2. 3D Printing.

One of the oldest sciences in the world is metallurgy. Think about it - metallurgy brought us from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. That's all about working with materials. As a Mechanical Engineering student, you're required to take at least a couple courses just about the crystalline structure of steel. Martensitic, Austenitic, Ferritic - it's not just what you put in it, it's how hot you cook it, how long you cook it, how quickly you cool it, how you work it, how you temper it. That's steel, the stupid, inelegant material that technophiles eschew, the fundamental basis of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Every other material has its own tweaks. Wood. Wool. Polyester. Leather. Go into the kitchen and open a drawer at random. Grab something. What is it? How was it made? If you had to replace it, what would you replace it with?

I have an engineering degree. I can answer that question for nearly everything in my house. I learned to solder at 11, learned to run a metalworking lathe at 14, learned to weld at 16, and was teaching AutoCAD by 17. I wrote my first STL file in 1998, a good ten years before any of you had ever heard of "3D printing." We used it for its intended purpose - rapid prototyping. 3D printing is a cool thing to do when you need to lay hands on something but not put any stress on it.

Go back to the kitchen. Find something utterly homogenous and plastic. It might be a jar lid. It might be a funnel. It might be a spoon. It might be a pancake turner.

Now imagine everything in your house made out of that.

The Great White Hope of 3D Printing is, of course, multi-material deposition. We'll reach the point, the acolytes will say, where our apparatus can print metal within plastic within glass. We'll sinter it with lasers and cure it in autoclaves and it'll be every bit as awesome as something manufactured through conventional methods.

Sure. I have no doubt about that. But look at the economics - a kilo of ABS filament is $36.50 on Amazon. Bulk ABS is $4.50 a pound on eBay. There's nearly a factor of 4 just in prepping the material for 3D printing. That's retail - five shite kitchen utensils are $2.99 retail at Ikea. They weigh a fifth of a kilo - your materials cost is more than double what Ikea can sell them for and make a profit.

And if you wanted a pancake turner, you wouldn't make it out of thermoplastic ABS anyway. That shit's all melty when it gets hot. Far better to do a bonded silicone and stainless utensil, which is two different manufacturing processes and a bonding step. You don't have to fuck around with either material - silicone injection molds like a champ and stainless can be stamped on a press so fast it's measured in Hz. Compare and contrast:

There's a part in the production process for stainless steel 3D printing during which the model is fragile and brittle. It's basically like wet sand. When you design, ask yourself this question: if I made this out of wet sand or brittle clay, could I lift the design without it breaking? If the answer is "no," then your design might break in production.

(Shapeways stainless printing requirements)

3D printing is a hell of a tool. The ability to draw something and form it out of the aether is supadope, no doubt. But the practical thing, then, is to come up with a way to injection mold it. CNC machine it. Sandcast it. Carve it. Plane it. In Pakistan they make AK-47s out of railroad scrap using near-stone-age tools. The practice is so pervasive it has its own term among gun collectors.

Your 3D-printed handgun is fucking irrelevant. Your 3D-printed everything is fucking irrelevant.

Consider the world of materials science to be the world of cooking. The world of manufacture is the world of food. 3D printing, then, is a spam-carving contest. Yes, you can make virtually any shape out of spam… but it's still spam. The vision of a 3D-printed future is the vision of a cornucopia reduced to Cheez Whiz. Yes, it's food and yes, it has its uses… but you're a fool if you think you can survive off it.

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1. The Singularity.

Jeron Lanier pointed out that technological atheists regard The Singularity in much the way Pentecostals regard The Rapture - a poorly-understood waving-of-hands and suddenly, we all get to live forever. There's a leap of faith involved in The Rapture - God will make it happen. There's a leap of fallacy involved in The Singularity - computers will solve all the problems involved in climbing "into the box."

William Gibson brought up the Singularity before it was cool in Neuromancer. Case uses a "copy" of a hacker he used to know. It's only a copy, though, and even the copy feels fake. How perfect is perfect enough, presuming the technology exists? At what point is the "you" in the box as good as the "you" on the outside?

And which one is "you" by the way? Lanier puts it this way in Your Brain In Silicon:

So now your consciousness exists as a series of numbers in a computer; that is all a computer program is, after all. Let's go a little further with this. Let's suppose you have a marvelous new sensor that can read the positions of every raindrop in a storm. Gather all those raindrop positions as a list of numbers and pretend those numbers are a computer program. Now start searching through all the possible computers that could exist up to a certain very large size until you find one that treats the raindrop positions as a program that is exactly equivalent to your brain. Yes, it can be done: The list of possible computers of any particular size is large but finite, and so is your brain, according to the earlier steps in the thought experiment, anyway.

