Future imperfect
Gonzo technology, past and present illustrates that some, if not all, of our ideas about the future are possible — at least at the prototype stage.
The M-497 jet-powered commuter train of 1966 hit 183 miles per hour in trials, a perfectly credible 300 kilometres per hour, and while it didn't go anywhere in service — quite simply, the North American railway network isn't up to scratch (and the noise abatement issues would have been somewhat problematic) — other nations routinely run steel wheel trains at that kind of speed (and I am so going on a Series 500 Shinkansen if I get the chance, this September!).
Meanwhile, the Kawada Industries' HRP-2 Promet Mk II humanoid robot weighs 58 kilograms, stands about 1.5 metres tall, can walk on slippery and uneven surfaces, use a screwdriver, and they're planning (software permitting!) to put them into production in 2010 as the HRP-3, a construction site labourer — the cost per unit translates to about US $120,000/£60,000. I think this might be just a little optimistic (and the idea of these things running around a building site on NiMH batteries gives me some cause for concern, too) but there is going to be a huge market for humanoid robots in Japan if they can crack the power management and control software problems. Most amusing of all, the HRP-2 was styled by Yutaka Izubuchi, designer of PATLABOR (among other classic animé about honking great humanoid industrial robots). Which shows that someone is working hard at making science fictional clichés come true, rather than just assuming that the invisible hand of market forces will wave a magic wand if we wait long enough.
Comments
Fantastic as long as Yutaka Izubuchi, isn't designing the hyper operating system as well.
But in all seriousness Patlabors did have a lot of thought behind their design:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT4F1I0viwc
As well as the capacity to transmit a lot of technical information in a lighthearted fashion.
Posted by: monopole | June 22, 2007 4:16 PM
I really don't see the point in humanoid robots. In an age when we have robots exploring other planets, walking up a flight of stairs seems distinctly non-impressive to me. Humanoid robots look good at expos, and on the news. But when it comes to exploring (but not colonising) space, defusing bombs, clearing minefields and all the other stuff robots are good for, the human-type robots are not going to be the best at the job.
Posted by: Brian | June 22, 2007 4:18 PM
The thing is - if you can crack a working humanoid style robot; you give it the flexibility of working that a human could have.
Obviously it just requires you to get the right AI, Sensors, gyros, balance, detection, logic circuits...
Posted by: Serraphin | June 22, 2007 4:39 PM
Humanoid robots should serve to fill one very useful niche: anything that's designed to be filled by a human-shaped body. Industrial welding bots and Mars rovers are the wrong physical shape to work as housekeepers or auxiliaries in nursing homes, because we actually inhabit environments that are tightly tailored to human dimensions and proportions. Look at a Roomba and ask yourself how you'd need to modify it to dust on top of a door frame, go upstairs without assistance, unload the dish washer, and feed the cat: by the time you've added the necessary attachments it's easier to just admit defeat and design something humanoid.
On the other hand, programming a robot to walk and chew gum is quite seriously a difficult problem. If it was just down to the servo motors and mechanical engineering, we'd have had Asimov-style servants decades ago.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 22, 2007 4:46 PM
In the same vein as the jet powered train, check out this jet powered VW Bug.
Posted by: Philip Tucker | June 22, 2007 4:48 PM
Oh brave new world, that has such rolling stock in it...
Posted by: Dave Hutchinson | June 22, 2007 4:48 PM
Human scale bipeds are good for this planet.
The world is built to human scale, to negotiate it you need a roughly human scale biped. Note the difficulties of the wheelchair bound or even little people in operating in a city.
That, and the Dalek realdolls don't sell very well.
Posted by: monopole | June 22, 2007 4:51 PM
For the really this-is-so-not-going-to-fly shape of future transport, you need to take a look at the jet-propelled Sinclair C5 (more on the origins of this miracle of misplaced British ingenuity here).
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 22, 2007 5:05 PM
Wow, how low would the productivity of that robot be?
Right now they seem to work much more slowly than the real meat (robot soccer notwithstanding), they need to recharge batteries every so often, they are unlikely to be autonomous in any degree - will thus need human supervisors (prehaps several of them when working around the clock), maintainance is definitly going to be an issue, their optical sensors will struggle much more with low light levels than the human eye ... and so on.
Even at $120.000 they'll be unable to do the work of the 3 human beings you could pay for a year with that money - maintainance, insurance (they'll sue the heck out of you if a robot stamps over someones flower fields ...) etc. included.
As for robots fitting in human opitimized enviroments, isn't that what the Americans have Mexicans for? (My apologies to anyone who might feel offended, but it had to be said.)
Posted by: tp1024 | June 22, 2007 5:14 PM
Charlie,
Kind of amusing to note that the communications systems that are used so blithely by the Libertarian zealots who worship market forces, like the ones who recently slashdotted this journal, were invented and championed by people whose motto was "The best way to predict the future is to create it."
And people are always mistaking them for salt shakers.monopole @ 6
Posted by: Bruce Cohen, SpeakerToManagers | June 22, 2007 5:26 PM
tp1024: you're quite right, on all counts.
I think what they're hoping is that over the next 5-15 years they'll get most of the autonomy issues fixed, so they'll at least be able to cope with basic instructions like "pass me the number four torque wrench".
I'm not convinced low light levels will be an issue -- human eyes don't work too well in the dark (at least, mine don't!) but software control will be a problem.
The flip side is, if they can get them working, even sluggishly compared to a human, well ... most human workers don't actually work for 8 hours in a working day. In fact, most of us aren't really busy for more than 2-3 hours a day. A robot running at a quarter of human speed could nevertheless drastically outperform a human if it's not constantly going home to watch television and sleep for 128 out of a 168 hour week, and isn't wasting three quarters of its on-the-job time nattering to its neighbours.
Finally: immigrants tend to increase their wages over time. Cheap immigrant labour isn't something you can count on forever -- it's just a transient function of incomplete globalization. And then there are countries like Japan where there's a strong prejudice against allowing immigration, coupled with demographic shrinkage of the workforce. Autonomous humanoid robots -- if they can be made to work in the field -- would be a big hit in that kind of environment, with labour costs spiraling into the stratosphere and lots of old folks who need their beds making and their apartments cleaning.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 22, 2007 5:29 PM
The shinkansen are nice. They are much more relaxing to ride on than the plane. Taiwan and South Korean now have them and they are building a few lines in China. I can sleep very well on the shinkansen. I do not sleep well on airplanes.
The problem is cost. Both the right-of-way acquisition as well as the construction cost of the rail line itself. Also, maintainence is an issue in that the alignment of the track must be checked (and adjusted daily). Also, normal railbed (like that in the U.S.) is not suitable for high-speed rail. All of the shinkansen tracks are on concrete rail bed.
