Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: First Steps to Self Sufficiency Message-ID: Date: 6 Dec 90 07:03:50 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Cincinnati, Cin'ti., OH Lines: 59 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In article ems%nanotech@princeton.edu writes: >TRANSPORTATION > >Nanokit number three could convert your automobile to run on hydrogen >and add a water cracking plant to your basement industry. Or perhaps [ etc. ] >COMMUNICATION > >This is a stickler. While not strictly necessary for self-sufficiency, >it is an ability we baseline humans won't want to give up. Yet it I admit to having been struck by the odd contrast between your treatment of transportation and communication. You talk about communication as something which we will want to preserve for perhaps frivolous reasons, while physical mobility survives as some unquestioned necessity? Physical mobility is just another form of communication, an expensive, dangerous, method with long latency but high throughput. So everything you say about the one goes for the other. Communication will remain strictly necessary for self-sufficiency. Without communication, conflict will ensue. (Even with it, conflict will ensue, but decreasing asymptotically to zero with increasing communication.) Even if everyone is "self-sufficient", something will always be scarce and desired, and people will want to compete for it. Thus if you shut yourself off entirely from all communication with the outside, eventually your neighbors will attack you, or turn your home into a national park, or pass a law saying you can't do this or that. Knowledge will also continue to increase forever, and you will naturally want to share in it. >requires cooperation. Communication protocols and hardware interface >standards will have to be agreed upon. Perhaps we'll give everyone >a personal ethernet address. Protocols and standards are necessary only because we live in Information Poverty. If you have enough information processing power available, you can afford to cope with chaos. For example, if you have a computer that is smart enough to figure out how to talk to all the other computers, you don't necessarily have to care whether all those other computers are perfectly standardized. Today, of course, nobody can afford such a waste of computer power, because it is too scarce (which is what I call Information Poverty). Thus we realize a high return by investing in standards, since they reduce information-processing overhead. Standards are constraining, however, and people don't like constraints. Most people would do things whatever way they like, rather than according to someone else's schedule, agenda, specification, etc. -- Dan Mocsny Snail: Internet: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu Dept. of Chemical Engng. M.L. 171 dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu University of Cincinnati 513/751-6824 (home) 513/556-2007 (lab) Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0171 Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com