires a rocket launch to deliver (by current definition, an act of war by a nation), it is almost inconceivable that there would not be a 50-100 warhead response.

An EMP attack is either a WMD and a significant existential threat to the US, at which point MAD applies, or it isn't, at which point one wonders why anyone would bother at all, and thus it's just an existential threat to the launching nation and unlikely to cause global decelerando.
Haven't I been clear that an EMP attack is always going to be an existential threat to the launching nation, whether or not it's a threat to the target?

jollyreaper said...

That's why I consider any nuclear weapon the camel's nose under the tentflap. Sure, it might stop after a hundred warheads or so each direction, but even that is catastrophic damage.

My gut reaction has always been that the first launch will be the one that ends the world. McNamara's idea of city-swapping with the Russians struck me as sick fantasy. But, as I said, this is a gut reaction, not an immutable law of the multiverse. My gut reaction from before the fall of the Soviet Union would be that the power struggle in the collapse of any nuclear-armed power would be a nuclear exchange, either against internal targets or with hardliner factions trying to to make an attack against the foreign enemy their last official act. I was happily soooo wrong in that regard.

Tony said...

Re: Scott

You're applying Cold War logic to a non-Cold War environment. For example, much of Manchuria could certainly be targetted from Malmstrom AFB, Montana. The great circle distance from Butte, Montana to Beijing, China is less than 6300 miles, while the Minuteman III missile has a reported operational range of 8100 miles.

But, if you wanted to fire a single missile from a sub, the idea that that would endanger the sub in any way is simply not credible. A Trident II could be fired from the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands and target points well inland of Shanghai. It's pretty darn hard to believe that the Chinese could prosecute an ASW campaign that far from home, and that close to Pearl Harbor, Hickam AFB, Kaneohe NAS, etc.

Tony said...

Re: Scott

The previous is totally ignoring the ALCM, which if launched from a 500 mile standoff could still reach 1000 miles inland.

I really don't think the US is handcuffed WRT limited nuclear options and China.

Thucydides said...

Smart weapons targeting transport and energy nodes is an attack on the nation's logistics, and I don't think that China has anywhere near the surplus transport or energy generation capacity that highly developed nations like the United States or Western Europe enjoy.

Even in the United States, food riots are "only three days away" since most people don't have large stockpiles on hand and supermarkets generally need to be restocked at least once a week, if not more often. Dropping a few American bridges or destroying a railway switching yard would have serious consequences, but there would still be plenty of work arounds here, via secondary roads and so on. In China, the infrastructure isn't as well developed so dropping the bridges or destroying the rail yard is not just serious, but a total disaster...

Rick said...

Herman Kahn style tit for tat scenarios strike me as interesting theoretical constructs, but the fundamental fact, it seems to me, is that any use of a nuclear weapon puts all potentially involved leaderships into a decision making environment where no one has ever been.

Cool headed rationality is not to be counted on - if it prevailed, you wouldn't get to the point of nuclear weapon release. And panicky people with H-bombs is an EXTREMELY dangerous situation.

Tony said...

Thucydides:

"Smart weapons targeting transport and energy nodes is an attack on the nation's logistics, and I don't think that China has anywhere near the surplus transport or energy generation capacity that highly developed nations like the United States or Western Europe enjoy."

Let's take a step back here. Iraq has a population of about 25 million. China's population is 50 times as large. There simply aren't enough munitions to signifcantly impact the Chinese economy overall, even if some targetted regions could be shut down.

Thucydides said...

Targeting China would be an interesting problem. Authoritarian regimes tend to be brittle and unable to respond well to rapidly changing events.

Using smart weapons to isolate a region of China through breaking the transport or energy grid would cause escalating ripple effects which would become difficult or impossible for the Chinese government to deal with. (just think of the effort the Chinese take to prevent a flood of people crossing the border of the DPRK. Now imagine the situation as masses of people attempt to flee from a Chinese province seeking food or shelter and beginning to overwhelm the resources of the neighbouring provinces, disrupting overstressed transport grids and diverting military resources and bandwidth.)

