[moldbug]

Stross answers his own question - he just doesn't want to go there. Turn your back on the Enlightenment's ideological values. Until the 21st century can accomplish this, it'll stay a tired, stale clone of the 20th.

SF and even fantasy are existentially dependent on plausibility. The more rules you break, the more you have to obey the ones you don't break. How can anyone find Enlightenment values plausible in 2012? What Enlightenment experiment hasn't been tried? Which one succeeded?

There's a lovely bit of counterreality in one of the original Gibson novels - Count Zero I think - in which US housing projects (UK: "council housing") have become dynamic centers of green innovation, with windmills on the roof and everything. Could you believe this in 1983? Just barely. From 2010, the reality:

http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-gre...

Don't miss the arguments (between cops!) about whether or not it was safe to take the elevators. What do your Enlightenment values have to say about that?

The next century (or two) will be about figuring out how to either (a) change human beings into something else, or (b) reconcile technical change with the grim, unspeakable reality of the human condition. That's a condition human beings understood much better before the Enlightenment. You certainly won't find any Cabrini-Greens in, say, Louis XIV's France...

[stcredzero]

Turn your back on the Enlightenment's ideological values.

I think that would make for some interesting stories. I could imagine the adventures of, say, a Bayesian Conspiracy surrounded by a burgeoning idiocracy that was largely sexting in class while the Enlightenment was being covered in history. (So it's not so much that society turns their back, they just don't get it in the first place.) This would be kind of an update of Larry Niven's Fallen Angels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_...

You certainly won't find any Cabrini-Greens in, say, Louis XIV's France...

Are you really claiming that slums entirely arose in the 3 to 4 generations prior to the revolution? Was there a huge pre-industrial revolution shift of population from rural to urban accompanied by huge sovereign debt? (This could be, I just don't remember enough about demographics.)

I would point out that he presided over a country where slavery was legal. (Though in his attempt at reform, he mandated that only Roman Catholics could own them and that slaves should be baptized.)

[moldbug]

Concentration camps and gulags excluded, I don't think there has ever been a human society - anywhen, anywhere - as degraded as the 20th-century tower block/project, a pure product of Enlightenment thought.

It's useful to go back and compare apples to apples when we compare the 19th-century "slum" to the 20th-century slum. You can read Robert Roberts on the Edwardian slum, for instance - a world which he grew up in:

http://www.julielorenzen.net/slum.html

Roberts: However, approximately sixty years after Engels wrote his book, Roberts described the working class as almost being obsessed with cleanliness. A dirty home or even a front step meant lower social status. Roberts wrote “Most people kept what they possessed clean in spite of squalor and ever-invading dirt. Some houses sparkled.”

Or read Riis' How The Other Half Lives:

http://archive.org/details/howotherhalfliv00riisgoog

You can even find an unbiased view of Southern slavery (admittedly milder than Louis XIV's Caribbean version):

http://books.google.com/books/about/A_south_side_view_of_sla...

You won't find anything like:

It never ceased to amaze me how the people could live like that~dirty diapers & sanitary napkins in the hallways, urine & feces everywhere, cockroaches scurrying from one apartment to the other and when you had the unfortunate luck of answering a call on the 11th floor of one of these hell-holes was horrifying! Just going in to see the "moving walls" and the chicken bones on the floor, the stove on for heat even though it was already 140 degrees in there and the stained couches & dirty mattresses on the floor where at least three or four little kids were napping with the roaches! Good times...

Lack of nice material things is one thing. Even in Cabrini-Green they had PlayStations. Louis XIV didn't have no PlayStation. Human degradation is another - and Enlightenment experiments hold the prize. (Especially if you count the "Soviet experiment" to its credit.)

[stcredzero]

Human degradation is another - and Enlightenment experiments hold the prize. (Especially if you count the "Soviet experiment" to its credit.)

I see where you're coming from. That's hardly a reason to throw out all of the >values< of the Enlightenment, however. I doubt Catherine the Great would've approved of Cabrini Green, and none of the Enlightenment experiments would've been conducted the same way had people in the past known what we know now about economics and game theory. On the other hand, we know these things. We have decades additional history about the pitfalls of unintended consequences.

In any case, I think this is a bit underhanded, if unintentionally so. First comes the implicit assumption of a not-widely understood interpretation of "Enlightenment" followed by the attachment of horrors of unintended consequences to the term.

