Reddit reviews Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

There's a book on this called "Scale" written by a theoretical physicist that explains why phenomenon like arteries and capillaries are all governed by physical constraints and shows you all the different ways those constraints manifest. If you liked this comment you should probably check it out. The high seas might be able to help.

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

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What an odd coincidence... I just started reading this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

First, I wasn't being pedantic. To me, it seemed like you neglected to mention an obvious flaw in your argument about the use of the word 'exponential.' It's actually kind of important that people understand exponential growth includes exponents less than two. You can read a whole book about why it's important here.

Second, you're trying to make a point that is ultimately your subjective opinion. "Language is about conveying meaning, not exact correctness." What? Says who? Which contexts? Why can't it be both? What's wrong with being precise with the words we use? Source please. As someone with a career in the social sciences, your comment hurt to read.

Finally, relax. I wasn't personally attacking you in that last comment. I was being genuine and expressing curiosity about your comment. However, you sound like an uptight asshole. If you can't handle some benign intellectual feedback, maybe don't post on Reddit.

Well, sort of.

But also consider: the first company to actually TRY to handle the dynamics of animal walking with any success was Boston Dynamics and they still are only on dogs and primitive human-like physical dynamics/kinematics.

Why did it take so long? The same reason why smart phones and IoT could never have happened sooner than it did or are now: the technology was either not available at all and its cost were not cheap enough or there was a "special" cognitive barrier to the "right solution".

How does Boston Dynamic do what they do? They looked (in many ways for the first time) at how animals actually walk. The key part is "muscle memory" which is strictly called "distributed computing" in a EE/CS sense.

The key part of this: the Cartesian philosophic model of Brain and Body being two separate things is 100% wrong - humans and animals are NOT two binary parts: mind and body. So they got out of the box on that and looked to biological systems which clearly proved it's a distributed system, not a binary system.

BTW is which also why "Singularity/Transhumanism" is also a lie and will be a very long time, if not forever, out of reach. And never even mind Moore's Law's new monkey wrench in that aspiration.

Animal bodies are NOT primarily controlled by the brain but instead use distributed computing of many "small brains" throughout the body. Muscle memory is a local muscle-nerve phenomena where the local nerves sense muscle flexion/position to "know" what the physical positions, forces and loads are doing as part of a "macro" function for achieving things like standing and walking. That's why you can "walk" without having to consciously think about it (except when you are just learning to walk).

You brain does NOT micromanaged the muscles for most movement. It can do so but only clumsily. Notice when you start a new exercise or sport routine: your brain sucks at movement but you eventually train the muscles and distributed nerves themselves with local feedback paths. Then your brain is out of the picture and everything works far better.

Boston Dynamics uses local electronic sensors, actuators and local microcontrollers to mimic this distributed control. Microcontrollers only got cheap enough yet powerful enough in recent years.

This radically reduces the computational load on the "brain" or top level computing in both their robots and in all (biological) animals.

And because this is biomimicry of a 100s-million-year-evolved-and-proven system, it actually works better than anything man has ever hacked together over the last 20-40 years. So we are only seeing this now.

Combined this though with the fact that most robotic applications that actually pay money are industrial applications or "B2B" which have healthy to great profit margins.

Consumer markets (and thus consumer robotics) are "B2C, which are the worst profit margin product classes. The only worse ones are charity which have zero profit.

So you can not build an industry around consumer robots until you already have something mature that someone else has paid the development costs for. There's never been a humanoid robot market demand so they've never been developed because there's never been money in doing so.

Industrial markets simply do NOT NEED and have never needed humanoid robots. They need practical automation that does NOT need to be pretty or aesthetic but does need to be cheap by their standards and do a specific job well. So that's what most robots looks like today: the market with the money doesn't need humanoid robots; they only need minimally practical and effective robots.

Boston Dynamics primary customers are not consumer (and not industrial): their primary customers are military! DARPA funded especially.

Yes, the military literally wants Terminator robots and Star War Clone Warriors. They LOVED the Terminator movies and the Empire's military capabilities in the Star Wars movies because they imagined having them under their command. They simply dismiss the possibility of the negative storyline or of being "the Baddies" because their lust is so strong they can ignore the cognitive dissonance. "It's just a movie; we far smarter than that! It would never happen like that!"

Technophilia a uniquely American quality and military technophilia is off the charts. It's technology for its own religious sake and concerns about actual efficacy, need or side-effects are not important to them.

(I used to work in a military technology think tank so I know the mindset all too well.)

No other market can support the salaries of the engineers required to do what Boston Dynamics does. Certainly NOT consumers (who are cheap as hell because they really don't have money - at the scale of industry markets or military markets).

Always look at the money required and consider who could actually afford such things. That tells you more about if or why a technology has or hasn't been created yet!

The other issue: energy. The amount of energy required for a human is about 90W. However non-biological robots take FAR MORE energy: literally KWs. There are lots of reasons (read this book to grok why - we don't yet know how to design "fractal" though what Boston Dynamics is doing is sort of that with its "nervous system")

In general humanoid robots are energy pigs to the point of being nearly impractical. Batteries with sufficient capacitor to drive mobile computing only arrived in the last 20 years. And even then, your average lithium battery pack has an energy density comparable to a hand grenade! That's why the TSA has restrictions on them in checked luggage.

The robots that Boston Dynamics eventually deploys to military use will likely required either: 1) a small nuclear reactor or 2) gasoline/Jet-A fuel with turbine. These are required to generate the required electricity to operate them (you saw this detail in Avatar - very insightful and technically correct in terms of required energy and likely fuel source).

Yes. The size of "invariant components" like cells set a limit on how small things can be. But cells are not the only component for which that is true. When it comes to mammals, the more important limiting factor is the circulatory system - mainly the size of the capillaries. The smallest mammal is the Etruscan shrew. And this is basically the smallest a mammal can be in theory. When you shrink a mammalian circulatory system smaller than a shrew's it becomes wildly inefficient. So mammals have never evolved to be smaller, even when it could have provided other advantages.

The circulatory system is also the reason why the blue whale is pretty much the biggest possible mammal. If they get any bigger, the space between capillaries becomes too large, and cells start to starve of oxygen.

There is an interesting book called Scale that goes into this topic is detail.

There are less deaths but tissue damage has remained within expected bounds. We just have faster, better healthcare.

Edit: according to a book I read.

A good place to start for fundamental principles is Geoffrey West and biological scaling laws, which generalize to other systems as well, such as cities.

Check out his book.

He's also done a podcast with Sean Carroll.

Not exactly what you want, but this book talks about complex systems and how we are really bad at trying to replicate them. It talks about cities, the economy and biology. Kinda why I find it hard to think any planned economy would work as well as letting it mostly handle itself and fixing it when required.

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

There’s also a book that covers this the topic of common patterns in nature, and goes into depth on how it applies to organisms of all sizes. Extremely interesting:

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

The answer seems to be “when working in 3 dimensions, there’s efficient ways to do things, so natural selection will tend towards them over time.“

For example, if there’s two ways to construct a circulatory system, moving the same amount of blood, but one moves blood with less energy, this frees up energy for reproductive activities, providing an advantage to that organism.

But these “laws of 3D construction” apply not just to veins/arteries, but to your brain, trees, and even cities’ sewers and power cables.

It’s all about efficient networks co-living in a single “organism”

Like it says in the screen grab you get about one billion, like all mammals.

Geoffrey West talks about this kind of thing in “Scale”

That is precisely it. The laws of scaling work that way. It's also the case that as population increases, average wealth increases.

There is a great book about this phenomenon:
https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582