Precarity and Artificial Intelligence: A Four-Wheeled Reason to be Skeptical about AI Optimism

The most recent post in my series on economic precarity hinted that the wildly optimistic claims of what artificial intelligence can do or is about to be able to do may be a bit overblown.  A case in point just surfaced this week: the Tesla Corporation (and its CEO Elon Musk in particular) are now being investigated by Federal prosecutors about claims made by Musk that Tesla's "self-driving car" AI technology has actually produced cars that drive themselves without any human input.  It seems this claim is not quite true, as "hundreds of crashes and dozens of fatalities" have proven over the last few years.  Musk may soon find himself the target of State-sponsored vengeance - a vengeance carried out by human prosecutors, plaintiffs, judges, and juries instead of robots.  They may optimize their "objective function" to return a guilty verdict.  Could this be the start of a rocky road for Musk ... ?

Megaprojects And The Curse of Babel

Today's post will be short.  I am zealously trying to guard my schedule because my business has three projects that are due within the next four weeks or so.  (This isn't much fun right now - I long to be an author of fiction sometimes, as I see pictures of authors with relaxed contemplative faces lounging at uncluttered desks...)  But I want to discuss the theme of last week's post a little more and offer a road map for further exploration.  

Last week's post discussed Elon Musk and his boasts that he will establish a colony on Mars.  That post described the physical challenges of trying to get to Mars via rockets whose thrust comes from chemical combustion.  Today I want to mention various estimates of the cost of such a venture.  According to a 2017 report by the Institute for Defense Analysis, the total cost of developing a manned mission to Mars is $120.6 billion in 2017 dollars.  According to former U.S. astronaut and ISS mission commander Steve Swanson, those costs would run from $100 billion to $500 billion.  Elon Musk is purportedly worth $195.6 billion at present.  He seems to have lost another $100 billion between the start of 2022 and now.  If he were to try to send even one mission to Mars out of his own pocket, I think it's safe to say that he would no longer be a high-flying celebrity afterward.  He might wind up needing to take a job as a shopping cart jockey or shelf stocker at a local supermarket.  (The Winco near my house is hiring, by the way.)

In other words, I don't think Musk has so much as a snowball's chance on Venus of sending anyone to Mars.  So why the hype about Musk and SpaceX, then?  That is a question whose answer will require a fair amount of research.  But its beginnings can be traced to the decision by the administration of George W. Bush to begin to privatize delivery of rocket-launched payloads into low Earth orbit.  Due to Musk's friendship with former NASA chief Michael Griffin, Musk's company was awarded the contract for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program to develop commercial resupply rockets for the International Space Station in 2006, even though Musk's company "had never flown a rocket" before, according to Wikipedia.  This award is even more surprising, given that twenty well-established aerospace companies had also bid on the project.  

So it seems that from the start, SpaceX has been a beneficiary of corporate welfare.  And as a beneficiary of corporate welfare, SpaceX may well become a poster child of the effects of privatization on the ability of societies to engage in large-scale, transformative projects.  I'd like to suggest that privatized societies dominated by hyper-capitalists lose this ability over time.  I'd like to suggest further that societies which want to advance in substantive, paradigm-shifting ways need to learn to engage in megaprojects.  These megaprojects cannot be left entirely to the private sector.  Neither can they be entirely the province of governments.  Rather, both government and the private sector must learn to negotiate a healthy balance.  Where this balance is unhealthy, graft and corruption appear and megaprojects do not deliver on their promises.  Crony capitalism is a state of unbalance, and turning free market ideology into a fetish tends to turn societies into crony capitalist states dominated by large players with contradictory self-interests.  

The corrosive effect of crony capitalism on a society's ability to undertake large-scale projects is most clearly seen when a crony capitalist society is hit by a sudden challenge, test, or shock.  One example of this is the botched response of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina.  Another possible example may well be the botched response of the Japanese government and private industry to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  (Author Haruki Murakami offers a surprisingly insightful criticism of the response to Fukushima in his book Novelist as a Vocation.)  For an example of the damage which a self-inflicted shock can cause to the systems of a crony capitalist society, we need look no farther than the failure of Russian military hardware and supplies during Russia's attempt to conquer Ukraine.  By the way, that failure is a fine example of the propagation of the outworkings of damnation in a society that ought to be damned.  Putin has reaped what he has sown - and he is not enjoying the reaping.  My hope is that things become even more unpleasant for him and for the Russian military. 

