Halfneum: a cryptocurrency thought experiment

I wrote this elsewhere originally, but it got very little reaction, so I am editing it a bit and posting this here.

Cryptocurrencies are something sorta new, since bitcoin is now almost ten years old. When envisioned they were meant to be currencies, used to buy and exchange value. However, they have become far more like securities, where people speculate for the value increases and then cash out. Or "hodl," as they say, and then cash out when the price is really really, high. I have wondered for a long time what it would take to make a real digital currency.

How could you change the dynamic such that you have a relatively stable (value wise) currency with low cost trading, high speed transactions and all the incentives for the 'miners' to still stay in the game. Likewise you want something that does not inflate ridiculously either. That breaks the whole rule about price stability.

No cost transactions have been attempted, (re: [Fcoin](https://steemit.com/life/@sogo/the-death-of-fcoin-a-tale-of-bad-token-design)). The problem was the wild inflation that took place. Likewise, it's backend in the ethereum network as a token, was badly broken and, at times, crippled the that network.

Others have tried to tackle took many coins in circulation by using a Proof of Stake, where you are rewarded for holding the coins rather than buying and selling. The problem is the price will still go up and it outright encourages hoarding, which is anathema to stability since it creates whales and those whales at some point will, in fact, cash out. Then, boom and doom.

One potential idea is something like a 'proof of transaction' where the more the coin is traded by someone, they will be rewarded. This would function something like a percent off or something like the Starbucks stars or rewards program. The more you spend, the more you get rewarded in more of the same coins. Now, there are two problems, IMO, with this. The first is then you fall into the bot trap. It'd be really easy for a bot system to be set up to ping-pong the coins around. This would generate the coins and cause inflation. The work around is to cripple the reward amount based on how often the transactions are taking place, but that would be, again, run against the whole idea of getting people to use it like money. The second problem is rewarding people with more coin for using the coin is inflationary still. Even if mildly so, it would cause the coin to lose value over time. From an economist, POV, this encourages the transactions: use it today or it will be worth less tomorrow! But from the POV of the crypto community, this would be really bad. Who wants to have a coin that will lose value. However, if this is meant to be a transactional item, this would not be a terrible solution.

There is another potential solution. Another alternative 'proof of transaction' might be to have a 'timer' in the coin. If the coin sits in a wallet for more than a set time frame, ie is not used or is in 'hodl,' half the value of that coin is deleted. Call it a 'half life' for a coin. When the coin is transacted, the 'timer' is reset for that coin. The deduction or deletion, when it happens, is then sent to the miners. The short fall between coins deducted and the value of the mining, is awarded with newly generated coins. Given the half life algorithm, the miners are then encouraged to sell those coins or use it to buy, say, Starbucks, asap. There would be some inflation still, but so long as the coin is adopted and used in brick and mortar and popular websites, then it ought to be relatively easy to keep the use rate up.

That's the rub though: it has been really hard to get many companies to adopt using cryptocurrencies. Another problem is this could be abused. Some nontrivial thought needs to go into the security of the coin so that no one could trigger a mass 'decay' and swipe all the coins. Likewise, getting the decay algorithm right, or at least the period for the decay algorithm right is equally important. A year might be too long. A day is 1000% too short.

At any rate, I am curious what others think. I know many people - potentially most! - in the crypto community view the coins as investments rather than transactional money. My attempt here was not so much to try to create a new coin as examine a potential method to turn a cryptocurrency into a transactional currency rather than just an investment.

I would appreciate some thought and feedback from the community.   I am sure I am going to be mocked here, since everyone is talking about the 'next coin to the moon,' but, here we are.  

Mini Crazy Thought: A Planetary Protection Mission for Mars

While working on something else, I was listening to the following SETI talk about looking for life at Martian hydrothermal vents, especially at the Nili Patera.  The talk is interesting, but sparked a thought related back to another, previous SETI talk.

The previous seti talk was about planetary protection or the idea we ought to prevent earth life from spreading to other bodies in the solar system so we can both study the worlds before life changes them, and be able to verify life does not (or does) exist before we contaminate the environment, so to speak, making it difficult to know what is happening.

There is a huge push for planetary protection now given the push to putting people on Mars.  There has even been suggestions people, given how biologically active we are, should not land on Mars at all!  That might not be given much serious consideration, but the level of protection has significant impacts on costs of missions and will have a serious impact on costs for any human space flight missions to Mars.

All of the assumptions about  hinges on the suggestion Earth life can survive on Mars.  Everything done to date about whether or not microbial or other life could survive on Mars has been either done in a lab or purely theoretical.  The labs really first order approximations of the environment on Mars, and a good first step in studying the potential for survival and contamination.  The rest is purely speculative or theoretical.  It need not be.

I am not suggesting sending life to another world.  While I think that will be an ultimate goal, I am thinking, here, that some ground truth ought to be established for planetary protection efforts.  To that end, we have five potential sites on Mars where there may be biological contamination.  Those sites are the Viking lander sites and the original Soviet Mars landers (Mars-2, Mars-3 & Mars-6).  None of these earlier missions were biologically protected to the levels of modern missions and may have caused contamination.

Before we wrap ourselves up in impossible requirements for planetary protection, it would make an enormous amount of sense to send specific missions to Mars to check for contamination at the Viking and Soviet Mars sites.  Perhaps one from each mission series, one American and one Soviet.  That would give us some 'ground truth' about the need for biological protection.  It would also establish if Mars is already irrevocably contaminated already or if Earth life cannot establish a toe hold on Mars without Human help.

I would suggest these be a couple rovers with TBD instruments and they be paid for through the Exploration line item rather than the Mars program or discovery, etc.  This would prevent the mission from raiding other portions of the NASA budget.  It would also scope expectations for the level of protection necessary for planetary missions.  That in turn impacts their costs.

Something to consider.

Mini Crazy Thought: What Will a 6th Generation Fighter be?