It's fallacy to attach unintended consequences a set of values, absent an analysis of implementation.

Is this going to turn into another Libertarian flame-fest?

[moldbug]

Really? I think results are always a good reason to question values. Note that libertarianism is an Enlightenment ideology too, just an older one (19th-century liberalism).

We know these things, so what are we doing about them? Replacing projects with Section 8? That would be fine if the problem was architecture, not Enlightenment ideology. If you read that cop thread you'll see what they think of Section 8. Here's what the Atlantic thinks:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american...

It's best to examine all these Enlightenment experiments from the standpoint of the debate between their critics and proponents before the experiment was tried.

If the results bear out the critics, not the proponents, what on earth are we doing when we persist with the experiment? Was it really an experiment at all? Scientific thinking may be better than nonscientific thinking, but nonscientific thinking is better than pseudoscientific thinking...

[stcredzero]

Really? I think results are always a good reason to question values.

So then 911 invalidates all the teachings of Islam. The children's crusade invalidates all of christianity? Ridiculous, and hardly examples of careful reasoning.

It's best to examine all these Enlightenment experiments from the standpoint of the debate between their critics and proponents before the experiment was tried.

Why? I suspect it's best for you and the particular axe you have to grind.

If the results bear out the critics...

The results always bear out the critics. The question is really how many ways of ruling a country have been tried, and what has there been to show for it. As far as that goes, everything has been a mishmash.

Scientific thinking may be better than nonscientific thinking, but nonscientific thinking is better than pseudoscientific thinking...

If you'd be sincere in this, then please be clearer about causality and causal relationships specifically with respect to >values<. I find your posts remarkably devoid of the specifics here. If you don't have concrete causal relationships, then your argument is just emotional manipulation by trying to link horrible things to ideology you oppose.

In general, meddlers with too much power who are too sure of themselves have caused untold misery, and it gets worse as technology amplifies our power. I'm not so sure particular ideologies are to blame so much as that general circumstance.

[moldbug]

"Christianity" and "Islam" are historical clades of theological doctrine, not "value systems" in the same sense as "left" versus "right" or "revolutionary" and "conservative." For instance, Christianity contains both the Anabaptist republic of Thomas Muenzer and the Spanish Inquisition. These can be classified as left and right extremes just as easily as Stalin and Hitler.

Left-right polarity is also seen in historical Islam (9/11 is not a product of Islam, but of Western revolutionary nationalism with a thin Islamic veneer), as well as even more divergent histories (eg, classical Korea). I have no doubt that if there are intelligent, gregarious aliens anywhere in the galaxy, they divide themselves into revolutionaries and conservatives.

There are only three ways of ruling a country. Aristotle, who had access to the histories of hundreds if not thousands of classical city-states whose annals are now of course lost, described them: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy.

Monarchy is the null hypothesis. The vast majority of historical governments have been primarily monarchical, often with some admixture of aristocracy. Pure aristocracy is much rarer. Democracy is difficult to even define (most nominal democracies, certainly including ours, are in fact aristocratic), extremely rare if it does exist, and commonly associated (as in the Greek case) with national if not civilizational decay in the near future.

An example of thinking about causality would be the French decision to cede Saint-Domingue its independence. Critics (inherently conservative) of this decision would postulate one kind of future for the new Haiti; proponents (inherently revolutionary) would postulate quite another. Of course, at the time this or any similar such decision had large numbers of very eloquent critics and proponents; so their arguments are easily discovered, if not obvious already.

(Or if you'd prefer to think in terms of Cabrini-Green, it's really not difficult to imagine what Elizabethan intellectuals would make of Cabrini-Green.)

Obviously, this historiographic practice accords with the basic scientific principle of judging an experiment by criteria established in advance.

It's a shame most people don't decide what historical ideologies are "discredited" by a rigorous and objective standard such as this. Instead, the standard is the inevitable one: the winner is always right. This is the simple, yet remarkably practical, basis on which our supposedly rational faith in the Enlightenment rests.

[srconstantin]

First, most poor people still don't live in projects. Second, I don't know if degradation matters more than material possessions.

[ChuckMcM]

I think Stross misses the ability to draw inspiration from 'good' stuff happening. I've challenged my SF writing friends on occasion to start with some change that really flips the bit. Two interesting starting points are;

Unlimited energy - Lets say Fusion or something like it finally comes around and now using a couple of hundred megawatts for a an individual a month isn't out of the ordinary. How does that change things? Imagine that you can install giant chillers in the ocean and regulate its temperature regardless of surface air temperature.

