I think it’s also worth considering that a society of people who rarely die would probably have population issues, as there is a limited carrying capacity. That’s most obvious in the case of biologic humans, where even with our normal lifespan, we are already close or even above carrying capacity. In more exotic (and thus less probable, IMHO) scenarios such as Hansonian brain emulations, the carrying capacity might be perhaps higher, but it would still be fixed, or at least it would increase slowly once all the easily reachable resources on earth have been put to use (barring, of course, extreme singularity scenarios where nanomagicbots turn Jupiter into “computronium” or something, which I consider highly improbable).
Thus, if the long-lived future people are to avoid continuous cycles of population overshoot and crash, they must have some way of enforcing a population cap, whether by market forces or government regulation. This implies that reviving cryopreserved people would probably have costs other than those of the revival tech. Whoever revives you would have to split in some way their share of resources with you (or maybe in the extreme case, commit suicide to make room for you). Hanson, for instance, predicts that his brain emulation society would be a Malthusian subsistence economy. I don’t think that such a society could afford to ever revive any significant number of cryopatients, even if they had the technology (how Hanson can believe that society is likely and be still signed up for cryonics, is beyond my understanding). Even if you don’t think that a Malthusian scenario is likely, it still likely that the future will be an approximately steady-state economy, which means it would be strong disincentives against adding more people.
Even if you don’t think that a Malthusian scenario is likely, it still likely that the future will be an approximately steady-state economy, which means it would be strong disincentives against adding more people.
I’m inclined to agree, actually, but I would expect a post-scarcity “steady-state economy” large enough that absorbing such a tiny number of people is negligible.
With that said:
Honestly, it doesn’t sound all that implausible that humans will find ways to expand—if nothing else, without FTL (I infer you don’t anticipate FTL) there’s pretty much always going to be a lot of unused universe out there for many billions of years to come (until the universe expands enough we can’t reach anything, I guess.)
Brain emulations sound extremely plausible. In fact, the notion that we will never get them seems … somewhat artificial in it’s constraints. Are you sure you aren’t penalizing them merely for sounding “exotic”?
I can’t really comment on turning Jupiter into processing substrate and living there, but … could you maybe throw out some numbers regarding the amounts of processing power and population numbers you’re imagining? I think I have a higher credence for “extreme singularity scenarios” than you do, so I’d like to know where you’re coming from better.
Hanson, for instance, predicts that his brain emulation society would be a Malthusian subsistence economy. I don’t think that such a society could afford to ever revive any significant number of cryopatients, even if they had the technology (how Hanson can believe that society is likely and be still signed up for cryonics, is beyond my understanding).
That … is strange. Actually, has he talked anywhere about his views on cryonics?
Honestly, it doesn’t sound all that implausible that humans will find ways to expand—if nothing else, without FTL (I infer you don’t anticipate FTL)
Obviously I don’t anticipate FTL. Do you?
there’s pretty much always going to be a lot of unused universe out there for many billions of years to come (until the universe expands enough we can’t reach anything, I guess.)
Yes, but exploiting resources in our solar system is already difficult and costly. Currently there is nothing in space worth the cost of going there or bringing it back, maybe in the future it will be different, but I expect progress to be relatively slow. Interstellar colonization might be forever physically impossible or economically unfeasible. Even if it is feasible I expect it to be very very slow. I think that’s the best solution to Fermi’s paradox.
Tom Murphy discussed these issue here and here. He focused on proven space technology (rockets) and didn’t analyze more speculative stuff like mass drivers, but it seems to me that his whole analysis is reasonable.
Brain emulations sound extremely plausible. In fact, the notion that we will never get them seems … somewhat artificial in it’s constraints. Are you sure you aren’t penalizing them merely for sounding “exotic”?
I’m penalizing them because they seem to be far away from what current technology allows (consider the current status of the Blue Brain Project or the Human Brain Project). It’s unclear how many hidden hurdles are there, and how long Moore’s law will continue to hold. Even if the emulation of a few human brains becomes possible, it’s unclear that the technology would scale to allow a population of billions, or trillions as Hanson predicts. Keep in mind that biological brains are much more energy efficient than modern computers.
Conditionally on radical life extension technology being available, brain emulation is more probable, since it seems to be an obvious avenue to radical life extension. But it’s not obvious that it would be cheap and scalable.
