Z-Day 2010 - "Be the change we want to see in the world

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I have one demand for the Venus evangelist: since your goal of economic coordination (which is rather technocratic, whether you like this revelation or not) depends primarily on the efficiency of some sort of artificial neural network, how will it work? Venus is dependent, critically, on details - details you and the projects founder seem unwilling to provide.

I gotta' love the Venus FAQ for providing the hard answers to the hard questions - namely how the "system of sensors" will actually work and organize society and what engineers/technicians/computer scientists have declared the project technically possible.

http://www.thevenusproject.com/the-venu ... uction/faq

How elucidating!

Quote-parsing errors again.

It would be rather long, wouldn't it? I saw well over a hundred questions on there. If you could send me a PM with it in text form that would be great.


If your input to the computer is not precise enough, it will act strangely. Have you ever had someone take something you say literally when you were speaking figuratively? Computers take everything extremely literally.



Wikipedia them. Gödel's incompleteness theorems established important limitations in formal mathematics. "Squaring the circle" was proven to be impossible in 1882. The Traveling Salesman Problem is an extremely famous problem in graph theory that has no good algorithmic solution- you can try to brute-force it if you have infinite computing power, but you really do have to have essentially infinite computer power unless you are looking at the most trivial cases.


But this is false. Poverty, war, crime–these things are improving. We're doing better than we were a hundred years ago on all these counts.


OK, some things are not computable. What did you hope to accomplish there?


Mathematics is different from science. It does not change. Trust me, Gödel's incompleteness theorem will never be wrong. It is correct, it has always been correct, it will always be correct. It would be correct even if the universe did not exist.


Why do you ask for studies? Studies can not establish absolute truth on any matter. It has been mathematically proven that it is impossible to square the circle. The other problems I mentioned are similar.


No, you are misunderstanding. I am comparing the goals of the Venus project to a number of similarly impossible goals. In the case of the Three Body Problem, I am stating that what the Venus Project hopes to achieve requires that they solve problems significantly more difficult than the Three Body Problem, which itself cannot be solved.


He's a famous German mathematician who, during the 1930s, destroyed any hope of realizing Hilbert's program for a formalization of all mathematics. I don't like his results, but I cannot deny that they are correct.


So? The electrical engineer of 50 years ago is retired or dead today. People will learn what is relevant for their time.


Sounds a bit like Vonnegut's fantasy in Player Piano. The only jobs left were for managers and engineers, and everyone else was basically on welfare. I doubt it will end up as he predicted.

Anyways, I disagree with some of your conclusions on money. Yes, it is just a means to an end, but it is highly effective as a means.


How can you claim our current economic system stands in the way of technology when the rate of technological advancement has never been higher than it is under that system?


Well, for the issue of war and violence in general, I would refer you to an excellent TED talk on the subject.


No. I am saying, if you want to do something with a computer, then you must have an algorithm. You can not have an algorithm for running the economy, therefore you can not use a computer to do it.

In more explicit logical form, let p="the Venus project's ideas could work" and let q="There exists an algorithm for running the economy."
I say "p implies q.
Not q.
Therefore, not p."

You failed to understand him.

What you want a computer to do and what you tell it to do are really two different things. The problem is that a computer program is an incredibly complex thing with all sorts of rules, and what this means is that the translation of desires into commands can be very difficult. Think of a computer program like a law. When writing a law, there is something you mean, but there is also that thing you write. Sometimes, what you write is ambiguous, and sometimes you make small errors. The problem is that a computer language doesn't handle ambiguity and that any error will result in failure or dramatically different results. To top this off, computers only respond to commands written in a certain way and are extremely literal. They don't get the "gist", but if you have a small misconception, the entire nature of the program changes.


The idea that we can never surpass c in speed is a major conclusion of Einstein's theory of relativity. Einstein's theory of relativity is well-known as it is his idea that he is best known for, and it is also well supported by a body of empirical research. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_re ... than_light The non-reversal of entropy is a conclusion from the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which is pretty old and pretty-well established. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law ... modynamics The issue of the impossibility of finding a set of axioms for all of mathematics is a straight-forward conclusion of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, which are mathematical arguments against the conceptual possibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del ... s_theorems Squaring the circle has been proved to be impossible since 1882 due to pi being a transcendental. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_the_circle

Orwell is being vague though because this isn't special knowledge. These aren't studies but rather well-accepted claims and even paradigms.


