Category Archives: Blog

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Europe: less people, mo’ problems?

Global population density mapLeading on neatly from Tom’s post about sustainable population growth is another New Scientist piece, which posits that Europe’s predicted decline in population will actually bring a whole raft of economic and infrastructural problems with it:

… look a little deeper, and the picture becomes more complicated. Decreasing population does not necessarily promise environmental benefits. The cost per head of population for infrastructure such as sewage systems or electricity supply increases when population numbers go down, making clean water and non-polluting energy even more expensive than they are today.

So can Europe overcome its demographic and ecological challenges at the same time? The solution might be found in a rarely discussed concept: demographic sustainability.

High population growth, such as that now taking place in many African countries, is not sustainable. But very low fertility rates are unsustainable too. It will be hard for countries with persistently low fertility to remain competitive, creative and wealthy enough to keep ahead of their country’s environmental challenges. What is needed is a middle ground.

A demographically sustainable Europe needs to have a stable or slowly shrinking population as the existing infrastructure operates most efficiently when the number of inhabitants remains fairly constant. What would it take to achieve this? At present, the average fertility rate in Europe is 1.5 children per woman, and in countries below this line there is an urgent need for family policies to encourage women to have more children. Countries with fertility rates above 1.8, including France, the UK and Sweden, do not need further pro-birth policies as immigration will fill the demographic gap.

I’m not going to contest the maths, but I think pro-birth policies will probably be unnecessary. Climate change is going to produce a whole lot of environmental refugees in the next few decades, and those countries with a declining birth rate could open their borders to them – two birds with one stone, if you will.

However, if those countries also happen to be the ones most paranoid about being “overrun” by immigrants, I guess it’s back to the government-sponsored Have More Kids campaigns… [awesome CGI population density map image by Arenamontanus]

[ For the record, I think that it behoves us as a sentient species to limit our population so as to best protect and sustain the environment that keeps us alive (and hence protect and sustain ourselves). However, sentience and sense have never directly proportional, and show little sign of becoming so any time soon… so I guess mitigating the fallout is the best plan in the meantime. ]

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Aubrey de Grey on the Singularity

pebblesGerontologist Aubrey de Grey gives his thoughts on the technological singularity (subtypes: intelligence explosion and accelerating change) in this interview in h+ Magazine:

I can’t see how the “event horizon” definition of the Singularity can occur other than by the creation of fully autonomous recursively self-improving digital computer systems. Without such systems, human intelligence seems to me to be an intrinsic component of the recursive self-improvement of technology in general, and limits (drastically!) how fast that improvement can be.
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I’m actually not at all convinced they are even possible, in the very strong sense that would be required. Sure, it’s easy to write self-modifying code, but only as a teeny tiny component of a program, the rest of which is non-modified. I think it may simply turn out to be mathematically impossible to create digital systems that are sufficiently globally self-modifying to do the “event horizon” job.

My view, influenced by observation of the success of natural selection[1], is that “intelligence” is overrated as a driver of strictly technical progress. I would say that most technological advances come about as a result of empirical tinkering and application of social processes (like free markets and the scientific method), rather than pure thinkism and individual brilliance.

I can’t speak to the possibility of the globally self-modifying AI issue.

de Grey goes on to discuss Kurzweil’s accelerating change singularity subtype:

I think the general concept of accelerating change is pretty much unassailable, but there are two features of it that in my view limit its predictive power.
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Ray acknowledges that individual technologies exhibit a sigmoidal trajectory, eventually departing from accelerating change, but he rightly points out that when we want more progress we find a new way to do it and the long-term curve remains exponential. What he doesn’t mention is that the exponent over the long term is different from the short-term exponents. How much different is a key question, and it depends on how often new approaches are needed.

Again, interesting, the tendency to assume that “something will show up” if (say) Moore’s law peters out is all very well, but IRL companies and individuals and countries can’t base their future welfare on the assumption that some cool new tech will show up to save us all.

Anyway, there’s more from de Grey in the interview.


[1]: The Origin of Wealth is a brilliant overview of the importance of evolutionary methods in business, technology, and the economy.

[image from sky#walker on flickr]

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Cheap > good: renewable energy and the developing world

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A chap from MIT called Daniel Nocero has been making a bit of a splash with a report on his recent development of a new catalyst for electrolysing hydrogen from water. While the catalyst itself is pretty big news, it turns out that Nocero’s research is geared toward a much larger vision – namely changing the way the global energy economy works.

Nocera pointed out that most of the work in providing carbon-neutral energy has focused on increasing efficiencies of existing technology and creating economies of scale, both of which will ultimately reduce the cost of electricity produced in the developed world. The problem has been that this has kept the price of the hardware expensive. As a result, the solutions we’re arriving at won’t make sense for the developing world. “We need to tackle the non-legacy world, and they don’t have any money,” Nocera said.