One of the things I enjoy is following and speculating about things militaria.  It probably stems from the 'family business' colliding with my geeky tech interests.  I've written about what to do with the LCS, etc., before.  Today, with the recent announcements of Northrop's one thoughts and concepts on the 6th generation fighter, I am going to throw some thoughts out.

Joint Strike Fighter Nevermore

The military has learned a lot about doing aircraft projects from the F-35.  Its something that ought to have been realized before, but simply put "one suze does not fit all."  What the navy needs, the marines need and the air force needs are NOT the same thing.  Whatever the FA-XX (US Navy) and the F-X (US Air Force) have in common, they will be separate programs and planes.  There will be two Sixth Generation fighters (at least) built by the Pentagon.

"If you can see it, you can kill it."

That's a quote from an air force general from the Gulf War circa 1991.  It struck me as pretty profound at the time - hey, I was in high school - however, it really is going to be a truism for the future.  Sorta. 

No matter what, stealth technology is going to be the minimum entry for a 6th gen fighter.  Sensors have become simply too good at detecting aircraft and stealth is not magic, but does greatly reduce the range detection happens at.  With hypersonic missiles proliferating, reducing that detection range is going to be crucial.  

Lasers will only make detection minimization a greater necessity.  A laser can reach out and kill something at the speed of light so long as the beam director can lock onto the target.  Minimizing the detection becomes even more crucial.  Optical stealth is likely.  Reducing IR signature is going to be part of the kit as well, but IR is notorious...

What Hammer to Bring Down?

Missiles and lasers.  These are the weapons a sixth generation fighter will bring to the hunt.  

The old and trusty gun will be removed in favor of the laser for air to air combat, light ground targets, but will remain for a replacement for something like the A-10.  

Lasers have no windage and are only limited by thermal management for the frequency of firing for the number of shots.  There's no longer an ammo limitation otherwise.  A military grade laser (100 kw+) will be able to reach out the horizon.  Gun range is far, far less (less than 5 km).  Laser also can be used against incoming missiles in a self defense mode.  This will GREATLY increase the costs downing an aircraft.

Missiles will change though.  Its lightly likely, to me, we will see missile become two stage.  The first stage will be hypersonic to allow aircraft to fire from beyond the horizon, very far beyond the horizon.  The second stage will be a very maneuverable missile as good or better than our current missiles, turning G's that would tear apart our current generation of missiles.  At least for air to air combat.  Air to ground might use the same base firs stage and then have a glider second stage to minimize the thermal signature.  

 The missile magazine is likely to be quite large by modern standards.  16+ missiles are likely to be carried.  It's also highly likely some of those hypersonic first stages will actually deploy drones with data feeds back to the fighter.  Radars, eletrooptical or infrared will all be featured.

Range to Kill

The fighters are likely to have a greatly increased range.  As in launch from Guam to be able to engage two to three thousand km away for air force birds and probably about a thousand kilometers for navy.  The new engines are likely to be necessary, but not likely to have hypersonic capabilities.  Hypersonics are NOT compatible with stealth.

One Fat Frakker

When adding all of the above together, the aircraft generated is bigger, much bigger than the ones we have today as fighters.  The heaviest F-111 is probably about right.  100k lbs (45 metric tons). 

What does a fighter clash look like?

Fed data via offboard platforms, fighters will close to sensor range.  Missiles will be lobbed at one another at extreme range, two to three hundred kilometers away.  The lasers will engage against the missiles and bring down what is possible.  

The fighters will close to just below the horizon and then will start popping up to take shots via laser.  These will be more reminiscent of infantry popping up and shooting, though with accuracy more akin to snipers than pray and spray.  The offboard drones, both deployed from the fighter and not, are feeding data to the fighter as well.

And THAT is the dogfight.  Its no longer closing to 5 km or less for a wild furball.  A laser would cut down anything closing that close.  This means maneuvering like an F-16 is history, even counter productive.  Climb rate and dive are more important when popping up and down for a laser fight than twisting hither and yon.

Just some crazy thoughts.

Mini Crazy Thought: US Navy Ought to Rejigger its Hangar Deck With Robot Plane Parking Structures

After looking at pictures like the above,  I immediately thought of these:

You could double stack the aircraft easily.

You could add another 40 aircraft that way easily.  However, you still need the maintainers and pilots.  Probably a better idea for the coming drones. 

Crazy Thought: The Border Patrol Should get the 141 Predator Drones to be Retired by 2018

The United States Air Force is going to be retiring the MQ-1 Predator drone from service by the end of 2018.  This will bring an end to a long service for the drone for the past twenty years.  The USAF plans to simply place them drones out in the boneyard and leave them there in a nonflyable storage, stripped of parts and rusting away.

Is this really the best idea?  The drones have life time left in them, but they are obsolete as far as frontline service goes.

Some asked if the US Army should take the drones: the army doesn't want them.  The Navy doesn't want them either: they are working on the far higher end UCLASS.

There is one more place these could end up: the Department of Homeland Security.  I'm generally not much of a fan of the department, to be honest, but there are parts of it which are useful.  The Coast Guard, for example.  I do have a love-hate, emphasis on the latter, relationship with the Border Patrol.  However, with all the stupid talk of building a wall between us and Mexico, and the failed attempt at the "smart border," I wondered if you could use those 141 drones to patrol the Mexican border.

The first problem is the fact the video feed of the Predator is like looking through a soda straw when you want to be looking at a wide area if you are going to be enforcing the border.  because of this, the Predators and Reapers have not been that effective at patrolling the border.  

There is a solution, but it will cost more money.  That would be the ARGUS-IS pod designed for the Predator and Reaper drones.  Without sacrificing the ability to zoom in to look at specific targets, the Predators would have an area of 100 square km (39 square miles, 6 1/4 miles on a side) it would be watching.

