30 ° progress

About a month later, the BALL OF ROBOTS will take place. It will be just a giant event - there will be an exhibition, a forum, a museum program and, most importantly, an international conference on robotics. In order to stir up interest, we will tell in each post about everything a little. But today I would like to start from far away from the theoretical part.

I just want to warn you that the topic is acute and controversial - about how to discuss the atomic bomb in 1942, so let's think about it a little and revise the topic of robotics - sometimes even jokingly, but within reason.

Mass culture

Today, the theme of robots occupies a rather strange position. It seems like all the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and even 70s robots were the coolest and most sought-after part of science fiction. Which is understandable - to make a mechanical person, means to release the present person from the routine. Even Socrates set this task as the main goal of our civilization.
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However, since the 1980s, when the technological level of industry has grown to mass robotization, robots somehow fall out of the mainstream. Already in Alien and Blade Runner - robots are uninteresting marginal outcasts. The science fiction genre is extremely politicized, it can be said that this is a real minefield. Therefore, in conditions of global political correctness, a drive attenuation occurs.

Even against the background of the phenomenal capabilities of computer graphics, which would seem to make the screen versions of futuristic extravaganzas of the 50-70s the most interesting and profitable business, in the West they prefer to shoot fairy tales, specially humbled and "debilized" - who saw "I, the robot" or "War of the Worlds" understand what I mean. Even the iconic Terminator managed to be removed simply by a miracle, there is a whole story - for ten years Cameron could not find the money for him, spat and took himself for a penny - without a fee (he sold the script for $ 1) and cut out all the special effects (liquid terminator, war in the future and all the pieces from the second part were in the first scenario).


Famous robots from Daniel Nyari

Contrary to logic in the 90s, they stopped talking about robots altogether. In 2000, automatic vacuum cleaners were called robots, and in our decade, the media perceive robots only as children's toys, deliberately ignoring even the glaring successes of Boston Dynamics. Well, if you think about it, you made a meakhnic ass for the army, and a complete copy of the person - who cares? Apparently only geeks like us.

Just look at the chart from google books to understand that this is not a clean thing:



The neglect of robots is obvious. This is with all the colorful themes and vivid "picture", which is so fond of the media. How can this be explained?

Such a paradox is usually explained with personal computers - they say that every house has a computer, then the Internet and robots have become vintage junk from the sixties, gathering dust in a closet of imagination with rocket packs, lunar expeditions and atomic bombs. The latter are just comparable in scale with robots, and what is interesting - at one time they gave exactly the same “media track” as the robots are now.

Few people know, but according to the official legend, the Soviet atomic project began with the bewilderment of the physicist Flerov (in whose honor the 114th element is named) - he certainly read all the materials on nuclear fission and in 1942 caught himself in a letter to Comrade Stalin: “ In all foreign journals, lack of any work on this. This silence is not the result of a lack of work ... In short, a seal of silence has been imposed, and this is the best indicator of what intense work is going on now abroad ... We all need to continue working on uranium . ”

Good analogy. The Manhattan project became visible only by a demonstrative lack of interest in the bomb, does this “non-interest” look like modern slur with robots? You will laugh, but it is very similar - here are two graphs from which the conclusion suggests itself that they have already done a humanoid robot in 1985 and classified it - which, of course, is an artistic metaphor, but I think it’s not very far from life.



The cold war is over, space has been turned down, nuclear weapons too - what does America spend on the military budget for the development of super-weapons? What megaproject is implementing now? They say that this is biofuel and ecology - "nanotechnology". Something I can not believe, but let's not guess.

Speed ​​of progress and singularity

It is impossible to talk about robotics without the overall context of progress. It is believed that progress is accelerating, and somehow strange, saying that for 40 thousand years, mankind moved with the speed of a horse, but over 50 years it suddenly accelerated to 17 km / s (Voyager).

However, this is all mass culture and it had the same opinion about progress in any period of time even in the 21st even in the 17th century - a person is always inclined to consider the past a dull boredom, torn by the shining progress of the last 50 years. You will find this point of view everywhere - even in China with its antiquities, even in England with the good old Victorian era. Typically, such a schedule is still crowned with the achievement of a “singularity” that will solve all problems in general.


Does it bother anyone that the compared phenomena are clearly not equivalent?