[…]

Hydrogen production isn’t generally considered a solution, because each step of the process involves energy losses and inefficiencies. But again, Nocera doesn’t care: if it’s cheap, the inefficiencies don’t matter, because higher-priced solutions are simply never going to be deployed.

There’s a strong general point here – namely that chasing after new and ever-more ingenious methods of generating clean energy is kind of self-defeating. We already have solutions that work – and while their efficiency curves may not appeal to the sensibilities of scientists and engineers, their ability to get the job done should be all the reason we need to roll them put to the places that need them most. We in the West can afford to wait for efficiency; the world’s poorest people cannot.

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Parasitic urban housing

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Here’s a nice little slice of near-future urbanist architecture-fiction; Australian architectural outfit Lara Calder have come up with a speculative scheme for “parasitic” urban housing, designed to recolonise otherwise unused vertical surfaces in the urban landscape. Architects tend to have a grasp of bombastic language far superior to my own (no, really!), so I’ll let the words speak for themselves:

To achieve sustainable densification the dwelling attaches itself to blank building fabric found in the city. It grows on empty facades, rock faces and bridges. It finds value by turning dead public space into lively private space.

prefab parasite housing - Lara Calder Architect

The Prefab Parasite is a parametric dwelling which incorporates many considerations into its flexible design. The facade reacts to orientation. The footprint can be wide or narrow depending on the site and always maintains its 36 square meters. The structural ribs are tuned to the exact building form using an algorithmic modeling system.

The fabrication and construction of the prefab parasite rely heavily on digital methods. The facade paneling system is designed and sent to fabrication to be machine cut out of an eco solid surface material consisting of compressed bamboo and recycled paper. The structural facade members are all controlled parametrically, as are the main structural ribs. The integration of the structure with the design system increases efficiency and accuracy of the construction process.

While it’s not completely implausible to imagine cities ordering the construction of buildings like this, it’s much easier to imagine them being a “favela chic” development, thrown up by guerrilla architects in the parts of big cities where the authorities no longer dare go… or just can’t be bothered to control any longer. [via Inhabitat; image ganked from Lara Calder Architect, please contact for immediate take-down if required]

Imagine for a moment a rogue city-state cordoned off from the country surrounding it; with no way of expanding horizontally, and insufficienct engineering power to expand vertically, all that’s left are the interstitial spaces. Slowly the city becomes a hive, the line between public space and private dwelling blurring to a point where the two terms become meaningless synonyms… and J G Ballard is worshipped as a visionary prophet in the hollow concrete temples of bridge piles and skyscraper foundations.

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Gross $4,000 a day with Viagra spam

Ever wonder why the flood of emails plugging funny-shaped blue pills for gentlemen shows no sign of relenting? The simple answer is that enough people keep clicking on them to make it an extremely lucrative business – according to Ars Technica, a detailed trawl of sales ledgers reveals that pharmaceutical affiliate spam networks can pull in $4,000 a day of orders:

Samosseiko discovered a wide-open PHP backend to GlavMed that contained evidence that the company is indeed set up to benefit largely from spammers. This involves e-commerce software for spammers to launch their own GlavMed copies or to simply set up domains that redirect to GlavMed. Additionally, some of the documents Samosseiko discovered were sales records, giving a glimpse into the purchasing behavior of GlavMed’s targets.

According to the sales records from GlavMed, there were apparently more than 20 purchases per day per spam campaign, with GlavMed claiming a 40 percent commission on each sale. With an average purchase of around $200, that adds up to over $4,000 total per day per campaign (or $1,600 for GlavMed).

Those are the sort of figures that would make even the most moral code-monkey think hard about trading in their sysadmin cubicle for the easy life. It’s abundantly clear that no amount of effort is ever going to stop people clicking on spam emails, and while the market is willing to line people’s pockets to the tune of hundreds of dollars a day they’re not going to stop coming… all the while funding other organisations with more nefarious aims and purposes.

This also highlights the problem with nation-states in a networked world restricting certain products and services to their citizens, as recent adventures in attempting to restrict online gambling sites has demonstrated. As geography continues its slide into irrelevance, attempting to ban something that’s openly available anywhere else in the world becomes an exercise in bombastic futility that does little beyond undermining your credibility and authority.

Perhaps opening up legal avenues for the purchase of the more popular and controversial pharmaceuticals is the answer? After all, serious thought is being given to relaxing prohibition on more dangerous drugs as it becomes clear that their restricted availability plays into the hands of criminals… why not make the drugs safer for consumers by controlling quality and distribution, and hobble an easy income stream for the underworld?

That said, there’ll always be something that people want to buy but can’t; I guess it’d be a case of finding where the tipping point between easy profits and risk of operation is. Then all we’ll be left with are dodgy refinancing offers and invitations to see fallen pop stars in the buff…

So, how long is it going to be before I have to lock the comments on this post to block the flood of pingbacks? Place your bets, ladies and gents, place your bets…