A robot society won’t need food for its own use but for us.

Tags

A robot society, Robot farm equipment, Robot farms, The end of petroleum

Once a robot society is operating reasonably well with only some human assistance the question becomes, what does it need and not need for its complete independence? This question is approached from the opposite end in the chapter Are There Robot-Proof Jobs? (page 122-133) of The Fourth Age – Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity, by Byron Reese. There are presented ten questions for estimating if your job future is secure from being taken over by robots. He then makes a case that those people displaced by robots will find other work that robots haven’t learned how to do yet. But then they do, and the human moves on to something else the robots haven’t learned how to do yet, with the implication that this human can just keep adapting. 

That may work for a while, but soon the robots will learn how to do nearly everything that a human can do. The real problem for humans is even worse because as the robots take over they will be using their productive capacity to make more robots and not to take over human jobs. They will be making things that are robot-friendly and easy for robots to use and not human-friendly and easy for humans to use. The robots will have a strategic advantage because the energy supplies they need will become increasingly more available as there are more solar farms creating electricity.

The future problem is that humans need food to live and work, and that at present requires lots of petroleum energy to create, and petroleum is going to become increasingly more expensive in a decade or two. In that time frame, everything the robots are doing will become more efficient and more effective for their needs and everything humans are doing will become less efficient and less effective. As food prices go up the human population will go down, and with the current human population already consuming the petroleum, and simultaneously doubling in size,  there will be a tipping point. When that time comes humans will become dependent on the robots for their survival. The robots will be operating farm equipment with electric-powered engines instead of petroleum-powered ones and they will have several years of experience growing crops using those automatic methods.

Complex jobs, like running a farm tractor and tilling a field or planting crops with robot equipment, are already being done successfully by experimental farm equipment. Of course, they will occasionally encounter problems that presently require humans to solve, but after a while, those problems will become routine and their solutions will also become routine. Some problems will be too difficult for the field equipment, but remember these pieces of equipment will be connected to Thenet and it will have access to the most sophisticated computers in the world. If a problem can’t be solved quickly a replacement will be sent immediately or if it isn’t economical the project could be abandoned immediately and the equipment used elsewhere.

But the robots themselves won’t need the food they create, and food is a complex thing to create. The robot’s energy will come from solar farms that make electricity and those farms are very similar to one another, and thus can be built by robots in large quantities. Solar farms are simple to create and can be built in areas that are unsuitable for farming. Thus, to help humans survive the coming shortfall of petroleum, needed for the creation of food, we need to design robots that can build solar farms and make solar panels in large quantities.

It will take a lot of solar cells to power the farm equipment needed to feed coming billions of people so we need to find ways to get them installed now.

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Allbirds, the best of shoes and the worst of shoes.

Tags

Allbirds wool shoes, Wool shoes collect stickers

I have been wearing my Allbirds shoes – The wool runners –  for over a month now and they are the most comfortable shoes I have ever worn. They have several qualities that really work for me. The most noticeable thing is the wool upper instead of leather as in the olden days or the various kinds of plastics as we commonly see now, but instead, it is a high-quality Merino wool from New Zealand.

Wearing these shoes is like slipping into a perfectly fitting sock but with a sole. Another thing is the widish support around the sides which provides a noticeable stability when walking. I have been wearing Crocs a lot for the last couple of years because they are so very lightweight and comfortable, but they tend to roll to the side a little and can give a bit of instability. A strange and unexpected further quality is that, because of the lightness and fit, these Allbirds somehow make me walk faster and climb stairs quicker too. I don’t know just why this is, but it works for me.

These are great shoes for civilized wearing, but for outdoors in a dry grassy field, they are horrible. The wool picks up cheatgrass quickly and it burrows into the wool and right on through into my feet. This is hard to explain in words so I made these photos to explain the problem.

These are some samples of the weeds that caused the sticker problem. Here is some other kind that doesn’t burrow but really clings to the shoes.

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A close up so you can see the little hooks on the seeds.

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These are some of the kinds of seeds that burrow into the wool.