Secondly, with 141 drones, you (at most) can have one third of them in the air at a time.  Minor maintenance and refueling will take out some and others will need major maintenance.  This leaves us with 47 Predators in the air at a time max.

With the border 1989 miles long, roughly, each drone would be responsible for 43 miles.  At any given moment, only 6.25 miles are being observed.  However, the Predator cruises at roughly 90 mph.  If you assume a circuit of 90 miles around (43 miles each way with a 1 mile overlap between the Predator tracks and a 1 mile turn, so to speak), then the Predator will sweep every half hour and be observing any particular spot for roughly 4 minutes.

25 or 26 minutes is pretty long if there is a car on road.  However, for looking for people on foot, piece of cake.  Likewise, if you consider, the evidence of places being used by cars or whatnot will also be observed.  Even vehicles on rough terrain could be caught, actually.

This would mean the 9 Reapers DHS already has could be placed on the border for specific areas which might be of interest without interrupting the normal patrols.  And the Reapers can be tasked for the Coast Guard, etc. when not on special tasking on the USA/USM border.

It seems doable.  On the technical and operational side.  However, this is really a money problem.  The DHS would need to set up at airports along the border.  Probably every hundred or two hundred miles.  That's 10 to 20 airports.  It also means procuring the 141 ARGUS-IS pods.  it also means the data produced would need to be archived and then accessible for analysis.  Each ARGUS produces over a petabyte per day.  This means 47 PB per day 365 days per year: 17.6 exabytes for a year's worth of data which would need to be on disk.  A five year period would need a massive tape library.  It would also need a massive computer center for the analysis of that data.  Plus the sudden surge in drone mechanics and pilots.  And security.  I am sure there are plenty of countries who'd be tempted to make off with an ARGUS pod and the border patrol is not the US Army....and the US Army has munitions swiped and stolen.  I'd guess you'd have a billion dollar program to build up and then half that to run it.

You'd have your border fence though and it'd probably cause less environmental problems and cost less.

Return of the Crazy Thoughts: Dealing with the Robopocalypse [Part 2]

This was originally planned to be the followup to the post I wrote in March 2015.  However, like everything it seems in my life, there has been far, far too muh to do and too little time, so things slipped.  This one slipped the most.  Or close to it.

So!  Much later!  Here we go!

The topic for the post series is the Robopocalypse and what to do with the fact so many jobs which we have long relied upon to help power our economy are simply going to go away.  Machines will take the place of workers.  This will be a greater disruption to how the economy works than even the first Industrial Revolution.  How we as humanity cope with it will determine the future.  I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but consider capital, as in dinero, will be able to replace labor in vast swathes of the economy cannot help but make you take pause when you consider the implications.

We could end up a world of the hyper-rich and the rest of us as serfs in a techno feudalist society: Blomkamp's Elysium captures the flavour, but not the details.  Or we could have a Pournellian Welfare Island Scenario.  Alternately, we end up like the residents of Wall-E's Axiom.  Or we could end up completely irrelevant.  And the future could go downhill from there.  Or we could go the extreme in the other direction, a Neo Luddite approach where those who do embrace the robopocalypse render us and our economy irrelevant: we would be the 'North Korea' of the 21st/22nd century, economically speaking.  None of those potentialities are particularly appealing. 

In the previous post, it was established that jobs for at least 26 million working force Americans are going to go away under the Robopocalypse of the next 20 years. This is through straight replacement of people with automata in the low hanging fruit of robotic tasks.  

There are also knowledge base jobs which can and will be replaced with software: think IBM's Watson, Apple's Siri and MicroSoft Cortana amped up with massive back-end databases.  These will move into the white collar jobs as well.  And that in turn will have a significant, if less clear impact on the availability of those jobs. 

Then there are those jobs which might have existed, but will be rolled back simply because the spending from the tens of millions of people now unemployable do not have the extra money to spend.  The restaurant may only need five people to cater to thousands daily, but if there is no one who can afford to go to that restaurant, then it won't exist.  

Here we seek another way.

However, what could that way be?  After all, you have potentially more people driven to unemployment than in the Great Depression.  In fact, for many, those workers may even be unemployable!  There are simply no jobs which those workers can take, not even the emergency crap jobs most of us could resort to: the emergency, crap jobs will simply not exist. 

All of those people simply cannot earn a living.  Period.

This means they will not buy the goods of the rich, so the rich will not remain rich long.  ("After all all, Mr Ford...")

It is already a case where the average person finds it exceedingly hard to vault past getting by.  Until a family (or individual) can reach the point where they can regularly risk five to ten percent of their income without any fear of what may happen, they cannot begin to accumulate wealth.  In addition, that five to ten percent must be above certain thresholds as well: it must be in the thousands of dollars on a regular basis.  If not, they cannot do the necessary bootstrapping.  This is in the economy now.

Consider the economy of the robopocalypse where a huge number of people cannot work at all based on their current skillsets and even their probable ones with training: the majority of employees from Mickey D's are not (most likely) going to become rock star programmers, engineers or scientists. Even so, there will be intense competition for what jobs there are and we could end up with a very high, European-like unemployment.

With very large numbers of unemployed, that gets dangerous.  At some point, they are going to come looking for what they feel ought to be their's.

What to do?

There is an obvious answer, but its one which when I began pondering what to do about the robopocalypse was very unpalatable: a guaranteed minimum income.  This i the concept whereby everyone is always guaranteed an income, whether they hold a job or not for the entirety of their lives.  The mechanism is everyone, regardless of their income, is cut a cheque each month for a certain amount.  The intent is to make sure everyone is at least above the poverty line and can survive.  Guaranteed.  This is the ultimate welfare state.  

I had a real problem with this when I was thinking about it.  After all, I am a Republican[1] (*gasp*shock*hiss for many of my readers!).  I believe very strongly in the 'right to fail:' that is a person has the right to succeed or fail on their own hard work.  People ought to be rewarded for their hard work and ingenuity. 

