Unschooling and exponential technological change; dignitarians
Paul D. Fernhout
"Unschooling and exponential technological change" and placed here for
future reference. :-)
That discussed examples of the same exponential trends people should take
into account when planning space (or Earth :-) missions in the 2028-2038
time frame. :-)
And these trends are why people are *really* going to laugh at part of the
Project Virgle joke (the Inc. part) in twenty to thirty years as these
trends continue to play out in either personal empowerment or planet-wide
catastrophe (or maybe both).
The same way we might laugh today at, say, the Salem Witch trials. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practical_Magic
Sort of. :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
"Not even in death were the accused witches granted peace or respect."
For a more current example of burning people who had done no wrong at a
metaphorical (non-equity) stake:
http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
"The UN’s first ever report on the state of childhood in the industrialized
West made unpleasant reading for many of the world’s richest nations. But
none found it quite so hard to swallow as the Brits, who, old jokes about
English cooking aside, discovered that they were eating their own young.
According to the Unicef report, which measured 40 indicators of quality of
life – including the strength of relationships with friends and family,
educational achievements and personal aspirations, and exposure to drinking,
drug taking and other risky behaviour – British children have the most
miserable upbringing in the developed world. American children come next,
second from the bottom. ... “The reason our children’s lives are the worst
among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of
the USA,” he said. “So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow
behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour
has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.”"
And probably these kids get figuratively burned for some of the same sorts
of unexamined reasons those women (some midwives?) got literally burned.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/wic_burn1.htm
And that is not even considering the obsolete seven lessons the kids are
forced to endure for almost their entire childhood:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
And that distress of children in both the USA and the UK is caused IMHO also
in part by many of the same sorts of unexamined economic processes Google
and Virgin implicitly (jokingly) propose exporting to Mars via the "Inc."
part here:
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Which makes no sense to me (even as a joke) both given these exponential
trends and also that for many children today in the USA and the UK it
obviously isn't working very well according to UNICEF. As with the
contractors, no Segways and massages for the kids either, of course, and
such would probably not help much anyway, given the level of existential
distress many are in according to the UNICEF study. :-(
One hopefully helpful idea:
http://jco.ascopubs.org/cgi/content/full/23/24/5520
"One of the most confounding challenges faced by end-of-life care providers
is helping patients achieve or maintain a sense of dignity. Our prior
studies of dignity and end-of-life care have shown a strong association
between an undermining of dignity and depression, anxiety, desire for death,
hopelessness, feeling of being a burden on others, and overall poorer
quality of life.1-4 Yet, dying with dignity is usually only vaguely
understood; hence, although the pursuit of dignity frequently underlies
various approaches to end-of-life care, its therapeutic implications are
frequently uncertain."
You can probably guess I spent a lot of time in nursing homes with my Mom
while all the people in them (whether old or young, whether infirm or
visitor or volunteer or paid caretaker) were suffering increased indignities
due in part to money indirectly siphoned off from these places to support
the Iraq war disaster. :-(
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5344334.stm
"The UN secretary general has said that most Middle East leaders regard the
US-led invasion of Iraq and its aftermath as a disaster for the region."
In some sense, we are all terminally ill from the day we are conceived. :-)
Some might disagree from a post-singularity perspective:
"Ray Kurzweil's Plan: Never Die"
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/11/56448
Of course, it may take Kurzweil a billion years (literally :-) to
discover this, but death is inescapably a part of life, because life is
change. If Kurzweil tries not to die ever, he will have to stop changing.
And then he is dead already. That is not to say embrace death any quicker
than it comes way down the road after a full life (if for no other reason
than how it effects friends and family), but it is to say that death is part
of life, the other side of the coin so to speak. Try to take away one side
of a coin and what do you have? Nothing. So we are left figuring out for
ourselves and our communities how to live *and* die with dignity.
But here's a less morbid approach to that idea:
http://www.dignitarians.org/
"The Dignitarian Foundation is an organization dedicated to promoting and
protecting the intrinsic right to human dignity - the belief that as a
person, one is automatically worthy, honorable, and deserving of respect,
regardless of status, station or stage of life. We believe we can and must
find alternatives to practices that harm individual dignity, instead of
continuing to convey the toxic residue of these indignities down the line,
from those with the most power to those with the least. Our mission is to
overturn the consensus view that says it is acceptable to treat certain
people and groups badly because other people are doing it or because you can
get away with it."
And I think those Dignitarian ideas will hold up well despite the
exponential technological changes outlined below.
Maybe even, someday, those Dignitarian ideas will even apply for "red badge"
Google contractors, too. :-)
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googlife
Even the unseen ones slaving away making Google's electronics in China or
wherever. :-(
http://www.csrwire.com/News/9197.html
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/26/203.html
After all, in some sense, now we are *all* Google contractors. :-)
http://www.worldpress.org/1101we_are_all_americans.htm
https://www.google.com/adsense/
Which at least sounds better than "we are all prisoners": :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=12113
"Cory Doctorow's Fiction About An Evil Google"
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/20/2325240
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.openvirgle.net/
Below is forwarded "Unschooling and exponential technological change".
