141–150 of 334 posts
It upsets me that an establishment like ESO would grip on the “data centers in space” narrative given the absurd physics constraints.
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Google “Kessler syndrome”.
I am aware of no orbital solutions for a catastrophic Kessler cascade in LEO. The only place you could engineer one is in GEO, because that’s a singular orbit, not a plane much less a volume.
Second, the situation is already so bad that current satellites in LEO already require active collision avoidance systems in order to avoid becoming sources of debris themselves. Starlink alone reports over 1,600 close encounters each week.
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I think that "Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet" is something you've just made up; the article you link talks about African people turning to Starlink because of local infrastructure issues, and the original article notes that the current satellite count is currently around 14k satellites. 100k is more than enough satellites to provide high-speed satellite internet globally. The article…
Not to mention starlink is not a solution for internet for everyone on the planet: it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area, no matter how many satellites they have in their constellation. It's a useful piece of infrastructure, but it's far from the panacea people seem to think it is.
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But that’s the thing! We could and we can!
None of the problems with building a utopia are technological, all of the problems are social and political. What the people arguing with you are telling you is that if you ignore the social and political problems, you're going to continue to create exactly the same kinds of problems that have been caused by every other attempt to solve social and political problems with technology. When you can figure out why people…
Of course they are. Pre-Green revolution humanity probably couldn’t make a utopia. Currently, I’d argue we need way more energy to make utopia-like conditions available to all.
Technology isn’t sufficient. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s unnecessary, unless one’s utopia permits dying horribly of infection due to minor cuts and abrasions.
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As a literal leftist by any reasonable metric, the recent trend towards “I wish it was 1995” and “AI is the worst” and “tech sucks now” from people I agree with on many other points frustrates me to no end. “You guys know we could basically live in a Star Trek style utopia if we get this right, right?” “The DATA cenTERS are STEALING the water and breaking Taleckshual ProPerty LERRS!” Like, I thought we were for pirac…
In Star Trek canon, humanity figured out how to live in utopia by destroying all existing power structures in a Third World War. What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventual utopia is used to train automata with the express goal to replace humans in those creative endeavors,…
Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war lol, just saying.
> What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventual utopia is used to train automata with the express goal to replace humans in those creative endeavors, removing the ability for humans to earn money by being creative themselves.
Right, I get the frustration, but how many "creators" were doing truly creative and expressive work writing ad copy or making up logos for shoe companies or whatever. The problem people have is capitalism, not the robots and it's short sighted of people to be angry at software tools rather than the system that has forced them to trade their time and skills for the right to exist.
I've literally lost my career before. The one thing that getting deathly ill has taught me is that "all things will come to an end." Someday, that will include me, but hopefully not today, and thanks to modern medicine, hopefully not any time soon. The idea that the only way an artist should be able to justify their right to survive is by shitting out jpgs on fiverr or whatever is as absurd as the idea that that was somehow meaningful work. If you're having a hard time getting hired, pivot. Adapt. Overcome. That's been my life for the last decade since I first got sick - and I'm not saying it's great, but you have to be able to adapt to new istuations. The world ain't going back. Do we become the Luddites and lose in the long run? Or do we "seize the means of computation and build something that strives for utopia?"
> Ideally, feeling important wouldn't be pejorative. Ideally, we'd have a way for artists to have food and shelter and continue to produce art.
I think food and shelter should be available for anyone on earth without any sort of need to justify it. But I do think that feeling really important should be a bit pejorative.
> The hopes that AI will cause this to happen are equivalent to hoping WWIII will come along and wipe out 2/3 of humanity so we can start over with United Earth and warp drives and replicators.
That's a false equivalency. Like, not even on the same planet.
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I am aware of no orbital solutions for a catastrophic Kessler cascade in LEO. The only place you could engineer one is in GEO, because that’s a singular orbit, not a plane much less a volume.
First, you never specified LEO, only “space”. Second, the situation is already so bad that current satellites in LEO already require active collision avoidance systems in order to avoid becoming sources of debris themselves. Starlink alone reports over 1,600 close encounters each week .
What I said applies to space, too, outside GEO, for the number of satellites anyone is currently talking about launching.
> the situation is already so bad that current satellites in LEO already require active collision avoidance systems in order to avoid becoming sources of debris themselves
They require collision avoidance to avoid being lost. There is no risk of a Kessler cascade in LEO right now and nobody who can do orbital mechanics is claiming as much.
We’d need millions more satellites than we have right now to start approaching the point where atmospheric clearance falls below the rate of new-debris production. And even then, you’re talking about a problem in specific orbits for months, maybe years. In the meantime, you get to allow nature to reclaim huge amounts of land from cell towers and conduit.
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Fleet Street in London used to print all the UK newspapers. They had unions who resisted automation. In the 80s, Rupert Murdoch built, in secret, a new fully computerised printing plant built in Wapping. The workers went on strike, so he fired them. Didn't even lose a single day of output*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute That is what you should fear from AI. Not the data centres themselves, that we cou…
> That is what you should fear from AI. Not the data centres themselves, that we could all be fired and the rich lose nothing as a result Sure. But what would have been better for the Fleet Street workers. The UK banning computerised printing? Or the union owning one? If AI is going to be to jobs in general as computerised printing was to newspaper printing, just blocking it doesn't make sense. That's my argument.
Like, worker ownership of the means of production and the assets in general is idea. But I'm speaking as an Alaskan who is quite fond of the PFD and think it doesn't go far enough.
These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those in stagnation or decline tend to attach themselves to these desires to hold the status quo. Anti-energy, anti-housing, anti-industry and so on because they've reached a local maxima in their ability to live and have chosen to spend their life in leisure. But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that…
As though Africans aren't interested in the stars, or climate change, or that they can't figure out fibre optics is borderline racist.
Europe - and soon the rest of us - are facing massive heat waves that are likely driven by climate change, it's a real problem.
That's 'actual science'.
By all means, build what you like, but you don't get to dump your externalizations on everyone else. There is no 'We' in your projects, you don't speak for us.