lack of improving quality of life, rise of the non-DNA replicators

I learned about economics and have come to the opinion that the average American has not worked to improve his life or the lives of others since the 1950's, and that everything that has occurred since the transistor was invented is about manipulation and control of others, not about improving the lot of humanity on Earth, let alone the biosphere.  The lack of usefulness includes nearly all publicly traded companies that have done so much to destroy the biosphere, control Washington at the expense of all humanity and the median American's wealth, and above all to enable the manipulative to achieve wealth at the expense of those who sought to improve life.  Blind competition between people is what is giving rise to the machines. As the free energy from fossil fuels dries up, the competition will heat up and evolution of all memetic systems (including DNA) will lead to the end of the dominance of DNA in converting energy sources into copies of the replicators.

"Good To Eat" by Marvin Harris and Aztec cannibalism

He tries very hard, and fails, to NOT say the unusual preponderance (for large states that need slaves and tax-payers) of cannibalism after battles for the Aztecs was NOT from the the lack of domesticated animals.  Lack of these meant that the best way to get the grain back to the capital along with some extra sorely-needed protein was to have an occassional war with the outer provinces that rebelled.  And that rebellion was built into the system because provinces knew their grain harvests might have to be marched by prisoners to the capital, and then the prisoners eaten for their protein.  Without the wheel, killing was minimized until the capital was reached. Religion being the mechanism of the procedure should carries no more weight in trying to discover "why" than it did for the middle east cultures despising pig as soon as forest disappeared, and hindus considering the cow sacred as soon as population exploded (it's more efficient for milk and plowing than eating).  The whole point of the book is to show that odd thoughts do not lead to odd food taboos, but that society-wide food production efficiency solutions lead to intelligent taboos.  A thing he finds strange is women in poor countries tabooing protien and certain foods during pregnancy, but it takes him a few pages to say "it might be because it leads to smaller children and smaller adults who need less protein and fewer calories".

bat radar, making an echo-vision device for the blind

1)  They have a muscle in the ear connected to the stirrup bone to turn off the ear's hearing when sending out the loud pulses.  Up to 50 times a second.
2) They can increase pulse rate when needed
3) The pulses reduce in frequency over the duration of the pulse to identify how far away echos come from. 
4) The beginning of the pulse might be constant to determine how fast the target is moviing via doppler effect.
5) ears move rapidly for an unknown reason
6) can distinguish from other bat echos possibly simply by the brain filtering out any received "pictures" of the world that do not make sense

I've thought about making an ultrasound device for the blind.  Place emitter in the high the center of the chest.  Cut received frequencies down to hearing range.  Use 4 receiving microphones, 2 on each side of hips or shoulders and about 6 inches apart vertically.  Then 4 earphones, 2 in front of each ear, about 1 inch apart.  So vertical and horizontal triangulation is magnified thanks to greater separation of the microphones than the earphones.  Also use 1) and 3) above. I would make 3) follow notes on a keyboard.  A loud low frequency note would be something big, further away.  Maybe use 2 octaves, 24 notes.

Or make the emitter, recievers, and headphones all part of a hat.

Optimal control by direct numerial solution

Sometime I want to learn this stuff ( http://www.schwartz-home.com/RIOTS/ and http://www.sbsi-sol-optimize.com/index.htm and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellman_equation )  and see how it might be combined with compression/pattern recognition techniques to make A.I. A smart machine seems to need the following:

1) desire (setpoint)
2) environment
3) modeling/predicting/compressing 2)
4) identifying which inputs (or levers inside the model) can be controlled for maximizing 1)
5) controlling the identified inputs or levers for maximizing 1)

Item 5) is called "optimal control", the goal of the links above.  Item 4) needs to be defined before 4 can be applied.  This seems to be what's missing in automated A.I. that seeks to maximize profit from a general environment.  It seems 3) and 5) have a lot of research behind them.   Maybe evolution (competition for max energy sources) has preprogrammed animals  to possess 4).  But humans seem good at taking the generalization a step higher.  The modeling part, if HTM/CLA methods are correct, needs nested prediction competitors, hierarchical.  It's interesting that SNOPT in the 2nd link above uses sparse techniques to solve non-linear optimization problems, and that the Bellman method solves the problem working backwards from the endpoint, and that the cost function that needs to be minimized is a Lagrangian and Hamilton's name is also attached (Bellman's equation is the discrete verson of the Hamiliton method).

Brain to CPU comparison

I want to compare energy-efficiency of today's computers to brains.  Looking at today's CPUs, I see 22 nm process for the Intel Haswell processor, having 1.4 billion transistors in 177 m^2 die size at 35 W max at 3 GHz.  So there are 4 transistors needed per NAND gate.  A neuron is 100 Hz max, with about 10,000 synapses. Each synapse is much more complex than a NAND gate but I'll consider all the advantages of CPU like 50 times more transistors firing at a time because more neurons are always in standby mode thanks to sparse encoding discoveries. But most significantly (but related to the sparseness) is that the brain memory is within the brain, whereas the CPU offloads it.  This hurts the speed of the CPU and doubles power consumption cost.  There are 100 billion neurons per brain operating at about 35 W max. 