A teaser is: "So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if
it was a million times faster than today's: ..."
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Unschooling and exponential technological change
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007
From: Paul D. Fernhout
To: ...
Exponential growth can be hard to understand; schools typically focus on
linear relationships in science classes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth
Computers are now increasing in performance by about 1000X per decade at
constant dollars, so by the time any toddler of today is finishing
graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade)
multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about
a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are
about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at
constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
(The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!)
As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Then --> Now (approximate increase)
CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal
improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such).
(somewhere in x100000 to x1000000)
RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000)
Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000)
And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation).
Some other considerations:
Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by
cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit,
but it's still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for
continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there,
producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance)
Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages
per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often
now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple,
since quality has changed so much).
And just like computers can now do things like play video and
compose music and talk via Skype and do Google searches --
stuff which was awkward to do 20 years ago on minis and mainframes if
possible at all -- so too we will likely see the widespread adoption of
things which barely work now, like machine vision, deft robotic
manipulation of things, and machine creativity
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~reingold/courses/ai/creative.html
http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/cohen.html
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=982
[ http://www.willowgarage.com/ ]
over the next twenty to thirty years. Certainly we'll have cars that
drive themselves (insurance and laws permitting) and they will generally
be safer than human operated vehicles (most bad accidents happen at
night when humans are tired and can't see well in the dark --
computers don't get tired and they can see in a variety of ways
including by radar). Example:
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp
(Assuming we don't blow ourselves all up with them first. :-(
"Tough All-Terrain Military Robot Unveiled"
http://www.livescience.com/technology/060428_crusher_robot.html
http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/ugcv/videos/index.htm )
See for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
"Also in 1995, the CMU Navlab project achieved 98.2% autonomous driving
on a 3000-mile (5000 km) "No hands across America" trip. This car,
however, was semi-autonomous by nature: it used neural networks to
control the steering wheel, but throttle and brakes were
human-controlled. ... For 2007, DARPA introduced a new challenge, which
it named the "Urban Challenge". The Urban Challenge will take place on
November 3, 2007. The location of the event will not be announced until
the qualification process is complete. The course will involve a 60-mile
(96 km) urban area course, to be completed in less than 6 hours. Rules
will include obeying all traffic regulations while negotiating with
other traffic and obstacles and merging into traffic."
That's what robots and computers can do more or less *now* -- so what
will they be able to do in twenty years?
So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a
million times faster than today's:
CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster,
though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million
processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and
processing power)
RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet
in RAM, see:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm
)
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
for MB, GB, TB, PB, EB series and their meaning
DISK: 300GB --> 300PB (which is 300,000 TB)
For reference, a DVD movie uncompressed is about 5GB.
Note that, according to:
http://elegans.uky.edu/blog/?p=49
300 TB would allow you to record your entire life in video for 16hr/day
for 100 years at 500MB/hr. So you could do that for 1000 people on just
your own $3000 2027AD personal computer. Or you could just perhaps store
the interesting bits of life video for perhaps a hundred thousand people
or so. Needless to say, storing all of human music currently on CD would
be trivial and not even noticeably strain such a computer's capacity.
But there might be little point, as the system could possibly be able to
just improvise music to suit your mood if you asked it.
Bandwidth: 800KB --> 800MB (conservative, just x1000, from optical fiber
to the home, but still enough to download a full length HD movie in a
few seconds)
See: "Internet2 Land Speed Record -- 9.08 gigabits per second."
http://www.internet2.edu/lsr/
Printing: 10 pages per minute in 2D (free, but toner costs) --> 10 cubic
centimeters / minute in 3D (free with the computer, maybe the toner,
especially for precious metals like gold or platinum, still costs).
Even if I were to be off by a factor of 100X, this would still be an
impressive computer, 10000X more powerful than what we have now. And in
another ten years by 2037 we would definitely see such a machine. And
then ten years beyond that, what will the performance be of desktop
computers when today's toddlers start having toddler's of their own?
Unimaginable at another 1000X performance. Desktop computers about as
powerful than all the computers in the world today put together?
Granted, growth rates may eventually slow down -- but people who study
this suggest exponential growth in performance/price will continue for
at least the next few decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
Another way these trends can be looked at is that [in 2027] today's wireless
networked desktop computer will be purchasable for less than a penny and
be somewhere in size between a postage stamp and a grain of sand (and
likely solar powered). What does that mean for privacy or for schooling
itself when a kid can buy $10 worth of computing and sprinkle 1000
networked audio pickup nodes around a school staff cafeteria or school
office? Here's a review of a sci-fi story that includes that theme by
Vernor Vinge’s called "Fast Times at Fairmont High"
http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/th/print/284/
"Fast Times obviously takes its title from the popular movie Fast Times
at Ridgemont High, but it's a little misleading because actually the
story is about junior high kids. It's set in the 2020s, I think - a
difficult era for authors to write about because the world needs to be
significantly different from our own, but still recognizably grown from
our world. ... The cumulative effect of all this technology was
absolutely amazing and completely believable. It's as far beyond our
current communications media as the net is beyond the telephone. It's
very exciting to imagine this technology coming into existence. Vinge
has other technological changes that I found less convincing. The
biggest was an effective increase in human intelligence due to better
computer support. He has these junior high kids doing Putman level math
problems with ease, and learning a programming language in a couple of
hours that the kid's father spent 3 years learning. Society is turned
topsy turvy, with competence running inversely with age. The adults are
helpless compared to these junior high kids, who themselves fear the
fifth graders. ... Overall while I did not buy everything Vinge
presented, it was an astonishing glimpse at a near future world which is
continuing to go through revolutionary changes."