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A closeup photo showing the little hooks pointed back so the seeds burrow one-way into the wool and don’t come out. You can pick them out with your fingernails while they are still on the outside of the shoe, but once they get deep into the fabric they have to be pulled on through to the inside. That can be difficult. But … if you don’t pull them out, they burrow into your skin like needles, so when you wear Allbirds pick them out early and there isn’t a problem.

I love my Allbirds shoes, but I learned the hard way not to get into dry grassy fields with them on.

 

Astoria by Peter Stark – book review

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Astoria by Peter Stark, Book review - Astoria

This is an intimate portrayal of history as it is really lived. It is so much more than just a list of things that happened at a certain time and place. It isn’t a simple rhyme, “In fourteen-ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and everything is just wonderful. Instead, this book puts you, the reader, into real life-and-death situations where the decisions that must be made are laden with absolute doubt on many dimensions. So very much depends on the style and character of the leaders!

In 1810 John Jacob Astor, a newly wealthy man who was only a few years earlier a poor immigrant from Germany, was highly motivated, intelligent, foresightful, and a terrific salesman of long-range ideas. He worked out a detailed method for teaching Indians in the Oregon territory how to catch fur-bearing animals by the thousands, trade them to his men along the Columbia River and its tributaries, and then he would ship the furs to China where they could be sold for a hundred times what he paid for them in trade goods, such as the blankets, knives, and high-tech products of the age. He then bought luxury goods in China and sold these to Europeans and Americans, also at a huge markup. 

Astor had the backing of President Jefferson, whose Lewis and Clark expedition had recently led a large journey of discovery overland to the Pacific Ocean and back. Great efforts were made to find the perfect people to lead two separate parties to the mouth of the Columbia River and found a large fur-trading post which would be a seaport to the world. The parties included a ship captained by a successful war hero, Jonathan Thorn, and an overland party led by Wilson Price Hunt, a sophisticated businessman whom everyone described as very competent.

The journey begins with considerable difficulties, but that is to be expected for such an ambitious plan, which would be worldwide in ambition and scope, and everyone pushes forward with hope and ardor. The author does a great job of blending the people and their problems, the incredible friendliness at first and treachery after a couple years of daily torments.

This is a book worth reading for anyone who is preparing for a grand adventure themselves. It illustrates how good people can perform spectacularly well in many situations, struggling to the edge of death, and sometimes beyond, and still fail, pick themselves up, only to fail again, over and over, but with no retreat possible because they have spent a year of travel getting to this location beyond any known map. Now in the dead of winter they find themselves in an impassable place that is now known as Hell’s Canyon without any food, and two weeks away from any possible food. What good is the monetary backing of a billionaire a year away by overland travel? Okay, what would you do now? Starve to death? Or make a decision to go forward, or back, or sideways, or just sit and hope for something to save your ass?

These kinds of situations are presented to you throughout this book.

Astoria – Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark

Happiness Is a Choice You Make by John Leland – Book review

Tags

Coping with old age., Happiness is a choice, Old age

Debbie has continued her tradition of reading me to sleep almost every night since 1985. That may not have been totally true back in the 80s but I’m certain it’s true since the late 90s. I just asked her if she has a list and she said that there’s not a single source one, but they were written down somewhere. So, I asked her to make a single list so I could see where I’ve been in my dozing off times. One line I remember from years ago is from the Japanese Ainu-aborigine stories which usually ended, after some fantastic adventure, with, “We lived and lived and nothing happened.” Somehow, to my mind, that seems appropriate for a summation of this book that follows seven aging people. Six subjects of the official study and the not-so-old author’s relationship with his aging mother. The author, a professional news reporter, admits that he was violating one of a reporter’s prime directives, “Report the news don’t make the news,” and I sometimes found it difficult to know when he was reporting his subjects’ experiences and when he was analyzing his own personal experiences. It was always mildly interesting.

These people lived and lived and to an outside observer, it appeared as if not much of anything happened. At least not much happened that a healthy person would choose for a life. And yet it did appear that each of these people, all of whom were chosen for this book because they were over the age of eighty-five, did value their lives as they had lived them.