If crony capitalism has extended even to space exploration, I imagine that space itself will inflict yet another unexpected shock.  Lives will be lost.  Because Musk seems to want to portray himself as a doer of megaprojects, the rest of us must ask whether he represents a case of healthy balance between the public and private sector, or whether he is actually a case of crony capitalism.

It would be instructive to delve in more detail into the subject of megaprojects, their role in societal development, and the potential for forfeiting this development by means of privatization and crony capitalism.  But I'm out of time today...

You Won't Get To Mars That Way

Making predictions is hard - especially about the future.

- Ancient Internet Saying

Elon Musk has been much in the news lately.  Elon is purported to be the richest man on earth, and his corps of public-relations spin doctors present him as a man whose wealth is largely self-made.  Like Stephen Wolfram, Musk talks much about his supposed "genius."  Not only does Musk appear to be a "cerebral narcissist," but he also appears to be a "somatic narcissist" as well, based on the fact that he posted pictures of himself fighting a sumo wrestler and that he challenged Vladimir Putin to a fight.  When people make such grandiose claims as his, it's only natural for objective observers to want to put such claims to the test.  I'd like to consider myself such an objective observer (although some may disagree).  Today's post will examine the claims of Musk through my particular lens, and will try to show Musk as a typical case of a certain symptom of late capitalism.  Note: I am not interested in Musk's claim to be a bad sumo-wrestling dude.  Maybe he can sort that out with other contestants on some American "reality TV" show.

First, let's consider Musk the late-capitalism phenomenon.  To me he seems to represent the kind of "hero" who would have been quite at home in an Ayn Rand novel such as Atlas Shrugged.  That is to say, he is a poster child for the assertion by many of the wealthiest members of the Right that transcendent projects of human endeavor are best handled by heroes who have enormous wealth and not by governments or the collective efforts of societies.  Such assertions are the basis for claims that privatizing of government services leads to better service for the citizens who depend on those services.  Of course, the actual track record of privatization is horrible, and includes people whose houses have burned down because they could not afford the services of privatized fire departments.  Other notable side effects of privatization include the monstrous expansion of the private prison industry as well as the creation of professional mercenary corporations like Blackwater.  

Those who promote the benefits of privatization claim that it saves public funds.  Yet these are often the recipients of massive corporate welfare payments to rich people, also known as government subsidies.  In this, Elon Musk is no exception.  Musk started life with massive advantages already in place, as he is the wealthy son of a white South African family which built its wealth by means of the apartheid regime during its existence in South Africa.  And the companies which Musk has founded since he came to the United States have all been the recipients of corporate welfare, as documented in the following articles:

• "Elon Musk, Welfare King!" - Reason Magazine, March 2021
• "After Elon Musk criticized Bernie Sanders' brand of socialism, Sanders took him to task for taking billions of dollars in government support" - Business Insider, August 2020
• "'Total Hypocrisy': Elon Musk Rebuked for Hit on EV Subsidies After Building Empire With Billions in Taxpayer Funds" - Common Dreams, December 2021
• "Elon Musk's Growing Empire Is Fueled by $4.9 Billion in Government Subsidies" - Los Angeles Times, May 2015

It is an open question whether most of Musk's business ventures would have survived without subsidies and other corporate welfare.  This is particularly true of Tesla.

Now among the claims which Musk has made, one of his most spectacular is that he will boldly take mankind where no man has gone before.  This claim also includes the claim that he, a private individual with enormous wealth, will manage this feat even though the space agencies of various governments have not managed to do this.  Therefore his claim goes beyond merely putting people into space.  It also transcends merely going to the moon.  Nay, it reaches even to the planet Mars.  It is this particular claim which I'd like to examine in more detail.

First, a bit of background about space travel.  To send a spacecraft from Earth to anywhere else, one must provide that spacecraft with a certain amount of kinetic energy.  That kinetic energy is given by the equation 

Kinetic Energy = 0.5 x (spacecraft mass) x (spacecraft velocity squared)

At a minimum, this amount of kinetic energy must be greater than the potential energy represented by the distance from your target to the surface of the Earth (and to a much lesser extent, the surface of the Sun since the sun is much farther away).  Potential energy represents the energy you must supply to an object to raise it a certain distance above the surface of a body that produces a gravitational field.  If Mars was stationary with respect to the Earth, then in order to reach Mars you would need to supply only the minimum kinetic energy required to equal the difference in potential energy of the gravitational field of the Earth and Sun at the position of Mars relative to the Earth's surface.  But it would take you a really long time to get to Mars!  

