Worldbuilding Realism Consultation Thread Mk. 4

[Purpelia]

A Tale of Two Industries: How Programming Languages Differ Between Wealthy and Developing Countries -- some evidence of how even certain coding skills are becoming low-skill (which is ALWAYS relative, not absolute).

There is no question that in the future coding is going to get easier and easier. But something I feel you are missing is that we as an industry are working hard to not just make it easier but make it go away entirely.

Even if we ignore stuff like the buzz about automating away code writing entirely to AI (which I don't see happening but feel the need to mention) modern programing frameworks already rely heavily on system generated code. When is the last time you actually had to write your own sorting algorithm or implement a wholly custom data structure? Hell, if you've ever come into contact with modern web Java you will have seen things like EJB which let you literally generate a database, a web site and all the required interconnections just by writing up a small number of classes. And of course, there is the whole direct design to code generation that's been going on with UML since it's inception.

So whilst in the near term we will indeed see these systems developing to such a state that you could conceive an office with a single university graduate engineer lording over a bunch of high school grade coders in the not even so long term all that will be left is that engineer.

[Gallia-]

That is, if the engineer hasn't worked himself out of a job; much in the same way the Propellant Men of the 1950's did, as the late, great John D. Clark relates at the end of Ignition. So perhaps relegated to the ever shrinking research jobs as software development settles in for the Long Stagnation, much like liquid rockets have stagnated since the 1960's.

[Purpelia]

That is, if the engineer hasn't worked himself out of a job; much in the same way the Propellant Men of the 1950's did, as the late, great John D. Clark relates at the end of Ignition.

There is always going to be a need for what we'd call a systems engineer. E.I. someone who designs the program from a conceptual standpoint. But yes, a lot of what we call software engineers now a days will slowly but surely work our self out of a job as technology advances.
In the future, although I would place this well after my lifetime, software development will be done mostly on the broad strokes system level with the actual details being handled by automation and eventually neural net AI's and the like. Now arguably, there is always going to be a need for a human touch to iron out details, fix stubborn bugs and the like and just do what machines can't*. But that's not as massive a number of jobs as I'd wish it was.


* And there are some things that machines just can't do, period. Not until we get to proper AGI. Stuff like fine tuning UX and such. But again, waning numbers.

[Gallia-]

In the future, although I would place this well after my lifetime,

This is what we all hope, but it seems like the average period from "gestation" to "stagnation" is one career cycle. So about 40 years. The modern software age thus ends sometimes in the 2030s or 2040s.

Now arguably, there is always going to be a need for a human touch to iron out details, fix stubborn bugs and the like and just do what machines can't*. But that's not as massive a number of jobs as I'd wish it was.

This is what happened to rockets, trains, and main battle tanks in the "post-industrial" countries. Which means that software development will likely shift to the Chinese and Indians in the coming decades, who will both have the IQs and the economic standing for it. They'll have maxed out their development of rockets, trains, and main battle tanks around that time (possibly better than what the West maxed out at) and start on the road towards end-game software development. The West will just become a civilization of an ever-declining number of MBAs, career philosophers, secretaries, call center workers, and an ever-increasing number of tax dependents and terminally unemployed.

Where economic dynamism goes from Asia no one knows. My guess is that it ends there. The West doesn't really have the guts to regain lost ground from neoliberalism, and demographics means that even if the population is growing (as in the USA), the individual worth of the population is still declining as the genetic stock of Western nations is diluted. So you have the double problems of the atoms of society become less capable (people become stupider) and increasing complexity of information (problems become harder) matched with a commensurate decrease in tax revenues due to long-term declining populations and slowed/stagnant median wage growth. The declining economic dynamism can be blamed on a lot of things but no one knows the real answer or solution. My bet is on the combination of declining birth rates and increasing dependency ratio as the biggest drivers, with secondary and tertiary factors being the stagnation of scientific innovation (which is inevitable) and reduction in tax revenues, respectively.

So the US economy, at least, is gradually ossifying as it refuses to take risks or gamble on new technologies, because the bulk of new technologies simply don't work, aren't practical, or have little return on investment if they succeed in both of those prior areas. The PRC may hit the same wall, or maybe their higher IQs and larger population will let them solve bigger problems and keep going a bit further than we did, but the West and its related civilizations are approaching what the East did in the 1970s: economic stagnation, demographic decline, and inevitable collapse.