Unlimited Biology - lets say we actually figure out how cells work, right down to every single chemical, its role, its action, its reaction. We gain the ability to arbitrarily rewrite every cell in our bodies, ok so perfect health for everyone, no more 'genetic disease', no more 'aging'. What is the world like in that scenario? Do we stay human formed? Do we keep our emotions? Things that we evolved for use as cave people, do they still serve us? Fight or flight instinct?

Its 'easier' in some ways to start from 'now' and delete things and write about their loss than to add new things. Its the latter stuff we don't see as much in SF.

[stcredzero]

I think Stross misses the ability to draw inspiration from 'good' stuff happening. I've challenged my SF writing friends on occasion to start with some change that really flips the bit. Two interesting starting points are;

    - Unlimited energy
    - Unlimited Biology

These both have big potentials for bad thing happening as well. I think Unlimited Biology has already been done a lot, however. I think it's so prone to weirdness that it tends toward dystopian visions. Also, a lot of this territory was covered in the 20th century.

Perhaps there's inspiration to be drawn from good stuff happening despite the tremendous potential for bad?

[ChuckMcM]

Perhaps the challenge then is to imagine the mechanism / property by which the bad thing is averted and the good succeeds. In a classical twist one would have the protagonist struggle against the bad thing, nearly lose, and then through a series of heroic actions over come to achieve goodness.

For me, that has been one of the interesting parts of SF is to see how people imagine we might over come either a temptation to do evil, or intrinsic evil.

[pjscott]

If you have nigh-unlimited energy -- and crazy people do too -- then planets become remarkably big targets. And space habitats become a practical alternative. That could be an interesting setting, and remarkably non-dystopian.

[stcredzero]

What do you mean by "nigh-unlimited?" Even if you have a store of energy that doesn't run out, thermodynamics will bite you if you try to use too much of it at once.

planets become remarkably big targets.

Even 1970's tech has access to huge amounts of energy for targeting planets from space, if all you want to do is to destroy stuff.

And space habitats become a practical alternative. That could be an interesting setting, and remarkably non-dystopian

"Burning Man in the Oort Cloud" has been done. There's still a lot of potential there, though.

[uvdiv]

"Unlimited energy - Lets say Fusion or something like it finally comes around and now using a couple of hundred megawatts for a an individual a month isn't out of the ordinary. How does that change things? Imagine that you can install giant chillers in the ocean and regulate its temperature regardless of surface air temperature."

This is the wrong question. Energy isn't limited any more than any other industrial product; the cheaper it is to manufacturer physical things, the cheaper it is to harness energy (and the cheaper it becomes). And conversely, in most uses of energy, you have a lot more "work" to do assembling whatever it is that uses the energy, than whatever harnesses it. It's really a problem of industry itself; and the more efficient that gets (in a fully-automated, AI-controlled industry -- many orders of magnitude), the more available it becomes. To get abundant energy you need industrial wealth (and vice versa); energy isn't an isolated problem and isn't the important one.

And on this note, there's practically no magic in fusion power. They can't drastically undercut "primitive" fission reactors, because much their infrastruture would be identical (heat exchangers, steam generators, power generation, the power grid...) Add up the costs of modern power, and fusion also carries most of them. It's like a "factor-of-two" miracle in the most optimistic fantasy -- not an order-of-magnitude, not earth-shattering magic. (Less optimistically, I don't see how anything like tokamaks or laser ICF machines can be anything but more complicated and costly than conventional power, and I haven't see any physically-sound alternatives.)

Sure, the fuel is "cheap and abundant" (if you fantasize D+D fusion becoming technically viable -- it's not so if you try the far-easier D+T using lithium-bred tritium) -- but that's exactly the wrong solution, because again, the costs are all elsewhere, on the physically-building-things part of the equation.

Heat rejection can be very serious. The current world looks like ~10^13 watts direct, anthropogenic heating (basically "energy use"), compared to a radiative forcing of ~10^15 W of anthropogenic global warming (closest figure of merit I believe) and ~10^17 W total terrestrial irradiation. (N.B. the greenhouse effect is a pretty huge "amplifier" of anthropogenic heating -- burning a ton of coal yields a certain amount of heat directly, but some 5 orders of magnitude more heat indirectly through AGW (if you integrate over the 10^3-10^4 year atmospheric residence time... don't quote me on this, I'm unsure)). Greenhouse heating is solvable, but at a couple orders of magnitude higher power consumption (say 10^15 W -- 100x present, think 10^10 people at 100 kW(th)), anthropogenic heating becomes a comparable climate issue. Approaching 10^17 W (think 10^10 @ 10 MW, if it goes there) you need geoengineering -- blocking parts of the sun (cliche), or increasing the emissivity of large swaths of the surface.

