[FRIAM] Drones to detect wildfires

[Prof David West]

I believe Merle recommended this book to the list sometime back, but Steve's comments suggest no one took her up on the recommendation. The book: Stanley, Kenneth O. and Joel Lehman, *Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned", the myth of the objective*. (Objective in the sense of goal.)

The book argues that *"setting high level ideals" *(objectives) and *"doing enough measurement and modeling to monitor how well we are doing" *pretty much assures failure.

I missed Merle's post recommending the book, but it came to my attention via Richard Gabriel and is being used in some research with Jenny Quillien (FRIAM and onetime Mother Church attendee) in the area of evolution as well as planning. The book's author's are AI professionals and researchers as is Gabriel, so out work might have some applicability to computing as well.

davew


On Wed, May 26, 2021, at 2:18 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> In most of the trajectories through the postCapitalistic subset of my
> imaginarium, maximizing profit or even gross production is eschewed in
> deference to satisficing the commodity stocks (including liquid
> currency) required to support the flows we might consider necessary and
> good.  
> 
> I agree with the sentiments specifically spun on the list that "none of
> us are smart enough to figure all this out ahead of time".  Kurt Godel
> warned us about that already.  I am not a proponent of an engineered
> econo-socio-political system, but I *am* a proponent of setting high
> level ideals to strive for (e.g. a humanist, biospherist, terran,
> Sol-system, Milky-way Galaxy-ist value system) and doing enough
> measurement and modeling to monitor how well we are doing and if we need
> to "nudge" the knobs on our models.  Engineering IS a part of our
> evolving nature, I can't change that.  What does it mean to obtain
> enough collective coherence on those values, the models that represent
> them and the data to gather?   I'm not sure...  I think the "culture
> wars" right now are a part of that and maybe it never will be anything
> but cacophanous dissonance.  
> 
> Technological Innovation is sure to be part of our future (short of a
> stone-age collapse), I just hope those of us who have a stake in how
> that unfolds include some humanist (etc.) perspective rather than
> letting the neoDarwinian stylization of manic hypercapitalism continue
> to be the dominant driver in *what* and *how* we innovate.
> 
> On 5/26/21 12:23 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> 
> > Yeah, OK. I agree. As with the FinTech payment plan band-aid I posted, our nudges can, at least, demonstrate some good faith attempts to "do good". But I'd like it better if we were more aggressive in our attempts ... aim high so that when you inevitably fail, you'll end up slightly higher than you would've if you'd aimed low. But I doubt focusing on profitability is the way to aim high. The space of profitable enterprises is *heavily* biased to the low hanging fruit. As Eric pointed out awhile back, the majority of high impact innovation is launched via non-profit efforts. In that perspective, profit limits high impact innovation by diverting resources to low impact innovation.
> >
> > On 5/26/21 8:59 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >> To clarify, by "remediate" I mean that some consequences are created (e.g. a pandemic, harm to the biosphere), and then there is a problem to solve.    Pfizer is a remediator.  
> >> Ford is a potential remediator with the F-150 lightening, solar panel manufacturers are remediators, Impossible Burger is a remediator, etc.  Yes, I recognize some will debate whether some of these are really remediators.   Nothing short of sitting around watching fungus grow will satisfy these people.     
> 
> 
> 
> 
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