The introduction of escalating food and energy prices was enough to kick off the current wave of revolts in North Africa and the Gulf States (and there are reports of small demonstrations happening in China as well), so it isn't beyond the bounds of possibility to destabilize an authoritarian country with some additional stressors.

Tony said...

Thucydides:

Sorry, but I think you've been reading too many technothrillers.

ElAntonius said...

Scott:
Haven't I been clear that an EMP attack is always going to be an existential threat to the launching nation, whether or not it's a threat to the target?

Yes, I'm generally in agreement with what you're saying.


Tony: If China does not have the level of weaponry to play MAD, then why would they launch any sort of nuclear device in the first place? Again, what would China hope to accomplish?

It's like shooting at a squad of police officers, and then crying foul when they shoot you back.

Nuclear weapons are very interesting in that regard...sure, unfired they are the absolute guarantors of national sovereignty, but once used, they are also the absolute destroyers.

My whole point is that any nation deploying nuclear weapons is going to face an enormous cost...the only way to reduce that cost is to ensure that the target nation is incapable of responding.

There is no "oops, my bad" with nuclear weaponry.

Tony said...

ElAntonius:

"Tony: If China does not have the level of weaponry to play MAD, then why would they launch any sort of nuclear device in the first place? Again, what would China hope to accomplish?

...

...the only way to reduce that cost is to ensure that the target nation is incapable of responding."


You've answered your own question. If the Chinese used a nuclear weapon against US naval forces at sea, in what way could the US respond with nuclear weapons that would be regarded as proportional by the rest of the world? Think about that for a while.

ElAntonius said...

You've answered your own question. If the Chinese used a nuclear weapon against US naval forces at sea, in what way could the US respond with nuclear weapons that would be regarded as proportional by the rest of the world? Think about that for a while.

Context is king. Is war ongoing? If so, then China opening that particular Pandora's Box wouldn't end well.

Are they nuking a CBG during "peacetime exercises"? Ditto.

Nuclear weapons are, sociologically speaking, not just really big bombs. The last 60 years of human history are colored with the fear that someone, somewhere, will decide that it's once again a good idea to deploy them.

In either case, you're not answering my real question. Why would China do it? We're talking about the two most intermingled economies in history. Victory by one party would only be Pyrrhic.

But, proposing somehow the US and China do end up in a situation so pear shaped that destruction of a CBG is even being considered...how does nuking a carrier group really even help?

I just fail to see a scenario where China feels the need to nuke a carrier group that ISN'T already really, really bad. If the US is deploying "smart" weapons against Chinese infrastructure, that sounds like we're attempting some regime removal...in other words, China's ALREADY under existential threat. If they nuke a CBG that isn't involved in a military operation against them, then any nuclear or conventional attack against one would be an open declaration of war and would very quickly spiral out of control any way.

And furthermore, how is delivering a nuke to a CBG at all an existential threat to the US? We're talking about decelerando here...destroying a carrier might set us back quite a bit in the tactical realm, but in reality won't do much except potentially ignite whatever war is going to far more dangerous levels.

Tony said...

Re: ElAntonius

The context in which a US carrier battle group would be a threat to China would be something to do with Taiwan, or some other Chinese overseas initiative in the Western Pacific, perhaps against Vietnam or the Philippines. In any case, one need not imagine some great existential war. The nuke(s) would be used as an equalizer. The Chinese would calim the act as an act of the weak against the strong, and a lot of people around the world would be happy to believe them.

As for the intermingled economies argument, you really need to read up on your WWI history. Prior to that war there were people who believed that such highly integrated economies would never engage in war against each other. Others believed that the workers would never fight each other to achieve capitalistic and nationalistic goals. Still more believedthat even if a war started, it would have to be quick, because the various national economies couldn't long support the cost of total war. Ummm...yeah.

Rick said...

Nuclear weapons are, sociologically speaking, not just really big bombs.