OK, so is the rainstorm conscious? Is it conscious as being specifically you, since it implements you? Or are you going to bring up an essence argument again? You say the rainstorm isn't really doing computation- it's just sitting there as a passive program- so it doesn't count? Fine, then we'll measure a larger rainstorm and search for a new computer that treats a larger collection of raindrops as implementing BOTH the computer we found before that runs your brain as raindrops AS WELL AS your brain in raindrops. Now the raindrops are doing the computation. Maybe you're still not happy with this because it seems the raindrops are only equivalent to a computer that is never turned on.

If you dupe me and throw me in the box, is that me? I don't think it is - any more than my writing is me, any more than my photos are me, any more than my wife's memories of me are me. I think "the singularity" isn't immortality, it's an extremely intricate cenotaph.

*

I do think the future is bright. I do think we'll barely recognize it. But I also think that there's a lot of concentration on fads because they're easier to think about than incremental change. Henry Petroski argues that necessity isn't the mother of invention - when you need something, you don't sit around coming up with clever ways to get it, you kludge something together and muddle through. By his reckoning (argued over an impressive array of books), Luxury is the mother of invention because it is only when you are idle do you have the time to ponder ways to increase your idle time.

Lazy people musing about laziness. That's the legacy of the human race. Thus, I look on with suspicion whenever I see someone fervently saying "all those that come before me are wrong!"

Change sneaks up on you. I saw a futurist's curve once where he pointed out that early adopters are always wrong because adoption is exponential. My favorite William Gibson quote is "I think most people are most comfortable ten years in the past." It takes a while to get used to things.

My grandfather outlived two hip replacements. That hardly makes him "transhuman." 3D printing is a tool, not a messiah. And when I die, I will rot and moulder away, regardless of how clever the computers have become. So will you. All we can hope is that we live on in the memories of those we care about - it's so much more important than living on in the memories of someone else's silicon.

"“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

- Mark Twain

3. Transhumanism.

There was a company that made atrial defibrillators. They were bought by Guidant. Guidant was bought by Johnson and Johnson. The stuff I did there has been lost to history, but it looked kind of like this:

That's a shock/pace lead for an ICD (Implantable Cardioverter Device). Ours were for atrial defibrillation. This is a thing that connects to a capacitor and zaps your heart when you feel bad so you don't feel bad anymore. They cost about $1500 to make, had fixation helixes made out of 80/20 platinum/iridium alloy and are the last fucking thing you want in your body.

There isn't a device made that's better than what your body makes and your body knows it. There is no way to get a port into your body that your body doesn't recognize as a wound. There isn't a thing you can shove under your skin that your body won't pearl over in plaque just to free itself from irritation. And if it can't, it's 'cuz you're huffing steroids like Mark McGwire and we have one word for you, my friend:

immunocompromised.

My grandfather lived to 94. He outlived two hip replacements. Granted, they're more complicated than false teeth but they're hella simpler than, say, cochlear implants. Don't get me wrong - if you're stone blind a 8x8 light/dark matrix is the shit but the only reason you want something extra under your skin is if the thing you got sucks.

Take that bellybutton piercing you still regret. Now put it somewhere you can't get to. Now fill it full of technology. Now figure out a way to get power to it. Now contemplate what happens when something goes wrong with it. Now suppose it grants you the Wisdom of Solomon -

is it really worth it?

Implants have gotten way better than they used to. As part of my biomedical hazing I had to read a 300-page book on the history of pacemakers. That shit used to be nuclear. But really, that's cybernetics in a nutshell - "sucking marginally less than it used to."

There is nothing outside your body that would be better off inside your body other than food, drink and medicine. And, it could be argued, that stuff isn't "inside" your body anyway - anatomically speaking, you are basically a tunnel.

I don't think the future will be what anyone expects, but I do think it'll be equally fantastic.

Will we build Hyperloops with 3D printers powered by thorium fusion? Probably not. But we'll improve manufacturing, mass transit, and energy sources in ways we can't yet imagine.

I grew up reading my father's Heinlein novels. Most of his books were written before the advent of electronic computers. His heroes fly around the universe, dramatically whipping out their slide-rules.

