
Can we survive technology? (1955) [pdf] - aidanrocke
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf
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erostrate
"The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal
and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the
atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the
world by about one degree Fahrenheit."

"Even in an airplane the number of vacuum tubes now approaches or exceeds a
thousand. Other machines, containing up to 10,000 vacuum tubes, up to five
times more crystals, and possibly more than 100,000 cores, now operate
faultlessly over long periods, performing many millions of regulated,
preplanned actions per second, with an expectation of only a few errors per
day or week. Many such machines have been built to perform complicated
scientific and engineering calculations and large scale accounting and
logistical surveys. There is no doubt that they will be used for elaborate
industrial process control, logistical, economic, and other planning"

~~~
porknubbins
Airplanes ran on vacuum tubes? Shit as a electric guitarist this would’ve
terrified me though I guess whatever they used was more reliable and probably
power cycled more responsibly.

~~~
mikeash
I wouldn’t say “ran on.” It wasn’t a fly by wire system or anything like that.
But plenty of electronic systems would have used vacuum tubes, such as radios
and radar.

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the-dude
"The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal
and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the
at­mosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the
world by about one degree Fahrenheit. "

edit : this PDF looks like it has been scanned, but the text is selectable.
Not sure I have seen this before.

~~~
IceWreck
This is done with OCR, specially when digitizing things.

The Internet Archive does this a lot. There was an old 90s book that I needed
but they never made an electronic edition. So the internet archive, scanned
and digitized it with character recognition to make a select-able PDF like
this, as well an epub that can be read on your phone like any other ebook.

Now that book is available for anyone to borrow and read. (its still
copyrighted so you gotta access it via their DRM controlled app/website, but
that can be easily broken and its better than not having access to that book
at all)

~~~
the-dude
Thanks for the heads-up. Of course I do know what OCR is. Just hadn't seen it
combined in the wild like this.

~~~
rayiner
Acrobat has had this as a built in feature forever.

~~~
the-dude
Didn't know that either. Makes me wonder if my browser ( PDF.js ) is doing the
OCR? Anybody knows?

~~~
philipkglass
He means that Acrobat Pro includes an OCR system that you can use to add a
searchable text layer to scanned documents. Readers like Acrobat Reader and
PDF.js do not perform OCR. You won't be able to use them to search scanned
documents if the document creator did not run OCR.

Google runs its own OCR pass on scanned PDF documents in order to index them
better. It can be annoying when you get a 50 page scanned document as a search
result and then find out that it doesn't include a text layer, so you need to
run your own OCR or skim the whole thing to find the relevant parts.

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damidekronik
"Consequently, a few decades hence energy may be free—just like the unmetered
air—with coal and oil used mainly as raw materials for organic chemical
synthesis, to which, as experience has shown, their properties are best
suited."

I am wondering why this prediction is so off given how other ones are spot on?
How the situation back then made John von Neumann believe it, and what
happened differently, moving this into the realms of fantasy.

Perhaps if an another effort of a scale of the Manhattan Project had happened,
the concept of the "free energy" would have been more realistic.

~~~
jaysonelliot
"Too cheap to meter" was a common assumption about the future of nuclear power
when it first began. If you only look at the amount of power available based
on the raw materials, it's a reasonable prediction.

They simply didn't take into account all of the associated costs and
complexities that would be involved with the actual nuclear power plants, not
to mention the political and social complications.

That doesn't mean such a future can never happen, it's theoretically possible.
We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current
level of technology and our current energy economy.

~~~
rayiner
They didn’t expect that government regulation would kill innovation in the
nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades
ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today. We may have had hundreds of
thousands more dead from nuclear accidents, but that would pale in comparison
to the tens of millions saved by phasing out coal earlier and pushing off
climate change.

~~~
dragonwriter
> They didn’t expect that government regulation would kill innovation in the
> nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades
> ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today.

The regulation is basically a liability shield and subsidy, the industry wants
more, not less, of it to build plants.

~~~
rayiner
That doesn’t mean that regulation doesn’t impede innovation, e.g. by
eliminating the incentive to adopt safer cycles. Moreover, the onerous review
of reactor designs means there is a high incentive to stick with older designs
that have already been reviewed by the government. (Thats a double whammy,
because it makes newer, safer designs harder to deploy while reducing the
incentive to deploy them.)

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hi41
I remember the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about man being
able to master technology and yet not have have grown comparably enough in
spirituality to live as brothers.

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aidanrocke
For the kind of explosiveness that man will be able to contrive by 1980, the
globe is dangerously small, its political units dangerously unstable.-John von
Neumann

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c3534l
I'm not sure if there ever existed a man as ahead of his time as Von Neumann.

~~~
carapace
Da Vinci? Bucky Fuller?

Legend has it that when Gödel presented "On the Completeness of the Logical
Calculus" von Neumann threw in the towel (on Hilbert's program) on the spot.

~~~
michele_f
Thank you for your comment. I didn't know that anecdote.

~~~
carapace
Cheers!

What I find fascinating is, he was the _only_ person in the room to understand
immediately. Even today, most people (and I mean mathematicians and
programmers and others who might be expected to get it) still haven't
internalized Gödel.

