Japan has been good at computers for a long time.
In 1954, Eiichi Goto invented the parametron, a logic device leveraging nonlinear parametric oscillation with two ferrite cores [and] in 1957, Goto led the development of the PC-1, a pioneering fully programmable stored-program computer powered by 4,200 parametrons. … Unlike the complex, maintenance-intensive vacuum tube computers of the era (vacuum tubes had relatively short lifetime compared with other circuit element, thus the necessity of replacement of a few vacuum tubes a day for constant operation), the PC-1 achieved high reliability with fewer components, low power consumption, and exceptional fault tolerance, ensuring sustained operation in a university laboratory environment.
Also, necessity…
Why did you create parametron?
“At the time, there were no computers in Japan. So we decided to make one at the Takahasi Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. But the university’s research budget was not enough. At the time, vacuum tubes cost 1,000 yen each, and transistors cost 8,000 yen each. Also, vacuum tubes wear out quickly. Transistors were still unstable. In comparison, ferrite cores, which had long been familiar in, say radio circuit construction, cost just 5 yen each. So I thought, why not use ferrite cores as the material? Ferrite cores are a stable material, and since they are made of pottery, they don’t break if you make them right the first time.”
Via Hacker News.
Casey and I got caught in a tornado warning on our way home from Michigan today.
In regular heavy rain we’d keep driving, but after a “Watch,” a “Warning,” and finally an “IMMINENT THREAT” alert screeched out of our phones, we stopped.
We pulled off in Gary and drove for the sturdiest building we could see, a combination Department of Motor Vehicles and Child Services.
The glass doors were locked and the security guards on the other side didn’t want to let us in. They have a no-pets policy, and we had Basil with us, wearing a summer bandana instead of his service regalia.
“Even in a tornado?” Casey asked. But before they could answer, someone else unlocked the doors and barreled out of them to shelter someplace else, and we stepped in after him.
A sweet guard, pro-Basil, or at least indifferent to him, showed us to the stairwell where a dozen other employees and clients sheltered.
The power went out in five minutes. Two emergency lights came on. One burned out quickly. The other one held.
We didn’t have cell service but one of the sheltering social workers did, and she used it to play Indiana weather TV out loud and to text her husband about the Italian beef she’d left simmering in a Crockpot since the morning, which would now live or die by the speed of the Indiana linemen.
Another social worker checked her Ring camera. Her American flag was ripped out by the wind, “pole and all.”
Meanwhile the DCS guards continued to check on us, steady yet sort of lumbering, using their phones as flashlights.
When the worst of it passed, about forty minutes later, the guards told us we could leave. But “DCS employees are not free to go home,” the social-worker-in-chief reminded everybody. “I want to be absolutely clear.” Casey and I stepped into the green-gray light, waded in the storm water. Got to the car, got to I-90, and returned home to Chicago, where the rain fills our basements, and the tornadoes only lick our gates.
“The best way to prevent a rogue AGI from processing the Earth into maximum paperclips is to unleash a second AGI that will work to stop it,” Matt Webb says.
Sounds scary to me, but I’m ultimately convinced that having a lot of somewhat-powerful super-machines around, in contest and sometimes in cooperation, is a lot better than having just one uncontestedly super-powerful machine around. Much like people and nations, as Matt says. (No machines isn’t an option, just like no states isn’t an option.)
This is a template which doesn’t always look like it is working, but it has worked at least in the case of not blowing up the king for some four centuries, and it doesn’t rely on 100% alignment: it relies on the dynamic equilibrium of multiple parties with competing interests.