Energy release/kg on order of 1,000,000x high explosives tends to have that effect.

I can picture scenarios that lead to a US/China nuclear war, but they all proceed from situations where one side or both are already facing catastrophe - say, economic collapse to the point of threatening the regime, so that attacking the yellow peril / red haired devils seems like the only way out.

Google Stuart Slade for some interesting discussion by someone who sounds knowledgeable on the subject.

World War I is a useful cautionary example regarding economic integration and the like, but no one went into WW I expecting 'regime change' to be a likely outcome - let alone personal annihilation of regime leaders.

Tony said...

Rick:

"Nuclear weapons are, sociologically speaking, not just really big bombs.

Energy release/kg on order of 1,000,000x high explosives tends to have that effect."


But that effect works both ways. If somebody uses a nuke against a clearly military target, away from all risk of civilian casualties, how does the government owning the military target respond? Nukes aren't just big bombs. You can't use tem to kill hundreds of thousands or millions when all you've lost is several ships and maybe ten thousand sailors. The sociological effect can in fact be inverted with careful, limited targetting.

"Google Stuart Slade for some interesting discussion by someone who sounds knowledgeable on the subject.

Ol' Stu has a pretty utilitarian attitude towards nukes. I wouldn't go looking to him for confirmation of the inescapable and inevitable MAD apocalypse.

"...but no one went into WW I expecting 'regime change' to be a likely outcome - let alone personal annihilation of regime leaders."

I think we can all agree there were a lot of things they didn't expect. That's why Bismarck made sure he had already won (by diplomatically isolating the enemy) before he started fighting. It's one whole heck of a lot safer that way. Bethmann-Hollweg and Wild Bill Hohenzollern didn't get that. Neither did the French hotheads, nor the Austrians, nor the Russians.

But it only took twenty years for everyone to make the same or similar mistakes all over again. So I wouldn't hold out much hope that anybody would take much heed of history today.

Anonymous said...

The last I heard (and my info is a decade out of date), the U.S. officially considered nuclear weapons to be fundimentally different than conventional weapons; ANY use of nukes would demand a response in kind. For your scinario of China nuking a CBG, we would be virtually reqired to nuke the Chinese Navy in response (the PLAN is about the size of a CBG or two). If the Chinese did nuke an American CBG and the U.S. President didn't respond in kind, then the American people would howl for his blood. I can only see that scinario happening as a last-ditch act of desperation, miscalculation, and full-blown panic.

On a side note, during the Cold War, the U.S. publicly said that nukes and conventional weapons were seperate and different and any use of nukes would require an overwhelming response-in-kind; the Sovite Union publicly stated that they viewed ALL weapons as being on a spectrum (pistols at one end, Tsar Bomba at the other), and even though both the U.S. and the Sovites knew what the other sides' view of nuclear weapons use was, neither side believed the other. After the end of the Cold War and military archives in the former East Germany were examined, it was found that the first use of nuclear weapons was to use low-yeald nukes to vaporize military bases in West Germany. The Sovites thought that the U.S. would only respond with the few low-yeald nukes they still had in theater, or simply accept that the Sovites had won...it never occured to them that the U.S. would respond to Sovite use of tactical nukes in Europe by launching a full scale nuclear attack against the Russian homeland. Thank god we didn't fight WIII in the mid 80's...

Ferrell

Rick said...

Ol' Stu has a pretty utilitarian attitude towards nukes. I wouldn't go looking to him for confirmation of the inescapable and inevitable MAD apocalypse.

That is exactly why I find his observations so interesting. From the previously linked bit:

The only people who mouth off about using nuclear weapons and threaten others with them are those that do not have keys hanging around their necks. The moment they get keys and realize what they've let themselves in for, they get to be very quiet and very cautious indeed.


To take on the particular scenario outlined, if the Chinese nuked a US carrier group, we could certainly find an isolated Chinese airbase to nuke, or an army base on the road to Tibet, etc. We probably have informed them exactly this, by some indirect means.