I can’t really comment on turning Jupiter into processing substrate and living there, but … could you maybe throw out some numbers regarding the amounts of processing power and population numbers you’re imagining? I think I have a higher credence for “extreme singularity scenarios” than you do, so I’d like to know where you’re coming from better.
I think the most likely scenario, at least for a few centuries, is that human will still be essentially biological and will only inhabit the Earth (except possibly for a few Earth-dependent outposts in the solar system). Realistic population sizes will be between 2 and 10 billions.
Total processing power is more difficult to estimate: it depends on how long Moore’s law (and related trends such as Koomey’s law) will continue to hold. Since there seem to be physical limits that would be hit in 30-40 years of continued exponential growth, I would estimate that 20 years is a realistic time frame. Then there is the question of how much energy and other resources people will invest into computation. I’d say that a growth of total computing power to between 10,000x and 10,000,000x of the current one in 20-30 years, followed by stagnation or perhaps a slow growth, seems reasonable. Novel hardware technologies might change that, but as usual probabilities on speculative future tech should be discounted.
Prediction confirmed, then. I think you might be surprised how common anticipating that we will eventually “solve FTL” using “wormholes”, some sort of Alcubierre variant or plain old Clarke-esque New Discoveries—in sciencey circles, anyway.
I’m penalizing them because they seem to be far away from what current technology allows
I … see. OK then.
Keep in mind that biological brains are much more energy efficient than modern computers.
That seems like a more plausible objection.
Total processing power is more difficult to estimate: it depends on how long Moore’s law (and related trends such as Koomey’s law) will continue to hold. Since there seem to be physical limits that would be hit in 30-40 years of continued exponential growth, I would estimate that 20 years is a realistic time frame. Then there is the question of how much energy and other resources people will invest into computation.
I’d say that a growth of total computing power to between 10,000x and 10,000,000x of the current one in 20-30 years, followed by stagnation or perhaps a slow growth, seems reasonable. Novel hardware technologies might change that, but as usual probabilities on speculative future tech should be discounted.
Hmm. I started to calculate out some stuff, but I just realized: all that really matters is how the amount of humans we can support compares to available human-supporting resources, be they virtual, biological or, I don’t know, some sort of posthuman cyborg.
So: how on earth can we calculate this?
We could use population projections—I understand the projected peak is around 2100 at 9 billion or so—but those are infamously unhelpful for futurists and, obviously, may not hold when some technology or another is introduced.
So … what about wildly irresponsible economic speculation? What’s your opinion of the idea we’ll end up in a “post-scarcity economy”, due to widespread automation etc.
Alternatively, do you think the population controls malthusians have been predicting since forever will finally materialize?
Or … basically I’m curious as to the sociological landscape you anticipate here.
So … what about wildly irresponsible economic speculation? What’s your opinion of the idea we’ll end up in a “post-scarcity economy”, due to widespread automation etc.
As long as we are talking about biologic humans (I don’t think anything else is likely, at least for a few centuries), then carrying capacity is most likely in the order of billions: each human requires a certain amount of food, water, clothing, housing, healthcare, etc. The technologies we use to provide these things are already highly efficient, hence their efficiency will probably not grow much, at least not by incremental improvement. Groundbreaking developments comparable to the invention of agriculture might make a difference, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious candidate for that which we can foresee, hence I wouldn’t consider that likely.
In optimistic scenarios, we get an approximately steady state (or slowly growing) economy with high per capita wealth, with high automation relieving many people from the necessity of working long hours, or perhaps even of working at all. In pessimistic scenarios, Malthusian predictions come true, and we get either steady state economy at subsistence level, or growth-collapse oscillations with permanent destruction of carrying capacity due to resource depletion, climate change, nuclear war, etc. up to the most extreme scenarios of total civilization breakdown or human extinction.
The technologies we use to provide these things are already highly efficient
This is certainly not true for healthcare.
Groundbreaking developments comparable to the invention of agriculture might make a difference, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious candidate for that which we can foresee
I think that making energy really cheap (“too cheap to meter”) is foreseeable and that would count as a groundbreaking development.
Do you think that modern healthcare is inefficient in energy and resource usage? Why?
I think that modern healthcare is inefficient in general cost/benefit terms: what outputs you get at the cost of which inputs. Compared to what seems achievable in the future, of course.
