This would stop the currently exponential pace of growth from outpacing what society, and regulation, can adapt to. Thus avoiding the inevitable crash that will happen when we lose control of the exponentially accelerating train of technology, and it flies off the rails.
Interesting idea, impossible to implement without creating problems ten times worse.
One could argue many such governors are already in place.
Some are financial, others are societal, a bunch are based on actual proactive intervention (e.g. through international laws because of ethics considerations).
The more important question is: who governs the governors?If we define ‘governor’ as a system whose task it is to regulate sth to keep it at a constant level, a good successful existing example would be central banks. They regulate money supply in order to keep inflation at a constant, prescribed, level.
But that would be more like the steering mechanism employed before the invention of the governor for steam engines: actual persons trying to regulate the speed of the engine by manually pulling levers.
The equivalent to the governor would be an automatic intrinsic feedback loop that, once established, is continuously and automatically working without manual intervention.
So your steam engine governor analogy might be not quite fitting.
Yep, the international law that such a mechanism would require would inevitably be broken by the usual suspects. We’re just not capable enough of organizing ourselves as a species.
Governors don’t cut off supply of steam - or fuel or anything - in a on/off kind of way: they regulate the input flow continuously in a way that self stabilizes at the desired engine speed.
Good catch, fixed
Most governors don’t have the balls like this one.
These governors gave rise to the phrase “balls out.”
When the governor is at its max the balls extend outward, slowing the speed of things.
Additionally, when the train starts going really fast, the balls raise up. In the conductors booth, the governor is usually next the wall, so these higher speeds also lead to the phrase “balls to the wall”.
It’s not as simple as that.
For some it might be true, but for others, the opposite would be actual beneficial.E.g. I see such a technological governor currently in action in my country trying to slowdown transition to sustainable energies.
I don’t think that is a desirable governor, unless you are over 60 and don’t give a shit about what will be happening in a few years, cause you’ll be dead by then.the actual balls from balls to the wall are in the building
Balls any smaller just wouldn’t do justice to such a powerful machine
I think these are actually the balls from “balls out” when the engine is going full speed the balls swing way out and are spinning around.
IIRC, “balls to the wall” refers to ball-shaped knobs on the throttle levers of a lot of aircraft. To go fast you push that lever as far as it goes “to the wall”
No, not really. It would limit beneficial advancements in technology as well.
Like crossing over to renewable energy sources and advancements in energy efficiency or battery technology. Thanks to EVs we have progressed significantly in that department within last few years.
Or medical advancements, covid and mRNA vaccines are probably a good example.
These would just need a different (higher) set point of the control loop, but still need some kind of regulating mechanism.
Even things like renewable deployment need some kind of selective dampening to make them work, e.g. to allow the old style energy infrastructure to keep up without the grid frequently collapsing.
Same for medical advancements. E.g. you don’t want the employment speed of new methods outpace the test and review measures ensuring people’s safety.
Well said
Fair, good point, yeah it would need some regulating mechanism to make sure that the gird can keep up and to make sure that medical advancements are safe to use.
I mean medical advancements already have a regulation mechanism in the form of certification that does indeed limit the pace of their development. It’s quite a clumsy one though and there’s no feedback loop, it’s more like a permanent break
Even things like renewable deployment need some kind of selective dampening to make them work
On this front there’s also fun challenges such as Javons Paradox where increased efficiency leads to increased consumption. This was observed all the way back to the Industrial Revolution as coal use did not decrease with increased efficiency but instead coal consumption simply kept increasing as it effectively became a cheaper input for the same amount of output
I remember seeing a similar effect when conventional lights became forbidden in the EU, followed by energy saving devices suddenly becoming widely available for decent prices.
EU expectation was now saving 80% of the power used for lighting.
Reality was that people instead just started putting up twice as many lights, and each with maximum available luminosity instead of the few dim ones they were content with before…
Technological progress ≠ technological development
Progress is when developments lead to improvements. Development without progress is wasteful and self-serving at bestinteresting. i would have defined it the other way around. “progress” = “marching forward”. whether we’re marching in the right direction, is another question. one can march to one’s doom, so progress is not always a positive thing. development, on the other side, comes from the inside, so we believe that it serves us and is therefore a positive thing.
