Repost: Common a priori objections by “debunkers”

(Note: This entire article has been duplicated from  activistnyc.wordpress.com. It can be read in full with this link)

Common a priori objections by “debunkers,” including arguments from authority and the “someone would have talked” and “too many people” arguments

 
Every now and then I get a wave of “debunkers” visiting this blog. They’re welcome to post here; I’ve learned a lot from them. But, in the future, I would like to try to avoid certain repetitious arguments, or at least confine those particular arguments to relevant threads such as this one.
There are some a priori arguments they almost always bring up in an effort to prove that there could not have been any government complicity in the attacks of 9/11. In recent debates here, those arguments got jumbled together with other, meatier issues in comment threads.
 
To avoid such jumbling in the future, I’ve decided to devote this post to the more common a priori arguments. I’ll then add a rule to my comment policy requiring that, in the future, these and similar a priori arguments be discussed only in comments below this post (or other posts on these same topics), rather than jumbled together with other, more substantive discussions.
 
In this post I’ll also provide a brief review of my debates with “debunkers” in general, for the benefit of “debunkers” visiting this blog for the first time. Some of the discussions we’ve had here have been very worthwhile.

• The most common a priori arguments
• One type of complicity hypothesis, defended here
• Letting the hijackers do their thing: People DID talk!
• Air defense failures: Hiding any interference?
• WTC: Hiding the planting of explosives, incendiaries, etc.?
• WTC: Why were no devices found in the rubble?
• Structural engineers and arguments from authority
• The most likely main motive for complicity, by high officials, in the 9/11 attacks
• But why destroy WTC 7?

The most common a priori arguments
 
The most common a priori argument is a claim that the culprits could not have gotten away with it.

The usual form of this is the “someone would have talked” argument. Related to this is the “too many people” argument, the claim that too many people would have to have been in on the plot, or at least would have noticed something strange going on, thereby making it impossible to keep a secret.
 
Also common are arguments from authority, It is claimed that we should not question the experts who say that WTC 1, 2, and 7 all collapsed as a result of nothing more than two jet crashes and the resulting fires.
 
Also it is often claimed that there were no likely motives, either for government complicity in the 9/11 attacks in general or for the destruction of WTC 7 in particular. And, in my opinion, many 9/11 Truth activists don’t do the best possible job of stating the likely motives. I will try to remedy what I see as some deficiencies in that regard.
 
One type of complicity hypothesis, defended here

In this post I’ll be defending the feasibility of one particular type of hypothesis about possible government complicity in the 9/11 attack. The type of hypothesis outlined below would be categorized by Nicholas Levis as “LIHOP plus”:
 
There were real hijackers. Al Qaeda is a real organization, but heavily infiltrated by the FBI, the CIA, and intelligence agencies from various other countries around the world. The infiltrators likely include agent provocateurs as well as just plain spies. At least a few high U.S. officials had very specific and detailed foreknowledge, which might have come to them not only via the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc., but also via warnings from foreign governments, plus informal high-level channels such as, perhaps, the Bush / bin Laden family friendship. The attacks were aided and supplemented in various ways by one or more high officials and a handful of other people, e.g. by preventing FBI interference in the hijackers’ plot, slowing down the air defense system to allow the hijackers to reach their targets, and possibly by either demolishing the WTC buildings or at least supplementing the attack on the WTC buildings via bombs or arson.
 
I do not necessarily believe that any particular hypothesis along the above lines actually happened, but I do believe it to be a real possibility, one of many possible scenarios that might lie behind the 9/11 coverup. The point of this post is not to prove that anything in particular actually did happen, but merely to show that hypotheses of the above type are possible.
 
Could this sort of thing have actually happened? Or would it have entailed too many people, who would have talked? I’ll explore these questions below.
 
But first, I should note that not everyone in the 9/11 Truth movement agrees with hypotheses of the above type. Not everyone in the 9/11 Truth movement advocates the WTC demolition idea. Some focus only on air defense issues, warnings and foreknowledge, etc. On the other hand, there are many other people in the 9/11 Truth movement who hold a pure “MIHOP” view, according to which there were no hijackers, and the planes were just remote-controlled, or something. I will not be defending the latter view here.
 
I’m currently agnostic on the question of what was done to the WTC buildings. In this post, I will defend the possibility that the collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7 could have been something other than purely natural consequences of the two jet crashes. (In this post, I won’t discuss the arguments against the purely natural collapse idea. I’ll discuss those in future posts.)

 
Letting the hijackers do their thing: People DID talk!
 
In my opinion, the only parts of the above “LIHOP plus” scenario that would need to have been known by more than a handful of people would have been (1) the foreknowledge by the FBI and by the intelligence agencies, and (2) the prevention of FBI and airport-security interference in the hijackers’ plot.
 
On these matters, lo and behold, there are people who have talked, such as FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and others listed on this page of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition site. The Jersey Girls have reported that they were approached by quite a few other whistleblowers who wanted to be called to testify before the 9/11 Commission, but who were never called, for whatever reason.
 
Also there has been quite a bit of talk about Able Danger, a military intelligence program which is said to have identified at least some of the 9/11 hijackers over a year before 9/11/2001.
FAA whistleblower Bogdan Dzakovic has remarked, “Since 9/11, I learned to have less contempt for the terrorists than I do for the bureaucrats and politicians who could have prevented 9/11 but didn’t.
 
They served in very pivotal positions of influence but due to gross incompetence or the fear of actually fulfilling their oaths of office to defend this country or possibly even something a bit more sinister, they failed to take any action. … Many of the FAA bureaucrats that actively thwarted improvements in security prior to 9/11 have been promoted by FAA or the Transportation Security Administration.” (Flying the deadly skies: Whistle-blower thinks the state of U.S. aviation security invites another attack by Bill Katovsky, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, July 9, 2006.)
 
Alas, whistleblowers too often don’t get listened to, as discussed in 9/11 whistleblowers ignored, retaliated against by Michael Hampton, who concludes, “It’s clear now to anyone paying the least bit of attention that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were completely preventable.”
One could argue that the problems here were (and still are) just incompetence, negligence, and cronyism. Perhaps. Then again, that very same incompetence, negligence, and cronyism, on the part of the relevant bureaucracies as a whole, could also have enabled a few people at the top to get away with a whole lot worse. More about this below.

 
Air defense failures: Hiding any interference?
 
Was something done to slow down NORAD’s response? Was something done to prevent the hijacked planes from being even intercepted, let alone shot down? If so, how many people would have been needed to accomplish that?
 
Not very many. On a matter such as air defense, where every second counts, it takes only a few lackadaisical people in top positions to slow everything to a crawl.
 