I think that modern healthcare is inefficient in general cost/benefit terms: what outputs you get at the cost of which inputs. Compared to what seems achievable in the future, of course.
I suppose that in optimistic scenarios one could imagine cutting labor costs using high automation, but we would probably still going to need hospitals, drug manufacturing facilities, medical equipment factories, and so on.
Fusion reactors, for example.
Always 20-30 years in the future for the last 60 years. I’m under the impression that nuclear fusion reactors might have already reached technological maturity and thus diminishing returns before becoming commercially viable.
Even if commercial fusion reactors become available, they would hardly be “too cheap to meter”. They have to use the deuterium-tritium reaction (deuterium-deuterium is considered practically unfeasible), which has two main issues: it generates lots of high-energy neutrons and tritium must be produced from lithium.
High-energy neutrons erode any material and make it radioactive. This problem exists in conventional fission reactors, but it’s more significant in fusion reactors because of the higher neutron flux. A commercial fusion reactor would probably have higher maintenance requirement and/or shorter lifespan than a fission reactor with the same power.
Lithium is not rare, but not terribly common either. If we were to produce all the energy of the world from fusion, lithium reserves would last between thousands and tens of thousands years, assuming that energy consumption does not increase. That’s clearly an abundant source of energy (in the same ballpark of uranium and thorium), but not much more abundant than other sources we are used to.
Moreover, in a fission power station the fuel costs make up only a fraction of the total costs per joule of energy. Most of the costs are fixed costs of construction, maintenance and decommissioning. A fusion power station would have similar operational and decommissioning safety issues of a fission one (although it can’t go into melt down), and probably and higher complexity, which mean that fixed cost will dominate, as for fission power.
If fusion power becomes commercially viable it would be valuable but most likely not “too cheap to meter”.
I suppose that in optimistic scenarios one could imagine cutting labor costs using high automation
No, I primarily mean new ways of treatment. For example, a hypothetical country which can easily cure Alzheimer’s would have much lower costs of medical care for the elderly. Being able to cure (as opposed to control) diabetes, a large variety of autoimmune disorders, etc. has the potential to greatly improve the efficiency of health care.
Always 20-30 years in the future for the last 60 years.
Yes, but I am not saying it would happen, I’m saying this is an example of what might happen. You’re basically claiming that there will be no major breakthroughs in the foreseeable future—I disagree, but of course can’t come up with bulletproof examples :-/
No, I primarily mean new ways of treatment. For example, a hypothetical country which can easily cure Alzheimer’s would have much lower costs of medical care for the elderly. Being able to cure (as opposed to control) diabetes, a large variety of autoimmune disorders, etc. has the potential to greatly improve the efficiency of health care.
I see. But the point is how much disability people will have before they die. It’s not obvious to me that it will go down, at least it has gone up in the recent past.
You’re basically claiming that there will be no major breakthroughs in the foreseeable future
I’m claiming that breakthroughs which increase the amount of available energy or other scarce resources by a huge amount don’t seem especially likely in the foreseeable future.
I’d say that a growth of total computing power to between 10,000x and 10,000,000x of the current one in 20-30 years, followed by stagnation or perhaps a slow growth, seems reasonable
From Wikipedia:
Although this trend has continued for more than half a century, Moore’s law should be considered an observation or conjecture and not a physical or natural law. Sources in 2005 expected it to continue until at least 2015 or 2020.[note 1][11] However, the 2010 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicts that growth will slow at the end of 2013,[12] when transistor counts and densities are to double only every three years.
It’s already happening.
Current process size is ~22nm, silicon lattice size is ~0.5nm . Something around 5..10 nm is the limit for photolithography, and we don’t have any other methods of bulk manufacturing in sight. The problem with individual atoms is that you can’t place them in bulk because of the stochastic nature of the interactions.
I think it’s also worth considering that a society of people who rarely die would probably have population issues, as there is a limited carrying capacity.
That’s most obvious in the case of biologic humans, where even with our normal lifespan, we are already close or even above carrying capacity. In more exotic (and thus less probable, IMHO) scenarios such as Hansonian brain emulations, the carrying capacity might be perhaps higher, but it would still be fixed, or at least it would increase slowly once all the easily reachable resources on earth have been put to use (barring, of course, extreme singularity scenarios where nanomagicbots turn Jupiter into “computronium” or something, which I consider highly improbable).