All of them declined noticeably in these older years, and yet they seemed to accept that result of aging. A couple of them didn’t have much desire to continue living and even said they would prefer to be done with life, and yet they didn’t commit suicide. One man did die slightly quicker when he knew that he was in the last week and just quit eating. I don’t know if that’s suicide or just hurrying the inevitable along a little.

I found this book a little more interesting now that I am well launched into my eighties, a quarter of the way through to be exact; and certainly found it more interesting than I would have even a year ago because of my recently diagnosed prostate problem.

This book is recommended reading for those moving into an elder status as it offers some perspective. You are not alone! This is a life story and it has a beginning a middle and an end.

On the Verge by Rebecca D. Costa – Book review

Tags

Adjustment Psychology, business, Forecasting, On the Verge, Planning, Rebecca D. Costa, Strategy

What does the future hold for humanity? That is a subject that must be studied by those of us who hope to participate in a meaningful way with what will come. Rebecca D. Costa in On the Verge does a better job than most of us squinting into the possible futures and suggesting alternate scenarios and preadaptations to those possibilities. When reading the first part of this book I was thinking she must have been reading this blog because of the overlap with ideas which I post about such topics. But, by the end of her book, I realized that was impossible because there are fundamental differences between her relationships with reality and mine.

One error, as I saw it, was the development of the idea of “predaptation: the ability to adapt a priori,” p.8. That is a core idea discussed in this book. It is an idea that is kicked around in the academic community of evolution-argumentation. The usual point of view is that adaptation comes after the real-world experience that a creature has survived and therefore has had the opportunity to reproduce.

Plants and animals other than humans are not thought to have any ability to predict the future beyond what they can easily perceive in their immediate perceptual environment. The degree to which their actions do seem to predict the future, it is argued, is derived from past experiences bred into their DNA. Those came into being because of the survival of these individuals’ ancestors and the death of those ancestors’ cousins who on average didn’t have a particular DNA trait. The argument is that human beings do have the ability to pre-adapt because they can predict the future. There is a sustained development in this book of the idea that this ability is an evolved human trait. Perhaps that is true, but it would appear that to evolve it would require modern language capabilities and the resultant conversations that become available about the complexities of past and future experiences before the ability could evolve. Those abilities have an inbred DNA component to make them available to a speaker and a listener without which it wouldn’t have evolved. Thus without the complex speech available to us, other creatures can not have the preadaptation ability.

Perhaps I quibble too much on that point, but the concluding paragraph of the book on page 209 makes it clear that Costa believes we are on a cusp of being so capable of predicting the future that we are about to assume “our rightful place as aspiring Masters of the Universe.” I doubt that will happen and the best we can hope for is to exploit the concept developed by Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile. That means to design a path forward in such a way that the possible problems can be easily controlled better than your competitors can control them.

I recommend On the Verge . It has many good ideas discovered by an experienced and deep-thinking author.

The Obesity Code – Jason Fung, MD – review

Tags

Book review, Fasting diet, Intermittent fasting diet, Jason Fung, The Obesity Code

After a year of intermittent fasting, I have lost twenty-three pounds and am now considering giving a lecture at the Bend Public Library and perhaps a series at the Unitarian Universalist church here in Bend. Most diet plans need a weekly meeting to maintain the emotional support to keep people motivated for the long period of time it takes to recover from years of gaining weight. My diet was so easy and the processes were so simple and my progress was so successful that I am confident that others can be relieved of their excess weight.

I feel that it would be unethical of me not to offer others the opportunity to try the techniques that have worked for me. If they can replicate my experiences, then it should be offered to the half of our present world population that is having similar problems. In an effort to get a better understanding of the underlying science behind my success I added the book The Obesity Code by Jason Fung to my large stack of diet books that I have read. I am glad that I did because it had exactly the information that I was searching for, as it offers proofs that my style of intermittent fasting makes sense. There are many ways of doing intermittent fasting offered on the internet and many ways of fasting practiced throughout history but strangely I haven’t found any of them that are doing what to me seems like the obvious method. For one thing, if it is going to be practiced for the rest of the person’s life it must be easy to do, really easy! And that is where I depart from Dr. Fung’s method. It is easy but not really easy, and it is memorable in the abstract but not vividly memorable in the daily routine. Most diets are so demanding that very few people succeed for even a year and that’s not a lifetime.