Scientists and science fiction writers understand by the notion of singularity that turning point, after which technical progress will accelerate and become so complicated that it will be inaccessible to our understanding, and the person himself will be freed from work so much that it will be beyond progress. The term was originally proposed by the American mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1993. He expressed the following idea: when a person creates a machine that will be smarter than a person, the story will become unpredictable, because it is impossible to predict the behavior of the intellect, superior to the human. Vindge suggested that this would happen in the first third of the 21st century, somewhere between 2005 and 2030.

2030 is actually not such an imaginary figure, it was confirmed by the US Congress . Yes, they had a meeting at which they decided that the mass production of robots and the associated singularity would come strictly on schedule. But there is talk about nanotechnology, which we will discuss in detail in the next article.

I think all this is some kind of aberration of consciousness.

Remember how the history of the Roman Empire or the French Revolution, described by Christians, is “the old regime”, there is simply a realm of decline and degradation, where people did not even wash. At the same time, it is obvious that typography was a big leap than the Internet, and the Roman Empire advanced far away from medieval obscurantism. On Habré it is not a ride, already because we all are familiar with Moore's law. I suppose it can be quite legally extrapolated to the whole technological evolution.



Anthropologists have shown that the human brain has not changed much since the appearance of the species. Everything else is a rapid advance in knowledge. That is, the person was just as smart and understood everything, the ideas of the Internet, robots or the internal combustion engine are trivial and were obvious even in ancient Greece. The idea of ​​a cellular or nuclear bomb is trivial. Another thing is to bring the idea to life.

But that 40,000 years ago, that now - the iron in our head is the same. Works on basic logic operations. If A = B and B = C then A = C. If there is logic, this instantly leads to a huge jump. Free will is born. It’s like a flight for a bird — it’s such a bonus in natural selection that it seems that all of humanity came from a small population (5,000 individuals) of the first intelligent individuals who multiplied and crushed everyone. And if the birds have a natural size limit, then there is no place to go away from the intellect - picking out from under the stone, digging a hole, driving it into a trap, knocking it on the fly with a stone.



And the whole history of mankind is a shock wave of civilization, a tsunami, sweeping away everything. A series of technological revolutions to overturn the life of each generation. It cannot be otherwise. Never any form of life, penetrating into the new range, will not chew snot. She will take the cash register at the rate of crystallization of the supersaturated solution. Reproduction is a progression. Geometric. Thinking - too. If a person thought of picking up a silicon ax, then tomorrow he would take a silicon processor, if he thought of pulling the skin on himself, tomorrow he would jump in a spacesuit on the moon. What is the difference then? Thinking is - thinking is not. If there is - think of it. By historical standards - instantly.


future?

This "wave" will not stop anything. Remember how many cultural breakdowns were only in the twentieth century, and what? World War II destroyed entire countries, but we mastered nuclear technology, radar, missiles, computers. Khrushchev was a fool, but with him they began to make TV sets, Yeltsin was an alcoholic at all, and the internetization began with him. Each of us has already experienced a dozen technological revolutions and didn’t lead usta - personal computers, Internet, cellular, smartphones. For centuries, our ancestors only dreamed of such things, and we immediately took them for granted.

Do you manage progress?

However, here begins the subtleties to which I lead. If you look at the whole, then the tsunami of progress really sweeps away everything in its path, on a common scale this is a completely uniform process - but if you look closely you will always see that there are areas lagging behind and rushing ahead. After all, progress is a man-made business - it is possible to slow down - as with genetics and cybernetics in the USSR, or to push it, as with the Internet and nuclear physics in the USA.

For example, the atomic bomb is a technology of the mid-fifties, and even the sixties. Man’s entry into space is the 1980s. Hence their strong influence on the culture - the swimsuit was called the “bikini” after the atoll on the atomic bomb test because it was an explosion from the future. Not to mention the superearly flight to the moon, which in fact only delayed the exploration of the cosmos and the moon for fifty years, if not a hundred.


Or retro?

We now turn to the practical part and put our progress on the microscope slide.

Where to look specifically? What is the core of technical progress? Where is its essence? Take a look around, this essence - "information technology". Logic, mathematics, language, writing, typography, encyclopedias, archives, newspapers, telegraph, television, Internet, computers. One word information. Information is progress by and large - what is this, if not the accumulation and processing of information?

We have the same supercomputer in our head for 40,000 years, but the whole “evolution” during this time is the evolution of the means of communication. Because this computer is locked in a skull box with a sooooo slow “voice modem”. In fact, people are like beacons in the dark, just blinking Morse code to each other. And even this Morsech is the greatest achievement. Imagine what it is - to invent a language from nothing? But writing, manuscripts, books, a printing press, newspapers, encyclopedias, and books - all these are fantastic breakthroughs and only they, in fact, moved progress.