However, Mars is not stationary, but moving in its own orbit around the sun.  So your spacecraft must have additional velocity in order to catch up with Mars and enter into orbit around it.  Supplying the energy to move from a moving Earth to a moving Mars is an expensive proposition.  If we therefore wanted to supply only the minimum energy required for such a trip, we'd need to inject our spacecraft into what is known as a Hohmann transfer orbit.  A trip from Earth to Mars using a Hohmann orbit would take 259 days, according to the NASA source in the preceding link.  So a manned mission to Mars would require a spacecraft capable of keeping at least four people alive for nearly ten months - unless you wanted to bring those people alive and safe back to Earth again after their mission to Mars was completed, in which case your mission would require another 259 days, plus the time required for the Earth and Mars to align in such a way that a Hohmann transfer from Mars to Earth would be successful.  We're talking about a mission that could last over three and a half years.

That's a lot of time, and thus a manned spacecraft would require extensive life-support systems on the same order of magnitude as the systems on the International Space Station.  But there are two further wrinkles: first, the effects of prolonged weightlessness on human bodies, and second, the fact that astronauts would need to be shielded from lethal radiation from both cosmic rays and solar storms.  It is well-known by now that prolonged weightlessness produces harmful changes in human bodies (see this, this, and this, for instance), so missions that use Hohmann transfers might need some means of exposing humans to near-Earth gravity on a daily basis.  This would require centrifuges, which would add mass to the spacecraft.  Radiation shielding would also add mass.

So let's talk about mass.  The International Space Station has a mass of 450 tons and can support seven astronauts.  But the ISS is also regularly resupplied from Earth.  Let's optimistically assume that a crew of four astronauts would need a spacecraft with a mass of 200 tons for a Mars mission.  How much fuel would it take to get them to Mars?  The answer to that question is found in the rocket equation, namely

Wet mass (that is, rocket + fuel) = rocket mass x exp((change in velocity)/(exhaust velocity))

So for a rocket that had a 200-ton payload and that needed to change its velocity by an amount needed for a Hohmann orbit, we could calculate the fuel required.  I leave that exercise to you, although I will give you the escape velocity of the earth: 11.2 kilometers (or 7 miles) per second.  I'll also give you another hint: Elon Musk has focused on rockets which burn a mixture of liquid methane and liquid oxygen.  An optimistic exhaust velocity for such a mix is 3,780 meters per second according to one source.  If you do the math (which I don't have time to do now, but which I may get around to in the next week), you will see what a sizable amount of chemical propellant is required to get your spacecraft to Mars.  And we haven't begun to discuss how to get it back to Earth again!  To get a glimpse of how someone else solved the rocket equation, consider Expedition Mars by Martin J.L. Turner.  He calculated that a spacecraft with a mass of 145 tons would need a total fuel mass of 5,000 tons.  That's 10 million pounds of fuel.  And that's just to get to Mars.  It would take another 400 tons of fuel to return to Earth.

Now you can travel faster than the minimum required velocity for a Hohmann transfer, but that will require more fuel, and the fuel requirement increases exponentially the faster you want to go.  If you switch from chemical rockets to rockets powered by nuclear fission, it is possible to save a significant amount of reaction mass.  But worldwide rates of extraction of naturally occurring fission fuel have already peaked, according to the German Energy Watch Group.  Making artificial fission fuel in breeder reactors has never yet been commercially viable, although the process has been used to create small amounts of plutonium.  But breeder reactors don't last long, as they suffer from neutron embrittlement.  Building a fleet of fission-powered manned spacecraft might therefore not have much of a future.  So Musk might barely be able to send a few people to Mars (although he might bankrupt himself in the process), but it appears that neither he nor anyone else has the ability to establish a colony there.  Speaking of colonies, the colonists would likely need to carry soil or expensive chemical processing apparatus from Earth to Mars if they wanted to live there long-term.  The ground on Mars is toxic to Earth-based plants.  So forget about becoming a Martian farmer.  And Mars has no free oxygen or natural shielding from cosmic rays or radiation from solar flares.  It would be a really hard place to try to colonize.