You need a very high traffic density in order for a shinkansen line to pay for itself. Most of the Japanese lines run at a loss. Only the Tokyo-Osaka run is profitable. A train leaves Tokyo station for Osaka almost every 5 minutes in the morning and early evening. The rest of the day has train departures every 10-15 minutes. Each train has the capacity for 1500 (three 747 loads). This is the kind of traffic load that is needed for these lines to be profitable. This is also why the U.S. will remain based on cars and airplanes for the forseable future. Most of the U.S. simply does not have the population density to justify high-speed trains.
The jet-train idea is rather silly. Its speed was not any more than that of the present day shinkansen, yet the noise would have been outrageous. A lot of funky ideas from the 60's (jet trains, super sonic airplanes, etc.) never made it and rightly so.
I'm actually not impressed with the humanoid robots coming out of Japan. To me, these are as silly as the 1960's jet-train.
Humanoid robots seem to be the current Japanese thing, much like religion and libertarianism being an American thing (hint?). Humanoid robots get the media attention, but real automation (which is one of the things I do) is much more prosaic - PLCs and SCADA/HMI - and is progressing just as rapidly. It is no accident that all of the worlds makers of PLC (except for AB and Siemens) are Japanese companies.
I actually see little use for humanoid robots. But then I'm a science and industrial guy. I have never thought much about robots being used for personal service. I prefer to interact with real people. I suspect most people are like me. Maybe the Japanese will prove me wrong.
Posted by: Kurt9 | June 22, 2007 6:07 PM
A memorable and relevant line from the Economist about 18 months ago:
HER name is MARIE, and her impressive set of skills comes in handy in a nursing home. MARIE can walk around under her own power. She can distinguish among similar-looking objects, such as different bottles of medicine, and has a delicate enough touch to work with frail patients. MARIE can interpret a range of facial expressions and gestures, and respond in ways that suggest compassion. Although her language skills are not ideal, she can recognise speech and respond clearly. Above all, she is inexpensive. Unfortunately for MARIE, however, she has one glaring trait that makes it hard for Japanese patients to accept her: she is a flesh-and-blood human being from the Philippines. If only she were a robot instead.
Posted by: Tom Womack | June 22, 2007 7:09 PM
Kurt9
Jet propelled trains will be viable and economical once we ditch the gas turbine for nuclear technology. That's right, dust off Project Pluto for rail use:
http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html
The engines were the size of a locomotive anyway, and ill suited for mounting on a Sinclair C5
Although there might be some NIMBY issues.
Posted by: monopole | June 22, 2007 7:33 PM
monopole @ 14
You think? If I lived near the tracks I'd be a little upset. About 35 years ago my kitchen window was ~15 feet from the tracks, and one Saturday morning the freight train that was supposed to haul 2,000,000 pounds of high-explosive (aircraft bombs to be exact) right past me 8 hours later blew up in the yards 10 miles away. We could see and hear the explosions for hours. And you want me to live next to glow-in-the-dark trains?
Posted by: Bruce Cohen, SpeakerToManagers | June 22, 2007 8:24 PM
One huge problem with humanoid robots for the next couple of decades, anyway, is going to be how much supervision and rescuing from their own limitations they're going to need. Control software just isn't going to be able to handle complex, changing environments well for some time, and inappropriate reactions on the part of the robots are going to be common enough that there will have to be a human supervisor close enough to each one to get to it if, for example, it starts to change the patient instead of the sheet.
Posted by: Bruce Cohen, SpeakerToManagers | June 22, 2007 8:29 PM
I think that when the control software starts working well enough to handle the complex environments of the non-factory floor in addition to performing tasks, it will be a weak-AI, or at least appear to be.
It seems more likely to me that the AI will be developed separately and put to use using these mobile robots (or others of any shape) as remote waldos and sensing devices. Because what's the sense of limiting the physical IO to a single base, with a few axes - for example a humanoid robot with two arms - when you could easily have it control more of said robots at the same time, using multiple arms and sets of 3D sensors with local, diverse and redundant image and feedback processors?
Posted by: Randy Bradakis | June 22, 2007 9:07 PM
I have a quiet personal bet with myself going: that the homeostatic control software for humanoid robots that works best will actually be a neural network system, and will end up mimicking large chunks of the human neural architecture because it's an already-extant model for how you control a bipedal robot with the right number of joints and sensors and of roughly the right mass and size in the same gravitational field. Probably implemented using specialized FPGAs designed to support neurocomputing.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 22, 2007 9:31 PM
About the fast trains: while the 250 kmh standard ICE train feels pretty normal, the 350 kmh fast track between Frankfurt and Cologne is somehow an experience (one thing: it feels fast, espeically if you walk in the train while it goes up to its travelling speed, the other: you look out of the window at the autobahn, and all the cars there look like standing still ...).
Posted by: Till Westermayer | June 22, 2007 9:32 PM
Charlie,
Human eyes are a marvelous device in some respects. One of those is a dynamic range that not even good old chemical film can keep up with. CCDs are much worse.
You're absolutely right arguing that sluggish robots with great endurance would surpass human beings, but not as long as they have to depend on the care of dedicated humans. And I'm rather sceptic that we can program robots to be autonomous enough in everyday live, if we haven't even figured out a program that can beat a decent GO (or weiqi) player. Or a robot that could roll around on mars without being in constant danger of running straight into a rock or getting stuck for that matter. At least not within the next few decades. All that might come along with the fusion reactor and artificial intelligence we've been waiting for for the last 50 years ...
Workforce is going to be the least of our problems:
At least in terms of manufacturing (and lately administration) the productivity of people is basically post singularity - output is almost independent of the number of humans working, after a certain skeleton crew - completely out of proportion with the actual production - is on the job more people can't increase the production. (Something Germany's 130-years-old social system has yet to realize.) We'll have all the people we'll need - but we have to make sure they'll be paid or have a decent living.
What's that rant about humanoid robots working in fields?
Sounds like the Agromech in Mechwarrior novels to me. Perfectly pointless. We can adapt the fields, the plants, the robots, the soil and whatever to maximize yield - and there is no doubt that human beings are not perfectly adapted to working on fields. And the fields themselves also have a long way to go. Maybe we can finally get away from monocultures with better automatisation, better pattern recognition etc. (For starters: one that could tell green leaves and green cucumber reliably apart ...)
Posted by: tp1024 | June 22, 2007 9:53 PM
Shinkansen & other high-speed trains:
http://thrillingwonder.blogspot.com/2007/04/super-high-speed-trains.html
Posted by: Merseybeat | June 22, 2007 10:03 PM
My guess is that the control software is going to be a number of individual neural networks connected in a more communications-oriented way, rather than being sub-networks of a single large neural net. The brain has had to build both its processors and its cables out of the same (or at least very similar) components, so the network is probably more complex than it needs to be for the purpose of building robots.