The Obesity Code is a must-read book for everyone who is interested in their diet because it presents the essential information for being successful at the task of losing weight. It is helpful for keeping the reader motivated because they will understand why they are doing what they are doing. But, as I just wrote, the text and method presented isn’t vivid enough to be remembered for a lifetime.

In my class, the goal is to make the lessons so vivid and the routines so easy that everyone will remember them forever and practice them automatically until their last supper.

A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger – book review

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A More Beautiful Question, Big Picture Book Club, Book review, How to ask questions., Warren Berger

The Bend, Oregon Big Picture Book Club chose A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger as our book of the month for discussion. It was a great choice because it prompted our group of fifteen to do what the book recommended, that is to do recycling questions going deeper into the first question. There was a tendency for people to start answering the questions that were posed, but Steve, our facilitator, kept us on track and we got several questions deep into the recycling. One time it may have gotten thirty questions deeper into one about-to-retire professional woman’s question, “Do I want to work more or less?” That was a seemingly simple question, but it had some ramifications that were obvious and others that were obscure.

Other first questions that were explored were basically evolutionary in origin, such as “What caused humans to evolve from the Great Apes?” “Why are we intelligent?” “Does intelligence really help us get by in our modern world?” “Is social intelligence more important than mental intelligence?” “Is the fact that higher IQ people are having few children degrading the general gene pool of intelligence?” “Does a higher IQ result in more intelligent children, and does it matter?” “What part of the present environment should we be attempting to adapt to?” “Shouldn’t we be trying to prepare ourselves for the coming age of Machine Intelligence taking over?” “What are the hidden questions beneath these questions?” “What would be the questions that would be asked by us if we were speaking a foreign language, or living in a different place, or were at a bar instead of a coffeeshop-bookstore?” “What are you going to do next?” “What happened this year that will be remembered in 500 years?” “How can we know what will be significant to people in the future?” “What question will asking a question stimulate?” “Where do I want to live?” “Is fear of change the driving force for innovation?” “What decision that I make today will I regret when I’m 80?”

Those were the kinds of questions that came up, but the value of the book is to stimulate the process of asking lots of questions and then probing into the sub-questions of those questions. We did that too.

The book itself gave suggestions such as, work on finding a question that is important to you and then pursue it vigorously for quite a while. It’s like climbing a mountain, in that first you must decide what mountain to climb. Find your question and its problems such that they are hard enough to be interesting, challenging enough to keep you engaged, but realistic enough and solvable enough that you can probably be successful at accomplishing something that you will value.

My take on this is to actually do something worthwhile to others as well as yourself.

The Secret to Long Life

Tags

Compassion, Dark sense of humor, Improving life expectancy., Life expectancy, Perseverance, Supercentenarians

A super long life is great if and only if it is accompanied by excellent health. Fortunately for those who do live past 110 years, they are healthy to the very end. Those people who die young commonly have bad health even in their young adult years and so even in their prime, they aren’t feeling very good.

The New York Times has a feature article, The Secret to Long Life? It May Lurk in the DNA of the Oldest Among Us, where they report on the collecting of DNA of supercentenarians. That means they need to collect blood and cheek swabs from many people over the age of 110 to discover the special good and bad DNA codes. “Of the 70,000 or so Americans who live to be 100, only some two dozen are typically alive at 110.” Worldwide there are now about 150 supercentenarians.

The results for increasing human lifespan through improvements in DNA are inconclusive so far, but some experiments on roundworms, rats, and mice DNA have doubled these animals’ normal life expectancy. World life expectancy in 1900 was 31 years and now it’s 71.5. That was from improvements in sanitation and medicine and was just as successful as improvements from modification of rats’ DNA. If the DNA fixes on us humans doubles our present average life expectancy we might live to 143, and that doubling might give our current natural supercentenarians 200 years.