That serves the conceptual ball back into their court, and underlines the point that you cannot count on taking one step up the escalation ladder and having it end there on your terms.

Is this an absolute protection against human stupidity? Certainly not, but I believe that it is rather robust. The Cold War was, by pre-nuclear historical logic, pretty much a worst case scenario - a Great Power system reduced to two rivals playing for the imperial purple, and with mouth foaming ideological hostilities to boot.

Nuclear weapons are, among other things, extremely sobering.

Tony said...

Re: Ferrell et al.

It wasn't that long ago the suggestions were coming from within the DoD that low yield nukes, combined with penetrating bomb casings, would make a great bunker busting weapon, and wouldn't really count as a nuclear release, because it would be a controlled, tactical use, with limited above-surface effects. The DOE even did some initial development work for a few years.

Now, exploding a weapon in the open air is a step up from that, but if targeted at a strictly military target hundreds of miles out to sea in a declared war zone, it could rationally be portrayed in the same light that we would have portrayed the use of a bunker busting nuke -- just an equalizer, who can blame us?

And so what if the US public howls in anger? The President is caught up on the horns of the dilemma Mr. Slade identified. But Stu left out one very big caveat: the logic only applies if retaliation can be proportional. The PLAN (Chinese navy), without the threat of a carrier battle group, could disperse to the point that nuking any single ship of small groups of ships -- the biggest of which would be a destroyer -- would be seen as a lame response. As for nuking remote bases, it's highly likely that the Chinese, just like us, place medium and major military bases near fairly large population centers. Go ahead an nuke a battalion outpost on the Mongolian border, that's going to be really impressive. Even that level of attack would still be a homeland attack, which is a lot more serious business than even losing a carrier or two, escorts included.

See, nukes aren't absolutely rulled out, by us or anybody else. But one has to use them cleverly in ways that cannot be plausibly retaliated against without risking a wider war that nobody wants. I'm not saying that if the Chinese followed that logic things would go their way. But by the same token, and US Prsident faced with retaliating to a tactical use at sea would have a real problem justifying it, even against a remote, nominally military target.

Rick said...

This scenario seems horribly risky, because the outcome depends entirely on the US responding as China presumes it 'should.' What if the US instead flattens a Chinese airbase, notwithstanding extensive damage to a nearby town?

I agree that nukes 'aren't absolutely ruled out,' but like this scenario they depend a host of assumptions about the other player's response - and if those assumptions are wrong, you are up shit creek, but still downstream of a dam that just burst.

Anonymous said...

You know, using a strategic weapon on a non-strategic target would seem to some, (especially during the heat of a war that has just escalated into the nuclear realm), to be a waste; there are other, nonmilitary, strategic targets just as justifiable as a military base. Three Gorges Damn comes to mind. It may not be smart, or keep the war from escalating, but I can see it happening.


Ferrell

Tony said...

Nothing is without risk. But we have to remember that the Chinese are the people that gave us Unrestricted Warfare, in which the authors suggested that anything that works is a viable tactic, no matter how seemingly far-fetched or unconventional. The authors in fact claimed as a right any tactic that evened the playing field for the weaker side.

From that I adduced that the Chinese could see using a nuke against USN forces at sea as nothing more than an Unrestricted Warfare type tactic. Would they do it for real? I don't know. But I do know that the worst military disasters have always been the result of failures of imagination on the part of the sufferer, combined with the application of a bit of raw, unrefined nerve on the part of the attacker.

Rick said...

Which does prove that the Chinese defense establishment is not immune from its own crackpot equivalents of the arguments for 'bunker buster' nukes.

But on the final point, I could as easily argue - with support from Thucydides (the original guy, not the commenter here) - that the worst military disasters have resulted from good old hubris.

Tony said...

Rick:

"But on the final point, I could as easily argue - with support from Thucydides (the original guy, not the commenter here) - that the worst military disasters have resulted from good old hubris."