But again, there's no way for many people to get to the point where they can earn any money under the robopocalypse.  And eschewing the robopocalypse in favour of human employment won't work either.  So, again, even if the answer makes you uncomfortable, it is still the answer.  Whether or not you like it.

It turns out there is actually a some conservative support for a guaranteed minimum income.  Milton Friedman wrote about a variant in his influential book Capitalism and Freedom.  Here is a very, very respected and most definitely conservative economist who advocated a minimum income to alleviate poverty and that was in the pre Robopocalyptic economy.

There is another "conservative[2]" who is quite famous who tried to get a minimum income implemented in the United States: Richard Nixon.  The monster report on this was his Commission on Income Maintenance that he followed up with trying get Congress to pass bills in support.  It failed and I am sure there might have been some nontrivial political distractions which helped preemptively derail any second attempts at getting it passed[3]. 

Finally, Alaska has its Permanent Fund.  Regular payments are made out of it in the form of dividends to every long term resident of Alaska...and Alaska is hardly noted for being a blue state. 

If the economist who came up with the conservative touch stone of school vouchers, the president who employed Pat Buchanan and one of the reddest states in the Union were & is ok with the concept with a guaranteed minimum income, then my conservative side ought to get over itself.

First Caveat: The Welfare Trap

The first problem is we are setting everyone up for the welfare trap.  This is where working at all is disincentivized.  If you work and earn above a certain level, then you lose your guaranteed income. This is part of the problem with a negative income tax.  There is little reason to work if you are not going to get more out of it by doing so.

The answer here is to guarantee everyone gets the income irregardless of how much they are making.  If you are a citizen of the United States, you get an income.  Whether you are a gazllionaire or fresh off the boat and unable to do anything other than breathe, you get an income.

Second Caveat: The Stratification Trap

Even with the implementation of a guaranteed minimum income, we still have a problem.  And sadly, its as big of a problem in its own way.  By providing everyone with the minimum to survive but no mechanism to thrive, we end up with a society of the immensely rich getting richer and the rest just to survive.  There must be a method built in for people to thrive not just survive.

The guaranteed income by itself is insufficient to make a healthy society.  You have a different case of the peasants and aristocracy.   People who survive and people who own everything.  Not good.  Even worse than things are today.

Despite having just proposed a very socialist concept here for the first half of the mechanism for dealing with the robopocalypse, the other half is going to be a very capitalist solution.  Even after the robopocalypse, there is going to be a need for businesses of various sorts.  Small, large, everything between.  The single biggest problem with starting a business is access to capital.  People have ideas, often very good ones which fill needs, but cannot get the money to get started.

The proposal here would be to create method for people to propose businesses and have them funded.  It need not be a solitary mechanism.  There may be several.  One may be the equivalent of kickstarter (properly regulated) whereby people can directly invest rather than donate to.  Another may be a form X number of loan guarantees per life time for a person from a larger, reformed SBA targeted at startup companies, allowing for larger amounts of capital to move there rather than just the standard small business loan.  It might even be a direct investment or loan by the government fund to the individual.

Third Caveat: The Structural Trap

How you set the fund up for this is really important.  Its funding source should not be raidable by Congress or the rest of the government.  Ideally, it ought to be built up in a manner similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund such that it will, over time, increase without increasing revenue streams if at all possible.  Likewise, it ought to be structured such it should be insulated from market fluctuations: a economic downturn could wipe out the fund if mismanaged.  That's dangerous and ought to be protected: people's lives are depending on this fund.

Fourth Caveat: The Funding Trap

The largest elephant in the room is funding.   Indeed, if you were to chop up the entirety of the budget of the United States and simply pay it out to every person in the country, you would end up only getting $11,000 individually.  That's too little for anyone to actually live on and would fail to provide for a defense or other government functions.

Where the income comes from for the fund is very important: it needs to be able to sustain paying for 310+ million people while not producing a crushing burden on those who are making money above and beyond.  Let's list the potential sources.  Reminder, these are meant to be suggestions, rather than absolutely required.

1.  A progressive income tax for income above the dividend paid out by the "US Permanent Income Fund."  It probably could be quite similar to what we have now, just with the equivalent of 'zero' tax being when someone does not earn anything above the guaranteed income.  The except to keeping everything the same or very similar would be to get rid of most of the deductions: the rich won't end up paying like Mitt Romney (15%), but what they really ought to (somewhere around 35%).  An exception might be for mortgages; however, but with a limit on the total amount of interest which can be claimed. 

2.  Social insurance taxes - since this would be largely replacing the social security - bring in another almost $1.1 trillion.  Raise the limit for social security taxes: currently this is only paid up to around $120k.  Everything you earn above that is social insurance tax free.  This could easily raise the amount of revenue significantly and could potentially pay even more than the regular income tax.

3.  Corporate taxes.  Guess what?  Corporations in the United States paid less than one fourth what individuals did in taxes in 2015.  That could easily be rectified.  After all, Google, Apple and others have a combined in excess of $100 billion in cash.

4.  A carbon tax.  Originally I was going to state a fossil fuel tax, but its largely the same.  Natural gas is cheaper in the US than anywhere in the world.  Add a moderate tax.  Coal is environmentally destructive and adds to our carbon emissions hand over fist. If a tax for the equivalent of 10 cents per gallon for carbon emissions were added at a flat rate across the board for all carbon sources, the US would collect over $500 billion.  If an associated carbon tariff is also employed, then the intake would at least be comparable to the income tax intake.