The system architecture of the brain seems to be a number of specialized organs connected in a specialized topology. Each organ may turn out to be a collection of smaller subsystems connected by similar connection mechanisms.
But we don't have to emulate all that as a neural net if the functional description of a working brain can be modeled as a set of components (each a net) connected by cables.
Posted by: Bruce Cohen, SpeakerToManagers | June 22, 2007 10:22 PM
Stross
Which shows that someone is working hard at making science fictional clichés come true, rather than just assuming that the invisible hand of market forces will wave a magic wand if we wait long enough.
Cute. You don't see the Invisible Hand because it's you - and me - and that other guy down there at the end of the bar. It's us, doing whatever it is that we do that makes the world go round and that Hand do it's thing.
@2
I really don't see the point in humanoid robots.
You probably don't live in Japan. They're looking at a huge labor shortage as people get older, there are going to be fewer young people running around to do scut work and the culture is biased against immigrants.
You can't expect them to redesign an entire cityspace around robots on wheels - humanoid bots are going to be the hod carriers and trash haulers in twenty years in Japan.
That and the only way we'll get mecha are if the Japanese figure out the locomotion thing (grin).
Posted by: Brian | June 23, 2007 3:59 AM
@21:
>the 350 kmh fast track between Frankfurt and Cologne is >somehow an experience
Nothing compared to the Shinkansen - which is much, much more comfortable compared to the ICE (even for tall Europeans).
Andreas
Posted by: Andreas Morlok | June 23, 2007 4:28 AM
Ooh, agricultural automation, one of my favorite topics!
Yeah, humanoid fieldworking robots are a ridiculous notion. Combine harvesters aren't particularly humanoid, but would be the perfectly obvious first step in automation (if a human driver weren't so cheap.)
Even if you're talking about tomatoes (or yeah, cucumbers), a wheeled base is still vastly superior to a humanoid frame -- anybody who thinks bipedal human-sized workers are built for tomato harvesting has never seen an actual tomato plant. The tomatoes are a foot above the ground! No, there, the trick is going to be gentle handling, and I can see that happening pretty easily, if Mexicans weren't so cheap. Even in other areas, like here in Puerto Rico, humans are still cheap enough that automation simply doesn't make sense.
Where it might make sense is when you start talking about raising organic produce in a high-CO2 atmosphere. Organic, because your financial return is so much higher, so you have the profit margin to talk about mechanization, and high-CO2 because it's not only really good for the plants, it simultaneously kills the insects -- presto, no need for pesticides.
An automated tomato harvester could run on a rail on the top of a long, skinny CO2-filled enclosure and harvest all the tomatoes you want, without that pesky need to breathe that makes humans so practical.
Trust me -- that is the future of organic produce. I've been toying with the idea of applying for some agricultural grants from the Puerto Rican government to try a pilot. Without the robo-harvesters, of course. That's just my secret pipedream. But the CO2 tents for organic produce are a winner -- the insects in the tropics are nasty little buggers and they'll eat a whole crop in a day if you let them. Besides, you could technically make plastic for the tents out of corn -- renewable and organic and not petro-based, another clear winner for Puerto Rico's island economy.
But back to agroautomation -- in the single movie I can recall that ever dealt with field robots (that Tom Selleck flick from the late 80's, the German title was "Spiders of Death" but I've never seen it in English) the robots in question were little boxy guys on wheels that looked like the front end of tractors. And their operators wore seed-company baseball caps, just like real life.
Those robots weren't humanoid. And I don't believe they would need to be. Fields are all flat. How else can you plant with existing planter technology? (Not to mention that if the field isn't flat, you have an awful lot of erosion... Even if the landscape isn't flat, you terrace your fields. So they're flat. Meaning wheels.)
(Sorry for the non-ninja subject matter. I'll try to do better next time.)
Posted by: Michael | June 23, 2007 4:32 AM
"I prefer to interact with real people. I suspect most people are like me."
Maybe, but I have to admit I'm an exception-- in thousands of years of human civilization and hundreds of thousand of human evolution, no one's managed to get the bugs out of people. The robot could at least theoretically be made to be the perfectly inoffensive servant or companion.
Even more advantageously, being able to substitute programming for training ought to be a great time and trouble saver.
Posted by: C | June 23, 2007 6:12 AM
Micheal,
I was all in favor of your grow-plants-in-CO2-filled-tents idea (even before you mentioned it, they had an appearance in Kim Stanley Robinsons "Red Mars") - until you mentioned the bugs ...
The problem is, that there are probably more useful bugs than harmful ones, you'd kill them along with the others. And that's just the smallest of your problems. You'd change the whole balance of microorganism growth. Soil, after all, isn't just dirt, it's a complex eco system. You'd really have to carefully study the influence of a CO2 enriched atmosphere on the organic components of soil. Those changes need not be bad, but must be carefully studied. And while you're at it, you could try to find out the most important organisms in soil etc. ... We don't know crap about a lot of that stuff.
Posted by: tp1024 | June 23, 2007 9:46 AM
Another fun aspect of growing plants in CO2 filled tents is what happens when your agrobot breaks down halfway along the track. At which point you need to either bleed air into the tent, or have somebody go in with an oxygen tank (and woe betide them if anything goes wrong -- CO2 poisoning regularly kills incautious brewery and sewage plant workers; now we've just added the relatively low-paid agricultural sector to the mix).
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 23, 2007 10:54 AM
Michael @ 25
" in the single movie I can recall that ever dealt with field robots (that Tom Selleck flick from the late 80's, the German title was "Spiders of Death" but I've never seen it in English)"
The film is called Runaway:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Runaway-REGION-NTSC-Tom-Selleck/dp/B00004TX5G/ref=pd_bbs_3/202-8824593-8775842?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1182592515&sr=8-3
Posted by: Nick | June 23, 2007 10:57 AM
I've long felt that humanoid machines are not going to be independent robots of the sort that so many past SF writers have described. They're going to be remote-control machines with human operators--Starship Troopers power armour with the man in a safe place.
And isn't the hardest part of a spacesuit the hands. Even if you want the man right there, why struggle with gloves?
Posted by: Dave Bell | June 23, 2007 11:01 AM
Dave @ 30
Humanoid robots are intended to solve two problems:
1) Doing dangerous jobs that humans have traditionally done, but which we now value our lives too highly for.
2) Doing menial jobs which humans have traditionally done, but which we now value our intellect and free time too highly for.
Your suggestion would only solve problem 1), although I agree that the technology to achieve this may well be more imminently within our grasp. (We'll have radio-controlled bipeds before we have genuine autonomous A.I.).
It's interesting that you choose power armour as your example though, because war machines are one of the areas where remote control devices are least desirable due to the potential for losing control of them during a battle, either due to accidental loss of communications, or intentional enemy action (hacking).