Yep...they won't use nukes on us because they're too afraid of what we'd do in retaliation, regardless of how carefully they could tailor the circumstances to make retaliation in-kind a political non-starter.

Rick said...

As they say in fencing school, touché!

Rick said...

Though I suspect the Chinese leadership would find itself less confident in this theory, because the price of miscalculation is both dreadfully high and dreadfully obvious.

Scott said...

... the price of miscalculation is both dreadfully high and dreadfully obvious.

And that, my friends, is why very few people actually consider using nukes. (much better said than I ever could)

The only ones that do consider the idea are those that truly don't think they would face utter annihilation. Like India and Pakistan, possibly Saudi and DPRK.

One of the points I was trying to make, that I believe was overlooked, is that this threat of utter annihilation is what convinces every country, even those that don't like the US at all, to keep tight control over delivery systems. You do not want to have someone who is not the head of state to decide to entangle the state in an annihilation event.

Despite John Ringo's otherwise rant-filled prose, the story 'Ghost' makes a point that I wish the US would go on record with: WMD are WMD. bio = gas = dirty bomb = nukes. Use of any CBRN weapon will result in instant sunshine at the country-destroying level.

If *any* attack on the US is an existential threat to the hosting nation, there will be no attacks on the US. Every other nation will make sure of that for America. I don't like ruling through fear, but murphy's 3rd law applies: If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

Tony said...

The real problem with such self-assurance is that I've been asserting China's best case for nuclear use against the USN at sea. They might be willing to trade an air or naval base and a medium sized city for the neutralization of a carrier battle group, if that's a war-winning trade. Massive retaliation is simply not going to be considered by a US President, no matter what his theoretical convictions ought to be. Nobody likely to be elected President is going to countenance being the greatest murderer* ever just to prove a point.

*And it would be murder, because it would be so wildly disproportionate.

jollyreaper said...

I think you greatly overestimate our civility. Depending on whose figures you trust, we've killed anywhere from 0 to a million civilians in Iraq and the leadership has studiously ignored the war protests. I think people gave up even trying to object to it.

If China made a nuclear strike on American carriers, I would not want to be sitting in their command bunkers waiting for the response.

Personally, I thought the whole push towards making nukes usable on the battlefield was insanity. Nobody's going to care about your definition of what is and isn't a WMD. I don't care if it's a sub-kiloton weapon or even if it's some wonder-weapon that weighs as much as a bullet and can hit like a 10 ton bomb. If you can describe it as a nuclear explosion, people are going to lose their minds. Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging had to be renamed because of that.

1. It counts if it happens to Americans.
2. We don't care if it happens to others.

Can you honestly tell me that Faux wouldn't go off the rails if America got nuked and Obama didn't nuke back back because he doesn't want to be a mass murderer? Articles of Impeachment would be whipped up faster than you can say "intern sex."

Note: I'm not advocating a course of action, I'm not validating it. I'm just saying that I think it would be unlikely for China to do something like that but if they did, they couldn't count on the American response being reasonable or rational. Maybe everyone involved would surprise us but I wouldn't put money on it.

Tony said...

Re: jollyreaper

Who or what is "Faux"? If it's a partisan or politically motivated epithet, could you please stop? Gratuitously insulting editorial comments make you look small and silly, no matter who they are directed at.

WRT the subject, I think you're simply mistaken that a US President would engage massive retalialtion for a single, isolated attack against forces at sea. "If one flies, they all fly" is a Cold War logic, based on existential conflict between the US and USSR. That logic doesn't apply to the 21st Century.

jollyreaper said...

WRT the subject, I think you're simply mistaken that a US President would engage massive retalialtion for a single, isolated attack against forces at sea. "If one flies, they all fly" is a Cold War logic, based on existential conflict between the US and USSR. That logic doesn't apply to the 21st Century.

The USSR had the ability to wipe the US off the face of the Earth. China could probably ruin our decade but not obliterate us in 20 minutes. So there wouldn't be the same necessity to catch their birds on the ground before they're launched.