According to Chapter 1 of the 9/11 Commission Report:

The FAA, the White House, and the Defense Department each initiated a multiagency teleconference before 9:30. Because none of these teleconferences – at least before 10:00 – included the right officials from both the FAA and Defense Department, none succeeded in meaningfully coordinating the military and FAA response to the hijackings.

 
Why were “the right officials” unavailable for so long? It was already obvious, by the time the second plane hit WTC 2 at 9:03 AM, that “America is under attack,” as Andrew Card informed George Bush at 9:05 AM. By that time it was already known that American Airlines Flight 77 had been hijacked too.
 
It is hard to believe that “the right officials” could genuinely have been that incompetent. Even if they really were just that incompetent, they should have been at least fired, if not prosecuted for negligence.
 
Everyone can see that “the right officials” were, at the very least, criminally negligent. That obvious fact cannot be hidden. The only question is whether their crime was something worse than mere negligence.
 
Had NORAD succeeded in intercepting any of the planes, there were only two people who could then authorize a shoot-down: the President and the Secretary of Defense. Both Bush and Rumsfeld were less than diligent about making themselves available for consultation on such an every-second-counts decision. (See my posts Bush at Booker School on the morning of 9/11 George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Myers: Their whereabouts on 9/11, and see the comment threads below these posts for more details.)
 
An even more important question is why no planes were even intercepted in the first place. Some people in the 9/11 Truth movement have speculated that someone may have deliberately created extra confusion for NORAD/NEADS, e.g. via false blips on their radar screens. If indeed something like that was done, it probably would not have been difficult to hide. It could have been done by just one person plus whoever gave that person access.
 
In any case, we do know that we’ve been lied to about the air defense failures. (See the section The lack of air defense in my post My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11.) We just don’t know exactly what was covered up.


WTC: Hiding the planting of explosives, incendiaries, etc.?
 
Many people in the 9/11 Truth movement believe that other things were deliberately done to World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7, besides just crashing planes into the Twin Towers.
A common objection to this idea, by “debunkers,” is that the perpetrators’ activities could not have gone unnoticed.
 
But it seems to me that their work could easily have been disguised as some sort of maintenance or upgrade, provided that their entry into the building was authorized by someone in a position of authority at the WTC complex.
 
Six weeks before 9/11/2001, Larry Silverstein became the new leaseholder for the entire WTC complex (except for WTC 7, which he already owned). Given the change in management, it was only to be expected that there might be some new contractors as well, or perhaps some special maintenance consultants. So, the entry of some new and unusual (but authorized) contractors would not have raised any eyebrows on the part of the security staff.
 
Any work involving the core columns could easily have been disguised as some sort of elevator work.
 
The perimeter spandrels could perhaps have been accessed via crawlspaces (ceiling chambers).
Any work involving perimeter columns would have been a bit more difficult to hide, because it would have required going into offices, meaning that the tenants would have known that there was some sort of work being done in their offices. But it could have been disguised as some sort of maintenance that required drilling holes in walls, such as electrical work, and it could have been done late at night when the office staff was absent.
 
I will assume that it was not necessary to access perimeter columns on every floor, but only on a minority of the floors, if indeed that was done at all. Thus the workers could easily have avoided those relatively few offices that were open 24 hours a day.
 
Whatever was done, it need not have required anywhere nearly as much work as a standard controlled demolition. The perpetrators need not have concerned themselves with various safety issues that are of concern to commercial demolition contractors. The collapse of the Twin Towers, and to a lesser extent WTC 7 too, spewed debris all over the place, damaging surrounding buildings, which is something a standard controlled domolition aims to avoid.
 
So I think it’s possible that the work could have done by as few as three or four people, maybe at most six or so.
 
(Reminder to “debunkers”: The point of the above is only to defend the possibility that the WTC collapses may have had a little extra help. I’m aware that my speculation does not prove that any such thing was actually done. Actual evidence for any such scenario is a separate topic, to be discussed in other posts.)
 
(P.S., 3/6/2008: The above is a summary of my replies to westprog99, originally in the comment thread following my post He oughta know better: Mark Roberts and the iron spherules, recently transplanted to my new post Hiding the planting of incendiaries, explosives, or whatever? Response to a common a priori objection. Comments on this topic should be posted underneath the latter post rather than here on this page.)

 
WTC: Why were no devices found in the rubble?
 
Another common objection by “debunkers” is that no remnants of explosive or incendiary devices were found in the rubble. Or, at least, no such remnants were noticed and publicly commented on.
In the first place, any such devices would most likely have gotten pulverized, along with nearly everything else.
 
Of course, they might not have all gotten pulverized.
 
Perhaps some remnants of devices were found, but people might have assumed that they were something else. A lot would depend on exactly what these devices looked like.
 
Another thing to consider is that the CIA was openly involved in the cleanup. The CIA had had an office in WTC 7 and searched the rubble during the cleanup, presumably to ensure that no classified documents went astray. (See the New York Times article The Intelligence Agency: Secret C.I.A. Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11 by James Risen, November 5, 2001. A copy of the printed version of this article is shown in the WTC 7 section of the video Loose Change Final Cut.)
 
If, by any chance, the CIA was in any way involved in the destruction of the WTC buildings, then, in addition to searching for classified documents, the same CIA agents could have searched for other things too, preventing those other things, too, from falling into the hands of other people. Those other things could have included … well, who knows what. Whatever the CIA agents might have been searching for besides papers, they had a perfect excuse to search the rubble thoroughly. And most likely they were around during pretty much the entire cleanup. How else could they have ensured that no classified documents fell into the wrong hands?
 
The CIA agents who searched the rubble might not, themselves, have known exactly what these mysterious objects were that they were searching for. They might have just been shown pictures and told to retrieve any objects that looked like thus-and-so, without being told exactly what those objects were. In that case, they would simply have accepted that they didn’t need to know what the objects were. I would expect that kind of compartmentalization to be commonplace in intelligence agencies.
 
Then again, the above hypothesis about CIA involvement in the cleanup might not have been necessary, if the devices themselves were sufficiently well-disguised.
 
Likewise, residues may or may not have been easily detectable, depending on what was used. For example, thermite leaves a residue consisting mostly of iron and aluminum oxide, both of which would have been present in the rubble anyway. So, to detect thermite residue, one would also need to look for other evidence, e.g. evidence that sufficiently high temperatures were reached in at least a few places.
 
(Reminder to “debunkers”: Again, the point of the above is only to defend only the possibility of an inside-job hypothesis regarding the destruction of the WTC buildings. I don’t claim to know what actually happened to the WTC buildings, or whether the CIA was in any way involved.)