At least the worst will not be see by our eyes, or our children's, but by our children's children, and their children. Post 2070s-80s is when global population starts to decline worldwide and probably post-2100 is when it becomes to become obvious and some of the full effects are felt. Japan's population will be halved in 2100 from what it is today, although the working age population proportion between 2050 and 2100 will be roughly equivalent. About half the population will be productive and half won't.

For populations that are "growing" (read: living longer) then it will likely be worse since the dependency ratio will be skewed further, depending on how many old people are still alive and need to be cared for. But everyone alive today except perhaps the youngest of all will not see that. Or if they do see it, they will not know what they're seeing, because they're suffering from some form of dementia.

At least IBM, Boeing, General Electric, and General Atomics will be in business for a few more centuries until we all die I guess. So that's something. Maybe they will become the new guilds of the neo-medieval era of cyber serfdom and digital fiefs. And in the end, if you're successful at life, the price of stability vs. dynamism isn't that bad, but we've been heading towards a steady state economy since the 1970s with the rise of globalization and free trade. So eventually, the USA is reduced to just being "Dallas, Miami, and NEW YAWK" while PRC is "Beijing and Shanghai".

Great if you've already made it in life (or your parents have), but not so much for everyone else. I suppose a good first step to restoring economic dynamism in the USA is to build a great big trade wall and ending the nonsense of "everyone can/should go to university," by replacing that with an open and terse acknowledgment of IQ disparities in the population. Something like "yes, two thirds of the population is incapable of working in the "knowledge economy", and tailoring policy around the idea of harnessing the abilities of the different IQ trifurcations the US population would be adequate.

Or just appoint Charles Murray as King of America? OTOH that's the exact thing that got America into its problems in the first place, so maybe not such a good idea. Perhaps he can be Chief Bureaucrat of Education or something.

[The Macabees]

There is no question that in the future coding is going to get easier and easier. But something I feel you are missing is that we as an industry are working hard to not just make it easier but make it go away entirely.

Even if we ignore stuff like the buzz about automating away code writing entirely to AI (which I don't see happening but feel the need to mention) modern programing frameworks already rely heavily on system generated code.

I brought this up in an earlier post.

This is a major force for making the barrier to entry for an employee even easier, because nowadays you don't even need to really know basic coding to get a $40k/yr. job at a small agency making websites for dentists.

Edit: But of course most jobs disappear, and the rate at which they change may accelerate, but that's not to say that what we see as low-skill and what we see as high-skill won't change with it.

[The Macabees]

I'll give another example.

I work in analytics, among other things. Parts of what would typically go to an 'analytics squirrel' is being automated. Google Analytics, for example, is implementing an AI that will answer questions like, "How many people visited my blog titled _______".

Squirrels are useful because most people don't have time to look into analytics themselves; the squirrel reports basic data to individual team members, so that they can improve their work.

With new automation, the squirrel seems to have less work, because the question that the coworker may have asked him/her will now be asked to GA.

But, that's not exactly true, because the type of data the squirrel reports changes. With GA automated, the squirrel can focus on reporting on voice of consumer data, or other manual data collections that are more qualitative than quantitative (and even with all the automation, the big money analytics studies still use manual labor -- survey data). What's automated is the math, which lowers the barrier to entry.

But by doing that it allows low-skilled workers dip their toes in a potentially high-skilled world. The real earners in analytics aren't the squirrels, or even the engineers, it's the decision-makers. It's the people who learn how to interpret the data, which can often be more about experience than raw intelligence (in fact, people with raw intelligence are often the worst, because they think they're so smart they can't possibly be wrong).

Edit: The automation has also allowed more people -- of dubious smarts -- to work for themselves and make money.

Edit 2: Look at this way, the ultimate scarcity is human labor. The more labor we have, the more raw resources we could 'dig out' and the more capital we could produce. Even if we assume that most people aren't smart enough to figure that out on their own, it represents a highly profitable opportunity for a smart person to figure out the automation (the capital) to put whatever spare able and willing labor there is to work.

There are a lot of smart economists who point at stagnation. This prediction has been made for decades upon decades upon decades. And as an economist who has read the literature, I think the pessimism -- as is typical in the field -- is overexaggerated.