Posted by: Nick | June 23, 2007 11:49 AM
Yes, but you can see Power Armour as a remote with zero-length wires.
And the whole unmanned aerial vehicle thing is one of the areas where the military are moving towardss combat remote control. It's a fairly low bandwidth application to keep the vehicle out of the cumulo-granite, and you can build a lot of error checking and correction into the comlink. Air combat, it's much more of an issue.
And have you seen the robot project for carrying casualties out of the battle?
I think the menial jobs thing is a bit misleading. A partial answer is to improve how the workers get paid; there's a dehumanising streak to the management. Think about the Japanese reaction to foreign workers as an extreme case of the problem. They want robots because they don't want to treat human beings as if they were real people.
It may be something as simple as changing how the work week is arranged. I know one local business which is always advertising the same job. The pay's good, the average hours per week are ordinary. But it's in 12-hour shifts.
Working with machinery. I wouldn't feel safe by the end of a 12-hour shift. As a farmer, I've done them, and it's frightening having one of those did-I-fall-asleep moments while driving a combine harvester.
(All typing errors are the cat's.)
Posted by: Dave Bell | June 23, 2007 12:38 PM
Re: growing stuff in CO2-filled greenhouses.
Unless you genengineer the plants they're not going to benefit from messing with the atmospheric mix. It turns out that higher concentrations of CO2 don't particularly promote plant growth -- the plants that are around right now are the winners in the evolution race that was run in an atmosphere with close to the current levels of CO2. They're not biologically capable of benefitting much from having lots more "food" present.
Posted by: Robert Sneddon | June 23, 2007 1:09 PM
Charlie,
I don't mean nidpicking, but I think you have some misconception about the agricultural sector. It won't be underpaid immigrants (be they Mexican, Polish, Belarussian, Moldavien ...) of yore working there. This would be a full blown industrial operation. The productivity of workers surveilling/operating machines is much larger than that of farmworkers sweating out a liter an hour, and consequently their education and pay will be a lot better. Just compare a factory worker at - say - Daimler-whatever-it-is right-now and one in a Chinese sweat shop. The latter is of course a low paid job, since these jobs typically have low productivity. (I wonder what kind of progress we might have made in automatisation without China providing some 500 Million workers to do all the manufacturing for the now-deindustrialized-world.)
As for machines breaking down CO2 filled tents:
a) It won't hurt much to fill common air in the tents/buildings for a few hours - CO2 after all is pretty darn cheap and the plants should be able to cope with it, even genetically optimized ones to make full use of the CO2 levels.
and b) engineers are fully capable of implementing safe failure modes that will not require a) in 95% of all cases.
An idea that just occured to me is that with the atmospheric seal you may even convince a majority of the EU parliament to allow the use of GM-plant in Europe. After all, you just need a slightly lower pressure to effectivly prevent contamition of the outside world. If those plants would depend on severly increased CO2 levels they could not even grow on the outside if someone took the seeds out there.
Posted by: tp1024 | June 23, 2007 4:01 PM
tp1024: I'm tending to listen to Dave Bell on this one. (He used to run a farm. And I know him personally.)
I'd also like to note that the anti-GM resistance in Europe isn't simply about contamination of the external biosphere with pollen; it's about eating the bloody things. With the organic sector growing at a compound rate of 25% per year there's serious public unease about just what goes into our stomachs. I personally think that some of the anti-GM sentiment is misplaced ... but the behaviour of the corporations marketing the stuff -- companies like Monsanto, for example -- doesn't fill me with confidence. Personally I gave up buying food at supermarkets a couple of years ago: about 50% of what I eat is organic. (I'm not terribly keen on being a guinea pig for the long-term side effects of cholinesterase inhibitors, for example, and the tendency of interesting organic metal complexes and heterocyclic organic molecules to end up dissolved in fats at the top of the food chain -- milk and cheese, for example -- has been a big incentive to switch to exclusively organic sources of dairy produce.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 23, 2007 4:08 PM
Charlie: "Which shows that someone is working hard at making science fictional clichés come true, rather than just assuming that the invisible hand of market forces will wave a magic wand if we wait long enough."
-- ah... Charlie... that IS the invisible hand working.
Unless you think Kawada Industries is a charity, or a government agency?
The market is an information-delivery system and a set of incentives.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | June 23, 2007 6:00 PM
Charlie: "I'd also like to note that the anti-GM resistance in Europe isn't simply about contamination of the external biosphere with pollen; it's about eating the bloody things."
-- sorry, you're already eating them. The "unmodified" Brazilian soy that's ubiquitous in European food products is actually mostly grown with GM seed smuggled in from Argentina. They just lie about it.
The anti-GM hysteria in Europe is amusing to behold; rather like watching a legion of people frantically trying to sweep back the ocean with brooms.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | June 23, 2007 6:04 PM
SMS @37: *rolls eyes*.
I think a careful look at the sociological phenomenon of the frankenfood scare is worthwhile. Most of the western European nations where people went overboard on it are so highly urbanized that most people think food comes from supermarkets and don't see rural areas or farms except from the windows of airliners and high-speed trains. There was a recent survey in the UK that discovered that about a third of school children didn't know that eggs and chickens were somehow connected, or that your carton of milk was obtained by squeezing a cow. About 20% didn't even know that the bacon in their sandwiches was made out of dead pigs.
Superstitious thinking about food shouldn't come as any surprise when people are so divorced from the source. <flame-bait strength="mild">It's like expecting a random sampling of Americans to reason sensibly about life on other continents</flame-bait>. (Based on the fact that only about 20% of US citizens hold passports, most of those are only used for travel to Mexico and Canada, and what passes for "foreign news" on US television is only loosely correlated with reality.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 23, 2007 9:09 PM
Charlie,
Maybe it's different up there, but in middle england things like "organic" vegetables seems to be a codeword for "twice and expensive and so low quality I'm far more concerned about food poisoning from eating them than long term chemical poisoning from "regular" vegetables".
The local co-op is a partial exception to that, but their organic vegetable quality tends to vary wildly from one day of the week to the next.
As to meat and such, I eat Kosher for reasons beyond religious.
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | June 23, 2007 10:18 PM
Andrew: yup, all of that. Being selective tends to go with the territory.
On the other hand, for dairy produce, it's from animals that haven't been fed on prophylactic antibiotics and growth hormones, and that have been eating herbicide-free grass. Once it's been pasteurized I'm reasonably confident of the quality.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 23, 2007 10:45 PM
am so going on a Series 500 Shinkansen if I get the chance, this September
Get a Japan RailPass before you leave if you're planning on taking trains at all. And in Japan, you should plan this, because the trains make a "short morning sightseeing trip" = anything within a 400km train ride.