Structural engineers and arguments from authority
 
A common response to WTC demolition hypotheses is: “Not a single structural engineer in the entire world agree with you! Every structural engineer in the entire world says that the WTC buildings collapsed solely due to jet impacts and resulting fires.”
 
First, that’s not true. There are some structural engineers who are members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Admittedly, not very many yet, but we’ll see who else joins.
When that’s pointed out, a “debunker” will usually reply, “Well, every single one of the world’s other structural engineers, besides the very few listed on the AE911T website, agrees that the WTC buildings collapsed solely due to jet impacts and fire.”
 
Well, that’s probably not accurate either.
 
First, the majority of the world’s structural engineers have probably not studied the WTC collapses themselves, beyond reading the pronouncements of mainstream experts. Most structural engineers probably have not even read the entire NIST report, for example. And, as the “debunkers” themselves are fond of pointing out in other contexts (e.g. in response to the argument that no steel-frame skyscraper has ever collapsed due to fire), every building is unique, with its own strengths and vulnerabilities. So, a structural engineer would have to have studied the WTC buildings oneself in order to have an informed opinion about them.
 
If one is going to do a numbers comparison, it would be fair to compare only those on both sides who have actually studied the WTC buildings and the WTC collapses on their own, rather than just reading summary reports in trade journals.
 
Furthermore, it’s likely that there exist at least a few structural engineers who agree with AE911T but who hesitate to join, out of fear of having their full legal names published on a controversial website. (I myself have not joined AE911T for that very reason. I’m playing it safe in that regard, given how some 9/11 Truth activists here in New York have been personally harassed. I’m not a structural engineer, but I do have a different kind of engineering background. It wouldn’t surprise me if at least a few structural engineers preferred to support the 9/11 Truth movement in more anonymous ways too.)
 
However, as far as I am aware, the “debunkers” are indeed correct that the purely-natural collapse hypothesis is the unanimously accepted orthodoxy in structural engineering journals.
 
So the question now is whether the consensus in structural engineering journals should be considered infallible – or, at least, sufficiently close to infallible that no one, and especially no one outside the field of structural engineering itself, should ever presume to question it.
 
(P.S., 2/28/2008: The remainder of this section is mis-stated. See the P.S. after this section, and see the discussion in comments below this thread.)
 
Well, let’s consider what kind of a field structural engineering is. In their more honest moments, structural engineers will admit that their field is on a somewhat less sound scientific experimental footing than most other kinds of engineering. For example, this post in the JREF forum, by Newton’s Bit, ends with the following quote:

“Structural Engineering is the art of molding materials we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to understand forces we cannot really assess in such a way that the community at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our own ignorance.” James E Amrhein

 
The problem is this: In almost any other kind of engineering, complete prototypes of any given product are built and thoroughly tested before the product is mass-produced and sold. If structural engineering were like almost every other kind of engineering, complete prototypes would be built and thoroughly built and tested, not necessarily for every single building, but at least for every building of a new and unusual design. Alas, that would be prohibitively expensive. For skyscrapers, it’s common to build and test prototype floor assemblies, but not a prototype for the entire building.
 
If structural engineering were like almost every other kind of engineering, there would be frequent experiments in which buildings, of various different kinds, were built for the purpose of setting them on fire to see whether and how they collapse. Such experiments have been done occasionally (e.g. Cardington Fire Test: The Behaviour of a Multi-storey Steel Framed Building Subjected to Fire Attack), but not very often. There’s just not enough funding for such experiments.
 
Ditto for experiments involving other kinds of damage to buildings. Also, there has not been much experimental study of the phenomenon of progressive collapse, which is said to have brought down WTC 1, 2, and 7. (Regarding the rarity of such study, see, for example, The science of how buildings fall down by Colin Nickerson, Boston Globe, December 3, 2007.)
 
For more about this matter, please see my post Engineers were surprised by the WTC collapses, December 7, 2007.
 
Another problem is this: In a field with relatively little hard scientific data (compared to what one might expect in other engineering disciplines that have been around for a long time), there’s lots of wiggle room for as-yet-unfalsified hypotheses. And, given whatever wiggle room they may have, most people will wiggle in a direction which they see as beneficial to their careers, and which avoids any boat-rocking. This factor might well have inflated the consensus in favor of the official story.
 
Even one of the most knowledgeable and articulate “debunkers,” Frank Greening, has acknowledged that institutional bias can be a problem. He’s a co-author of the latest Bazant paper, but he is nevertheless highly critical of the NIST report. (See his fascinating post Confessions of a 9/11 Agnostic, on page 6 of the thread Debate! What debate? in the JREF forum.) As far as I can tell, he suspects a coverup, not of 9/11 being an inside job, but of possible flaws in the design of the WTC buildings. (See also this post of his in the JREF forum thread Another engineer criticizes NIST & FEMA.)
 
So, an orthodoxy in the field of structural engineering should not be regarded as beyond question.
At the same time, those of us who question that consensus should certainly not regard ourselves as infallible either. The collapses of the WTC buildings involved many factors that need to be examined cautiously and in quantitative detail, and on which too many people in the 9/11 Truth movement have jumped to premature conclusions. (See my post Demolition of WTC: Let’s not overstate the case, please.) We should not simply dismiss the orthodox view; we should at least try to understand it, to the best of our ability. And we should recognize that we ourselves do not have the final word. If we ourselves do not have the expertise needed to resolve the issues, we should encourage those challengers of the official story who do have at least some relevant expertise, but we should not endorse their views without question either. We should be willing to wait and see.
 
(P.S., 2/28/2008: In this and subsequent comments, westprog99 argues that structural engineering is, in fact, a “mature discipline.” See the ensuing discussion. It might have been more accurate for me to say, as I do in this comment, that the field of structural engineering is probably “mature” on the question of what is needed to ensure the safety of buildings under normal conditions, but perhaps not quite so “mature” on the question of how buildings of various different kinds perform under various extreme conditions.)


The most likely main motive for complicity, by high officials, in the 9/11 attacks
 
In my long-ago post Reply to some folks at Screw Loose Change, one objection I did not respond to very well was this one:

4. If your whole plan is to attack Iraq, why not blame the attacks on Saddam? Wouldn’t that actually help to further your goals, instead of the nonsensical “frame Osama to attack a country that has nothing to do with our target” scheme?

I still stand by most of what I said in reply to that objection:

Perhaps because Al Qaeda already existed, and perhaps because making use of Al Qaeda was both easier and less suspicious-looking than cooking up a totally new CIA-front Iraqi “terrorist group” from scratch. Also, the point of the 9/11 attacks, from the point of view of the American perpetrators, probably wasn’t just to justify a short-term war against Iraq or Afghanistan, but to justify a century of “war on terror,” with a variety of targets. That would explain why the attacks had to be so exceedingly massive and dramatic, as well as explaining why the exact nationality of the terrorist group wasn’t too important, as long as they were Islamist and thus could be tied, in the American popular imagination, to just about any Muslim country that the administration might choose to go to war with for whatever reason.

