Comments on: The Machine Doesn’t Stop

By: hannu

hannu — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 07:13:56 +0000

Yep. This is something called The Doomsday Argument, usually credited to the physicist Richard Gott, who famously visited the Berlin Wall, concluded that he was not a particularly special visitor and therefore had to be roughly somewhere in the middle of the Wall's lifetime. After a few back-of-the-envelope calculations he concluded that the Wall would last between 3 and 20 more years. This was in 1969...

If you apply Gott's mathematics to mankind, you find that we have a 95% chance of extinction within 9000 years or so.

Anthropic principles are perhaps philosophically problematic, but I do think there are cases where they can play a useful role. In string theory, for instance (if José is still reading this I'm sure he can give a more detailed reply), it's starting to look like there is a vast moduli space of physically possible universes and it could very well be that the only principle that "chooses" this one is the presence of intelligent observers (us): this would explain the fact that certain physical constants appear to be extremely fine-tuned to allow for the existence of intelligent life.

As to the Doomsday Argument, and my armchair philosopher application of it to innovation, I don't know. What sort of observers should one average over here? There's no way to tell...

Another interesting (and even more speculative) consequence of the same kind of reasoning is that we're all living in a simulation. There's a pretty interesting paper by the philosopher Nick Bostrom about this. My gut feeling says that there's something subtly wrong with his argument, but I can't really point my finger at it.

By: Apesnake

Apesnake — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 02:22:28 +0000

Is one interpretation of the mediocrity principle not that in order for us to not be born at some very early part of a civilization then there must be a massive drop in population coming? Most of the people who have ever lived are alive now so if we are at the halfway point the population will be in free fall soon. Not that I am sold on the mediocrity principle though - being first at something may be unlikely but someone has to play the role.

By: hannu

hannu — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 23:29:10 +0000

GPS does indeed sum up a lot of the technology of the 21st century very neatly. But I think Sterling’s point had more to do with the seemingly ever-shortening cameraphone generations. More and more new features are added in so quickly that people (except perhaps the few and far between early adopters) don’t really have time to get used to the new features. Yet there is a lot of innovation behind those features – it’s just invisible because nobody uses it.

By: José

José — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 23:13:01 +0000

I beg to disagree on the Bruce Sterling’s choice of “definitive gizmo”. Every physicist knows that the definitive gizmo of our times is the GPS receiver, which incorporates in an essential way both quantum mechanics (as any other electronic device) and general relatitivity (to account for small deviations from the newtonian orbit of the satellites). No other device (that I know of, certainly not the cameraphone) requires for its existence the two great scientific revolutions of the XXth century.

By: Sam

Sam — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 19:34:00 +0000

i beat 20Q with “stereo speakers”