You can buy a 3D printer now, but it costs about $50K,
http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?ID=2
same or less as bulky laser printers cost 25 years ago. See:
http://www.printerworks.com/Catalogs/CX-Catalog/CX-HP_LaserJet-History.html
"Xerox started work on laser printers back in 1969. By 1977 Xerox was
selling the 9700 (a 120 page-per-minute, full-duplex monster) for about
$350,000." Now you can get laser printers for free with a new computer.
What will happen with 3D printing? See for example:
"Educators: 3D Printing the Missing Link to Engage, Advance Tomorrow’s
Engineers"
http://www.zcorp.com/news/newsdetail.asp?ID=445&TYPE=1
"High schools, colleges and universities are increasingly adopting 3D
printing to put physical objects into the hands of the students who
conceived them, bringing the design education process to its logical
conclusion. Rapidly transforming ideas into real-world objects firmly
engages developing minds while exposing them to advanced technologies
that will propel their careers, say educators. “Students get an idea,
sketch it out, develop it [CAD software], animate it, print it, and then
hold it in their hands,” says Bruce Weirich, computer drafting
instructor at Ontario High School in Mansfield, Ohio, USA. “When they
hold it in their hands, they’re closing the loop, which really brings
the value of the exercise home. Until then, it’s all conceptual and
virtual. Completing the circle is important. It turns kids on.”
Education’s adoption of 3D printing follows a wider trend in
manufacturing. Annual sales of rapid prototyping systems have been
escalating at a 37 percent average annual clip over the past 18 years,
driven most recently by the popularity of 3D printing systems, according
to Terry Wohlers, president of the Wohlers Associates consulting firm."
Granted, that last press release copy makes it sounds like schools are
keeping up with the technology the vendor is selling -- but somehow I
doubt it -- at least not for *most* kids.
Note that today's typical desktop computer is more powerful than a
supercomputer of 20 to 30 years ago. For comparison, the fastest
supercomputer in the world today "BlueGene/L" has 131072 CPUs and on the
order of 16 TB RAM (and runs GNU/Linux).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-963285.html
So, that is in the ballpark on what today's toddler may have on his or
her desktop in 20 years as they are looking for their first job. But
really, who would want to hire someone dumbed down by schooling with
desktops that can perhaps simulate the human brain? See _Manna_ for
speculation about "terrafoam" projects used to house the jobless in the
USA in 2030:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
since that level of computing power is likely enough to finally drive
robots by machine vision.
Machine vision plus other sensors already works well enough to just
about drive cars coast-to-coast and in traffic. Digital camera
technology now is very cheap. So this is not a huge stretch to consider
machine vision in twenty years being ubiquitous and causing huge
economic dislocations -- unless the entire basis of our ration-unit and
scarcity based economy changes to gift-giving and a sense of abundance
before then. See for example the Native American writings and art of
Marcine Quenzer:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm
>From there: "The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The
gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field
of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits
in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims,
the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying
their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always
enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given
back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the
Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The
misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed
those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of
the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is
given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for
the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy.
In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have
forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that
comes once a year."
So, we are perhaps really talking about a return to *old* ways of being,
and *old* ways of relating to each other; the kind of ways which
unschooling and "free schooling" help attune people to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
[These are ways developed in a "pre-scarcity" culture, and turn out to be
useful in a "post-scarcity" one, after the current "scarcity" bubble pops,
in part thanks to Google. :-)]
What does it mean to be going into a "technological singularity" or
"intelligence explosion"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
with major social institutions (like school) completely inadequate to
the task of surviving it and yet still trying to intentionally "dumb
down" most kids
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/bookstore/dumbdnblum1.htm
for jobs that no longer exist? It will make issues like
manufacturing jobs leaving the USA for China seem trivial in comparison.
The culture shock may be enormous.
I would think many of the unschooled
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
will likely have more flexibility to prosper alongside such machinery,
when desktop computers can hold the
entire internet of today in RAM, and 3D printers come free with
computers. ... Who knows what social and economic changes all that will
bring? Seems like unschooling is the best hedge one could make for a
changing world. And even if it nothing helps, at least kids will get a
many years of happier "just in time" learning from life (instead of
years of coercive dulling "just in case" learning in school).
--Paul Fernhout
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html