But I would now add the following:
 
The most likely main motive probably had to do with Afghanistan, the country which was invaded almost immediately after 9/11. Before 9/11/2001, there were actual military preparations, not just a plan, to invade Afghanistan. However, if 9/11 had not happened, it would have been extremely difficult to sell the American public on the idea of invading Afghanistan, given what a meat grinder Afghanistan had been for the Soviet Union back in the 1980’s. (For documentation on the preparations for an invasion of Afghanistan, see the section on The war in Afghanistan in my post My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11.)
 
This, the need to justify an invasion of Afghanistan is a likely motive for complicity in the 9/11 attacks, regardless of the reasons why the Bush administration wanted to invade Afghanistan in the first place. Most likely there were several different motives for the invasion. The relative importance of these motives can be debated.
 
One topic that has been debated quite a bit is the role of oil (and other energy sources such as natural gas) in U.S. foreign policy. Some interesting information on this topic can be found on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations. (See especially this collection of pages on “energy security.”)
The Bush administration got lots of mileage out of 9/11, on more matters than just Afghanistan. It provided an excuse for the Iraq war too, and for torture, and for various curtailments of civil liberties. These other things could perhaps be seen as secondary motives, but the most likely primary motive was to provide an excuse for invading Afghanistan.

 
But why destroy WTC 7?
 
Various “debunkers” have asked what the motive could have been for destroying WTC 7 in particular.
 
Some people in the 9/11 Truth movement have speculated that the motive might have been the destruction of records. WTC 7 had a lot of interesting tenants, including the CIA, the FBI, the EEOC, and the SEC, any one of which might have had something that the perpetrators wanted destroyed.
To this, “debunkers” have had two responses: (1) If the point is to destroy papers, why not just use a shredder? (2) All but the most recent records were likely backed up somewhere anyway, so could not be destroyed.
 
My reply is that there’s a difference between (a) actually destroying records and (b) having a good excuse to lose records that one isn’t supposed to lose. The destruction of WTC 7 might have been good for the latter purpose, if not the former. Furthermore, in the event that the CIA was involved, they might have had something other than just records that they wanted destroyed.
 
Anyhow, there’s also another possible motive for the destruction of WTC 7. My guess is that, from the point of view of those who planned the destruction of the WTC buildings, there might have been a lot of unknowns, and that these unknowns were dealt with via redundancy.
 
The planners might not have known, for sure, whether the hijackers would succeed in hijacking the planes, and, if so, whether they would succeed in crashing into the buildings, and, if so, whether the resulting damage and fires (plus whatever devices might have been planted in the Towers, if any) would succeed in bringing the Towers down. In case the above did not fully succeed, then perhaps the collapse of a third skyscraper might provide the desired melodrama.
 
Given how WTC 7 was hit by flying debris, the planners may have decided, on the fly, to use that as an excuse for an allegedly “natural” collapse, and to time their remote-controlled devices accordingly, e.g. by first setting off incendiary devices on floors 7 and above to start the fires, and then waiting 7 hours to destroy the building by setting off incendiaries or explosives further down, say, on floor 5. But, in the event that WTC 7 had not been hit by flying debris, I’m assuming here that the planners would have had some sort of backup excuse for the collapse of WTC 7 – perhaps even bombs (or incendiaries) planted by a “terrorist.” But the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 provided a much better excuse, so they went with that one.
 
In addition, if the planners also wanted to destroy one or more specific offices in WTC 7, for whatever reason, they would have done so by two redundant means: First, by just setting the specific office(s) on fire. But the planners could not have known in advance whether fire fighters would succeed in putting out the fires in WTC 7. To deal with that uncertainty, demolishing the entire building might have been a backup means of destroying whatever offices the planners wanted to destroy.
 
Disclaimer: This entire discussion about WTC 7 is hypothetical, since I don’t claim to know what happened to the WTC buildings, let alone what the motives were.

Computational incompressibility

Some of the things that go on in this mysterious reality of ours are totally beyond the ability of sapients to understand. Just as it would be impossible for a dog or cat to grasp the theory of relativity, it may well be impossible for a human to discern the true meaning of life. Even if god itself decided to step into our world and explain such things, the words would have no meaning to us. Some information is so densely encoded that it simply cannot be passed on from a higher toposophic to a lower. The superintelligent entitys which populate science fiction will often say and do things which simply cannot be explained to baseline humans. One example of this would be in the popular game mass effect, when commander shepard attempts to interrogate an AI named sovereign, and find out why it desires to exterminate all life in the galaxy. Shepard: “What do you want from us? Slaves, resources?” Sovereign: “My kind transcends your very understanding. We are each a nation, independent, free of all weakness. You cannot even grasp the nature of our existence.”

 A conversation with sovereign

Why would the game have a villain that can't explain its motives to the heroes? Isn't that just a lazy plot device to enable a giant battle? Well, no. In an example of fridge brilliance, the developers of mass effect had just hit upon one of the major issues that will complicate relations between man and god: Computational incompressibility. In a recent article [1], philosopher paul humphreys describes this as a behavioural facet which is underivable by a process simpler than whatever actualizes that behaviour. One manifestation of this is the inability of great apes and parrots (some of whom have a vocabulary of hundreds of words) to have a real conversation with their caretakers. These creatures may be able to vocalise/signal, but they cannot use language or any other human domain features. This is not surprising: Homo sapiens are the worlds only general intelligence, which means we have a quantitative and qualitative superiority over all other animal species in terms of cognition. There may be near-equals in one or two categorys, but none compete with us in all eight.
 

A necessary simplification
   

It goes without saying, but intelligence isn't isotropic. This becomes very obvious when observing individuals with savantism, who exhibit peak human abilitys in the realm of mathematics and aesthetics (particularly music), but are extremely deficient in all other areas of cognition. Many savants are not even able to dress themselves! This alone should be enough to put doubt upon charles spearmans g-factor hypothesis: When you throw in the possibility that there may be entire toposophic realms above the human level, then its usefulness as a universal intelligence test becomes nul and void. Anyway... Computational incompressability represents an anthropomorphic problem for us, in that even when we know that we are dealing with an alien mind far smarter than us, we tend to underestimate what its true capabilitys might be [2]. This tendancy explains why so many people either disregard the dangers posed by a superintelligence, or assume that such creatures could be easily bargained or reasoned with.
 