Beyond 10^17 watts you can't keep the earth anything like its natural state: even you completely block out the sun, you more than make up for it with the heat you generate on earth. The only way to dissipate heat from the earth ultimately is into space (forget ocean chillers at this point!), and the only way to do that is the way it's being done now -- radiatively. (Modulo material properties, emissivity/abosprtivity) the power you can dissipate per area goes as he 4th power of temperature (T^4) in absolute units (rel. absolute zero). So there's exactly two options: one, to drastically increase the surface area, which will look like "moving into space" -- creating a habitable world far larger in aggregate surface area than the earth (though not in mass). The other is fairly dystopian, to heat up the earth's surface beyond the habitable point -- e.g. moving into refrigerated underground cities (this is thermodynamically sound). With this insanity you could dissipate 10^22 W with a solid-carbon surface around 4000 Kelvin -- about 50,000x the current solar budget or 10 million times the current anthropogenic budget. Maybe you could still run computers at this temperature.

Anyway, 10^8 watts per capita => 10^18+ watts is no longer an "earth" solution -- you either push it off-earth, or alter the earth beyond recongition to solve heat dissipation.

(I'm actually not imaginative enough to figure out how to spend 10^8 watts. That's the order of the (average) power of launching a space shuttle once per day -- and you could probably fit a hundred people in something on that size, 1 MW per person. Even rocket-powered spaceplanes at Mach 20 aren't that costly...)

[ChuckMcM]

This is science fiction we're talking about here, keep that in mind.

I disagree with your assertion that unlimited energy is the 'wrong question'. Consider the scenario that energy is created from the destruction of matter (vs oxidizing it) and we switch the entire planet to that energy source, we eliminate all green house gases associated with energy production and a big chunk of those associated with transport (all cars/trucks/trains become electric, no more coal or fossile fueled power plants, we burn hydrogen/oxygen in planes perhaps. So on the climate change front at least we can revert the human contribution of CO2 back to prehistoric levels.

Ok so then there is the question of actively regulating the temperature of the ocean (which we might want to do for other reasons like food production). One might speculate on using the planet mantle as a ginormous heat sink. It has a fairly large heat carrying capacity over all.

See when you're writing science fiction you don't run into this bump:

"And on this note, there's practically no magic in fusion power. They can't drastically undercut "primitive" fission reactors, because much their infrastruture would be identical (heat exchangers, steam generators, power generation, the power grid...) Add up the costs of modern power, and fusion also carries most of them. It's like a "factor-of-two" miracle in the most optimistic fantasy -- not an order-of-magnitude, not earth-shattering magic. (Less optimistically, I don't see how anything like tokamaks or laser ICF machines can be anything but more complicated and costly than conventional power, and I haven't see any physically-sound alternatives.)"

You are extrapolating on existing fusion principles and getting stuck. Gene Roddenberry invented "warp engines" which provided the energy in limitless quantities, and then went on to think about "Ok given some reason why X is true, now what?" kind of stories.

My take on Stross' essay is that we don't really do enough of that. And that is in part because our technology is 'close enough' these days that writers fall into the pit that you just stepped in, reality, aka 'non-fiction.' (I really liked the cyberpunk examples in this regard) So getting one's thought process out ahead of that can be quite challenging. (Easier if your fiction it more fantasy oriented, since you make a hard break with reality)

[uvdiv]

"Ok so then there is the question of actively regulating the temperature of the ocean (which we might want to do for other reasons like food production). One might speculate on using the planet mantle as a ginormous heat sink. It has a fairly large heat carrying capacity over all."

Not on these scales. At 10^18 W (your 100 MW person * 10 billion people) -- about 5x the current solar budget or Kardashev I -- you could heat the entire oceans 10 °C in about a year, or the entire earth's crust 10 °C in about 100 years. (Oceans are about 10^21 kg [1], crust is between 10^23 - 10^24 kg [2]; I'm using the specific heat value for granite here [3]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrosphere

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_crust

[3] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-d_3...