[Taihei Tengoku]

Great if you've already made it in life (or your parents have), but not so much for everyone else. I suppose a good first step to restoring economic dynamism in the USA is to build a great big trade wall and ending the nonsense of "everyone can/should go to university," by replacing that with an open and terse acknowledgment of IQ disparities in the population. Something like "yes, two thirds of the population is incapable of working in the "knowledge economy", and tailoring policy around the idea of harnessing the abilities of the different IQ trifurcations the US population would be adequate.

You can't restore growth by kicking an economy down to a lower level of development, that's not how the Solow curve works. A big trade wall is just a big constriction of the production frontier and a strictly worse outcome than free trade.

[Purpelia]

1337 in your nation. Is 1337 speak still a thing in your nation or has it died along with hot pink and other trends of the era?

[Crookfur]

1337 in your nation. Is 1337 speak still a thing in your nation or has it died along with hot pink and other trends of the era?

It's more or less gone and only the preserve of the olds as far as the youth are concerned.

Hip youngsters use old mechanical typewriters hand modified by artisan guru barristas to be wired with key sensors and USB connections. They also refuse to use Twitter type things that might at all limit thier gloriously flowing artistic yet insightful messages. Rumours of a semaphore based messaging app are probably true...

Normal casual scum speak entirely in emoji alongside abbreviations and new terms that make leet haxors look like champions for the campaign for clear English.

[Romanian Germany]

Why are we talking about real life

[Crookfur]

Why are we talking about real life

Are we? Are we really?

Or are we talking about something beyond the humdrum realm of normality, something so vast and glorious it would explode the minds of the sheeple if they were to become aware of it?

Come! You have twitched curtains that blind the world and caught a glimpse of what lies beyond the veil, it is time to embrace the next level...

[Purpelia]

Why are we talking about real life

Are we? Are we really?

Or are we talking about something beyond the humdrum realm of normality, something so vast and glorious it would explode the minds of the sheeple if they were to become aware of it?

Come! You have twitched curtains that blind the world and caught a glimpse of what lies beyond the veil, it is time to embrace the next level...

I like the color of your thoughts.

[Austrasien]

That is, if the engineer hasn't worked himself out of a job; much in the same way the Propellant Men of the 1950's did, as the late, great John D. Clark relates at the end of Ignition. So perhaps relegated to the ever shrinking research jobs as software development settles in for the Long Stagnation, much like liquid rockets have stagnated since the 1960's.

There is a difference though. Rockets were a potentially expansionary technology; had economical access to space ever become possible we would have gained access to resources that are otherwise vanishingly rare on earth and potentially exploited the unique environment of the vacuum and microgravity to produce new materials which otherwise cannot be made in terrestrial conditions. It would have provided the foundation for long term economic growth. That the development of such technologies has petered out to almost nothing was a great loss.

The modern tech industry just doesn't do this, though it absorbs vast amounts of skilled labour and capital, the vast majority of what it produces does things we could already do or simply did not need. "Tech" does very little to make us healthier, wealthier, smarter or happier. Like fashion or fine dining, its main purpose is itself and to demonstrate you are a hip, happening person/business (businesses are definitely not above fashion) down with the disruptive technologies and innovation. Which is a real function that has always been part of human societies but it isn't a terribly useful one. Certainly not good enough to justify taking the cream of our intellectual talent and the lions share of investment capital.

If automates itself into almost nothing it would be a net benefit because all those smart young people who waste their lives and brains working to help FB find more ways to sell user data to ad bots they might again turn to the furtherment of technologies with the genuine potential to begin the next age of economic/social/political revolution. Like access to space and nuclear energy that could open up vast new frontiers of growth, or even experimental/theoretical physics which still has the potential to produce totally new insights which fundamentally alter our understanding of the world with implications hitherto unimagined (economists might call this a black swan - and no swans are blacker than the ones that might come out of a particle accelerator or be glimpsed through an astronomers telescope).

[Welskerland]

What would the primary form of transportation people would use if cars weren't all that common? Welskerland is environmentally conscious, so fossil-fuel burning cars aren't widespread. Some people have them, but they never really caught on with the general populace, and there is a carbon tax.