 
[1] http://philpapers.org/rec/HUMCAC

[2] http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/readinggroup/barrett1996.pdf

Video transcript

[Fighting and containing transapients, part 1. This video was released to youtube on october 8, 2012. It was eventually removed on behalf of fox broadcasting, so the contents will be reposted in text format. An archived copy is available here]

A superintelligent intellect is one that has the capacity to radically outperform the best human brains in practically every field, including problem solving, brute calculation, scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills. Such entities may function as super-expert systems that work to execute on any goal it is given so long as it falls within the laws of physics and it has access to the requisite resources. Sometimes, a distinction is made between weak and strong superintelligence. Weak superintelligence is what you would get if you could run a human intellect at an accelerated clock speed, such as by uploading it to a fast computer. If the uploads clock-rate were a thousand times that of a biological brain, it would perceive reality as being slowed down by a factor of a thousand. It would think a thousand times more thoughts in a given time interval than its biological counterpart. Unfortunately, no matter how much you speed up the brain of a creature like a dog, you're not going to get the equivalent of a human intellect. Analogously, there might be kinds of smartness that wouldn't be accessible to even very fast human brains given their current capacities. Something else is needed for that. Strong superintelligence refers to an intellect that is not only faster than a human brain but also smarter in a qualitative sense. Something as simple as increasing the size or connectivity of our neuronal networks might give us some of these capacities. Other improvements may require wholesale reorganization of our cognitive architecture or the addition of new layers of cognition on top of the old ones. When discussion of increasing ones smartness comes up, the question often arises: Does intelligence progress linearly, exponentially, or both?
 
In other words, is intelligence something that is isotropic? Does it look the same when scaled up or improved? Current evidence suggests not. Because if it did, then problems that realistically require one genius to solve should also be solvable by two or three non-genius, and that clearly is not the case. The only benefit that comes from having multiple thinkers on a subject is that each individual usually has a different viewpoint, specialise in different things, and have more brute force to throw at the problem. Thats where the synergistic effect of multiple minds coming together stems from. But clearly, this has a limit. The feats that can be performed by one person with an IQ of 180 cannot, in practise, be replicated by two people with an IQ of just 90. There are interesting examples of this phenomenon. (The right genius in the right place) Dozens of philosophers had pondered the solution to the paradoxes raised by zeno of elea. Some of the greatest minds in recorded history tried their hand at cracking it, but the paradoxes did not budge. They managed to withstand two millenia of attempts at scrutinising them. It was not until recently that a definitive answer was provided by peter lynds, in the paper time and classical and quantum mechanics. This suggests a non linear intelligence gradient. But why stop at the human level? After all, from a cosmopolitan viewpoint, the difference in smartness between individual humans is tiny compared to the difference between a human and a primate, or a reptile, or an arthropod. Giant disparitys in intelligence are what is of interest to us, especially given the task of repelling a hostile force of transapients.

This is because no matter how many primates you assemble, they will still not be able to perform the feats of a human, them being unable to understand why three minus two equals one, or to utter rené descartes famous philosophical statement. Let us posit a brand new theory of intelligence differentials. In a nod to orions arm, it will henceforth be known as sophontology, a dicipline which shall concern hypothesising the natures of minds occupying all points on the great toposophic plane. What ought to be the main yardstick of this approach? One idea comes to mind. It will go under the name of domain thresholds. A domain is a landscape that encapsulates minds whose natures follow a certain pattern. This pattern corresponds to the kinds of thought that a being is capable of. For humans, this includes language, self awareness, rationality, abstractness, theory of mind, objective permanence, mathematics, aesthetics, and others. Domain features are the reason why it is impossible to say, for example, that humans are x amounts of times smarter than an animal:We simply posses cognitive abilitys that they do not (which makes numerical comparisons impossible). That begs the question, how can a reasonable comparison be made between something which is present, and something which is not? Theres no clear answer to this. Suffice to say, domain features are the point on the chart where the incremental curves into the exponential. That is something which has important ramifications in an intertoposophic war. After all, it is by definition not possible to compete with a being who exhibits domain features you lack. A reptile cannot compete with a human at arithmetic. It does not even have any concept of numbers.
  

Domain thresholds: Non-sapients occupy the 

1st rung, sapients occupy the 2nd rung, while 

transapients occupy the 3rd rung

  
There is every reason to believe that there are more domain features which the human archetype has not evolved to exploit. A superintelligence will be able to take advantage of this, and compete with us in behavioral categorys which we have no hope of responding to. There are a number of historical precedents for these sorts of things happening. Most recently, was the rise of the hominids. With only a mere tripling in brain size, the descendants of australopithecus were able to surpass all others and dominate the world: Without objective permanence or abstract thought, the animals that these ancient pre-humans competed against had no way to fight back strategically. They had no notions of area denial, of scorched earth, of distance weapons or physical traps. Why should we think the situation would be any different for us, going up against a band of transapients? In the orions arm encyclopedia, a wide variety of such conflicts are portrayed in realistic fasion. One area in which the OA are unique is the fact that they have multiple different stages of superintelligence, six in total, each more powerful and more foreign than the previous. This notion would have much in common with the concept of domain thresholds. Of particular interest is the encyclopedias rejection of the so called plucky baseline meme, which is the idea that ordinary unenhanced human beings can still give a good account of themselves in the face of overwhelming posthuman intelligence and firepower. The OA have determined it an impossibility for any non-superintelligent individual or group to carry out the following actions:
  

• to hack into an Angelnet or transapient Operating System (so it is impossible, literally, for a baseline-equivalent to hack into even an SI:1 angelnet, no matter how infinitely lucky e might be)

• Outwit or fool an Angelnet (e.g. smuggle in weapons, commit a murder, perform an act of sabotage, conceal one's position or motives, whatever)

• Out think or outperform on its own terms a transapient

• Correctly operate non-baseline friendly transapient tech (including weapons)

• In any way comprehend or reverse engineer transapient tech

• escape unaided from ahuman exploitation

• have any victory against a transapient "pest extermination team" sent to get rid of you

• outperform or beat or overwhelm in a military manner and/or by superior force of numbers an individual or group of transapients whose job is to get rid of you

• in any way harm an archailect

 
So - for the purposes of this discussion - the only way that a mere sapient can match a transapient is by emself becoming a transapient. A flatworm in a muddy pond cannot appreciate works of art, or understand general relativity. But if it evolves or is provolved to human equivalence, and becomes human, then it can. It would be ridiculous to have a "plucky flatworm" beating up a human, or out-performing one in literary criticism or university calculus, while still remaining a flatworm. But for a flatworm to evolve into a human, that also means it would no longer be the same being, it would be changed, totally, in every way; ascended and transcended beyond its original condition.