Thus, if the long-lived future people are to avoid continuous cycles of population overshoot and crash, they must have some way of enforcing a population cap, whether by market forces or government regulation. This implies that reviving cryopreserved people would probably have costs other than those of the revival tech. Whoever revives you would have to split in some way their share of resources with you (or maybe in the extreme case, commit suicide to make room for you).
Hanson, for instance, predicts that his brain emulation society would be a Malthusian subsistence economy. I don’t think that such a society could afford to ever revive any significant number of cryopatients, even if they had the technology (how Hanson can believe that society is likely and be still signed up for cryonics, is beyond my understanding).
Even if you don’t think that a Malthusian scenario is likely, it still likely that the future will be an approximately steady-state economy, which means it would be strong disincentives against adding more people.
I’m inclined to agree, actually, but I would expect a post-scarcity “steady-state economy” large enough that absorbing such a tiny number of people is negligible.
With that said:
Honestly, it doesn’t sound all that implausible that humans will find ways to expand—if nothing else, without FTL (I infer you don’t anticipate FTL) there’s pretty much always going to be a lot of unused universe out there for many billions of years to come (until the universe expands enough we can’t reach anything, I guess.)
Brain emulations sound extremely plausible. In fact, the notion that we will never get them seems … somewhat artificial in it’s constraints. Are you sure you aren’t penalizing them merely for sounding “exotic”?
I can’t really comment on turning Jupiter into processing substrate and living there, but … could you maybe throw out some numbers regarding the amounts of processing power and population numbers you’re imagining? I think I have a higher credence for “extreme singularity scenarios” than you do, so I’d like to know where you’re coming from better.
That … is strange. Actually, has he talked anywhere about his views on cryonics?
Obviously I don’t anticipate FTL. Do you?
Yes, but exploiting resources in our solar system is already difficult and costly. Currently there is nothing in space worth the cost of going there or bringing it back, maybe in the future it will be different, but I expect progress to be relatively slow.
Interstellar colonization might be forever physically impossible or economically unfeasible. Even if it is feasible I expect it to be very very slow. I think that’s the best solution to Fermi’s paradox.
Tom Murphy discussed these issue here and here. He focused on proven space technology (rockets) and didn’t analyze more speculative stuff like mass drivers, but it seems to me that his whole analysis is reasonable.
I’m penalizing them because they seem to be far away from what current technology allows (consider the current status of the Blue Brain Project or the Human Brain Project).
It’s unclear how many hidden hurdles are there, and how long Moore’s law will continue to hold. Even if the emulation of a few human brains becomes possible, it’s unclear that the technology would scale to allow a population of billions, or trillions as Hanson predicts. Keep in mind that biological brains are much more energy efficient than modern computers.
Conditionally on radical life extension technology being available, brain emulation is more probable, since it seems to be an obvious avenue to radical life extension. But it’s not obvious that it would be cheap and scalable.
I think the most likely scenario, at least for a few centuries, is that human will still be essentially biological and will only inhabit the Earth (except possibly for a few Earth-dependent outposts in the solar system). Realistic population sizes will be between 2 and 10 billions.
Total processing power is more difficult to estimate: it depends on how long Moore’s law (and related trends such as Koomey’s law) will continue to hold. Since there seem to be physical limits that would be hit in 30-40 years of continued exponential growth, I would estimate that 20 years is a realistic time frame. Then there is the question of how much energy and other resources people will invest into computation.
I’d say that a growth of total computing power to between 10,000x and 10,000,000x of the current one in 20-30 years, followed by stagnation or perhaps a slow growth, seems reasonable. Novel hardware technologies might change that, but as usual probabilities on speculative future tech should be discounted.
Prediction confirmed, then. I think you might be surprised how common anticipating that we will eventually “solve FTL” using “wormholes”, some sort of Alcubierre variant or plain old Clarke-esque New Discoveries—in sciencey circles, anyway.
I … see. OK then.
That seems like a more plausible objection.
Hmm. I started to calculate out some stuff, but I just realized: all that really matters is how the amount of humans we can support compares to available human-supporting resources, be they virtual, biological or, I don’t know, some sort of posthuman cyborg.
So: how on earth can we calculate this?
We could use population projections—I understand the projected peak is around 2100 at 9 billion or so—but those are infamously unhelpful for futurists and, obviously, may not hold when some technology or another is introduced.