Ok, but the issue is that even on the current economy's flaws, there are doubts about your reasoning. Additionally, you haven't studied the working of the current economy in any depth. You don't know much about any major accepted form of economic theories in the academy as far as I can tell.

In any case, I somehow doubt that it is just "sin" holding people back. Views of that vary within Christianity and Christianity isn't the only religion or social force within society.


Marx believed in taking care of everybody on the planet. He believed in a worldwide revolution and is known for saying "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need", that is hardly a big "money" kind of statement, rather that stands against a lot of egoistic tendencies.


Ok, but if one takes evolutionary theory seriously, then it is likely that the love of power is hard-wired into humanity. People don't pass on their genes by being nice but rather by taking care of themselves, their family, and their clan respectively. This kind of mentality is not likely to ever be abolished though.


Honestly, PPR has tended to hold to forum rules loosely. Unless a poster is really crossing a line, some sympathy is held because it is known that PPR is very argumentative and that arguments do stir some passions. This isn't to say that if you complained, no moderator would do anything, but rather that this is a segment where thicker skins are recognized as part of the territory.


He is trying to interpret you. He interpreted one of your claims as the claim that reality issues such as the limits on computability were based upon the capitalist system rather than on reality.


One of the claims Orwell is making is that chaotic systems are uncomputable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

"Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general."

The issue is that based upon the economy being a chaotic system, a computer system with the requirement of long-term prediction will generally fail.


This is a mathematical theorem. 1+1 has always equaled 2. Math doesn't change as much as scientific understandings and many of those aren't expected to change either.


They're well-known facts, I provided sources though.


That last statement is a mere assertion, Orwell's statement about the economy being chaotic is pretty acceptable, and this notion that this makes computation impractical is also pretty acceptable. That being said, a large number of economists don't think this is implementable. For one, the computational demands, even by the oversimplified neoclassical theories, are way too great, there would be tons of linear systems that would have to be solved in conjunction with each other. Additionally, many economists don't think this is how it works at all anyway, given that there are forms of knowledge that are tacit, and that are difficult to measure much less compute.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godel One of the most significant mathematicians and logicians of all time.


They probably won't be automated. The issue is that people like dealing with people. A machine would be weird and creepy in some form or fashion for a good number of service jobs.


He gets them from a talk by psychologist Steven Pinker on the matter. It's a video that's gone around the forum a bit in the past.
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_ ... lence.html


Um... it *HAS* to have an algorithm. An algorithm can't exist. Therefore Venus Project won't work. His reasoning is straight-forward.

I would argue that math doesn't change ever. Mathematics has not changed in all of human history (or in all the history of the universe), we just know more of it now. At no point has mathematics ever had the kind of serious upheaval you see in science after the introduction of new ideas that contradict old ideas, because an idea that was valid before will always remain valid. The worst we've seen was that some previous mathematicians were sloppy with their rigor, and we had to clean up some old ideas. But we've never had to throw out our previous conceptions the way physicists do every couple centuries.


It's much worse than that, actually. The economy is nonlinear. Linear systems are the sum of their parts, so reductionism works. If you try that in a nonlinear system it fails spectacularly. It becomes essentially impossible to analyze anything in isolation. Nothing can be analyzed except everything.

I know.

I already gave your point. You claim it is chaotic. The claim that there are too many linear systems to calculate together for any computer known to man is saying that even our oversimplifications are insufficient. I said "even by the oversimplified neoclassical theories" before I talked about the linear systems.

Ok, how about you two start putting your m,oney where your mouth is and asking me to elaborate on parts of the information on the official sites. I have sent Orwell a PM containing the Venus Project FAQ, along with other relevant information so come on.

Remember 3 rules:

1. If the question you ask has an answer or elaboration there, there is no point in asking me.

2. Give me exact details of where you got your enquiry, so I can easily find it myself and confirm you got it from OFFICIAL sources of The Venus Project and The Zeitgeist Movement. NOTHING from splinter groups or sites critical of the proposals and attempting to make a mockery of it or anything similar OFFICIAL SOURCES. Show me exactly where you got the statement you need answering or elaborating on. Coz I don't trust either of you not to lie.