But the political pressure of retaliating in kind, I don't think that could be resisted. If they sink a carrier group, we're going to have to hit them back, hard. Possibly confining the retaliatory strike to military targets, we might not jump immediately to taking out cities. But I would find it incredibly, extremely surprising to see the US nuked and not nuke back. If one of our cities got hit, we're going to nuke one of theirs. It wasn't all that long ago that western nations were willing to firebomb cities as a matter of course.

Johnson was willing to stay in the Vietnam War after he knew it was lost because he didn't want to appear soft on communism. We killed what, an estimated two million Asians in that war? I've heard people go back and forth about it but I think the dead GI's did more to sour the public on the war than the dead Asians.

As I said, if the Chinese launched a nuclear strike on American forces, I would not want to be sitting in their bunkers when America responds.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"As I said, if the Chinese launched a nuclear strike on American forces, I would not want to be sitting in their bunkers when America responds."

If I were the Chinese nuking US carrier(s), I would immediately hold a rally at the Olympic stadium and have the whole Central Committee there, daring the US to nuke downtown Beijing in retaliation for a carrier battle group.

IOW, you're simply not following the logic, j. The Chinese have just made a limited attack against a strictly military target. That significantly limits US options. It's not just the bloodthirsty portion of the US populace that the Administration has to worry about, but those who would object to a homeland attack in retaliation (a large plurality, if not a majority), and everybody in the international community (even our allies) who would turn their backs on us is we did such a thing.

The President has to take all of these things into consideration when choosing a response. He can't just lash out. And he's not going to get impeached -- Congress is going to be in as much turmoil as the Executive branch over something like that. He'll probably retaliate somehow, but he's not going to do anything drastic.

jollyreaper said...


The President has to take all of these things into consideration when choosing a response. He can't just lash out. And he's not going to get impeached -- Congress is going to be in as much turmoil as the Executive branch over something like that. He'll probably retaliate somehow, but he's not going to do anything drastic.


If the Chinese leadership did nuke a CVBG, I'm sure that your line of reasoning would be exactly the same as they one they followed. I just think the plan relies too much on the US president behaving as expected. I could easily see him reacting in a way they weren't anticipating.

Rick said...

All of this is a bit abstract, really, because there'd have to be some context of why the Chinese decided on nuclear release in the first place.

But I'll stand by my general point, that while there are no absolute guarantees whatsoever, the prospect of getting nuked back has great power to concentrate the mind.

Note that India and Pakistan have gotten a great deal more circumspect with each other since they became nuclear powers.

Tony said...

Rick:

"All of this is a bit abstract, really, because there'd have to be some context of why the Chinese decided on nuclear release in the first place."

They don't have CVBGs, but they have nukes and MRBMs, and they consider whatever operation the US sends the CVBGs against worth extreme measures to protect.

"But I'll stand by my general point, that while there are no absolute guarantees whatsoever, the prospect of getting nuked back has great power to concentrate the mind.

Note that India and Pakistan have gotten a great deal more circumspect with each other since they became nuclear powers."


Of course. But when we start believeing that nothing is worth using a nuke against, we start making ourselves vulnerable to nuclear use.

Anonymous said...

As far as nuclear exchanges' between the U.S. and China goes; even a two to one response would put our point across and not alienate anyone too badly; You nuked one of our CBGs, we nuke one of your navy ports and an airbase; do it again and we'll nuke four military targets, ect; the U.S. can do this a lot longer than the Chinese can aford to.

Ferrell

Milo said...

Jollyreaper:

"But the political pressure of retaliating in kind, I don't think that could be resisted. If they sink a carrier group, we're going to have to hit them back, hard. Possibly confining the retaliatory strike to military targets, we might not jump immediately to taking out cities. But I would find it incredibly, extremely surprising to see the US nuked and not nuke back."

I think the US's chief objective here would be to win whatever conflict of interest inspired the Chinese to try nuking them in the first place. They would now be willing to use nukes in pursuit of this objective, but they wouldn't use more than they need to - but also no less.