And Musk's boast has been that he will establish a colony there.  Musk's boast about Mars thus appears to be a boast without much basis in fact.  It may be that during the last ten years we have developed the ability to send a 150-ton or 200-ton spacecraft to Mars - but the journey would have been prohibitively expensive even for governments, let alone individuals, which is why no government has done it.  I think putting humans in such a craft and bringing them back again alive is still beyond our capability.  Making such a mission pay benefits that are worth the expense is even farther beyond our capability.  The challenges of such a journey appear to place a limit on the modern myth of the uber-wealthy hyper-capitalist self-made hero.  These challenges demonstrate once again that there are challenges beyond the powers of any individual, challenges which can only be met by the collective response of societies.  Such a conclusion may cause some of Elon's flying monkeys to choke a bit - but such is life.  As for me, I don't think he, much less "we", will be going to Mars anytime soon.  Maybe Musk would be better off wrestling Putin.

P.S. For more information on the life-support challenges of a manned mission to Mars, please see "Red risks for a journey to the red planet: The highest priority human health risks for a mission to Mars," Nature, November 2020.

P.P.S Today's post is an example of the kind of post that I can currently write with only a modest amount of pain and suffering, since I already have a fairly large background knowledge of the subject and therefore I don't need to do as much research.  I still owe readers some posts which I promised over a year ago, but those posts will involve high levels of pain and suffering, due to the large amount of research and analysis involved.  Just saying that I haven't forgotten...  Also, I'm really irked by the way so many websites that present technical information have dumbed down their content over the last several years.  (See this for instance.)  Their coverage of many topics has collapsed into mere titillating "soundbytes" full of cute pictures and sometimes baseless hype, and their web pages are now full of paid ads, which reduces one's ability to take them seriously.  This is a crying shame.

Nimrod's High School Yearbook

 

Tower of Babel, Mathys Schoevaerdts, created

between 1682 and 1702, public domain

On the 13th of this month, a ninety-year-old, formerly somewhat well-known Canadian actor took a ride in a rocket manufactured and owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner and former CEO of the vast Amazon.com empire.  The name of the actor who took the ride is, of course, William Shatner, who was the main star in an American sci-fi TV series that first aired well over fifty years ago.  The name of that series was Star Trek.  And Star Trek, which initially struggled to find acceptance with the executives of the network on which it aired, has become enough of a cash cow that over the years it has spawned several big-screen movies and a number of spin-off TV series.  (Some might say that Star Trek has by now become in the American consciousness like a piece of chewing gum that has been left in a person's mouth for 55 years...)

Some interesting things about Shatner's Star Trek character, Captain Kirk: he was supposed to be a youthful super-achiever whose drive and determination had helped him to become the youngest captain in Starfleet.  He was also modeled very much after the type of Germanic war-hero typified in ancient Anglo-Saxon fables such as Beowulf - that is, he was always the first member of his crew to confront any mortal danger, the bravest and most physically capable (with the possible exception of his first officer, Mr. Spock), the point man leading the charge as his ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, boldly went where no man had gone before.  (He was also a champion womanizer.  Lucky for him that there were plenty of compatible alien women on those planets where no man had gone before!)  According to several sources, Shatner struggled at times with his association with Captain Kirk during the first years after the original Star Trek series was canceled by its host TV network - perhaps being fearful of typecasting.  But those struggles soon died away and Shatner began to consciously associate his own personality with the larger-than-life character of Captain Kirk.  And as Kirk had commanded the lion's share of attention in both the original series and the movies that resulted from it, Shatner sought to command all available attention for himself in any social setting in which he found himself.  I speculate therefore that the chance to ride in Jeff Bezos' rocket must have seemed the chance of a lifetime for him to recapture some of the lost glory of his youth.