Today's desktop CPU:  1.4 billion transistors / 4 trans per NAND * 3 GHz = 1 E18 comparisons per second

Brains:  100 billion * 100 Hz * 10,000 = 1 E17. 

So computers seem to be very roughly 10 times more efficient as brains in terms of energy use, and exist in a much smaller package.  Humans cost about $100,000 to raise to the age of 18, whereas the CPU is $200 dollars, and can be focused to a specific task and changed to any other specific task immediately, without making errors and working about 20 times more per week. 

The brain is a reactive pattern recognition system, plus an optimization seeker who's method of operation is a mystery, very far from a CPU, so the comparison is difficult, but the CPU can use the internet as its memory.  Even a small hard disk can accurately retrieve every biography ever written, along with the DNA sequence of every author who wrote those books.

The future of the dollar and inflation

 

If 2% inflation is the target and if technology advances continue to provide 2% efficiency increases each year, and if the world economy expands 2% per year, then 6% excess money printing can go on forever...as long as the dollar does not lose market share in the world GDP increase.  Of course the BRICs and Europeans are not going to put up with this free ride the U.S. dollar is getting forever.  Interest rates will soon rise and game will be up. Dollars will come home and the pressure will be so great that finally the money printing will go to main street instead of buying toxic assets off the banks balance sheets...but with the dollars getting on main street and with dollars coming home...look out for inflation, especially in oil and Chinese products. 

DNA can't compete with the machines (amazon post)

Electrical motors are about 1,000 times more efficient per energy and capital expense than muscle. Computers are about 10 million times more efficient per energy and capital expense than brains, if the task to be performed can be programmed. The goal of evolution seems to be to utilize available energy and matter sources to create copies of the machine(s) that do the "utilization". This is based on the physics "principle of minimum total potential energy" (see wiki) and I do not know why evolution theorists have not identified this as the "meaning of life" ....i.e. simply following physics. DNA-based machines have been the dominant form of "excess energy extraction" for most of Earth's history, but clearly something new is a-foot. Since 10% of all humans that have ever lived are alive today, statistics indicates we should not be shocked if we are in the midst of humanity's biggest and final days. I'm referring to the "anthropic principle" and "Doomsday Argument". Silicon solar cells are about 100 times more efficient than plants at capturing sunlight energy, and a world covered with their blackness would increase global warming which increases wind speeds for even more energy-capture from wind turbines. DNA is water-based and operating at ambient temperatures and pressures, but our economic system now has access to much higher temperatures and pressures to smelt silicon and other metals, create super-strong carbon-carbon bonds like nanotubes (which are functionally superior in every replicator-needed way when compared to the C-H bonds of organics), and many other things. DNA needs to move ions to create electrical impulses while metals can carry the influence with electrons which weigh thousands of times less. This is the basis of DNA's inability to compete our machines when it comes to capturing photons for energy, utilize that energy to move matter, and to think quickly in how to do it all in the most efficient way. If we want to improve humanity's fate during this transition, I recommend a world-wide economy that we can all agree on that issues more money only to societies that increase "happiness per median person" and to starve societies out of the economic system via currency restriction (cessation of loans and an increase in taxes like duties) that try to devalue their own population (and thereby everyone else if their is free trade) by over-stressed work conditions caused by an EXCESS of machine-intelligent workers who are blind to the negative consequences of their pain and thoughtless competition AGAINST the rest of humanity, in pursuit of cheaper "things" that make everyone's life more costly (the free market under basic rule of law, especially with free trade, optimizes marketplace transactions but only at the expense of the entire system even if most tragedy of the commons are taken into account). I am not advocating a restriction on education or work, but they should be done only for fun and in pursuit of fun. We've had 1,000 times more technology and 30 times more energy per person than we did 100 years ago, and yet we have had maybe only a 10x factor improvement in quality of life. If we were COOPERATING and a little more intelligent, we should have control of these machines and utopia should already be here. But no, blind evolution is the heaviest hand at work here, going under the names of democracy and free markets. Even the most technologically-advanced countries like the miraculous South Korea do not indicate the future is looking good: South Korea has the highest young-adult suicide and alcohol consumption in the world. This is the fate of the world thanks to free trade and blind competition that seeks only to raise GDP. A "real" and "productive" GDP per median person is the goal we should seek while using a fixed-quantity (crypto) currency, although "happiness" would be a lot better than GDP because our material wealth per median person is already high and happiness seems so distant to so many.