I don't expect anyone to simply launch a nuke for the sake of launching a nuke, even in retaliation. But at this point the US would not back down from the war because "we can't win without resorting to nukes", if it comes to that.

ElAntonius said...

Part of the problem is that by launching nukes the host nation makes the *launchers* targets...and most likely, target numero uno.

Nuclear silos are often well hidden and well reinforced. Submarines are the former, but I suspect the Chinese navy doesn't have a huge amount of them. Bombers are neither, but they are the easiest path for nuclear delivery from a technological perspective.

Even if the US isn't wanting to retaliate in a nuclear manner, one would presume that at the point of nuclear use by the Chinese on a strict military target the only options are to utterly destroy the Chinese launch capacity, or to cease whatever war effort exists in the first place.

And the dirty truth is I don't think the US flat out has enough ordinance to do that in the conventional manner. Sure, we have all sorts of ways of knocking out bombers, but I don't think bombers are going to be a primary threat to CBGs (It's not like CBGs aren't loaded to the gills with interceptors and AA defenses)

So that leaves sub-hunting and bunker-hunting...no one is really going to mess all that much with a sub-hunt, they'll just start demolishing resupply ports, and if those prove too hardened for conventional assault, we'll either have to get dirty or get peaceful.

As for silos...well, there's an ugly truth to that. We all know what it is. There's a reason that both Russia and the US viewed total nuclear annihilation as the deterrent for ICBM attacks.

That's the problem with nukes...they essentially force a total war situation, and total war with nuclear equipped opponents is not a pretty scenario.

Also: there's a reason nuclear bunker busters never made it past the drawing board.

Tony said...

Ferrell:

"As far as nuclear exchanges' between the U.S. and China goes; even a two to one response would put our point across and not alienate anyone too badly; You nuked one of our CBGs, we nuke one of your navy ports and an airbase; do it again and we'll nuke four military targets, ect; the U.S. can do this a lot longer than the Chinese can aford to."

The Chinese only have to do it once. They take out a CVBG or two, take their lumps, succeed in whatever initiative they're taking, and anything the US can do later is presumably moot. As I already said, US non-retaliation in kind is the Chinese best case, and the result they would work to achieve. But taking a nuke or two in retaliation deosn't mean they lose.

Scott said...

Eh, remember how many missiles/bombers would be needed to get one warhead to the target.

An absolute-minimum launch would be a single Minuteman III (3x 375kt), but that requires the Russians to not panic when that set of MIRVs goes over their heads. No thanks, I don't want to risk involving the Russians in a US/China dispute on the Chinese side.

Next-smallest release would be a single Trident II/D5 (~12x 375kt). Problem is, launching one D5 reveals the position of 23 more, so you would need to launch enough to not cripple your response when you lose that sub. I estimate *that* minimum number as at least 6 birds, possibly as many as 12. And it still carries a substantial risk of involving the Russians.

Bombers? 24+ warheads per plane, and each plane operates with 2 friends (based on Linebacker raids during Vietnam, supposedly following nuclear-war doctrine), plus however many additional attacks to clear a path to the real targets. A minimum of 72 warheads in a single flight, times a minimum of 3-4 flights.

All this makes even a "limited" nuclear attack an awful lot bigger than most people would have considered.

Once you run through *that* calculus, using a nuke for your opening bid becomes very unattractive.

Tony said...

Re: Scott

I have to agree that ICBMs are out, for more reasons than the ones you mentioned.

But what's this worry about a single SLBM launch leading to the loss of a boat? As already mentioned, a missile could be launched from the vicinity of the Hawaiian islands and still reach well into China. There's not going to be any Chinese ASW activity there. (Or if there is, we have bigger problems than losing a single missile boat.)

Likewise, what's the idea with gravity bomb equipped bombers? For a limited strike, we would use ALCM, which, if fired from a 500 mile standoff, could reach up to 1000 miles inland. (At least -- official figures generally understate capabilities.)

Anonymous said...

