I'd like to recommend The Interval at the Long Now, a bar that's integrated with Long Now's presence in Fort Mason in San Francisco. If I were living in SF, this would be my hangout. Parts of a prototype 10K clock were used to construct some of the bar furniture--very cool and modern. The bar is small, intimate, and can be crowded but is usually filled with interesting people. Fridays brings Off the Grid at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, a food truck event, in the parking lot near the Interval.
I can attest to the fact that this is one of the coolest places in SF if you’re into futurism—which I think is saying a lot. It’s the first place I take guests from out of town.
I can attest to two things -- the Interval is a great spot to grab a good drink (and the talks they put on are great, and attract a great crowd)... and I lost a ton of respect for the Long Now Foundation when they pivoted from the future of humanity to conspicuous consumption three feet above sea level.
A number of years back, the Long Now moved their offices to the current space at Fort Mason. Part of the reason they picked the spot was that the ground floor could be a small museum, showcasing the Long Now's work the public, including the many tourists passing by.
However, although many passed by, not many actually came in. After some years, they decided to give people another reason to come in, one that has worked for centuries: caffeine and alcohol. So, via their "brickstarter" campaign, [1] they raised money to redo the historic space. (FYI, I'm a donor.)
It worked out wonderfully. I was in there the other night and every chair was full. And not just of random drinkers, but many people clearly interested in what was going on. Around the orrery [2] was a group of people animatedly discussing its purpose. People were looking at the exhibits. In front of one of the patrons at the bar was a fat Roger Penrose book.
And I should add that this wasn't a "pivot". All of the Long Now's projects still go on as before. And having their own venue has allowed them to expand their lecture series from once a month to almost weekly.
I was skeptical when the idea initially came up, but as a donor, occasional volunteer, and long-time fan, I think it has worked out wonderfully. Their mission, after all, is to get people to think about he long term, and the first step of that is getting their attention. Thousands of people per year now visit that wouldn't have. To me that's a win.
The ideal spot for a bar is near people, regardless of whether that location will be underwater in a century. It would be a lot more expensive and irresponsible to move every one of the visitors than to move the bar uphill every decade or two.
They still might not be a real threat, though. Perhaps you and Abekkus would like to register a wager with the Long Now prediction registry and betting site? http://longbets.org/
Is an individual soldier not an autonomous weapon? Autonomy in war is an unchangeable given, not something to be (or that can be) overcome.
Talking about "autonomous weapons" as something to "overcome" seems like anti-AI fear-mongering. There doesn't seem to be any real basis for it other than assuming as a foregone conclusion that AI is necessarily prone to inhumane malice. I'm vastly more afraid of most humans having weapons than I am of AI having weapons.
I don't think it's as clean a division as you suggest.
Imagine somebody takes a drone platform with decent processing power, mounts a gun like that, and builds in basic target-seeking. Then they make 100 of those and turn them loose in a major metropolitan area. They'd fit neatly into a box truck and cost under $100k in parts.
It might not be as deadly as 100 people with guns, but logistically it's a hell of a lot easier and cheaper, and I'd expect it to have a higher terror value. Especially if you have them mostly land on rooftops and wait for a random period.
That's reasonably doable given current tech. And we expect a lot of progress in ML and robotics over the next decade. Imagine ones that listen for police radio frequency use and then very accurately target people in uniform, for example. Ones that can wait days or weeks outside charging. Ones that collaborate to map, track, and overcome threats.
Personally I'm not particularly worried about it. America already has a lot of weapons and explosives sloshing around; I expect we'll figure out how to deal with this too. But I do expect we'll have to deal with it. Too much of our existing defense is tuned for humans. E.g., fences and walls have been an important part of defense technology for at least 10,000 years.
Jens Olsen (Danish locksmith and (I believe largely self-taught) watchmaker designed and (partially, as he died before it was complete) designed what is to me the most impressive mechanical clock in existence today - Jens Olsens Verdensur, housed in the lobby of the Copenhagen town hall.
It keeps track of several astronomical events, easter &c - and is, as mechanical clocks go, allegedly the most accurate clock in existence.
It will only have completed its largest cycle sometime around the year 27000AD - as long as someone sticks around to wind it weekly and perform maintenance, that is.
Not quite the same philosophy behind it as the Long Now - but amazing engineering porn nonetheless, and definitely recommended to drop by if you ever find yourself anywhere near Copenhagen.
At this point and to me, the clock itself is almost an afterthought compared to the Seminars About Long Term Thinking (SALT): http://longnow.org/seminars/podcast/
Say they're "organizationally independent but philosophically aligned" with the Long Now foundation; I assume they at least have some formal arrangement with the original?
I wish they would have gone with Holocene Era epoch for the year instead of using the same BC/AD // CE/BCE one we currently use padded to five digits. Makes a lot more sense to me if we think of this year as 12017 than as 02017.
Agreed, with one caveat: we should probably think of THIS year as 12018!
The 10,000 Year Clock extends our perception of time further into the future.
Adopting the Holocene Calendar, as proposed by the geologist Cesare Emiliani in 1993, would extend our understanding of the "long now" further into the past, which I would argue is equally as important.
Is there broad consensus on exactly when the Holocene Era began?
The best that I can tell is "approximately 11700 years before 1950", which means we're approximately in the year 11768. But approximate years are not enough for people who actually need to type them into calendar apps.
It doesn't even have to be measured from any real event as long as everyone is on the same page. Jesus wasn't born on December 25, 1 AD, either; but nobody cares.
That's why the epoch was arbitrarily set at 10,000 years before the BC/AD epoch. A rough approximation that lines up with the current calendar works a lot better for everyone than a more accurate approximation.
There was a Stuff You Should Know podcast about this just recently [0]. An impressive amount of engineering has gone into something that seems much more artistic than scientific.
The very first thing that I thought of was the massive clocks in the book Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, clocks which could run in a kind of "low power mode" for at least 700 years.
This project is very cool, but the writing style of the website puts me off too much to read through the whole thing. Is there another source of info about this?
We have so many short term ideas: chasing quarterly profits, carrying a national debt, passing climate decline to our kids, designing garbage appliances and vehicles that fail right after warranty, and on and on.
This is showing us where the other side of the road is with long term thinking. How do you keep an institution running--physically and socially--for 10 ky? How do you even communicate with people 10 ky from now? We can't even read half the stuff written in stone 2 ky ago about big things like kings and wars; forget about writing a detailed maintenance manual, or describing tools or materials they'll need in a language probably dead for thousands of years. Will they even want to?
So by having examples of both kinds of organizations, the middle of the road is more moderate, moved away from disposable, self serving, instant gratification and more towards sustainable and altrustic.
News on the actual clock has been a little sparse over the last couple years but last I heard they had finished drilling out the main entrance and vertical shafts for the clock and some of the large central components had been created (iirc the winder and the escapement). The latest update on their long now clock Texas website is from 02011 though. Biggest problem with having your project be a pet project of a mega-rich guy like Bezos, it can die/wither on a whim, not sure if that's what's happened but it's been a _long_ time with no news.
The last update to the members-only clock blog was three years ago. It mentions that the tapering spiral staircase around the main shaft had been cut. and the 80 foot high chime generator mechanism was completed.
