A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
This would stop the currently exponential pace of growth from outpacing what society, and regulation, can adapt to. Thus avoiding the inevitable crash that will happen when we lose control of the exponentially accelerating train of technology, and it flies off the rails.
It's not as simple as that.
For some it might be true, but for others, the opposite would be actual beneficial.
E.g. I see such a technological governor currently in action in my country trying to slowdown transition to sustainable energies.
I don't think that is a desirable governor, unless you are over 60 and don't give a shit about what will be happening in a few years, cause you'll be dead by then.
Governors don't cut off supply of steam - or fuel or anything - in a on/off kind of way: they regulate the input flow continuously in a way that self-stabilizes at the desired engine speed.
Good catch, fixed
We're trying pretty hard to slow down EV and green energy adoption as much as possible in my country, that count?
But seriously, in an ideal world this would be the role of taxes. Technology running out of control and harming people or the planet because too many people are making too much money off it? Tax 'em until its no longer worth their while to behave in those ways.
Taxes are one mechanism, but they don't work if you let corporations get too big/powerful. Then you get regulatory capture, no matter how many anti corruption measures you bake in
Capitalism needs constant pruning to incentivize competition and align companies with the common good... And even that never seems to last very long
Very true, and that's the reason why governments being "pro-business" (as opposed to "anti-trust") is just pouring gas on the fires of inequity. Governments are supposed to regulate, tax, and incentivize businesses to act in a way that benefits the country overall, something we seem to have totally lost sight of in the USA decades ago.
We’re trying pretty hard to slow down EV and green energy adoption as much as possible in my country, that count?
Well, on the one hand, we're trying some very heavy-handed bureaucratic strategies to prop up O&G and to undermine domestic green alternatives.
But, on the other hand, we're fucking up all the major international suppliers of O&G while incentivizing the world's manufacturing powerhouse to spam green energy grids across the underdeveloped world at below-cost in order to build out a 21st century trade network.
So it's a double-edged sword, and we're just pinwheeling around with that thing.
Yep, apparently Cuba is undergoing the fastest green energy transition of any nation in history thanks to our fuckery, so this sword probably has like 8 edges at least.
this. taxes and regulation are part of a healthy economy. Its like excersising and eathing right. we have been a idle junk food eating economy for a long time now.
Hmm yes I can definitely see a formulaically determined tax rate serving as the break
We need that for wealth as well, ie, wealth caps. Younger too rich? Taxes go up to 100% 9f income until you're below the limit again
Yeah, this is something ive thought ab9ut too. Something like a tax rate that approaches 100% the more you make/own, so that you reach a pt of diminishing returns. The tax money would need to go elsewhere than the national budget though, so as to not just move the dangerous concentration of wealth elsewhere.
We need that for wealth as well, ie, wealth caps.
The perpetual struggle of any human-administered system is in how you keep the agents of the system (those implementing the policy) aligned with the principles (those setting the policy). Because we did have high tax rates and nationalization plans and even outright communist manifestos floating around the country eighty years ago. And then they were systematically sabotaged and dismantled by bureaucrats more aligned with the monied interests than the voting public.
In the modern day, you can't even get a ballot amendment passed on majority (even super-majority) vote without a court casually overturning it, a legislature refusing to implement it, or the executive to enforce it.
Even something overwhelmingly popular, like high-speed mass transit or national health care or the policing of pedophile super-predators, is neglected on a bipartisan basis time and time and time again.
Who ~~Watches~~ Taxes the ~~Watchmen~~ Taxmen, so to speak? What kind of social organizing principle gets a large bureaucracy of people committed to redistributing wealth suited up and on the ground to do what must be done?
Where's this exponentially accelerating train of technology and how can I board it? All I see nowadays is this buggy predictive text engine.
What we actually need to govern is management stupidity.
There’s an old riddle - How is a mouse when it spins?
Tap for spoiler
The higher the fewer
It’s not been confirmed, but it is believed that the weights of a governor was known as a mouse, and so it means that the higher they get, the further out the balls are, and so the fewer rotations they make
Most governors don’t have the balls like this one.
These governors gave rise to the phrase "balls out."
When the governor is at its max the balls extend outward, slowing the speed of things.
Additionally, when the train starts going really fast, the balls raise up. In the conductors booth, the governor is usually next the wall, so these higher speeds also lead to the phrase "balls to the wall".
Interesting idea, impossible to implement without creating problems ten times worse.
One could argue many such governors are already in place.
Some are financial, others are societal, a bunch are based on actual proactive intervention (e.g. through international laws because of ethics considerations).
The more important question is: who governs the governors?
Yep, the international law that such a mechanism would require would inevitably be broken by the usual suspects. We're just not capable enough of organizing ourselves as a species.
also btw what you're describing is called a negative feedback regulatory circuit. it counteracts fluctuations of some quantity, thus stabilizing the quantity over time.
it appears in almost all machinery.
To add to this, when a lot of people say "it'll cause a negative feedback loop" technically they're referring to a positive feedback loop, where the feedback makes the change worse instead of correcting it.
Positive feedback is actually insanely useful in the right application. A great example is a light switch. There's positive feedback for each position and it's inherently unstable in the "middle" where even a slight nudge forces the switch over fully to the off or the on position.