Scott: I have to agree with Tony; a sub could fire a single missile and then leve the area at high speed; shoot-n-scoot. By the time enemy forces could respond to the area that the missile was launched from, the sub would be tens of miles away at the very least; more probably closer to 100; if you couldn't find it before, what makes you think you could find it now?
Ferrell

Thucydides said...

Near future developments will make even these calculations somewhat suspect. The Indian military operates the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile and is developing a hypersonic version. The USAF is developing a hypersonic Prompt Global Strike "boost/glide" missile which can travel thousands of miles in minutes.

BrahMos comes in air, sea and land based versions, which means the strike is not only very fast, but also comes at you from any direction (a heavy truck carrying a ground launch version, any ship capable of housing the beast in the sea launch version, and a heavy bomber or strike plane for the air launched version).

This would allow "tit for tat" strikes using conventional weapons (I take your aircraft carrier, you hit an airbase) without raising the nuclear threshold.

Rick said...

But the underlying for main force conflict between major industrial poers is one that was supposedly expressed by a Navy guy in the 80s, who described our war plan against the Soviets as "Fight with conventional weapons until we're losing, then fight with tactical nukes until we're losing, then blow up the world."

Powers can tit for tat each other, and so long as someone backs down, none the worse off (except for the odd carrier group, etc.).

But if the loser in any round considers losing unacceptable, it is on to the next round, and after a few rounds things get seriously out of hand ...

Thucydides said...

So long as there is some sort of rational calculation of cost/benefit, then the best we can hope for is nations weilding hypersonic boost glide weapons are willing to back down once they have made their point (or the sudden application of force overwhelms the opponents political machinery and they declare defeat or ceasefire).

The arguments that retaliation will involve large numbers of weapons is the one which I think is mooted here, you would probably assign a pair of boost glide missiles to ensure one gets through, which is a certain signal of restraint (a wave of incoming missiles would be a pretty clear sign the gloves are coming off).

Of course, no one can always count on being rational

Philippe said...

It's odd, the "e-Panphlet" you linked from Tyler Cowen to isn't available to Canadian accounts. What's the deal?

Rick said...

Welcome to the comment threads!

I have no idea why Cowan's e-pamphlet wouldn't be available to Canadian accounts. Does Amazon have a separate Canadian site (a la Amazon.co.uk)?

Maybe googling would get you to a site where you can order it?

jollyreaper said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704587004576242450234233350.html

more at the link

Putting on the Brakes: Mankind Nears the End of the Age of Speed

The human race is slowing down.

When the U.S. space shuttle completes its final flight, planned for June, mankind will take another step back from its top speed. Space shuttles are the fastest reusable manned vehicles ever built. Their maximum was only exceeded by single-shot moon rockets.

The shuttles' retirement follows the grounding over recent years of other ultrafast people carriers, including the supersonic Concorde and the speedier SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. With nothing ready to replace them, our species is decelerating—perhaps for the first time in history.

It has been a good two-century sprint, says Neil Armstrong, who in 1969 covered almost 240,000 miles in less than four days to plant the first human footprint on the Moon. Through the 18th century, he noted in an email exchange, humans could travel by foot or horse at approximately six miles per hour. "In the 19th, with trains, they reached 60 mph. In the 20th, with jet aircraft, we could travel at 600 mph. Can we expect 6,000 mph in the 21st?" he wondered.

"It does not seem likely," Mr. Armstrong continued, although he holds out some hope.

Rick said...

Arguably this is a natural process. Maximum travel speed did not change much from the development of the chariot and horseback riding in the Bronze Age to the beginning of the railroad era.

Most of the increase took place in not much more than a century, c. 1830-1960, and technology then overshot the requirement. The airline industry has no significant interest in SSTs - the additional time they save is not worth the development and operating costs.

Interplanetary travel could add another order of magnitude, to ~100 km/s, as a sort of coda to the industrial revolution. Probably not much more than that, because required drive power goes up as the cube of travel speed, making Really Fast interplanetary travel an economic loser.