Category: Future

This is how Big Oil will die – NewCo Shift

Self-driving cars will be electric because of cost. And the cost will be so low, oil will not survive.

Source: This is how Big Oil will die – NewCo Shift, by Seth Miller

As inexpensive natural gas has pushed coal out of the market, coal consumption has dropped roughly 25% … The major coal companies, who all borrowed to finance capital improvements while times were good, were caught unaware. As coal prices crashed, their loan payments became a larger and larger part of their balance sheets; while the coal companies could continue to pay for operations, they could not pay their creditors.

The four largest coal producers lost 99.9% of their market value over the last 6 years. Today, over half of coal is being mined by companies in some form of bankruptcy.

When self-driving cars are released, consumption of oil will similarly collapse.

The costs of electric self-driving cars will be so low, it will be cheaper to hail a ride than to drive the car you already own.

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox – Future of Humanity Institute

Source: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox – Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler & Toby Ord

Conclusion 1: the Fermi paradox isn’t very paradoxical

  • Overconfident guesses makes it seem hard to get empty universe
  • When our uncertainty is properly accounted for in the model, we find a substantial a priori chance that there is no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little or no surprise when this is what we see.
  • Reasonable priors (or even the literature!) give enough uncertainty to make empty universe fairly likely
  • Note that this conclusion does not mean we are alone! Just that we should not be surprised if this is the case.
    (This is a statement about knowledge and priors, not a measurement: armchair astrobiology)

Conclusion 2: the great filter is likely in the past

  • Given the priors and the Fermi observation, the default guess should be that the low-probability term(s) are in the past.
  • Note that a past great filter does not imply our safety
    (The stars just don’t foretell our doom)

The Internet as existential threat | Raph’s Website

As we rush towards putting more and more things “in the cloud,” as we rush towards an Internet of Things with no governance beyond profit motive and anarchy, what we’re effectively doing is creating a massive single point of failure for every system we put in it.
…
What we are building is basically a perfect scenario for collapse, where a commons is consumed by actors who either don’t care or don’t understand the collective damage that is possible in a connected system, and the tipping points that can ensue.

If software eats everything, then the ability to kill software is the ability to kill anything. Net connectivity becomes the single point of failure for every system connected to it.

A typical US city only has three days of food within the city limits, because the Internet has enabled just-in-time delivery of foodstuffs. Economic optimization within a network tends to imply specialization, which means that even those lovely rural communities that in theory grow their own food don’t grow balanced diets locally. And you’re laughing at an Internet connected juicer? Your juicer is already Internet-connected. If that goes down, you don’t get any more juice! It’s just connected in a way you can’t see.

We think of critical infrastructure in terms of government-owned or controlled utilities… but the food trucking fleet is “critical infrastructure.”

In a world where we take actual damage when something digital is attacked, any CPU is basically a weapon, and leaving Internet connected CPUs unattended is basically leaving armory doors open.

The issue is whether we are increasing the fragility of the system and thereby increasing the likelihood of cascade effects.

Source: The Internet as existential threat | Raph’s Website

Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars – Scientific American

Source: Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars – Scientific American

RE: “Making Humanity a Multi-Planetary Species” by Elon Musk

Elon Musk has put his Mars-colonization vision to paper, and you can read it for free.

Musk’s Mars vision centers on a reusable rocket-and-spaceship combo that he’s dubbed the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). … The ITS boosters will be designed to fly about 1,000 times each … Each ITS ship would probably be able to make 12 to 15 deep-space journeys during its operational life, Musk wrote, and each fuel tanker could likely fly to Earth orbit 100 or so times.