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.
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
Very true, and that’s the reason why governments being “pro-business” (as opposed to “anti-trust”) is just pouring gas on the fires of inequity. Governments are supposed to regulate, tax, and incentivize businesses to act in a way that benefits the country overall, something we seem to have totally lost sight of in the USA decades ago.
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.
We’re trying pretty hard to slow down EV and green energy adoption as much as possible in my country, that count?
Well, on the one hand, we’re trying some very heavy-handed bureaucratic strategies to prop up O&G and to undermine domestic green alternatives.
But, on the other hand, we’re fucking up all the major international suppliers of O&G while incentivizing the world’s manufacturing powerhouse to spam green energy grids across the underdeveloped world at below-cost in order to build out a 21st century trade network.
So it’s a double-edged sword, and we’re just pinwheeling around with that thing.
Yep, apparently Cuba is undergoing the fastest green energy transition of any nation in history thanks to our fuckery, so this sword probably has like 8 edges at least.
Hmm yes I can definitely see a formulaically determined tax rate serving as the break
We need that for wealth as well, ie, wealth caps. Younger too rich? Taxes go up to 100% 9f income until you’re below the limit again
Yeah, this is something ive thought ab9ut too. Something like a tax rate that approaches 100% the more you make/own, so that you reach a pt of diminishing returns. The tax money would need to go elsewhere than the national budget though, so as to not just move the dangerous concentration of wealth elsewhere.
We need that for wealth as well, ie, wealth caps.
The perpetual struggle of any human-administered system is in how you keep the agents of the system (those implementing the policy) aligned with the principles (those setting the policy). Because we did have high tax rates and nationalization plans and even outright communist manifestos floating around the country eighty years ago. And then they were systematically sabotaged and dismantled by bureaucrats more aligned with the monied interests than the voting public.
In the modern day, you can’t even get a ballot amendment passed on majority (even super-majority) vote without a court casually overturning it, a legislature refusing to implement it, or the executive to enforce it.
Even something overwhelmingly popular, like high-speed mass transit or national health care or the policing of pedophile super-predators, is neglected on a bipartisan basis time and time and time again.
Who
WatchesTaxes theWatchmenTaxmen, so to speak? What kind of social organizing principle gets a large bureaucracy of people committed to redistributing wealth suited up and on the ground to do what must be done?
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 its 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.
Yep
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.
To add to this, when a lot of people say “it’ll cause a negative feedback loop” technically they’re referring to a positive feedback loop, where the feedback makes the change worse instead of correcting it.
Positive feedback is actually insanely useful in the right application. A great example is a light switch. There’s positive feedback for each position and it’s inherently unstable in the “middle” where even a slight nudge forces the switch over fully to the off or the on position.
Also Schmitt triggers for electronics. That’s basically how all computers work under the hood. Once you cross a threshold positive feedback takes over and forced the output from rail to rail (0V or ground, to 5V rail supply for example)
In fact most amplifiers use negative feedback because if you had positive feedback you would end up with your amplifier screaming at the top of its lungs (that’s also why if you put an instrument close to a speaker it causes positive feedback and amp screech)
“it’ll cause a negative feedback loop” technically they’re referring to a positive feedback loop
I’ve heard the terms “vicious”/“virtuous” cycle kicked around.
Nah. Take out the greedy fuckers that make money out of making technology miserable and give me fully automatic space gay communism.
What we actually need to govern is management stupidity.
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.
Where’s this exponentially accelerating train of technology and how can I board it? All I see nowadays is this buggy predictive text engine.
There’s an old riddle - How is a mouse when it spins?
Tap for spoiler
The higher the fewer
It’s not been confirmed, but it is believed that the weights of a governor was known as a mouse, and so it means that the higher they get, the further out the balls are, and so the fewer rotations they make
We 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.
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.
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.
One thing you can’t accuse Doctorow of is a lack of class consciousness or failing to consider the plight of workers in a wide range of fields.
The centaur/reverse centaur metaphor instead is aimed at addressing OP’s misguided suggestion that we need to throttle tech as such, by instead inviting us to reflect which tech empowers people to do what they want and what tech enslaves people to do what someone else wants. We don’t need to “slow down” the former, and we need to smash the hell out of the latter, but most importantly we need to stop lumping them all together in the same bucket as “tech” or “AI” or whatever.
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.deleted by creator
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.
Good catch, fixed
Interesting idea, impossible to implement without creating problems ten times worse.
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?I suggest we get some Frankensteins, and have Lenny “The Guvnor” McLean.
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.
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.
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.