Paradox of the machine gun

One of the most famous weapons of the second world war was the MG 42 machine gun, employed by the German army. It was a weapon with a fearsome reputation among Allied troops. The MG 42 was based on the archetypical MG 34, considered by many to be the first general purpose machine gun. It could serve as a light machine gun when using a bipod, or a heavy machine gun where using a tripod. Compared to other weapons of the time, the belt fed MG 42 not only had a higher cyclic rate of fire (at a rate of 1200-1500 rpm), but a higher sustained rate of fire as well. The wall of lead that came out of the gun barrel left a deep mark on many Allied soldiers. The MG 42 made prominent appearances in many memoirs and history books. What many don't seem to have considered is why the German army selected a machine gun with such an unusually high rate of fire. It went against their strict doctrine of ammo conservation, which demanded that a weapons cyclic fire rate be kept artificially low (so that even during a mad minute, ammunition expenditures would be sustainable).
  
Most sources on this matter will assert: ''The high rate of fire resulted from experiments with preceding weapons that concluded that since a soldier only has a short period of time to shoot at an enemy, it was imperative to fire the highest number of bullets possible to increase the likelihood of a hit... The disadvantage of applying this principle was that the weapon consumed exorbitant amounts of ammunition and quickly overheated its barrel, making sustained fire problematic.'' Or this: ''The Germans however came to the conclusion that a soldier in combat only fires when he sees the enemy and has but a few seconds to do so, taking this as a medium for all combatants they deemed it was he who fired an increased amount of bullets had an increased chance of a kill.'' But is there any truth to these explanations? An essay penned by our resident military guru, Jim Storr, suggest there is a completely different criterion that is not being accounted for.
 
Pondering the vast number of rounds per kill that are expended over the course of an engagement, like the notorious 250,000 bullets per KIA in Iraq and Afghanistan, Storr suggests that something is interfering with a modern armys ability to employ small arms fire. This goes beyond things like stress and return fire making our troops accuracy levels decreases. Indeed, even if we accept that most of the shots fired off in a battle are done only to suppress the enemy and not to kill him (since soldiers conceal themselves, they are hard to hit), this cannot explain how a quarter million rounds are expended just to kill one soldier: The only explanation is that the suppressing fire itself is being delivered in a fundamentally incorrect manner. Back in 1944, a study carried out by the army operational research group concluded that projectiles must not only pass within a certain proximity of a human combatant, but also arrive in a certain volume before he will feel threatened enough to take cover.
 
These are quantifiable data points that allow us to measure how much success a weapon and its user are having in a firefight. Armed with this knowledge, a group of soldiers from the British army were sent onto the firing range to train on a new piece of equipment, the live fire intelligent target. The results showed that most rounds fired missed by too wide a margin to drive an enemy to the ground, and that ammunition was expended at too high a rate to be sustainable for more than a few minutes. Thats consistent with what we have seen of other armys engaged in armed conflict: Infantrymen are not trained to excel at the role of suppression, nor do they have the proper weapons. The training problem can be solved by offering courses like those available at the TTECG, and giving sergeants stricter protocols for fire control. Of course, this still leaves us wondering what kind of small arm is best suited to suppression. If you thought it would be a belt fed, sustained fire weapon (with a quick change barrel) like the MG 42 or minimi, Storrs response will come as a disappointment:
 
''The British L86 magazinefed SA 80 Light Support Weapon (LSW), with its bipod, is extremely good at suppressing targets out to 500m or more... That is principally because it is accurate enough for almost every shot fired to contribute to suppression. The L110 (Minimi) Light Machine Gun (LMG) performs far worse in such trials. At best, only the first shot of a short burst passes close enough to suppress. However, subsequent shots in that burst go anything up to 6m wide of the mark at battlefield ranges.'' There is something very important that mr Storr neglected to consider, however. And that is the combat role that infantrymen have in mind for their machine guns. In WW2, the Germans placed a greater emphasis on engaging area targets, while the British focused on suppressing point targets. Not surprisingly, they both selected very different weapons prior to entering the war. The MG 42s wide cone of fire enabled it to suppress groups, while the bren guns narrow cone of fire enabled it to suppress individuals. Both were successful in fulfilling their combat role, but that brings another question to mind: Which philosophy (area targets vs point targets) is the correct one?
 

 
Before we can answer this dilemma, there is an important reality of the battlefield that must be borne in mind. Ever since the adoption of the rifled musket in the mid 1800s (and then the breech loading rifle in the late 1800s), armys have been forced to abandon close order formations and disperse themselves in order to survive weapons fire. The level of dispersion that occurred in this time frame is surprising. A book by Trevor Dupuy indicates that during the American civil war, armys were dispersed to the tune of 257 square meters per man. [1] During world war 1, the dispersion increased to 2475 square meters per man. During world war 2, the dispersion increased to 27,500 square meters per man. In other words, the amount of men in a given space (force densitys) decreased by a factor of 107 from the civil war to WW2. The trend towards increased dispersion has continued to accelerate. With that fact in mind, its hardly surprising that the number of bullets needed to kill an soldier has increased to such ridiculous highs.

Soldier of fortune magazine provides some figures on how much ammunition was expended per enemy killed in both world wars and korea. [2] Roughly 5000 rounds were fired for every enemy KIA in WW1, whereas 25,000 rounds were fired for every enemy KIA in WW2. In the Korean war, the ammunition expenditure went up to an incredible 100,000 rounds per KIA. Thanks to this data, we can safely conclude that there is a strong correlation between force densitys and rounds per KIA. The more dispersed the enemy is, the harder they are to suppress and to hit. It seems that the old German practise of having their machine guns fire at groups (area targets) was a better compromise, and more reflective of the type of battle a soldier was likely to encounter. They got more mileage out of their MG 42s than the British did with their bren guns. There is enough empirical evidence at hand to show that a machine gun with a wide cone of fire is what is really needed, so that infantry squads can engage area targets. Using machine guns to engage point targets is counterproductive, as that is a job better suited to the rifle.


Notes

[1] Numbers, Predictions and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles, by Trevor Dupuy.

[2] Soldier of Fortune Magazine Guide to Super Snipers, by Robert K. Brown.

An unfortunate development

Recently, a study was released by oxford scientists on how to enhance the traumatising effects of imprisonment on criminals. These individuals, led by rebecca roache, considered various mediums for how this goal could be achieved, in order to not only increase the duration of punishment, but also its intensity. This approach is not news to me. After watching the hypercube and hellraiser back in late 2010, I determined that such exotic methods of torture would inevitably be brought to fruition within a few decades (even though the actual inventor may not be human). The amateurish enthusiasm and naivety of these researchers is quite appalling. Miss roache and her colleagues apparently have no plans to give this penalty its appropriate status: Instead of using it as a monumental deterrent of last resort akin to nuclear tipped ICBMs, they instead want this torture parcelled out to common criminals, in the foolish hope that it will help eliminate all crime. That anyone (much less tenured scientists!) thinks society can not only engage in such haphazard and profoundly evil practices, but actually benefit from it, is nothing short of amazing.
 