But this also contradicts our perception, right? Information technologies are perceived as a cherry on the cake, and not something basic. Imagine New York 1985.


Michael Jackson has already begun to turn white, but before the Internet even as before the moon - 10 years.

It seems everything is the same - skyscrapers, taxis, advertising, subway, people in jeans. But. Cellular communications - zero! The Internet is zero! Comp - zero! Barbarism? No, this is the same New York, just the figure is always lagging behind and will lag behind the external attributes of material culture. Remember Ancient Rome - everything seems to be there, but there are no printed books or newspapers yet, although the society has been ready for them for a long time. It resembles a supersaturated solution, waiting for its focus of crystallization. For example, modern cars - everything seems to be already there, but a driver is still required, which already looks like a vintage flaw in Tesla - the first real autopilot for cars was created in 1992!

So get ready, at the singularity stage, progress makes a dead loop and ... information technologies become the material basis for the production of completely physical robots. A sort of frozen in iron and polymers thought. Approximately as personalki.

Progress chart

So why not see how exactly the world is moving towards the creation of robots. What inventions were steps on this path and how much did each of them increase overall productivity? What schedule will we see - flat or steep as an Olympic springboard? And most importantly - how to build a progress chart? What parameters to take?

I think no one will argue that the main "momentary" indicator of progress is labor productivity. It is measured in "operations per hour." In turn, O / H is the ratio of the amount of goods and services produced to the amount of resources spent on their production. That is, when we need less resources per unit of production, productivity increases. Industrial inventions are primarily designed to raise the productivity indicator - in short, our case.

Fortunately, statistics figures do not need to be collected by yourself; they are handled by the Ministry of Labor. Well, or should be engaged - on the website of our Ministry of Labor there are no statistics at all (shame and shame!). That's why I took the American one from this table . They also don’t have sugar - they were found only from 1947 to 2011 and then in relative values. That is, 100 points is 2005 - all the rest is interest from this year. But for the construction of the schedule is enough. Now we note on the chart the key inventions and voila:


Thanks for the picture Alexander Dragin

When I saw this schedule myself, I was pretty discouraged - it clearly contradicts the whole of my article - the schedule rises sharply up after 1995! What is clear is that the post-industrial economy began, and with the release of Windows, mass virtualization of workflow began, which accelerated workflow and management, and management itself became the backbone of the economy pushing industry.

This is the real science - to conduct research and get an unexpected result! It took me forty minutes to figure out a dotted line and understand that the schedule is not something that goes up, but sags in general. And quite funny - from the pager to the iPhone. In fact, there were much more inventions - but I had to shorten the list for readability, anyone can get it in kamentakh

Let me assume that over large periods of time we will see even greater fluctuations, but in general progress will always go along an inclined straight line. On my chart it's 30 degrees - well, that's the promised joke)

What's next?

How to continue the schedule after reaching the singularity? It is difficult to say - first, a mass release of anthropoid robots will be created, then these robots will begin to produce themselves. This first devalues ​​the cost of the robots, and then devalues ​​the production itself as such. Then, artificial intelligence will begin to replace human, for example, design offices and scientific institutes.


Million Chinese will be replaced by these robots at the factory for the production of iPhones

But computers in the twentieth century have already done this - replacing millions of people and, as you can see, no jumps, the system balanced everything. Even unwanted workers in Europe and the States were fired smoothly and without disasters. And the replacement of people by robots will be served even softer - in fact their silence is the first stage of the velvet revolution. First, the robots will be silent, then they will start releasing cute fluffy animals and only a real mechanical person will step on the soft prepared soil. This "little step for the robot, but a giant leap for humanity" will go like clockwork.

We are on the verge of a technological revolution that seems incredible. But I am convinced that, like all genuine revolutions, it will not even be noticed. Remember the appearance of the Internet - it turned every person’s life on the planet, turned culture upside down and made a revolution in general. But we took his appearance for granted, the Internet was waiting, and I even remember my first impression of online in 1998 and it was surprisingly unexpected, it can be squeezed into two words "It's time!"

The introduction of robots will also go smoothly, the performance schedule will just continue to go up smoothly, and we will only sigh with relief when buying our first robot - “it's time for a while”.