It's 2014 and we haven't achieved interplanetary colonisation yet, much less interstellar travel. But we have electronic computers Heinlein couldn't have dreamed of.

Will our predictions be wrong? Yes. But it's still fun to hypothesise. And regardless, I think the future will be just as bright, only different.

Sorry, I'll get off your lawn now.

We are the Borg. Resistance is futile.

*

5. Easy Nuclear Energy

"You will remember this day, kids. You will look back and tell your grandkids about the day everything changed."

- My 8th grade science teacher, March 23, 1989

I grew up with "establishment" physics, as I mentioned. Norris Bradbury was a family friend. Classmates of mine teach particle physics at Berkeley, Irvine and somewhere in Italy - my Facebook feed gets esoteric. And no matter how much i wish it were different, break-even fusion is a bitch… unless you don't need to contain it.

Bill McKibben does a pretty good breakdown of modern nuclear energy in Eaarth. Despite being a dyed-in-the-wool hippie, his argument against nuclear power is that it's not cost-effective without subsidy… and then goes into a number of examples illustrating why new reactors have been rare of late for purely financial reasons.

Obviously, the externalities of any large-scale power production schema are non-negligible, and the peculiar externalities of nuclear waste are their own thing. But the bottom line on thorium reactors or cold fusion or whatever the flavor-of-the-month is pencils out pretty quickly when you recognize that some of the smartest people on earth have yet to figure out a better way to do it.

We used to do really stupid shit with reactors. nuclear bombers. Nuclear ramjets.. Hell, my grandfather was intimately involved with Project Plowshare. These are smart people - hella smarter than me and I'm reasonably quick. And if they haven't figured out a way to do it better, Captain Crazypants from Unknown University had better have documented his triple point energy pretty extensively.

4. Quantum Leaps in Mechanical Engineering

There's a grinding reality about physical things that computer scientists just don't get: On the human scale, physical things are wholly chained to Newton's Laws of Motion. Computational cycles can improve logarithmically but f shall always and forever equal m*a.

I "invented" a new valve system for the 4-stroke internal combustion engine when I was 16. Took it as far as machining parts to try it out on a Briggs & Stratton rototiller. It was going to make me rich, it was - I'd solved valve float. There were going to be problems with leakage but that was incremental. It was well worth the struggle.

At 18 I caught a segment on the late, lamented Beyond 2000. Some goddamn Frenchman had stolen my idea without ever meeting me. Worse, he'd built prototypes. Worse, he was racing Formula 1. Still worse, he'd stolen the idea from some dude back in 1938.

It answered one question - the design worked. It answered another, too - leaking was a problem. I lucked out, though - the Frenchman turned a large fortune into a small one pursuing a problem that engineers had licked a dozen different ways for half a dozen decades. I spent some time studying vehicle design and stumbled across four other valve designs similar to mine. All of them worked sort of; none of them worked quite as well as the conventional poppet valves that have been the mainstream of Otto Cycle engines for a hundred years now.

The equations are complex, but they are repeatable. The math can be done. If it's bigger than a breadbox and sounds too good to be true, it is.

I've seen a growing trend around here towards the Singularity. Towards 3D printing. Towards transhumanism. Hyperloops. Thorium fusion. Rose-tinted Jetsons stuff. And, recognizing my nasty tendency to spoil everyone's fun, I hereby foreswear any participation in these threads. It's no fun for anyone - I piss in everyone's cheerios and the dreams die a little. Meanwhile I grump about wondering why nobody pays attention.

C'mon, do we really need to tell you that your comments are valued? Ignorance might be bliss, but it ain't the truth.

I think people have the need to dream. Projects like those are easy to dream about. Which is fine and okay if it's not too realistic, but not if millions of research dollars are spent on a lost cause. On the other hand, we really do need to think of new ways to produce energy, to improve health and reduce our pressure on the planet. Finding the balance between ambition and realism is damned hard.

Someone beat me to the badge. Well said kb.

Whatever, dude. I still really like that episode of x files where mulder accidentally gets uploaded to the Internet.

Seriously though, I'm sure it's frustrating to get into these battles, but your sensical approach is appreciated. I hope you don't quit commenting on those posts altogether. I don't have the technical expertise to counterbalance most of the arguments (except for the artificial consciousness business), so it's always heartening to read counter arguments to what I see as wild conjecture and speculation.