In the cities, people would use public transports such as buses and subways,of course, but what about those who live outside the city, either in the countryside, or in exurbs?

[The Akasha Colony]

What would the primary form of transportation people would use if cars weren't all that common? Welskerland is environmentally conscious, so fossil-fuel burning cars aren't widespread. Some people have them, but they never really caught on with the general populace, and there is a carbon tax.

In the cities, people would use public transports such as buses and subways,of course, but what about those who live outside the city, either in the countryside, or in exurbs?

A nation that never really adopted motor vehicles is a nation that is not modern. The development of the motor vehicle was a revolution because of the possibilities it opened up in the economy (the easy movement of goods and workers) and motor vehicles remain ubiquitous because there is no practical replacement for them so far.

There is simply no alternative to some form of motor vehicle for the transportation of those not served by public transit. Unless you consider horses or other pack animals as a viable alternative, but it isn't unless you're actually a livestock breeder and have the necessary skills to raise and keep pack animals. Unless you subsidize some form of on-call vehicle fleet like paratransit services to service these residents, but then you're operating an extra fleet of motor vehicles anyway and people would probably still prefer their own cars rather than have to wait for a pickup every time they want some more milk.

[Taihei Tengoku]

That is, if the engineer hasn't worked himself out of a job; much in the same way the Propellant Men of the 1950's did, as the late, great John D. Clark relates at the end of Ignition. So perhaps relegated to the ever shrinking research jobs as software development settles in for the Long Stagnation, much like liquid rockets have stagnated since the 1960's.

There is a difference though. Rockets were a potentially expansionary technology; had economical access to space ever become possible we would have gained access to resources that are otherwise vanishingly rare on earth and potentially exploited the unique environment of the vacuum and microgravity to produce new materials which otherwise cannot be made in terrestrial conditions. It would have provided the foundation for long term economic growth. That the development of such technologies has petered out to almost nothing was a great loss.

The modern tech industry just doesn't do this, though it absorbs vast amounts of skilled labour and capital, the vast majority of what it produces does things we could already do or simply did not need. "Tech" does very little to make us healthier, wealthier, smarter or happier. Like fashion or fine dining, its main purpose is itself and to demonstrate you are a hip, happening person/business (businesses are definitely not above fashion) down with the disruptive technologies and innovation. Which is a real function that has always been part of human societies but it isn't a terribly useful one. Certainly not good enough to justify taking the cream of our intellectual talent and the lions share of investment capital.

If automates itself into almost nothing it would be a net benefit because all those smart young people who waste their lives and brains working to help FB find more ways to sell user data to ad bots they might again turn to the furtherment of technologies with the genuine potential to begin the next age of economic/social/political revolution. Like access to space and nuclear energy that could open up vast new frontiers of growth, or even experimental/theoretical physics which still has the potential to produce totally new insights which fundamentally alter our understanding of the world with implications hitherto unimagined (economists might call this a black swan - and no swans are blacker than the ones that might come out of a particle accelerator or be glimpsed through an astronomers telescope).

These people turned to tech because it was where there was money. Motive precedes exploration (as it does all risky endeavors), whether it was making money from trade with (15th century) China, making money from the gold mines of the New World, or being a theater of World War III. There is no sense spending trillions to extract trace amounts of iridium from the asteroid belt unless there was quadrillions to be made. The barriers to entry of things like nuclear power is one part increased efficiencies in petrochemicals but also another part overregulation. It makes no sense to indict market processes for under-providing a certain good when its cause is an impediment to the market.

Of course, this is before the problems of the Fast Cult and its chronic undervaluation of services against speed and joules.

[Gallia-]

That is, if the engineer hasn't worked himself out of a job; much in the same way the Propellant Men of the 1950's did, as the late, great John D. Clark relates at the end of Ignition. So perhaps relegated to the ever shrinking research jobs as software development settles in for the Long Stagnation, much like liquid rockets have stagnated since the 1960's.

There is a difference though. Rockets were a potentially expansionary technology; had economical access to space ever become possible we would have gained access to resources that are otherwise vanishingly rare on earth and potentially exploited the unique environment of the vacuum and microgravity to produce new materials which otherwise cannot be made in terrestrial conditions. It would have provided the foundation for long term economic growth. That the development of such technologies has petered out to almost nothing was a great loss.