So … what about wildly irresponsible economic speculation? What’s your opinion of the idea we’ll end up in a “post-scarcity economy”, due to widespread automation etc.
Alternatively, do you think the population controls malthusians have been predicting since forever will finally materialize?
Or … basically I’m curious as to the sociological landscape you anticipate here.
As long as we are talking about biologic humans (I don’t think anything else is likely, at least for a few centuries), then carrying capacity is most likely in the order of billions: each human requires a certain amount of food, water, clothing, housing, healthcare, etc. The technologies we use to provide these things are already highly efficient, hence their efficiency will probably not grow much, at least not by incremental improvement.
Groundbreaking developments comparable to the invention of agriculture might make a difference, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious candidate for that which we can foresee, hence I wouldn’t consider that likely.
In optimistic scenarios, we get an approximately steady state (or slowly growing) economy with high per capita wealth, with high automation relieving many people from the necessity of working long hours, or perhaps even of working at all.
In pessimistic scenarios, Malthusian predictions come true, and we get either steady state economy at subsistence level, or growth-collapse oscillations with permanent destruction of carrying capacity due to resource depletion, climate change, nuclear war, etc. up to the most extreme scenarios of total civilization breakdown or human extinction.
This is certainly not true for healthcare.
I think that making energy really cheap (“too cheap to meter”) is foreseeable and that would count as a groundbreaking development.
Do you think that modern healthcare is inefficient in energy and resource usage? Why?
What energy source you have in mind?
I think that modern healthcare is inefficient in general cost/benefit terms: what outputs you get at the cost of which inputs. Compared to what seems achievable in the future, of course.
Fusion reactors, for example.
I suppose that in optimistic scenarios one could imagine cutting labor costs using high automation, but we would probably still going to need hospitals, drug manufacturing facilities, medical equipment factories, and so on.
Always 20-30 years in the future for the last 60 years.
I’m under the impression that nuclear fusion reactors might have already reached technological maturity and thus diminishing returns before becoming commercially viable.
Even if commercial fusion reactors become available, they would hardly be “too cheap to meter”.
They have to use the deuterium-tritium reaction (deuterium-deuterium is considered practically unfeasible), which has two main issues: it generates lots of high-energy neutrons and tritium must be produced from lithium.
High-energy neutrons erode any material and make it radioactive. This problem exists in conventional fission reactors, but it’s more significant in fusion reactors because of the higher neutron flux. A commercial fusion reactor would probably have higher maintenance requirement and/or shorter lifespan than a fission reactor with the same power.
Lithium is not rare, but not terribly common either. If we were to produce all the energy of the world from fusion, lithium reserves would last between thousands and tens of thousands years, assuming that energy consumption does not increase.
That’s clearly an abundant source of energy (in the same ballpark of uranium and thorium), but not much more abundant than other sources we are used to.
Moreover, in a fission power station the fuel costs make up only a fraction of the total costs per joule of energy. Most of the costs are fixed costs of construction, maintenance and decommissioning.
A fusion power station would have similar operational and decommissioning safety issues of a fission one (although it can’t go into melt down), and probably and higher complexity, which mean that fixed cost will dominate, as for fission power.
If fusion power becomes commercially viable it would be valuable but most likely not “too cheap to meter”.
No, I primarily mean new ways of treatment. For example, a hypothetical country which can easily cure Alzheimer’s would have much lower costs of medical care for the elderly. Being able to cure (as opposed to control) diabetes, a large variety of autoimmune disorders, etc. has the potential to greatly improve the efficiency of health care.
Yes, but I am not saying it would happen, I’m saying this is an example of what might happen. You’re basically claiming that there will be no major breakthroughs in the foreseeable future—I disagree, but of course can’t come up with bulletproof examples :-/
I see. But the point is how much disability people will have before they die. It’s not obvious to me that it will go down, at least it has gone up in the recent past.
I’m claiming that breakthroughs which increase the amount of available energy or other scarce resources by a huge amount don’t seem especially likely in the foreseeable future.
From Wikipedia:
It’s already happening.
Current process size is ~22nm, silicon lattice size is ~0.5nm . Something around 5..10 nm is the limit for photolithography, and we don’t have any other methods of bulk manufacturing in sight. The problem with individual atoms is that you can’t place them in bulk because of the stochastic nature of the interactions.