When I went in 2001, the pass paid for itself within a day because the individual ticket prices are high. The pass covered everything except the fastest Shinkansen- for those there was a slight surcharge ($40).
Check to see if Japan runs a tourist office near you: if it's like the one in San Francisco, it'll be full of printed guides to various towns and tourist spots. I often found many of those to be more useful than either guidebooks or internet sources.
For example, one was a booklet of hotels that rent to foreigners. Japan has a free English-language phone service that'll do everything except make reservations. We'd call the phone service, they'd call the hotel and check that a room was available, and then when we spoke with the hotel manager all we had to say was 'hai' to whatever they'd say. Worked out well.
Posted by: Kathryn from Sunnyvale | June 23, 2007 10:59 PM
JR passes are on the agenda, but the nearest travel agent who handles them is in London, i.e. the thick end of 600 kilometres away from here. I expect to spend quite a long time on the phone this week ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 23, 2007 11:12 PM
Charlie, not so much "selective" as if I only ate deacent quality organic vegetables, I'd not *have* vegetables a lot of the time.
Dairy products, well, don't eat many...
(there are cash issues there as well, I admit - I really really need a better paid job)
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | June 23, 2007 11:32 PM
Seems like there is absolutely no idea you could possibly have for the first time.
Posted six and a half hours ago:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/91636 (for any other German speakers around)
containing a link to ... guess what:
http://visionrobotics.com/vrc/index.php?option=com_zoom&Itemid=26&catid=4
Anything but humanoid I'd say.
And yeah right, the sentiment on GM-food, especially here in Germany, is also about eating the stuff, though I could not possibly judge what offends people more and on which of the topics people are least informed about. Most of that is just I-don't-want-any-atoms-in-my-coffee thinking, people are _just_ against it, because they lack the knowledge, the capacity, the willingness, the resources or the time to understand even the basics about it. And as they have no idea about it, they are against it for no reason in particular. (That is my opinion, nothing else.)
I also have to agree with disagreeing with the behavior of Monsanto and others, also the issuing of patents on living organisms or genes that we all run around with. I just hope that all of that is going to lead up to the demise of the whole system some time. Right now it is not just ridiculous, but anachronistic and hampering development.
Posted by: tp1024 | June 23, 2007 11:49 PM
tp1024 @ 27: by "bugs" I mean actual insects, not the soil organisms, but now that you mention it that is indeed something I'm going to look into. And I'm not talking about fully evacuating the oxygen, either, by the way -- just tipping the balance to slow the bugs down would be a help. To be honest, I'm not even sure there would be soil involved at all for many crop species -- I like aquaponics, myself, having (1) done a small amount of dabbling in it and (2) read a little about ongoing experiments in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Cheap protein, tilapia.
Robert @ 33: not according to what I'm reading from Purdue. But I grant you that I'm hardly an expert yet. And note: I'm not talking about didding with the air that much. Actually, just keeping them in a tent at all would do a lot to keep the ants and caterpillars out -- the CO2 mix is just a little icing on the cake.
Genetic modification would be missing the point entirely. This is something I'm actually starting this year, not something I want to do in the lab for the next 20.
Charlie @ 28: cheap tents. Rip them out if the machine breaks down, grind them up and toss them to the worms for recycling, and put a new layer of plastic down when you've kick-started the machine again. They'll have to be replaced on a regular basis anyway after sufficient exposure to tropical sunlight -- you can trust me on that one, the sun down here is murder and it's year-round. It's frankly all that free energy that has me convinced that the tropics would be the perfect place to feed the world, if you could slow the native ecosystem down in its ineluctible drive to digest anything in its way. But at least I could feel a little better thinking that Puerto Rico will be able to feed itself when the oil runs out -- something that right now would make Haiti look like a day in the park.
Also in re that comment -- the robots are just for fun. I'm not sure what will be necessary to make them cheaper than people -- and my primary point was to note that agrorobots will almost certainly be non-humanoid.
Humanoid robots will be damned important on the market, though, for one reason if nothing else, and this touches on a couple of earlier comments. Non-humanoid robots are there to do work. Humanoid robots are there to be slaves. That is, their humaniformity (cringe) fulfills a social purpose, not necessarily a functional one.
Shorter SMS @ 37: "I'm right in all respects, and if you disagree with me, I will take refuge in my knowledge that you are an unwitting dupe." Sheesh. First of all, most organic food I myself buy is produce, not "products", thus perforce contains no soy ingredients, whether Brazilian or not. Second of all, I very much doubt that magical GM soy is "ubiquitous" in European food products in the first place. You're as tiring as ever, and I've noticed that when I pass your books on the shelf at the bookstore, and occasionally think one might be worth buying, I realize who wrote it. And I put it back -- not because of any silly notion of boycott, but because I realize that the whole damn thing is going to reek of ignorance and spite and will simply increase my blood pressure. And that is solely because of your ridiculous behavior here on this very forum. Wake up and learn some humility. You might find it wins you the occasional friend. (Or, more likely, you will continue your passive-agressive posting behavior in the rather pathetic belief that you are "winning".)
The organic produce market is indeed capitalizing on some pretty overblown fears, and people's buying choices are in almost every case wildly misguided, because they think if they bought something at Whole Foods it must have come from the local farmers whose pictures are prominently displayed, rather than one of three nominally organic agrobusiness companies in California, or rather questionable producers in South America. But that doesn't mean that the notion of fresh, healthy food is wrong, no matter what you might wish were true, SMS. (Hell, I find I can't remember your actual first name; is it Steve?)
The primary worry about GM crops is that there have been no studies of their effects when consumed. Sure, we can presume to imagine, as SMS surely does, that the chemical composition of the foods being roughly equivalent, there must be no difference in their effects when eaten. And maybe that's true -- but studies should nevertheless be done. But I know of only one researcher who attempted to do so -- and he was ruthlessly hounded by the food industry and lost funding. Not that rich men would spend money to corrupt science to protect their investment -- that would, of course, give lie to the notion that our market economy respects scientific findings, thus it cannot be true. (In the long term, basing your investments on reality pays off, but in the short term, manipulating public (and insider) belief about reality pays off much better. And that's not science, but who's keeping score on that, anyway? The people doing this manipulation don't know or care squat about the scientific method; all they want is something to print in the prospectus, and they'll spend whatever it takes to get that, and to demolish anything that contradicts it. You'd think that as a science-fiction writer, SMS would realize that science works but not everything done by paid researchers is science -- too bad he's not a ninja writer like Charlie.)