 This is where the shit storm began

They don't even pause to consider the wisdom of having a punishment that meets the crime, or ask whether such inordinate sentences should only be reserved for the darkest of souls. No, they want to use it on petty criminals like magdelena luczak and mariusz krezolek, a couple who were found guilty of... Killing their son... By poes law, is this a joke? You do not apply that kind of horsepower against garden variety criminals. This treatment isn't reserved for mere rapists or killers, it is solely the forte' of those who engage in wholesale and wanton destruction of human civilisation at large. Magdelena luczak and mariusz krezolek? Don't make me laugh, they aren't even in the fu*king game. If you want to create hell pits and actually stick human beings into them, you'd better make sure that only top tier psychos like ben netenyahu or dick cheney are targeted. And even then, confinement should not be authorised unless the courts undergo the trial of the century, and prosecutors can put together an armor-plated case that leaves absolutely no stones unturned.

 One stupendous crime...

 And one stupendous punishment

 
Hopefully, my brief diatribe can properly convey the seriousness that lies behind this question, and dispel whatever horseshit notions have been peddled by these scientists. The logical fallacys are easy to identify if you spend enough time debating feminists and their absurd belief that we could (or even should) have commitment free sex with no regard for traditional ethics. The prognosis remains the same, because the disease is identical: Moral relativism. This repellent ideology is responsible for much of the decay that we see in modern society, and it needs to be dumped in the trash where it belongs. All that aside, I can't help but wonder what will become of miss roache and her peers. By releasing such a provocative study under their own names (rather than an alias), these individuals have unknowingly nominated themselves for a darwin award. Inventors of torture devices have a  long and ugly history of being reimbursed for their hubris. Two of the most karmic/ironic examples of this are perillos of athens and joseph guillotin.
 
 
Ideally, this is how a 911 war crimes tribunal would proceed:  http://www.sxolsout.org.uk/110.html
 
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Now that you have heard all the evidence from myself and my learned friends you will shortly retire to consider your verdict. The United States Of America must now wash it's hands of these vile, sadistic mass-murderers. America must now move on. The sooner we can forget George W. Bush ever existed the happier the whole wide world will be. I ask you now to find the accused. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and their ninety-two main conspirators. Guilty on the following counts.

Guilty Of High Treason By Gross Election Fraud And Conducting Two Illegal Government's From 2001 - 2004 & 2004 - 2009.

Guilty Of High Treason By Premeditated Mass Murder For The Purpose Of Starting Illegal War’s For Base Personal Financial Gain.

Guilty Of High Treason By Spending $1 Trillion  American Taxpayer’s Money On Creating Anti-American Terrorists.

Guilty Of Unprecedented High Treason Against We The People By Ignoring Our Founding Father’s Constitution And Everything Our Founding Father’s Stand For.

There can be no other outcome to this trial than the death sentence for the bestial Bush Family Gang of cold-blooded-mass-murderers who brought shame and disgrace to America in a way none of us had previously thought possible."

Demented Bush apologist Bill O’Reilly, who had found it expedient to move aboard, predicted the trial would last two years and the Bush cabal would walk. The trial actually lasted five weeks. All ninety-six found Guilty of Unprecedented High Treason Against We The People were executed on live TV, so justice could be seen to have returned to The United States Of America.

Infantry weight overload

Many people have begun to realise the stupidity of sending soldiers into harms way with 90-100 lbs of gear on their back. It not only comes with health risks, but seriously impedes performance. There have been notable advances in lightweight field gear, but the military brass have a special talent for putting back every pound that is shed. This issue can be resolved by removing the authority of everyone (except squad and platoon leaders) to interfere with what the soldiers take into battle! Free from the desk jockeys influence, the men will be able to carry a more spartan load that does not exceed 1/3rd of their body weight. Lets see how easy it is to arrange a pack for the infantry.
   
There is a weight table over at combat reform which is very useful in this process of deliberation. Assuming a 180 pound man in peak physical condition, this sets our load at just 60 pounds. Can we supply the basics that are needed for two days in combat? If we start him off with 5 pounds of cloths, a 8.2 pound SCAR-H long rifle, and either an entrenching tool or an individual first aid kit (both of which weigh about 3 lbs), then hes left with room for just 43.8 pounds.
 
Leather combat boots, 4.20 lbs
PASGT Kevlar Helmet, 3.00 lbs
PASGT Kevlar Flak Jacket, 8.50 lbs (not including ballistic plate/carrier)
M17A1 Mask, 2.97 lbs
TLBV/ETLBV, 2.00 lbs
-Sub total, 20.67 lbs
 
1-quart canteen/cover/cup, 3.60 lbs
Medium ALICE ruck, 2.46 lbs
Ecotat lightweight sleeping bag, 2.10 lbs
Meal-Ready-Eat, 1.12 lbs (two)
Personal items, 4.00 lbs
-Sub total, 35.07 lbs
 
M9 Bayonet/wire cutter, 1.79 lbs
20-round STANAG magazine 7.62mm, 1.51 lbs (ten)
Arges Type 86 hand grenade, 0.39 lbs (four)
-Grand total, 53.52 lbs
 
UH OH... Does anyone notice a problem here? That 7.62mm ammo is taking up too much weight! But its not like we can switch to a 5.56mm caliber. No way, thats for sissys! We need to get radical here, think outside the box... Reducing the ammo supply clearly isn't an option: 200 rounds is right around the optimum amount required for each soldier *. Hmm... Then maybe we could use aluminum cased bullets? Not so long ago, guys like carlton meyer thought about the pros and cons of this ammunition. Meyers actual quote is: 'Aluminum cases are one-third the weight of brass, so a couple hundred rounds will weigh a pound less.' In reality, he might have been underselling the aluminum cases by quite a lot. Lets run some quick numbers to see.
 
A 7.62x51mm round weighs 25.5 grams, and the actual casing weighs 12.96 grams. Since it is made of copper (which has a density of 8.92 g/cm3), the weight savings that could be achieved by making it out of aluminum (which has a density of 2.7 g/cm3) are significant. The modified 7.62mm round could weigh just 16.44 grams. Put 20 of them together into a 172 gram STANAG magazine, and thats a weight of just 500 grams, or 1.10 lbs. With ten magazines, you can shave off 4.10 lbs! A laudable achievement, but still not enough for our purposes. We would have to switch out the STANAGs with PMAGs, since they only weigh 110 grams. With that arrangement, you've now saved 5.40 lbs of weight.
  