Up to this point, all we've done is balanced the US budget, neglecting other sources of income for the government.  And the carbon tax, we hope, will slowly decrease in revenue.  This

5.  A robot tax.  This would be a direct, specific tax on the bot which is replacing Assuming a bot costs the same as one year's salary for the employee the robot is replacing, even a significant tax at the time of purchase would hardly be arduous since the bot will be far, far cheaper over the long term.  A 100% tax would be possible (though perhaps not advisable) if the bot was replaced every 5 years, the business owner still comes out way ahead.  Even with the price drop of the goods as there is a race to the bottom for pricing, the revenue from the 'robot tax' would be quite significant; doubly so since the cost of services and goods would decrease and allow for more production and bots and the associated tax.  In fact, there would be enormous amounts of growth if costs really dropped that much.  A tariff of a similar kind would probably be necessary as well.  How that would work with free trade deals, I have no idea, to be honest.

Recap:

The idea here is everyone gets a guaranteed minimum income.  This is intended only to make sure people have comfortable, but not luxurious life.  Additionally, the cost of this would be born by those who can afford it, the corporations which make far more than individuals do and pay far less taxes, the bots which are replacing people and a carbon tax (really a lot like the petroleum based funds if you think about it).

However, a mega welfare state is not the sole change.  The second change would also be to greatly increase the access to capital by the average person through a major expansion of the SBA (with the understanding most of the businesses would fail and not ding the person) and other potential methods as well.  This would also allow for people to start their own businesses and with the aid of the robopocalypse potentially bootstrap themselves.

The fundamental idea here is people are taken care of at comfortable, but not luxurious level.  Then it is up to them to bootstrap themselves - and they have the tools to do so now - past that point.  However, that takes their own hard work to do so.

There are questions which need to be answered - besides verifying we can afford this plan - and those will be addressed in the next post.  Which might take a while.





1.  I'm a fiscal conservative, social liberal, foreign policy conservative and technological liberal.

2.  He'd be comfortably within the left wing of the Democratic Party these days...how bizarre.

3.  While I do not like Nixon much at all, I'm none too fond of LBJ and he, while seemingly a loathesome man, succeeded in doing some pretty impressive legislation.  Nixon might have produced some good socially if not for his paranoid stupidity that led him his criminal acts.

Return of the Crazy Thoughts: Dealing with the Robopocalypse [Part 1]

Originally, this was going to be post 10,000.  I found I was too crazy busy to finish the writing in time.  I am simply overwhelmed by what I have to do.  However, one month after post 10,000, I am posting this.  My latest crazy thought: what to do about the Robopocalypse.

As I get older, there have been a lot of things which have been weighing on my mind.  The future has weighed on my mind.  This has been the case since as far back as when I was 10 and we moved to Los Alamos on the conscious level and back even further because  was always thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up: the first time I remember answering that question was when I was 4 and I wasn't even asked, I just spontaneously told my parents in the car I wanted to be a doctor on the way back from the beach in Santa Barbara.  That rapidly switched to paleontologist and stuck until I was 10 and my aunt gave me the book on Lucy by Dr White.  I didn't turn out to be a paleontologist at all, but my passion for Deep Time, human origins and all things paleo didn't fade.  I do find it interesting my consideration of the future blossomed at the same time I was digging into the origins of humanity.

Recently I have been considering the future but in very specific ways.  The first is through my involvement in the aerospace industry, GLXP and NASA.  What Noel calls my attempts to build yesterday's tomorrow.  However, through my discussions with Noel, Carlos, James & Doug, I have also been considering the future in another manner, the coming impact of robotics and information technology on the economy  What I have been calling the Robopocalypse.  Why did I call it that?  Because I was ribbing Noel over his concerns about the future economy.  He is deeply concerned about the future with regards to the economy and automata.  A number of economists and futurists are.  I thought it was silly because even if half the current jobs disappeared, it would not be overnight and it would be a transition not unlike what happened at the end of world war two when 50% of the country had been employed in agriculture (Agriculture now employs 1/2 percent, btw). However, as I have read and considered more, I do think there will be problems.  And it will take a rather different approach to address them.

Let's set out Noel's worries.

The Jobs at Risk

This will not be a comprehensive list, but it touch on some obvious problems.  In fact, let's limit this to seven categories.

1.  Driving.

This includes taxis, truckers and the like: these are all people involved with driving and delivering goods or people.  There are 223,000 taxi drivers and chauffeurs in the United States.  There are 1,273,000+ delivery drivers in the US.  There are 653,300 bus drivers in the US. There are 1,700,000+ truckers in the US.  You are looking at an area of employment of around 4 million people in the United States, not including part timers like Uber drivers and whatnot.  With the coming of the self driving car technologies, these jobs are all most likely to go away.

2.  Fast Food

There are 4,438,000+ people working as waiters and servers.  2,148,000 worked as cooks.  Of those 4.5 million (+/-) 3.6 million were working in the fast food industry.  With the advent of the burgertron and the like, you are likely to see those jobs go away.  Or at least the fast food portion.

3.  Janitorial

There are 2,324,000 people working as janitors.  There are 1,434,000 people working in house cleaning.  The bots are coming for their 3.7 million jobs, too. 

4.  Construction

Construction equipment operators total around 409,700.  There are 902,000 carpenters.  There are 229,000 masons (brick and concrete).  There are 1,284,000 construction laborers.  Plus another associated ~600,000 others (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).  You're looking at around 3.5 million jobs there. 

5.  Manufacturing

Assembly line workers are about 1,755,000 strong.  Machine operators are about 1,013,000. Painting and coating?  149,000.  Welders?  357,000.  Machinists?  476,000.  That's another 3.75 million jobs.

6.  Cashiers

There are 3,338,000 cashiers in the country.

7. "Movers" (longshoremen, warehouse workers, etc)

There are 3,428,000 of them.

There you have 25.31 million plus jobs which are in danger and probably will be replacing in the next two decades at the latest.  The labor force in the United States is 156.4 million!  

You're looking at an implosion of at least 1/6th of all jobs in the United States just from those categories.  There will likely be more.   This is doubly the case since Watson and its buddies (machine learning based software bots) are being developed and they have implications for other, non labor workers.  Especially vulnerable are the assistants and secretaries, as the technology behind Siri and Cortana improve.

