This would stop the currently exponential pace of growth from outpacing what society, and regulation, can adapt to. Thus avoiding the inevitable crash that will happen when we lose control of the exponentially accelerating train of technology, and it flies off the rails.
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- 15 minutes
also btw what you’re describing is called a negative feedback regulatory circuit. it counteracts fluctuations of some quantity, thus stabilizing the quantity over time.
it appears in almost all machinery.
- 24 minutes
cory doctorov recently wrote about reverse centaurs: instead of you controlling the machine, the machine controls you. (instead of human head on machine body, it’s machine head on human body). they presented it as something that AI brings about and that is especially bad.
in think that we’ve already been living in that world for a hundred years though: every time that a factory owner tells the factory workers what they must do / how they must do it, the worker was effectively the body part of a centaur. just that the head was some other human, instead of a machine. but i suspect that from a worker’s perspective, that would hardly make any difference. so when doctorov complains about reverse-centaurs today, it’s only because he hasn’t been the body part for the last hundred years already. it’s because the higher-up classes are hurting today that they make a whole lot of noise about it, as if this was a completely new and unprecedented phenomenon. meanwhile, large parts of society have already been living like this for generations.
- 52 minutes
It’s never the hardware nor the software, it’s always the wetware that’s the problem. We just need to get our shit together. We can’t do that by losing our shit and freaking out over technological progress.
- 4 hours
Nah. Take out the greedy fuckers that make money out of making technology miserable and give me fully automatic space gay communism.
- 4 hours
These exist on induction motors too. Know what happens when it’s not there?
The motor gets too much of the blessed Motive Force for too long that it’s Machine Spirit cannot contain it and then the Spirits leave the motor as magic smoke and burn out the motor.
Without a governor on tech, that’s the fate we’re gonna have. We’ll all be magic smoke, as we’re slowly(or rapidly?!) annihilated.
5 hoursWe have one. It’s called being human. As humans have a limited ability to understand and invent, there is a limit to technological growth rate. It’s just that this governor is set at a development rate that is much higher than what the society can handle.
- 5 hours
No, what we need is a system where technological progress takes into account the benefits and detriments to all people and the system we exist in (nature+), when implementing said progress. The problem isn’t that things are moving too fast, it’s that a few people have seized control of these things and are pushing them, to the destruction of literally everything else.
Wouldn’t computers have been better if we all got the gains and by now, the time of AI, we were already only working 2-10 hours a week? Look at the charts, that’s where we should be right now. AI should be a “we all have to put in 45 minutes of gig work a week to maintain boomer levels of financial stability” moment.
And no, not just Americans or Western Europeans, everyone should be at this level by now. That is how far we have progressed, and that is what has been stolen from all of us.
- 8 hours
We’re trying pretty hard to slow down EV and green energy adoption as much as possible in my country, that count?
But seriously, in an ideal world this would be the role of taxes. Technology running out of control and harming people or the planet because too many people are making too much money off it? Tax 'em until its no longer worth their while to behave in those ways.
Taxes are one mechanism, but they don’t work if you let corporations get too big/powerful. Then you get regulatory capture, no matter how many anti corruption measures you bake in
Capitalism needs constant pruning to incentivize competition and align companies with the common good… And even that never seems to last very long
- 6 hours
Hmm yes I can definitely see a formulaically determined tax rate serving as the break
- HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish7 hours
this. taxes and regulation are part of a healthy economy. Its like excersising and eathing right. we have been a idle junk food eating economy for a long time now.
- 18 hours
It’s not as simple as that.
For some it might be true, but for others, the opposite would be actual beneficial.E.g. I see such a technological governor currently in action in my country trying to slowdown transition to sustainable energies.
I don’t think that is a desirable governor, unless you are over 60 and don’t give a shit about what will be happening in a few years, cause you’ll be dead by then.- 17 hours
Well, one could argue it is less corruption and lobbying but the normal process by which technological progress has been regulating itself for most of the time.
Typically, the younger generations embrace new tech in daily life, while the more conservative older generations are more set on preserving the status quo, ideally resulting in a steady, manageable introduction of new tech over the course of decades.
This in itself is not bad, but in some instances that natural slowing-down mechanism just fails.
Governors don’t cut off supply of steam - or fuel or anything - in a on/off kind of way: they regulate the input flow continuously in a way that self-stabilizes at the desired engine speed.
- 18 hours
Interesting idea, impossible to implement without creating problems ten times worse.
- 18 hours
One could argue many such governors are already in place.
Some are financial, others are societal, a bunch are based on actual proactive intervention (e.g. through international laws because of ethics considerations).
The more important question is: who governs the governors?- 15 hours
I suggest we get some Frankensteins, and have Lenny “The Guvnor” McLean.
- 17 hours
If we define ‘governor’ as a system whose task it is to regulate sth to keep it at a constant level, a good successful existing example would be central banks. They regulate money supply in order to keep inflation at a constant, prescribed, level.
- 17 hours
But that would be more like the steering mechanism employed before the invention of the governor for steam engines: actual persons trying to regulate the speed of the engine by manually pulling levers.
The equivalent to the governor would be an automatic intrinsic feedback loop that, once established, is continuously and automatically working without manual intervention.
So your steam engine governor analogy might be not quite fitting.
- 18 hours
Yep, the international law that such a mechanism would require would inevitably be broken by the usual suspects. We’re just not capable enough of organizing ourselves as a species.
No, not really. It would limit beneficial advancements in technology as well.
Like crossing over to renewable energy sources and advancements in energy efficiency or battery technology. Thanks to EVs we have progressed significantly in that department within last few years.
Or medical advancements, covid and mRNA vaccines are probably a good example.
- 17 hours
These would just need a different (higher) set point of the control loop, but still need some kind of regulating mechanism.
Even things like renewable deployment need some kind of selective dampening to make them work, e.g. to allow the old style energy infrastructure to keep up without the grid frequently collapsing.
Same for medical advancements. E.g. you don’t want the employment speed of new methods outpace the test and review measures ensuring people’s safety.
Fair, good point, yeah it would need some regulating mechanism to make sure that the gird can keep up and to make sure that medical advancements are safe to use.
- 9 hours
I mean medical advancements already have a regulation mechanism in the form of certification that does indeed limit the pace of their development. It’s quite a clumsy one though and there’s no feedback loop, it’s more like a permanent break