As the father of two kids with digestive allergy problems (one has kidney problems modulated by atopic allergy, and the other has Crohn's Disease) I pay a lot of attention to food. We've had actual solid results from dietary changes -- and of course that's necessarily anecdotal given our population size, ha ha, but it's suggestive. Sneers that "you're already eating GM food without knowing it, you pathetic fool" are tiresome and inaccurate. Which won't stop SMS, of course, and I say this from experience, but in actual point of fact here in reality, it is indeed possible to know what you are eating if you care to find out. Especially if you grow it yourself. Hence my increased focus on just that -- but since I grew up in farm country myself, and the son of back-to-the-land Mother Earth News readers, I've always been interested.
So yes, SMS, you are correct that if you live like an ignorant schmuck and buy the most colorful packaged food on the shelf, odds are you're eating something that didn't evolve on its own. But if you care about what you are eating, this is simply not the case. The problem -- whether eating nominally "organic" food or not -- is the processing, not the origin.
Ideally, for some values of "ideal" which don't square well with the treehugger crowd I usually talk to about this stuff, you'd be able to grow some of your own food in your home or a nearby small facility, then cook it yourself with a great deal of automation -- thus living on fresh produce and very freshly harvested material, while still being able to interact with our urban society at a meaningful level, in terms of both geographic proximity and the amount of time you have to participate. Organic farming/gardening takes a lot of effort, time I wouldn't have to earn money or blather on online forums like this one, if I were living from it exclusively. And the same goes for cooking from scratch. But both of them are incomparable for improving your health.
My intuition is that addressing that need is going to be profitable over the next twenty years. I certainly hope so, anyway, because this is one industry move I'm actually moving towards participating in. Worst case: I get to spend time playing with robots in the kitchen, and eating good fresh produce I grew myself. That's hardly a lose.
Oh, hey, SMS @ 36: wow, a comment that I agree with. So you're not the Fatuous Channel after all. That's encouraging. I hadn't noticed it was you who'd written it.
Andrew @ 39 -- oh hell yeah. The same goes for a lot of Indiana, and Puerto Rico as well (my two stomping grounds -- I'm actually in Indiana at the moment, even though my thoughts and planning are in Puerto Rico this year). Hence my belief that there's a lot of money to be made -- because people pay a lot of money for crap identified as "organic" and I figure they'll appreciate a choice that really is.
So. Sorry for the length of this post; I actually care about these issues. I should probably shut up here and post them on my own blog instead, but eh. Once you get started typing in one place, it's hard to move to another.
Posted by: Michael | June 23, 2007 11:59 PM
tp @ 44: "Most of that is just I-don't-want-any-atoms-in-my-coffee thinking" -- yes. It is. Which makes it difficult for any serious person to raise the point that corn is already problematic enough for many people with food allergies, without randomly changing God only knows which of its proteins.
Combine that with the fact that the science of the digestive system is embarrassingly naive when it comes to both the mechanisms and the consequences of food allergies, and you think, hey, maybe sticking with the species we've used for a few thousand years might be good idea. Which is why more science is needed -- because it might well not be a problem, but the current knowledge just isn't sufficient to know for sure, and since (pace SMS) this affects every fricking body in the world except people who grow all their own food, it behooves us to find out.
But again -- that science potentially threatens billions and billions of dollars of investment. So it's nipped in the bud in no uncertain terms when anybody threatens to do it.
And wow -- cool orange harvester. It seems somewhat ... questionable to me to make a 3D model of the entire orange tree, then move the harvester through to get the oranges (what, there's no wind?) but if your processing time for each camera view is high, I can easily imagine that individual cameras on each gripper would slow the process down to the point where it's just not feasible.
And yeah -- the current government rumbling about immigrant labor certainly does have the agribusiness people scared shitless. If they have to do without cheap labor, they'll be up a creek.
Posted by: Michael | June 24, 2007 12:46 AM
In my part of the US at least, it getting hard *not* to eat organic foods, if you look for something a cut above basic staples.
Though I mostly eat packaged and prepared organic food, I haven noticed many quality problems with fresh organic fruits and vegetables. Mainly they're a little smaller than traditional products.
As for GM food, I'm all for it. I can understand why some people might not like to eat it, however. Labelling items that are GMO-free might be a solution.
Posted by: Andrew G. | June 24, 2007 6:00 AM
"Superstitious thinking about food shouldn't come as any surprise when people are so divorced from the source. It's like expecting a random sampling of Americans to reason sensibly about life on other continents."
-- I was born in France, myself.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | June 24, 2007 7:29 AM
"Organic farming/gardening takes a lot of effort"
-- tell me. I've done it. Far too much like hard work. Which goes for farming of any sort, and that's the opinion of most of humanity, who 'flee from the land' as soon as they get the opportunity.
Being close to the Earth turns out in practice to shedding a lot of sweat while wallowing in the mud with the bugs.
Thing is, I'm a historian, so I know how lousy food often was in the prelapsarian preindustrial paradise; spoiled, scanty, adulterated, seasonally unavailable and just plain poisonous for many.
The ordinary food in supermarkets in 1st-world countries is cheaper relative to average incomes and higher in quality than at any time in the past.
We're _healthier_ than at any time in the past, too. We're so healthy we live long enough to die of degenerative diseases.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | June 24, 2007 7:38 AM
"And yeah -- the current government rumbling about immigrant labor certainly does have the agribusiness people scared shitless. If they have to do without cheap labor, they'll be up a creek"
-- "agribusiness" is largely a myth, as far as actual farming is concerned.
If you look at the census returns, you'll find that the number of hired laborers in American agriculture has been declining faster than the number of farms. So has the number of hired farm managers.
There are far fewer migrant laborers than there used to be, both in absolute numbers (tho' those are still large) and as a proportion of the agricultural labor force.
In other words, farming has become more reliant on the labor of farm owners and their families over the past couple of generations.
Farms have also gotten larger and more heavily capitalized, of course.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | June 24, 2007 7:42 AM
OK, the farming I did was bulk crops, mostly grain, and that's where the big machines can pay offBig machines, big fields, large-area monoculture. But a few tens of miles away you get vegetable crops that still need hand harvesting, and they do depend on immigrant labour, mostly from the new East European members of the EU.
GM Crops: there are at least three major approaches.
1: Crops producing their own pesticide. One example is cotton, modified to produce chemicals which deter certain insect pests. Sounds safe, even "green", because nobody eats cotton and you get the pesticide without a petrochemical-based factory. But waste from the cotton plant can end up in animal feed.
2: Crops producing a specifical compound for further processing. This is still on a small scale, and an extension of existing specialised crops. For instance, the Opium Poppy, and varieties of Cannabis Sativa grown for fibre rather than pharmaceuticals. There are car manufacturers who use hemp fibre to reinforces plastics: some expensive cars could be siezed for their cannabis content in the USA.
3: Herbicide-tolerant plants which allow weeds to be controlled with inexpensive non-selective herbicides.