Some interesting things about Shatner's rocket ride: most media outlets wrote that Shatner became "the oldest living human being to go into space."  But that begs a question: where and what, exactly, is "space"?  For if one digs beneath the surface (and if one is sufficiently geeky to do so), one learns a few things.  So watch yourselves, because I'm going to geek out for a few paragraphs.  First off, let's look at the launch vehicle that Shatner and his fellow passengers rode.  It is named the New Shepard 4, and its typical flight profile is thus: it launches vertically, then ascends under power for 140 seconds, reaching a maximum velocity of 3,615 km/h (2,247 mph).  Once the powered phase of the flight ends, the crew capsule coasts upward to an altitude of 66.1 miles above the ground, which is just above the von Karman line.  The von Karman line is a widely accepted definition of the boundary of space.  Given the fact that other definitions used by some of the armed forces of the world's most advanced nations are a bit more lenient (allowing for definitions of a boundary of space below 60 miles), we must hand it to Mr. Shatner.  He really did go into space after all.  But could he have stayed there for any appreciable time?  The answer is no.  The velocity of his capsule at its maximum altitude was far below the velocity required to achieve orbit.  And even if his capsule had achieved orbital velocity at its maximum altitude of 66.1 miles, atmospheric drag would have degraded its orbit very quickly so that in much less than a 24-hour day, he would have fallen back to earth again.  Such facts cut Shatner's trip a bit down to size.

And maybe the boasts of the people who put him into space ought to be cut down to size a bit as well, as well as the boasts of their competitors.  The two most dominant figures in the privately funded race to space are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.  They are now locked in a lawsuit over space, by the way.  (See this also.)  And both have made a number of rather outlandish claims about what they are going to do to get humans back into space again in a big way.  Bezos seems to me to have painted himself as the visionary humanitarian whose interest in space travel springs from his desire to make a better future for humanity.  Musk, on the other hand, seems to me to have painted himself as the uber-smart inventor whose genius has imbued him with the power to work magic.  Bezos boasts that his company is intending to build a space station as a place for researchers and industrialists to get some out-of-this-world work done.  Musk, on the other hand, has promised to colonize Mars.  (See this also.)  But geeks like me must ask, How?  Who's going to pay for it all?

For the undeniable fact is that space travel - the way it is done at present - is expensive.  The unavoidable element of expense consists of providing the kinetic energy required to accelerate a load to orbital velocity.  And it gets even more expensive if you're trying to accelerate that load to a speed that will enable it to escape the gravitational pull of Earth.  That required amount of energy is captured in the following formula:

where k.e. stands for "kinetic energy", m stands for mass, and v stands for velocity.  If you're handy with math, you can therefore calculate the amount of energy possessed by an object with a certain mass when it is traveling at a certain velocity.  That's how much energy must be supplied by the fuel which any rocket uses to accelerate a mass to orbital velocity or to escape velocity.  And when you calculate how much chemical energy is contained in any given amount of the fuels now used in rockets, you see that it takes a lot of fuel to put a given mass into space.  Moreover, there's a hard upper limit on the amount of energy you can extract from fuels that are burned in chemical reactions.  Making large amounts of these fuels costs some serious folding money.  That's why Bezos, Branson, Musk, and others will find that they will fail in the same places in which the governments who initially pioneered space flight have failed.  No one will be able to pay for their dreams.

But some might protest, saying, "We can always use nuclear fission rockets!  They have much higher potential energy densities than chemically fueled rockets!  And one day we'll have fusion rockets, which have even higher energy densities!"  However, the promise of cheap space travel via nuclear fission rockets depends on the possibility of an abundant supply of plutonium fuel, and an abundant supply of plutonium fuel depends on the ability to construct breeder reactors that are both safe and commercially viable.  At present, breeder reactors are neither safe nor commercially viable.  One problem which breeders have is that operation of the reactors destroys the materials the reactor is made of, by processes such as neutron embrittlement.  The same process threatens to make nuclear fusion commercially non-viable for the foreseeable future.  And this of course does not take into account the problems with proliferation of weapons-grade nuclear material and large amounts of radioactive waste, as well as environmental degradation.

So now, let's drop the geek persona for a bit and ask some philosophical questions.  Could it be that the space boasts of Branson, Bezos and Musk are part of a larger cultural trend?  Could it be that fantasies of space conquest are a sort of psychic defense mechanism for the most high-flying members of the Global North as the Global North is increasingly forced to confront the signs of its own mortality, its own loss of dominance, its own passing?  Could dreams and boasts of space conquest serve the same function as the magazines I see from time to time in the checkout line at Winco when I shop for groceries - magazines commemorating the life of John Wayne or of America's best rock bands or the British royal family or the Apollo lunar landings or World War 2 or the Beach Boys?  Could it be that the flight of William Shatner was, in the grand scheme of things, really nothing more than a very expensive moment of nostalgia?  Perhaps what's needed now is not a cultural escape into fantasies of unlimited success, brilliance, beauty, power and love, but a realistic letting go of lost glories and a realistic embrace of a future that is actually coming.