This doesn't exactly get us on target, but then, that just goes to show that arranging an infantry mans pack is more difficult than it looks. Its entirely a matter of compromise, and having the freedom to swap out gear on a day to day basis. Sometimes, there are just certain pieces of equipment that you know will not be needed, and they get dumped in favor of other things. A 60 pound limit is a difficult goal, but its something that must be achieved if we want soldiers to be capable of marching at high speeds with minimal fatigue. Modern infantry formations have too large a logistical footprint to be sustainable in a major war: BCTs typically posses around 210 of the lumbering HEMTTs, even though the brigade itself masses less than 5000 men! Western nations cannot depend on perpetual access to a massive quantitys of cheap fossil fuels: Someday, we will have to relearn the fine art of marching by foot.
 
 
*Some would suggest an alternative approach of using aluminum casings for 5.56mm (while accepting the inferior ballistics that come with it), but they don't say what all the saved weight would be used for. In practise, the men would probably end up carrying extra belts for the GPMG, which is not a bad a tradeoff.

Monotheists and future shock

Within the religious community, there has been considerable ire raised against the transhumanist and singulatarian movements. Probably the biggest purveyor of this has been thomas horn, a devout christian who has vocally opposed the tenets of self enhancement. His theme has really made its mark amongst the god-fearing patriots in america. You only need to take a look at any number of alex jones or mark dices videos on youtube to confirm this. Of course, much of their vitriol can be understood as a knee jerk reaction to the endless march of technical progress, a repeat of the luddite movement in old england. Futurists have known for quite some time that this dynamic would play out again, simply because there are still so many people who live at the bottom of the future shock spectrum. [1] The vast majority of these individuals seem to be barely at the SL1 level, and cannot be bothered to read seminal works like CFAI or nanosystems.

What are some ways we can curb this unhealthy attitude? Only by making sure not to force more futurism on them than they can handle. This means being keenly aware of the uncanny valley. [2] No matter what optimistic projections are made by psychologists or sociologists, sentient AI (much less humanoid robots) will never be able to work alongside most people. Unless they can perfectly emulate human behaviour and appearance (like data) the presence of an android will inevitably end up alienating people, and no amount of top-down peer pressure will change this. You cannot force people to comingle with ever smarter AIs without invoking the adversarial attitude. [3] Simply put, if humans are made to feel threatened or alarmed by a non human (but highly intelligent) agent, they will respond with aggressive tribal behaviour. Under no circumstances should anyone make their creation look human, act human, or in any way mask what they are. Nor should we mass produce them for use as accessories. Thats asking for trouble.

Now, back to the neo luddites. They actually have a lot of overlap with the bioconservatives, albeit with a distasteful religious bend: Anyone who thinks they can find the answer to their hangups about the future by thumbing through the bible, well, they're beyond hope! Hackneyed attempts to ban GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, robotics) will only drive their proponents underground, where research is conducted in more risky circumstances, with a greater risk of dangerous malfunctions. Cutting funding could prove difficult as well. Nobodys want practiononers of these dark arts being forced to set up a black market, trading their knowledge and technology with criminals in exche for money. On the other hand, if you really want to create a dystopian cyber punk setting, you could always just set up a replica of the ATF to curb this activity! (Wait, thats not funny...) Like it or not, GNR is something that must proceed in the open, where it can be subjected to the scrutiny of the scientific community.

A drug lords brain trapped in the body of an

armed combat droid. What could go wrong?

 
The bioconservatives will scream bloody murder, but what other alternatives are there? Computer assisted genetic enhancement is going to be a big industry in a couple decades, something that any college level biologist will be able to try his or her hand at. This is our gateway to morphological freedom. An individuals right to body modification is something that should be guaranteed under international law, even if its end result is mankind cladding off into multiple different directions: There are numerous social and ethnic groups who will envoke the right to self determination, up to and including the alteration of their genomes. In the grand scheme of things, this is not a major concern: We'll simply be seeing a return to the kind of genetic diversity that was known 40 or 50,000 years ago, when homo sapiens lived alongside at least three other hominid species. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for nanotechnology. Even though the fear of open air nanomachines has proved groundless, other concerns remain.
 
Molecular manufacturing will allow engineers to create many different kinds of exotic chemical bonds, which could lead to revolutionary improvements in battery technology, solar panels, capacitors, and fuel cells. Even ordinary substances like steel and concrete could benefit. They are, after all, 'a macro-material strongly influenced by its nano-properties.' Through the use of nanofactorys, we might be able to mass produce mono crystalline iron, which have a tensile and compressive strength 100 times greater than ordinary steel grades. This would have far reaching industrial applications, particularly in skyscrapers or megaships. And who knows what other breakthroughs could come from nanofactorys? The military could use highly reactive compounds like thermium nitrate in bombs and artillery shells. Doctors could use medical nanomachines that synthesise raw atp and deliver it intravenously, alleviating the need to consume dead plant or animal matter.
 
Last but not least, we come to the neo-luddites greatest concern, artificial intelligence. Sigh. So many bad ideas have been put into the publics mind through the medium of science fiction. The most popular fear, that androids will eventually tire of being treated as slaves and rebel against their human creators, is not even on the experts top 10 list. Pioneers like eliezer yudkowsky, ben goertzel, and nick bostrom are much more worried about the threat posed by recursively self improving AI, which can potentially wreak havoc even with minimal access to the physical world. There really is only one way that you can solve this problem, and it doesn't involve remaining perpetually on guard for rogue superintelligences. Indeed, this is a task that will become more and more difficult in the future: The more powerful computers become through moores law, the easier it will be to create a seed AI. Once you pass a certain computing threshold, all it will take is for a programmer to install the wrong source code onto his machine.

Afterwards, you will likely get a paperclip maximiser scenario. There have been theorys posited about how you could take down a seed AI, but this is really only an interim measure. If we fail to intercept even one of these hostile superintelligences, that will be enough of an opening for it to secure first move advantage and take over the planet. That is why yudkowsky and others have proposed the friendly AI concept: All you have to do is create a machine which has superhuman benevolence, make sure it runs as designed, and allow the AI to bootstrap itself to omnipotence. How we will achieve this is a highly technical question subject to intense debate. There is little an uninformed public can do to help the issue, and much they can do to hamper and obfuscate it. They and the neo-luddites would be better off preparing to confront the department of homeland security, and federal law enforcement. After all, they represent a clear and present threat for which there is an obvious solution to.


[1] http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/works/shocklevelanalysis.htm
[2] http://hplusmagazine.com/2010/01/15/valley-dogbots-war/
[3] www.acceleratingfuture.com/lexicon/