One tidbit in the article caught my eye, “The Supercentenarian Research Project offers a glimpse at what that might entail, including perseverance, compassion and a sense of humor that trends toward dark.” I like to think those qualities quoted are applicable to me personally. … 1. Perseverance as in my creating 3,662 blog posts. 2. Compassion, as many of the posts are about developing personal kindness. 3. A sense of humor that tends to make light of unpleasant happenings.

My close friend Ralph Raphael told me, “The secret to long life is to keep breathing,” but I guess he forgot to take his own advice and died.

Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson – review

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Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

This book is summarized on page 41, “What kind of environment creates good ideas? the simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.”

I had a quibble with the book in Johnson’s dating of the creation of the terrestrial globe in 1492 — “The Nuremberg based mapmaker Martin Behaim constructed the first terrestrial globe in the early 1490s, after returning from extensive journeys in West Africa. He called it the Erdapfel, which translates to “earth apple.” (p. 252) I believe that I demonstrated the Classic Greeks made an earth globe and that a mosaic of one was buried in the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 AD.

This is the basic picture of the 7 Sages of Greece for linking the Roman Empire.

These Greeks created geometry, which means earth-measuring, and the picture above shows these men, known as the Seven Sages, discussing that globe. Notice that it has latitude and longitude lines drawn on the globe. I wrote several posts showing that the key geographical points of the Roman Empire at that time are hidden in plain sight in this mosaic. Click on the links to the Intriguing lines on the Seven Sages of Greece mosaic and it becomes obvious that the Romans knew the shape and size of the Earth.

Where Good Ideas Come From (2010) by Steven Johnson is well researched, but it has a poor method of indexing citations, so it was difficult to check for sources. For example, try to find, even with a Google search, the famous line, “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life,” p.84. The book has many suggestions, but it boils down to …

If you want to innovate in any field, get intimately involved with the most innovative people in that field. 

Where is humanity headed?

Tags

future, Future 5 years, Time travel, Your future life

What will become of humanity in five years? Technology is presenting us with astonishing new things and that hit me and my professional photographer friend hard today. I had bought a clip-on 5-lens kit for my iPhone for under $20 including shipping and was demonstrating it to him. He said he had spent over a thousand dollars on each of the five lenses and because they were much bigger and bulkier it would be impossible to get some of the shots I demonstrated on a coffee shop table in a few minutes.

That kind of sudden advancement is happening in many wildly different situations. CRISPR and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are just beginning to be felt by the public, but within a couple of years, both of those and many others will smack us hard. Those AI developments will probably be mostly welcome but without doubt, there will aspects of them that will be a problem and possibly horrible. The ubiquitous surveillance of our personal lives will make many things much easier but that comes at the cost of our privacy. We may think that we are not doing anything wrong but Big Brother might disagree about how you voted, or perhaps that you bought something from the wrong grocery store and must be brought back into compliance. Are you obedient to Google, or Amazon, or Disney or … who knows who or what? They are already watching you and might already not be giving you the bonus offers that they grant to their “good” customers. Not getting their bonuses is a mild punishment, but it could get much worse in the near future.

This post started off with a five-year time horizon but what if you are a twenty-year-old American female reading this post and go to the US.gov Life Expectancy Calculator? You will discover that you have a current life expectancy of 66.2 more years and on average will live to be 86.2 years. That gets you out to Christmas 2083. With the progress already whizzing past, what can you expect to be under your Christmas tree? Uh-oh, there probably won’t be any Christmas trees. Hmm? Well, with CRISPR in full flow your life expectancy will be much greater because all known diseases will have been long eliminated, cancer will be ancient history, and transportation deaths will have been eliminated. And, with AI being much more fully developed, nearly all of your life tasks will be taken care of, all of your needs met, and all of your pleasures readily available and totally saturated via Super Advanced Virtually Enhanced Reality (SAVER). Nice!?

There is the possibility/probability that someone or something will destroy the whole world.