In that case it is the technological developments whose pace needs to be dampened, because it is those that pose the danger.
Yes. Dampening is a good way to describe it. This feels akin to degrowth. Although it is not about shrinking, it is about directing efforts towards sensible, effective and necessary development. As opposed to going as fast as possible at an attempt to secure a competitive position
The narrative of needing to progress all the time, in any way possible, is just too strong. And unfortunately, globally, it makes sense: if we don’t do it, somebody else will. This is the material for hypes & bubbles, yet it still continues.
And it’s a question of money. Financial growth is basically a synonym for progress.
I remember one of my school teachers explaining to us exponential growth and built-in obsoletion: economists theorize that economies follow a certain wave pattern: it goes up for a while, it comes down for a while. That’s a healthy economy. And this was reality for a while, until roughly the 1970s* iirc. Then something changed, and suddenly it became overwhealmingly important to uphold growth, at all cost. Like healthy tissue developing cancer. I think you can see how built-in obsoletion (and similar concepts like fashion, design etc.) plays an important role here: it’s what keep consumers buying.
So I, an innocent teenager, asked: “But wouldn’t it be better for everybody if we changed back to a more sustainable economy & production?” And the answer was “Yes, and they know it, but it would require a problematic transitional period of maybe a few decades, and not a single politician/party on the whole planet will risk that.”
That was 40 years ago. Since then I believe that education (and much better education than what we have nowadays) is the only way out of this mess, in the long term.
* what happened then?
Balls out!
Can we get one for politics and political corruption first?
We’re trying pretty hard to slow down EV and green energy adoption as much as possible in my country, that count?
But seriously, in an ideal world this would be the role of taxes. Technology running out of control and harming people or the planet because too many people are making too much money off it? Tax 'em until its no longer worth their while to behave in those ways.
We’re trying pretty hard to slow down EV and green energy adoption as much as possible in my country, that count?
Well, on the one hand, we’re trying some very heavy-handed bureaucratic strategies to prop up O&G and to undermine domestic green alternatives.
But, on the other hand, we’re fucking up all the major international suppliers of O&G while incentivizing the world’s manufacturing powerhouse to spam green energy grids across the underdeveloped world at below-cost in order to build out a 21st century trade network.
So it’s a double-edged sword, and we’re just pinwheeling around with that thing.
Yep, apparently Cuba is undergoing the fastest green energy transition of any nation in history thanks to our fuckery, so this sword probably has like 8 edges at least.
this. taxes and regulation are part of a healthy economy. Its like excersising and eathing right. we have been a idle junk food eating economy for a long time now.
Hmm yes I can definitely see a formulaically determined tax rate serving as the break
Taxes are one mechanism, but they don’t work if you let corporations get too big/powerful. Then you get regulatory capture, no matter how many anti corruption measures you bake in
Capitalism needs constant pruning to incentivize competition and align companies with the common good… And even that never seems to last very long
We have one. It’s called being human. As humans have a limited ability to understand and invent, there is a limit to technological growth rate. It’s just that this governor is set at a development rate that is much higher than what the society can handle.
Nah. Take out the greedy fuckers that make money out of making technology miserable and give me fully automatic space gay communism.
No, what we need is a system where technological progress takes into account the benefits and detriments to all people and the system we exist in (nature+), when implementing said progress. The problem isn’t that things are moving too fast, it’s that a few people have seized control of these things and are pushing them, to the destruction of literally everything else.
Wouldn’t computers have been better if we all got the gains and by now, the time of AI, we were already only working 2-10 hours a week? Look at the charts, that’s where we should be right now. AI should be a “we all have to put in 45 minutes of gig work a week to maintain boomer levels of financial stability” moment.
And no, not just Americans or Western Europeans, everyone should be at this level by now. That is how far we have progressed, and that is what has been stolen from all of us.
These exist on induction motors too. Know what happens when it’s not there?
The motor gets too much of the blessed Motive Force for too long that it’s Machine Spirit cannot contain it and then the Spirits leave the motor as magic smoke and burn out the motor.
Without a governor on tech, that’s the fate we’re gonna have. We’ll all be magic smoke, as we’re slowly(or rapidly?!) annihilated.
Yep