You are looking at a potential unemployment not seen since at least the Great Depression - and possibly even matching the Great Depression! -assuming these people cannot be trained for other jobs.  The crux of the problem is though the jobs they could easily be trained for are, well, gone.

This is why Noel et al are very nervous about the Robopocalypse. He is concerned about the fact that capital would supplant labor: you can buy a machine with money and it'll keep working until it breaks, which case you can get another one. That requires a lot of money and what we call the middle class even if we have jobs will not be able to afford it.  Never mind the lower or working classes.  This would leave us in a virtual state of feudalism.  Those with money keep it and get more.  Those without ... well.  sucks to be us.

So what do we do about it?  We can't let this come about, can we?  We certainly can't let millions starve!  We definitely cannot let a return of feudalism, even a techno feudalism, take place.

So, what to do?

There are multiple solutions.  They range from the ludditical to utopian (for the silly responses) to even inspired by Milton Friedman of all people.

That will be covered in the next Crazy Thoughts Post.

Alternate History Crazy Thought: "Next Year in Nauvoo!"

James wrote a review of a book which in turn got me thinking because he mentioned the Utah War. This was the clash between Mormons in Utah under Brigham Young vs the Buchanan administration in DC, which little actual fighting took place and there were few deaths for something of an armed conflict of the time, save for the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

One of the contingencies Young planned was to move the Mormon community north on yet another exodus.  In this case, the plan was actually for the island of Vancouver.  For the moment, let's assume the US government has decided to rid themselves of these troublesome missionaries and Young triggers the exodus.  

Young showing up in British Columbia with more people than would have been in Vancouver until the 1900 would have really alarmed the Brits.  There would be three different possibilities here.  

The first is the least likely, IMO, and the border gets scarier in the late 1850s.  However, that's tempered in a big way by the fact the American Civil War was about to go boom.  On the other hand, it might not be after the Civil War since the President Grant tried to exploit the Red River Rebellion and Louis Riel to try to take Manitoba for the US.  On the gripping hand, if the Mormons had been harried out of Utah to Vancouver,  they are not likely to be big fans of America.

The next most likely event is the Mormons becoming fervent Canadians.  The Mormons get the spin of the Loyalist being persecuted by the damned Yanks and get used to anchor the western seaboard from American encroachment.  Vancouver becomes a Canadian Utah and Mormon Zion.  

Honestly though, with the reputation the Mormons had and their particular doctrines of the time, its more than likely the Brits are going to see them off.  I'm sorry, chaps, time to move along.  But where to?  After all, the Go West, Young Mormon!  Go West! kinda runs into the end of the continent.  They could go north, but...

Historically, Mormons when proselytizing in Polynesia and the Pacific Ocean islands.  Hawaii is probably the most noted of those missions.  So, harried from Missouri, harried from Utah, harried from Vancouver, the Mormons go West again...to Polynesia, but especially to Micronesia during the American Civil War while the Brits feel they can uproot the weird Americans with less chance of something going wrong.

Missonary work still goes on in Europe and elsewhere, but Zion is now the atolls and islands of Micronesia.  Guam would get a coral block temple and there they would stay for 30 years.  The world would not be done with our ATL Mormons.

The Spanish American War and the Imperial expansion of the Japanese would bring more misery to the ATL Mormons.  The Mormons would attempt to help the Spanish hold off the Americans, and it would have consequences.  The Americans would chase the Mormons from Guam and the Mormons would set up in the surrounding islands.  While already present in many places, they ended up concentrating in the Northern Mariana Islands. 

When the Japanese took them in 1914, things did not go well.  Increasingly wondering whether or not the Mormons were a 5th Column for the Americans, the Japanese packed up the lot of them and deported the Mormons to Taiwan at first, emptying the South Pacific Mandate of the potential guerilla army threat.  This is declared a success in 1925.  Once in Taiwan, the Japanese kept them apart in separate, dedicated colonies.  When the Kominka Movement kicked off, it was decided the Mormons were unredeemable and could not be remade into Japanese citizens.  The 60,000 of them were deported to Manchuria to work camps.

They would suffer through the deprivations of WW2 and come out the other side.  Unfortunately, the Chinese Communists, Mao especially, were not overly fond of them.  They were then moved to the Chinese West, Xinjiang, in the early 1950s.  Their numbers were now 50,000.  There they would stay and slow grow over the next 15 years.  Unfortunately, the Cultural Revolution would strike and being the most western (albeit very mixed at this point) group, the Mormons would suffer again.

However, this time the Mormons would make their own move.  The Prophet, Hyriam Hattig, would organize the exodus of the majority of members across the Chinese border into Afghanistan.  In 1968, the Mormons left China.  They would take up farming for a time in the mountains of Afghanistan.  The Afghanis were suspicious but also sympathetic.  At least until 1978.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a disaster.  For the Afghanis, the Soviets and now for the Mormons.  It would kill a number of Mormons.  It would also cause the Great Schism.  The Mormons had finally broken through 100,000 people at the start of the war in their settlements in their valleys.  However, Mormons had become very apolitical and only out for their own survival rather than to change or convert the world.  Most followed the 'render unto Caesar...'  When the communists took over, they rendered until caesar, or at least 75% of them did.  The rest, sick of their being the narrator of the world's dog, moved south, across the Hindu Kush and became the partisans everyone feared they would.  They would even spawn rival Prophets.  Those who moved south became the Abandoned (the Fallen as called by the Wanderers), in the Mormon terminology, and those who remained, the Wanderers (the Lost as called by the Abandoned).  

When the Soviet Union began withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Wanderer Mormons pleaded with the Soviets.  Gorbachev took them in and placed them in Crimea.  It did not make them popular with their new neighbors.  However, when the coup came in August 1991, Mormons took it on themselves to free and hide Gorbachev.  It would not stop the fall of the Soviet Union, but it would make the Ukrainians even less fond of them.  