The example I'm most familiar with are the "Roundup Ready" crops pushed by Monsanto. Rge active ingredient of Roundup is glyphosate, an out-of-patent compound which subverts the plant's metabolism so that it poisons itself. It gets enthusiastically consumed by sol bacteria, and the glyphosate is less toxic than the solvents, oils, and wetting agents which carry it.
But if you grow a Roundup Ready crop, the purchase contract forces you to use the Monsanto product.
In the UK, the main proposed glyphosate-tolerant crop was oilseed rape, also known as canola. One of the fears given great publicity was the possibility that the gene would get into weeds and prevent them from being controlled. This was based on some pretty fundamental ignorance.
The point about the GM crop was that selective herbicides for brassicas are expensive. OSR is almost embarrassingly susceptible to some cheap selective herbicides used on wheat. Alternate OSR and wheat, and weeds that are hard to control in one crop can be readily controlled in the other.
This is called crop rotation.
The big problem with GM crops is that they tend to even more extreme monoculture. If I wanted to grow milling wheat in the UK, there are maybe half a dozen varieties in large scale use, with differing breeding and differing metabolic resistance to pests and diseases. Add the newer and older varieties, and you can double or triple that number.
How many Roundup Ready OSR varieties are there?
Breeding a new crop variety is expensive, but it's not incredibly so. British farming, in the late Twentieth Century, could support a dozen or so plant breeding companies dealing with wheat. Which meant you had a choice of varieties bred for British conditions.
It really was evolution in action.
Can you imagine Monsanto competing with themselves?
So there are millions of acres of genetically identical crop.
The question you should be asking yourself is "Do I feel lucky?" Mother Nature packs something consioderably more substantial than a .44 Magnum.
Posted by: Dave Bell | June 24, 2007 1:53 PM
Oh, and Mr. Stirling, I think you're being misled by the agrregation of statistics for all crops, throughout the USA. A style of business that works for corn doesn't work for tomatoes. And US-style farmng isn't neccesarity the way the crop might be grown in Europe.
Looking at recent USDA figures:
Russia: 45 million tonnes from 24 million hectares.
That's less than 2 tonnes per hectare.
Canada's yield is predicted at 2.6 tonnes per hectare.
The prediction for the UK is 8 tonnes per hectare. Back when I used to have a copy of Nix to hand, that was barely break-even.
I recall an article in The Furrow, a few years ago, that reported on some US farmers who had adopted European techniques, and finding that they had land which wasn't worth farming. You can get equipment for a combine harvester which will map where the crop is growing.
Average USA -- 38.7 bushels per acre. Well, that's around the same as Canada.
Posted by: Dave Bell | June 24, 2007 2:28 PM
Monopole @ 14:
Jet propelled trains will be viable and economical once we ditch the gas turbine for nuclear technology.
Heh. A few months back, New Scientist had as one of its "This week 50 years ago" snippets a quote from an article they published in 1957 about a German design for a nuclear-powered locomotive: "Trains to go nuclear".
Posted by: Peter Erwin | June 24, 2007 2:48 PM
Didn't a recent article show that "genes" are not unique portions of DNA that only code for one protein; rather that overlapping portions of two or more "genes" code for different proteins? What up until now we called a gene is just a portion of DNA that we can connect to a particular protein. Therefore if you insert a gene for coding insecticide, unknown proteins will also be created from overlapping parts of the new insecticide gene and the previous DNA - and we have no real understanding of what those unknown proteins will do.
I am very much a layman in these matters, however. So I will welcome corrections to my understanding of facts.
Posted by: Mr Teufel | June 24, 2007 5:23 PM
Hey, Charlie. You might get a kick out of this. Picture a public school in New York City, circa 1982. Over the course of the year, the kids grow vegetables in a terrarium, tracking their growth over time, learning a little about biology and a little more about ecology.
At the end of the year, of course, the class takes the carrots and potatoes out of the terrarium, cleans 'em, and eats 'em. Or at least Ms. Ferrara is about to chow down on a carrot when young Joey Espinoza, always concerned about his teacher's well-being, yells out, "You can't eat that! It's growing in dirt!"
Joey went on to design airplanes for Boeing.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | June 24, 2007 7:00 PM
Mr Teufel @ 54:
Some genes do overlap, but not all. You have to have some specific conditions for it to happen; it's not going to automatically appear very time you insert a gene.
Also, I would suspect that randomly created proteins would be strongly nonfunctional, since they don't fit into the plant's biochemistry. They might cause the plant to be weak or die; they're less likely to cause the plant to manufacture something unpleasant.
(I think most poisonous/toxic substances produced by plants are non-proteins, produced by a complex sequence of steps mediated by different proteins.)
Posted by: Peter Erwin | June 24, 2007 7:08 PM
-- I was born in France, myself.
A link to examples of sensible reasoning about it would be helpful here. All I remember you coming out with was some Snitchens-style asscrack about They Shall Be Buried Beneath A Tide Of Muslims While Americans Look On In Horror Faintly Tinged With Smugness.
But perhaps I'm mixing you up with someone else.
Posted by: Adrian Smith | June 25, 2007 12:56 AM
Labelling items that are GMO-free might be a solution.
That would be far too boycott-enabling for some people.
Posted by: Adrian Smith | June 25, 2007 1:01 AM
The anti-GM hysteria in Europe is amusing to behold; rather like watching a legion of people frantically trying to sweep back the ocean with brooms.
They just don't feel like eating what someone tells them is good for them. I can understand how that must come across as insubordination, though. Refusing the benevolence of American corporations, the presumption of it! Surely being buried beneath a tide of Muslims is too good for them.
Posted by: Adrian Smith | June 25, 2007 1:08 AM
Peter, except now with pebble bed reactors, a nuclear-powered train is a lot more viable.
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | June 25, 2007 2:01 AM
Peter, except now with pebble bed reactors, a nuclear-powered train is a lot more viable.
The nimbyism along the rail lines would be something to behold, though.
Posted by: Adrian Smith | June 25, 2007 2:15 AM
@58: Adrian, I think people have a right to eat or not eat what they like. While I'm not bothered by GM food enough to seek out and avoid these things, I believe those that wish to have a right to be informed. As do vegans have a right to know if there are even trace animal products in food. If you believe in The Market, as so many seem to, then you should believe in total freedom of information about the products being marketed, as economics is based on the concept of informed consumers. And given the tendencies of corporations to obfuscate information that may hinder sales, the consumer has a right to distrust them, especially when the corporation is trying to sell them something they may not be equipped to understand.
Posted by: Mr Teufel | June 25, 2007 2:47 AM
@58: "They just don't feel like eating what someone tells them is good for them."
How do they know the unmodified food is safe? I don't think most traditional foods have been put through much in the way of randomized, double-blind scrutiny, we just know they don't kill the average consumer too terribly quickly. Of course, you could say the same about tobacco.
The strange thing to me about European food preferences seems to be the bizarrely strong conservatism and risk aversion.