Also Schmitt triggers for electronics. That's basically how all computers work under the hood. Once you cross a threshold positive feedback takes over and forced the output from rail to rail (0V or ground, to 5V rail supply for example)
In fact most amplifiers use negative feedback because if you had positive feedback you would end up with your amplifier screaming at the top of its lungs (that's also why if you put an instrument close to a speaker it causes positive feedback and amp screech)
“it’ll cause a negative feedback loop” technically they’re referring to a positive feedback loop
I've heard the terms "vicious"/"virtuous" cycle kicked around.
These exist on induction motors too. Know what happens when it's not there?
The motor gets too much of the blessed Motive Force for too long that its Machine Spirit cannot contain it and then the Spirits leave the motor as magic smoke and burn out the motor.
Without a governor on tech, that's the fate we're gonna have. We'll all be magic smoke, as we're slowly(or rapidly?!) annihilated.
Yep
No, not really. It would limit beneficial advancements in technology as well.
Like crossing over to renewable energy sources and advancements in energy efficiency or battery technology. Thanks to EVs we have progressed significantly in that department within last few years.
Or medical advancements, covid and mRNA vaccines are probably a good example.
These would just need a different (higher) set point of the control loop, but still need some kind of regulating mechanism.
Even things like renewable deployment need some kind of selective dampening to make them work, e.g. to allow the old style energy infrastructure to keep up without the grid frequently collapsing.
Same for medical advancements. E.g. you don't want the employment speed of new methods outpace the test and review measures ensuring people's safety.
Even things like renewable deployment need some kind of selective dampening to make them work
On this front there's also fun challenges such as Javons Paradox where increased efficiency leads to increased consumption. This was observed all the way back to the Industrial Revolution as coal use did not decrease with increased efficiency but instead coal consumption simply kept increasing as it effectively became a cheaper input for the same amount of output
I remember seeing a similar effect when conventional lights became forbidden in the EU, followed by energy saving devices suddenly becoming widely available for decent prices.
EU expectation was now saving 80% of the power used for lighting.
Reality was that people instead just started putting up twice as many lights, and each with maximum available luminosity instead of the few dim ones they were content with before...
Fair, good point, yeah it would need some regulating mechanism to make sure that the gird can keep up and to make sure that medical advancements are safe to use.
I mean medical advancements already have a regulation mechanism in the form of certification that does indeed limit the pace of their development. It's quite a clumsy one though and there's no feedback loop, it's more like a permanent break
Yes, i kinda forgot that.
Well said
Nah. Take out the greedy fuckers that make money out of making technology miserable and give me fully automatic space gay communism.
Can we get one for politics and political corruption first?
It's never the hardware nor the software, it's always the wetware that's the problem. We just need to get our shit together. We can't do that by losing our shit and freaking out over technological progress.
Balls out!
We have one. It’s called being human. As humans have a limited ability to understand and invent, there is a limit to technological growth rate. It’s just that this governor is set at a development rate that is much higher than what the society can handle.
No, what we need is a system where technological progress takes into account the benefits and detriments to all people and the system we exist in (nature+), when implementing said progress. The problem isn't that things are moving too fast, it's that a few people have seized control of these things and are pushing them, to the destruction of literally everything else.
Wouldn't computers have been better if we all got the gains and by now, the time of AI, we were already only working 2-10 hours a week? Look at the charts, that's where we should be right now. AI should be a "we all have to put in 45 minutes of gig work a week to maintain boomer levels of financial stability" moment.
And no, not just Americans or Western Europeans, everyone should be at this level by now. That is how far we have progressed, and that is what has been stolen from all of us.
the actual balls from balls to the wall are in the building
I think these are actually the balls from "balls out" when the engine is going full speed the balls swing way out and are spinning around.
IIRC, "balls to the wall" refers to ball-shaped knobs on the throttle levers of a lot of aircraft. To go fast you push that lever as far as it goes "to the wall"
The narrative of needing to progress all the time, in any way possible, is just too strong. And unfortunately, globally, it makes sense: if we don't do it, somebody else will. This is the material for hypes & bubbles, yet it still continues.
And it's a question of money. Financial growth is basically a synonym for progress.
I remember one of my school teachers explaining to us exponential growth and built-in obsoletion: economists theorize that economies follow a certain wave pattern: it goes up for a while, it comes down for a while. That's a healthy economy. And this was reality for a while, until roughly the 1970s* iirc. Then something changed, and suddenly it became overwhealmingly important to uphold growth, at all cost. Like healthy tissue developing cancer. I think you can see how built-in obsoletion (and similar concepts like fashion, design etc.) plays an important role here: it's what keep consumers buying.
So I, an innocent teenager, asked: "But wouldn't it be better for everybody if we changed back to a more sustainable economy & production?" And the answer was "Yes, and they know it, but it would require a problematic transitional period of maybe a few decades, and not a single politician/party on the whole planet will risk that."
That was 40 years ago. Since then I believe that education (and much better education than what we have nowadays) is the only way out of this mess, in the long term.
* what happened then?
edit: I wonder if the downvoters would like to explain themselves?
the best explanation i've found is the hirtenstabmodell (not sure how to translate this to english, maybe "shepherd's staff model"?). i've never seen a single article about it published unfortunately so i can't link to it. it's all hearsay from close friends.
i'm not sure how to start explaining. it's a long and convoluted story. anyways it ends up saying that yes, infinite exponential growth cannot be sustainable, but within certain chapters of human history it is still the way to go. a whole lot of technology got developed since 1970. basically all of IT, but also international relations (globalism, and end to the cold war, relations to china, etc.)