The modern tech industry just doesn't do this, though it absorbs vast amounts of skilled labour and capital, the vast majority of what it produces does things we could already do or simply did not need. "Tech" does very little to make us healthier, wealthier, smarter or happier. Like fashion or fine dining, its main purpose is itself and to demonstrate you are a hip, happening person/business (businesses are definitely not above fashion) down with the disruptive technologies and innovation. Which is a real function that has always been part of human societies but it isn't a terribly useful one. Certainly not good enough to justify taking the cream of our intellectual talent and the lions share of investment capital.

If automates itself into almost nothing it would be a net benefit because all those smart young people who waste their lives and brains working to help FB find more ways to sell user data to ad bots they might again turn to the furtherment of technologies with the genuine potential to begin the next age of economic/social/political revolution. Like access to space and nuclear energy that could open up vast new frontiers of growth, or even experimental/theoretical physics which still has the potential to produce totally new insights which fundamentally alter our understanding of the world with implications hitherto unimagined (economists might call this a black swan - and no swans are blacker than the ones that might come out of a particle accelerator or be glimpsed through an astronomers telescope).

I don't disagree with this (aside from rockets ever being affordable and, anyway, solid fuels were just better :groovy:) [Though, by the time we'll need space minerals we will probably have exhausted so many easy energy resources on Earth we wouldn't be able to access space minerals; I guess you can blame evolution for giving humans myopic time preference that works fine on a day-to-day scale but not so fine on a generational scale].

Anyway, I'm just saying that in general it'll end up plateauing at some point, like all technology inevitably does [and, TBH, everything else in the universe too, including heights, weights, smarts, wealth, science, medicine, to name a few].

Hopefully when it does we can return to productive things that improve people's lives, like basic research, though that requires a large amount of non-profit motivated (read: public) funding to achieve, and I guess the combination of collapsing demographics and increasing privatization means that we're settling in for some kind of digital age long stagnation [for the West]. Lower tax revenues and increasing financialization means that the majority of money will be held by profit seekers, and there's no money to be made in investing in things that actually improve people's lives in the long-term, because the investments aren't guaranteed to have a return and basic research is boring. You wouldn't see NASA, CERN, or the US Army being able to fund itself on a stock market. And no venture capitalist would support an organization doing work on finding how gravity works or what the unified field really is. :\

So we'll have to hope that India or the PRC or some other country that has actual or potential positive demographics and rising tax revenues in the future will take up the torch of civilization. Maybe all our smart people at ORNL, LANL, and LLNL will be shipped to the PRC or India in the not-so-distant future. Or ship themselves there, since they can probably do that with the talents that they have. That would be a nice, happy ending for the human race, though not so much for the European civilizations and their descendants.

OTOH, whether or not you consider the Chinese or Indian kleptocracies to be a good successor to the USA as World King is a bit debatable. I think that they will collapse before the West peters out completely, so there will be no potential torch bearers when Western civilization runs out of steam. Alternatively, they collapse after the West does and after they become "civilization", because India and China are terminal kleptocracies and that is sort of what happens to kleptocracies.

Then we get to ride the sub-replacement fertility express to extinction.

e3: I guess what I'm really trying to say with the rocket analogy is that these sort of trends only last a single career cycle, because the new technologies are only fashionable to a single generation. Rocketry and liquid propellants were the "cool" thing to do in the 1950s and '60s. Then it became particle physics and nuclear fusion research. Then it became computers. Now it's software development for those computers. Before rockets, it was aerodynamics and aviation. Before that it was locomotives and automobiles. Before that, it was steam engines. All these things lasted about 20 years of "hotness" before everyone moved onto the latest dumb trend.

So the entire 20th century wasn't so much a period of rigorous and sustained scientific development as it was a series of successive cultural/societal obsessions with the latest dumb trends coinciding with highly practical and useful devices. A fluke, if you will, that we managed to get three or four good rolls on the practicality/utility scale of things, and we were so ignorant of how the world worked that we didn't really need very much effort to find the basic principles that entranced entire generations of children. When the going gets hard, humans get going I guess. Only the most diehard spergs would want to be a particle physicist, materials engineer, or aerodynamicist these days because the hot and happening things are being a software developer (increasingly waning, though), geneticist, or bio-engineer.

