X-Message-Number: 25569
References: <>
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Technology Failures & The Anatomy Of Breakthrough
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 00:46:40 +1100

I agree with most of what Bob Ettinger writes in his response to me. 
His essay on probability for the most part as well. Bob issues a 
challenge at the end of it, however:

> The important thing is that there have been very many successful 
> projects of technology, and very few or none that have failed. If you 
> can think of a failure, that qualifies according to our criteria, 
> please let us know.

I'd suggest most spectacular technology failures are quickly shunned in 
favour of alternatives and workarounds, so will be under-represented in 
any history of inventions. Still a few come to mind:

Tesla's Wardenclyffe - wireless transmission of power.
Dyson's Project Orion - real space travel.
O'Neil's Lagrange colonies - real space stations.
Fuller's Dymaxion cars, houses, etc.
Russell & Whitehead's Principia
Pons & Fleischman's cold fusion
etc.

But for the most part Ettinger is obviously right - we have seen 
amazing progress in so many technological domains all at once it's 
foolish to bet against new technology succeeding in rapid order.

We may qualify this in AI where the failures have to date completely 
dominated the successes. Billions of dollars were poured into he 
American Strategic Computing Initiative and the Japanese 5th generation 
project without obvious result. The massively funded AI labs at 
Stanford and MIT have almost completely given up on their original 
HAL-like development goals, settling into applicably profitable niches 
like bioinformatics, robotics, and VR. The figure of the wild-haired AI 
researcher declaring that this time, This Time, he's got it right, it 
will scale, it will speak, it will Wake Up, has become an icon in cheap 
SF flicks and a joke among venture capitalists. If we apply Bob's 
probability methods to AI then the outlook is not rosy.

But having beaten that particular dead horse into butter let's consider 
the anatomy of breakthrough. If AI can't happen on T/VN computers, what 
have we got that's not T/VN? De Garis's career points the way here. 
FPGAs - CPUless computing - are an extremely popular technology without 
obvious Turing equivalence, so classical complexity results may not 
apply there for novel solution architectures. And quantum computers are 
indeed qualitatively different from massively parallel T/VN computing 
arrays, so the same goes there. It may be that the complexity bounds 
that to date stopped real AI in its tracks are about to disappear in a 
puff of paradigm reformulation.

In which case all bets are off. My reply to Mark Plus's original 
question was not intended to deny the possibility of real AI or MNT. It 
was to discount Vinge & co.'s faith-based reasoning about same. The 
rational answer to Mark is, no one knows. Whether or not the next 30 
years produces a technological singularity, it is extremely likely to 
produce new technology whose implications for good and ill we cannot 
imagine today. Cryonicists, as neophiles, should look on this 
uncertainty with pleasure.

Peter Merel.

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