They would cross into Europe and Wanderers would become a traveling people in the 1990s making their name a reality.  They would wander in their RVs there for another 24 years.  They would reunite once every three years for 'General Conference.'  Each band of Wanderer's is called a Ward.  Given how few Wanderers there are, each country has a Stake.  All of them report to the Prophet and Quorums.  The biggest change to the church and people would be they took up missionary work again.  Unfortunately, this didn't help their image.  A wandering group seeking converts.  Great.

Back in Pakistan, the Abandoned would slowly evolve their own way.  Their own revelations would state that Christ visited the Kashmir like he had the Americas.  They migrated to Kashmir and integrated, albeit roughly into society.  However, they were far, far more rough than their Wanderer cousins.  If someone knocked heads with them, they knocked them right back.  They built their own temple up in the glaciers.  It's been blown up twice.  But each time rebuilt.

In 2016, Jackson Tanner, an aspiring politician, would begin, successfully, to lobby for bringing the Mormons back to the US.  He succeeded in 2024 having argued the Mormons were US citizens by birth.  The genealogical records the Mormons kept were key.  

The Wanderers had always had the saying, "Next Year in Nauvoo" and in 2024, it came true.

Idle Speculation: The Nauka Module Will be the Basis for a Russian Solo Space Station or Sino-Russian Space Station

The current situation in Ukraine made me wonder what will happen on numerous fronts. The US and Russian are becoming enemies again. Our operations in Afghanistan are about to become untenable: we will lose the supply lines through Russia and the ones through Pakistan are going to probably go away too. I have personal reasons too (3 are out, btw). However, in space...the space station, we are very, very dependent on the Russians. That will likely go away, too.

Putin's team ha already said they will not be supporting the ISS past 2020. The US and Europe DOES plan to do so. There are a couple modules which are built or being built by the Russians which have not as yet flown. One of them is the Nauka module. Its launch has been postponed to at least 2015, if not 2017. It will have its own propulsion (which is the source of the problems now, but can be fixed).  The Nauka module is based off of Zvezda, which provides a lot of the boost capability for the ISS.

 Then add in the Oka-T-MKS module, the node module and something like a Rassvet or two, you are well on your way.  You can either invite the Chinese or others (Indians?) or go it alone.  Given the political situation and given the capability... I am not totally out there.  OPSEK was an earlier concept which may or may not happen.

Borderless World: Threat or Menace?

The audio is pretty bad.

Fourth Crazy Thought of the Day: Singularity For You! An Argument Against Uploading

I have stood at times claiming the Singularity isn't coming. I have made a point at times of even mocking the idea, even going as far as joining the call to label the Singularity the "Rapture of the Nerds." I have only made vague statements as to why this was the case, sometimes making snarky one-off comments like "The Heat Death of the Singularity." Its time to put a little more thought and time into the subject.

I am seeing too articles about thinking machines and ridiculous videos expounding on the future is all computer and meatspace is, at best, obsolete in my kids and even possibly my own life time. I am writing my own response to the idea of the Singularity, or rather, at least one aspect which keeps getting thrown around. Today, I am tackling not AI per se and the fear mongering associated, but rather the idea of uploading. Taking all the data of your brain and turning into a very accurate model run on a computer which will be a high fidelity copy of you. Your mental twin or even afterlife. (*cough*RON*cough*)

Why? Because its complete and utter nonsense that this is happening any time soon and I will explain why.

First off, let me scope this a bit further. This is NOT an academic, peer reviewed paper. Nor is it even a white paper which must run the gauntlet of at least your peers at place of work. This is a blog post. The research backing it up is of the variety using google and personal knowledge. There will be some links to various places, but there won't be a bibliography. And, again, I am not tackling anything other than the uploading scenario.

Secondly, this is an extrapolation of the brute force method of simulating a human brain. It *IS* the method I hear to most often thrown around. However, its still brute force and there may be other methods which are less computationally intensive. I do not know of them, however, and what I don't know or can't information on is not something I feel comfortable refuting.

Those stipulations in place, let's do this thing.

The brute force method I mentioned above is literally scanning the entire brain, getting its state - a snapshot if you will - and simulating it on a computer down to the level of physical processes with the assumption and belief this will be sufficient to produce a human mind as software. The idea then is you can run that software at human rate or even potentially faster if the computers are available to do so.

You could then work 10 hours per week your reference frame, goof off 158 hours in the week while running at 4x wall clock speed still accomplish as much as you did as a meatspace person. Indeed you could even contemplate the world, sort out problems or even come up with self congruent, noncontradictory religions in the wall clock time of a week if you had a megaspeed up. Best of all, your mind would never 'die.'

So, for the moment, what would it take to simulate a human brain? After all, some have been arguing we are rapidly approaching the point where the supercomputers we have perform as many computations a second as the human brain. Is that sufficient to run a simulated human brain even in real time?

Let's see.

Let's head down to the smallest part of the brain, the synapse and see if there is a good simulation of it. In fact, there is and its called MCELL 3.0. It simulates a single synapse of a neuron. In 2007, it took 45 seconds of wall clock time to simulate a single synapse for one second of simulated time on an AMD operton derived node.  45:1 is not so good, if not as bad as some other simulations I have either worked with or known.  Based on improvements in performance, increased core counts and increased memory, the good news is we can do a real time simulation of a synapse!

If we can model the synapse, we need to take the step up.  How many synapses are there on a human neuron?  Roughly 10,000.  My day job's brand new supercomputer, Edison, is building out Phase 2 and it will only have 5500 nodes: that's two petaflops sustained performance!  Edison cannot run a neuron.  Let's check out Titan at Oak Ridge National Lab.

Titan has 18k+ nodes with two CPUs of eight cores each.  Right there we can run at least 1.8 neurons' worth of synapses!  Woo!  The good news though is though Titan runs with a GPU per node.  That GPU is 7x times faster than the combined two Opteron CPUs.  Now, I'm being bad here for a moment and using a linear extrapolation: GPU coding is NOT like #std CPU coding.  Also there are communications overheads not being included here.  Nor am I counting the computation for the internals of the neuron.  