After all, we still have plenty of unsolved questions in rocketry that will likely never be answered in real life. Like lithium. ):

[Kazarogkai]

What would the primary form of transportation people would use if cars weren't all that common? Welskerland is environmentally conscious, so fossil-fuel burning cars aren't widespread. Some people have them, but they never really caught on with the general populace, and there is a carbon tax.

In the cities, people would use public transports such as buses and subways,of course, but what about those who live outside the city, either in the countryside, or in exurbs?

Trains, lots and lots of trains. That and pack animals. Reminds me of an idea I had for a TL on the AHD in which cars were banned in metropolitan reasons for safety reasons with streets being regarded as the domains of pedestrians and the occasional trolley and cars relegated to the country as the property of country bumpkins. I wondered how cities would develop and especially how they would get supplies. An interesting solution that I came up with was the use of underground trains which rather than transporting people would transport supplies into the city. The main thing though that I figured was density. Efftons of it too. And when I say dense i'm not talking New York dense I'm talking Kowloon Walled City style:



Kinda cool in a diesel/cyber punk type of way.

[Taihei Tengoku]

You can't containerize subways unless you build very expensive underground trainyards with big underground cranes.

[Gallia-]

An interesting solution that I came up with was the use of underground trains which rather than transporting people would transport supplies into the city.

For what purpose?

Even the most absurd of arcology would have above-ground trains.

[Kazarogkai]

An interesting solution that I came up with was the use of underground trains which rather than transporting people would transport supplies into the city.

For what purpose?

Even the most absurd of arcology would have above-ground trains.

So they won't kill the pedestrians in the street duh. This is an alternate world where they banned cars inside city limits to keep pedestrians safe. They would be back at square one if they allowed freaking trains, which are no better than cars in that regard, in city limits.

[Taihei Tengoku]

For what purpose?

Even the most absurd of arcology would have above-ground trains.

So they won't kill the pedestrians in the street duh. This is an alternate world where they banned cars inside city limits to keep pedestrians safe. They would be back at square one if they allowed freaking trains, which are no better than cars in that regard, in city limits.

The trains aren't on the street...

[Kazarogkai]

So they won't kill the pedestrians in the street duh. This is an alternate world where they banned cars inside city limits to keep pedestrians safe. They would be back at square one if they allowed freaking trains, which are no better than cars in that regard, in city limits.

The trains aren't on the street...

Where else would they be but on the street with pedestrians?

[Taihei Tengoku]

The trains aren't on the street...

Where else would they be but on the street with pedestrians?

[Prosorusiya]

It's unlikely you'd run a tourist sleeper train on steam - while yes, it is a nice interest, it's less efficient and it causes a lot of noise and soot. An IRL example of what you are thinking of, the Eastern and Oriental Express, runs on diesel. A journey for each passenger is about $2,500 so they make serious bank off it.

Noted on this and the prior count. Frankly, for an all tourist train I'd only run first and second class sleepers (I really do want it to be an all sleeper train). I'll probably run it with a limited set of cars, and schedule it faster than domestic trains... perhaps the sleeper cars would actually be run through on a Russian Railways train from Moscow, and then picked up by my own connecting train at the border.

Anyhow, further research seems to indicate something like the following for a consist:
1 Baggage Car
1 Dining (aka Restaurant) car
2 1st Class sleepers
4 2nd "Coupe" class sleepers

And the baggage car might actually become a crew dorm, once I work out at route for the train and it's travel time.

Anyways, I'd probably run it with a mix of VL-60 and Fk class electric locomotives. Both are, I think, long in the tooth enough to be considered "classic" and I think the Fk has good enough looks to rival any steam engine.


Class F


Class VL-60

~~~

On an unrelated note, I am thinking of working on a storefront which custom builds steam locomotives... do you guys think that, in addition to the usual tactics of advertising on the storefront, it would be worth it to ask other industries which might be open to using industrial\fireless locomotives would be worth the effort? Those little machines used to be everywhere in the olden days, and would be easy for a locomotive shop to turn out on the cheap. I feel like that might be an untapped market, compared to the lesser amount of people actively looking for railway locomotives on GE&T...