3. I don't know the answer to absolutely everything. I will do my best to answer your questions, however if I cannot prvcide an answer I will direct the enquiry to those in a position of specialisation in that field. So obviously demanding from me an answer concerning quantum mechanics is an excersise in futility.

Let's get this party started.

Last edited by Adam-Anti-Um on 21 Feb 2010, 12:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.

You guys are keeping yourselves busy y'know... I've seen this thread get one more page since yesterday. o.O

I know, it's incredible. It's partly coz the deliberations are so long winded. Partly also coz either these ideas are arousing an incredible quantity of curiosity or controversy. I'd like to think that it's both. Something like this can never be explained breifly and easily. Especially if my audience is these guys.

Questions:

1. What civil engineers, city planners, computer scientists, programers, software engineers, and geologists/green technologists have proclaimed this project "feasible today" and where is their work?
2. How and on what principles and algorithms would the Venus Project Supercomputer function?
3. Are there blueprints for this supercomputer?

What MP said. I read the FAQ, and I really can't find anything concrete in it. All of it is just vague hand-waving. The particular example that he gave is probably the single most disturbing thing- in the FAQ, the question is basically "Give me some technical details" and the answer is "Oh, we can do it." Nonsense. The mathematics is sufficient to demonstrate that it cannot be done.

The one thing I find interesting is the assertion that the current system will collapse, thus leading to the implementation of the new system. Again, I am violently reminded of the Communists here (the whole "recurrent crises of capitalism will lead to a proletarian uprising" bit), and this is a major reason why I don't generally take communists seriously. I really don't see any evidence that our current system is bound to collapse. It certainly does not seem likely to do so in the immediate future. And even if the system did collapse, there is absolutely no reason to assume there would suddenly be mass demand towards some obscure technocratic pipe dream. The more likely scenario following a hypothetical catastrophic collapse is that a lot of of people are pretty much screwed, and the survivors pick up the pieces and go on with some modified version of the old system.

The Venusites seem to be pure techno-utopians.

The most substance I can find is a bunch of suggestions involving technologies that are still concepts. It seems few indepedent engineers or technologists have really reviewed the Venus Project's proposals - which seems to be technology 1 + technology 2 + ... technology 4500 will somehow yield the way to a greater society.

See what I mean:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7euHuYhtWJw[/youtube]

The odd thing this genius fails to mention in his video is that:

1) LOTS of (presently) unprofitable ideas are developed by the state-sector (particularly the Pentagon) - so long as there is a chance of better returns later.
2) Few of the specifics of these ideas have ever been presented and blueprints.
3) Few external engineers, scientists, software engineers, computer scientists, computer programers, environmental scientists, green technologists, or geologists have viewed Jacques ideas.
4) Venusites have a near religious offendability and need to have their ideas sheltered from critique.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIdiOMoXNNQ&NR=1[/youtube]

Fresco and his fellow evangelist fail to explain the supercomputer(s).

"Jacque, are you saying computer programers will run the world?" - Theo Chalmers (a conspiracy nut himself)

For you concerns about the stability of the ecnonomy, refer to ths video.

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?doc ... dum&hl=en#

My argument is simple. I'd like to forget everything else and just go to this simple series of statements:

1) The Venus Project entails a computer being in charge of resource management (premise)
2) A computer can't do anything if it doesn't have an algorithm for doing it (premise)
3) There is no algorithm for solving a high-order nonlinear dynamical system (premise)
4) The economy is a high-order nonlinear dynamical system (premise)
5) Therefore, there is no algorithm for allocating resources (by 3 and 4)
6) Therefore, a computer cannot perform this task (by 5 and 2)
7) Therefore, the Venus Project cannot succeed (by 6 and 1)

Now, this is a simple logical argument. You can only possibly disagree with my conclusion if you show a flaw in the logical structure of the argument or demonstrate that one of my premises is false. Have at it. If there is no mistake in the logical structure above, and all my premises are true, then I have just refuted the Venus Project beyond any conceivable rational disagreement.

Once you review all the information, and there is a lot of it, you will understand more.

And besides, Jacque Fresco is not a mathematician. That is why he delegates those tasks to those more capable.

Last edited by Adam-Anti-Um on 21 Feb 2010, 4:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.