Even so, being way overly generous, we can do a whole eight (*8*) human neurons in simulation in real time. It requires 8 MW of power to do so and I bet that does not count cooling.

We can almost do a fruit fly.  The Chinese probably can.  However, set aside the fruit fly.  Let's keep on the ball of humans.

Let's be generous again.  Let's assume there are enormous improvements in algorithms for the simulations which can be done.  MCELL may not be the fastest simulation.  Let's argue, for the sake of generosity, argue we can get three orders of magnitude improvement on the simulation speed.  This allows us 8,000 human neurons.

How many neurons do people have, really?  1,000,000,000,000,000.

The fastest American supercomputer is, under way overly generous terms, still 125,000,000,000 times too slow.  A supercomputer which could sustain an exaflop would still be over 20 million times too slow.  It would also take over 160 MW to run if you used the absolute best possible CPU cycle to power ratio on the current top500 and DOUBLED it (6 gigaflops/watt).

The comeback is we have Moore's Law.  Moore's  Law states every 18 months the number of transistors per area doubles: people have warped this to mean every 18 months computers get twice as fast.  oy. That's incorrect, but for the sake of generosity, we'll use that.  

How many generations are we away from brute forcing, under the generous terms above before we can simulate all the synapses in the human brain in real time?  It is 37 generations or 55 years.  That's with an assumption of a 1000x speed up over MCELL 3.0 and no overhead for communication or whatnot.  If there is no speed up then we're looking at another 10 generations or 18 years.  The soonest we could take on human brain simulating computer would be 2068 or 2086.

What's the power consumption?  Koomey's Law claims every 18 months the amount of power necessary to do a flop is cut in half.  So, power consumption of supercomputers ought to be stable if that were true, right?  We ought to be using the same amount of power a Cray-1 did.  After all, Moore doubles the speed and Koomey cuts the power in half.  These ought to balance out.  They haven't.  A Cray-1 ran with 115 KW of power and that included the cooling.  Titan runs with 8.1 MW of power and it probably does NOT include the cooling: the rule of thumb here is we use as much power to cool the systems as we speed on running them.  If you allow for a drift from Koomey's Law similar to what has happened between the Cray-1 to Titan, you're looking at a 500,000 times increase in power.  Even if we are again generous again with our factor of 1000 improvement handwave, allowing this time for a 1000 times improvement in power over the the drift from Koomey's Law, you're still looking at 500 times the power you need to run Titan to run a simulated human brain.

That's 4 GW.  You need an upgraded Palo Verde (actually 1.2 PVs) for running a single person.  The largest nuclear power plant in the USA is needed for ONE PERSON.

Even if you were still able to break that by our magic factor of 1000 wand down to 4 MW, half of Titan, the cost is as much as 1000 households per year and you on average get 4 human beings out of that per household.

So, for the moment, consider.  We granted 1000 times improvement over current algorithms for simulating the synapses.  We ignored the other processes for running the brain than just the synapses.  We granted a 1000x improvement from the observed drift from Koomey's Law for supercomputers.  Trtuthfully, actually its more than that, but I am being generous here.  It doesn't matter if I am off by a fator of two or ten or even a thousand.  I gave over a factor of a million.  I'd still come out ahead here with over a factor of 1000.  

This doesn't even consider the idea we may, at some point hit the sigmoid for computational technologies.  I just run with the idea we will always have computer technology moving along in the wrong headed moore's law interpretation.  There is a point, either in complexity or in

Economics, my friends, kills the Rapture of the Nerds.  Its simply cheaper to raise a human being from birth to death than it is to upload one person and keep them running.

The Singularity, at least as envisioned by those which see us simulating us in uploads just ain't gonna happen.

Second Crazy Thought of the Day

This is going to annoy Noel.  A lot.

However...

Noel and I have been discussing the Robopocalypse in email for some time.  Carlos, James and Doug have also been participants, for that matter.  However, the basic thought has been whether or not the coming of automata, computer driven automata, will be a problem for people, especially for Americans (the rest of you, too, but we're both yanqi, and somewhat nationalist, so we're viewing our tribe first).

Yes, Virginia, the droids are going to take a lot of jobs.  The argument is whether or not this is a bad thing (Noel, yes.  Me, no).  And whether or not the Singularity style uploads or their equivalent will allow force obsolesce of even the creative class or insight driven jobs (Noel, worried.  Me, not concerned in the least; why is for a post after the holidays).

However, one point Noel makes very, very well is with the Robopocalypse, labor in the sense of manufacturing, construction, many basic service jobs, etc will be going away.  Labor will be replaced by capital.  This helps divorce productivity from population size.  So long as you have the money to buy the equipment, the number of people running it will be quite low and wages will not dominate.  Why send it off to China (originally for the wage differential), when the machines will cost the same here or there and you do not have transport costs for the end goods.

Now, this has some concerns (lower employment for production, even for many, many services) and how to solve that is something to be addressed.  However, that's not the question I am going to address here.  Its not the Crazy Thought.

If it takes $ to buy the machines of the Robopocalypse and it grows the economy greatly, it would seem to follow the more $ you have, the more you are able to build out and have the greater production and economic growth in the sense of lower level services. 

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world.  Our economy is second to none and the part of the reason we're 'losing ground' to China (and in the future India) is their numerical superiority: if they had the same percentage of middle class, they'd have far, far more folks which to draw their creative class from and work the jobs we have, etc.  And they'll do it for less for some time.

 So.  We're richer.  Those machines cost $.  Those machines negate China's advantage.  or India's.

Seen the crazy thought yet?

If we, as in the United States, wanted to stay on top of the heap in the 21st and possibly later centuries, the Robopocalypse seems like a damned good way.