[SEQ RERUN] Disappointment in the Future

[MinibearRex]

Today’s post, Disappointment in the Future was originally published on 01 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A list of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions for the period 1999-2009.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Stuck In Throat, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

[falenas108]

Surprisingly, a lot of these predictions that weren’t true in 2009 are coming true in 2012. Also, a lot of the ones that aren’t true are in the same category, like text to speech technology.

[advancedatheist]

“Disappointment in the Future”? Welcome to my world.

I’ve ragged a lot on Eric Drexler lately because, frankly, I’ve waited for something like his “molecular nanotechnology” to come along before many of you were even born. (No one has turned into a nanotech version of the Green Lantern lately, like the gamer hero in Travis S. Taylor’s novel, The Quantum Connection.) I started to have misgivings about Drexler’s vision before I read the physicist/​quant Scott Locklin’s mockery of it here:

http://​​scottlocklin.wordpress.com/​​2010/​​08/​​24/​​nano-nonsense-25-years-of-charlatanry/​​

Now I consider Drexler’s ideas even less credible.

The same goes for Gerard K. O’Neill’s ideas about space industrialization and colonization. You may not have noticed yet, but people don’t live very long, and I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t spend your life expecting the arrival of technological miracles like space colonies and nanomachines, unless someone starts to turn those ideas into real hardware. I’ve only begun to read up on Elon Musk’s proposal for colonizing Mars, but I won’t get excited over that until a real space ship can send someone to Mars who can set foot on that planet and live to tell about it.

Interestingly, brain preservation technologies, which have expanded beyond cryonics, have a set of problems which we can improve upon in the here-and-now with current tools. In fact, we can make progress in that area independently from speculations about revival mechanisms. If I had any say over how the cryonics movement does things (and I apparently don’t, unless I gain some authority through perseverance and attrition), I would advocate that we quietly drop the Drexler nonsense which has damaged cryonics’ reputation over the past generation and concentrate strictly on improving the integrity of brain cryopreservation.

[Plasmon]

From your link

Mechanical objects on microscales do not exist

Ahem

Also, we barely have self-replicating macroscopic objects, despite the fact that such a thing is obviously possible, so it’s no surprise that there are no non-biological microscopic replicators, whether or not non-biological microscopic replicators are possible.

[advancedatheist]

Assuming for the sake of argument that a 3D printer can replicate all of its own parts, it still requires human labor to put those parts together into another 3D printer. By contrast, Drexler assumes that the parts in his nanomachines would just automatically self-assemble to minimize potential energy, like the self-assembly of biological molecules in aqueous solutions. Seems like the difference matters to me.

BTW, Locklin weighs in on the alleged printed firearm receiver a few months back:

http://​​scottlocklin.wordpress.com/​​2012/​​08/​​11/​​bad-engineering-journalism-reporting-on-3-d-printing-of-guns/​​

Nerds have this fantasy that solid printers will make them infinite open-source useful objects in … the future. This is the sheerest fantasy; a fantasy that can only be held by people who have never made a useful mechanical object in the workshop. Solid printers can make crude unassembled plastic parts; nothing else. No electronics can be made in this way. No assembled parts can be made in this way. Even if a home printer could print things of metal (this will never happen on a cheap home use basis as you need a very high power laser to melt metal powders), it will effectively be sintered metal, or sintered plastic-metal composites. That’s not the same thing as a machined piece of solid metal. It doesn’t have the same mechanical properties, and barring some preposterous breakthrough, it never will. Some parts will not ever be realizable with this sort of technology: for things like, say, a plastic simulacrum of a rifle barrel within linear tolerances, you’ll always need specialized machine tools.

[Plasmon]

a 3D printer can replicate all of its own parts, it still requires human labor to put those parts together into another 3D printer

Certainly. A true macroscopic replicator would also require robotic parts capable of assembling both the printer and the robotic parts, and a printer capable of printing printer parts as well as robotic parts.

Drexler assumes that the parts in his nanomachines would just automatically self-assemble to minimize potential energy

I grant that this seems implausible, especially for non-biological “mechanical” parts.