Posted by: C | June 25, 2007 3:11 AM
C @ 58: That's a good point. Pretty much all "natural" food has had less testing than GMO foods. It was created by fairly random mutation and breeding for traits without know exactly what else you were getting. Not to mention a period there where bombarding with radiation to see if anything useful happened was the cutting edge in crop development.
Posted by: Andrew G. | June 25, 2007 4:47 AM
How do they know the unmodified food is safe?
They don't. But being told that they should eat something new because it's been tested by SCIENTISTS goddamit and if they don't eat it then they're hopeless Luddites seems to have had the effect of making a few of them dig their heels in on the issue.
People can be so emotional sometimes. I mean, not trusting scientists! Whatever is the world coming to.
Posted by: Adrian Smith | June 25, 2007 4:57 AM
There's been several trial sowings of GM crops in the area where I live, and the anti-GM protesters turn up in full hazardous materials protection and destroy the crop.
On one occasion they got the wrong field.
There's also some evidence coming out of the USA that the extreme-monoculture problem has greatly reduced the economic advantage of Roundup Ready crops.
Posted by: Dave Bell | June 25, 2007 7:45 AM
@65 Adrian:
Versus telling people that they should only eat the traditional food, and that they'll fall prey to any number of unspoken potential maladies if they munch the GM food?
The tauting comes because this does start to sound like reactionary ranting. "These new things will bring unspecified harm! They must be prohibited, even if the harm hasn't been demonstrated yet!"
It gets filed with people who are convinced the internet is used by no one but perverts and scam artists, that gay marriage will being about the downfall of civilization, or that video games will result in children turning homicidal en masse.
Posted by: C | June 25, 2007 8:52 AM
Versus telling people that they should only eat the traditional food,
It's the devil you know, innit.
and that they'll fall prey to any number of unspoken potential maladies if they munch the GM food?
I worry more about unusual genes going walkabout myself.
The tauting comes because this does start to sound like reactionary ranting. "These new things will bring unspecified harm! They must be prohibited, even if the harm hasn't been demonstrated yet!"
I've personally got no problem with lots of people signing up as unpaid guinea pigs for Monsanto. Their altruism may bring me untold benefits, like knowing which are the soybeans to avoid ten years from now, should any such materialise.
It gets filed with [...]
Only by libertarians afaict.
Posted by: Adrian Smith | June 25, 2007 9:46 AM
@68
The main problem here to my mind is that there's yet to be demonstrable harm from the stuff, yet it still meets with opposition. What's the reason, if not paranoia?
Avoiding unknown risks simply because they're different than known risks is not a particularly good strategy for development, as it would tend to stultify most new growth and development.
Posted by: C | June 25, 2007 11:34 AM
I'd be somewhat more impressed by European objections to GM food if they were accompanied by more of an interest in knowing what's in the (non-GM) food people are already eating. There's a dramatic contrast between American food labeling and, for example, German food labeling; the latter is rarely anything more than the ingredients.
Some people need to keep track of how much of certain things (e.g., sodium or cholesterol or carbohydrates) are in the food they're eating. Most people, arguably, might want to have some idea how much saturated fat or trans fat is in the food they're eating. This is easy to do with packaged foods sold in US markets, but much more difficult in German markets.
Since European consumers are apparently less concerned about such things than American consumers, it suggests that European objections to GM food don't flow from a purely rational, "I want to know what's in my food so I can eat intelligently" perspective.
Posted by: Peter Erwin | June 25, 2007 11:53 AM
Andrew @60: we've got nuclear-powered trains. Safe nuclear-powered trains, even.
Or rather, the French have got them. They're called TGVs, and they're electrically powered, and 90% of the French electricity supply is nuclear generated.
(Why put a nuclear reactor on a rapidly moving platform with inadequate shielding that's vulnerable to collisions, when you can stick it under a concrete dome and run wires out to the train?)
C @69: y'know, food is pretty fundamental. You stop eating it, you die. Having large and somewhat secretive corporations who have in the past coopted regulatory machinery to push products into the market that weren't terribly safe trying to do the same to the human food chain is a bit worrying to some people. This is essentially a political/regulatory problem; I suspect the opposition to GM food per se will fade if issues of regulation and testing -- and monopolisation of the market -- are addressed.
I'll also note the fun Monsanto has had in suing farmers who aren't customers of theirs, but whose farms are adjacent to customers for roundup-ready crops and who grow similar plants. They allegedly basically go fishing for samples -- which they will get; pollen dispersal doesn't respect real estate boundaries -- and then take legal action for patent violation. This fun little business practice is a big stick that is used to cultivate a nascent business monopoly, and the issue of whether the GM crops are good or not is entirely orthogonal to it: the alleged business practices are clearly dirty, and that's enough -- in my opinion -- to warrant regulatory investigation (and a consumer boycott -- on my part, at least).
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 25, 2007 11:54 AM
@69 Clearly food's important (I say while enjoying breakfast), but
Posted by: C | June 25, 2007 12:06 PM
@69: Clearly food's important (I say while enjoying breakfast), but unless you feel like growing your own, you are going to be at the mercy of someone else's motives and potential chicanery. In this, getting food from the corporation and the small farmer are no different.
Are regulations on GM crops any less stringent than those for selectively-bred ones?
Posted by: C | June 25, 2007 12:22 PM
C: I think you mean should regulations on GM crops be any more -- or less -- stringent than those for selectively-bred ones?
I'm inclined to say "no -- but this doesn't mean we should relax regulations on anything; if anything we need to get tough." On the other hand, when dealing with an existing strain of crop that's been around for some decades, a case can be made for grandfathering it in until there's time to do some detailed research on it.
It'd be quite a bummer to discover that, after all these centuries, potatoes are the cause of hypertension, wouldn't it?
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 25, 2007 1:13 PM
@73, here in the UK the organic gatekeeper for "organic" is the Soil Assciation, and some of the rationale for some of their rules on organic food production is a trifle irrational.
(Oh dear, did I just write a sentence like that?)
The thing is, they permitted some really old-fashioned chemistry--pesticides such as nicotine--while, for livestock, giving a massive loophole for modern veterinary science. So organic beef is almost certainly differently fed, may have been farmed without preventative medication, and may have been dosed with modern curative medications.
Now, there are ways of farming so as to reduce pesticide use. There can be safer options, and a lot of the rules on pesticide use and storage, on the farm, can be cheerfully ignored by the home gardener. And the supermarkets. It's a huge breach of the rules for a farmer to store pesticides in any building containing foodstuffs. Tesco are selling herbicides and insecticides, and letting their customers put them in the same shopping baskets as a loaf of bread.
And yes, there's the paranoia about dirt from our customers. You used to be able to get processed sewage solids as fertiliser, for free. Including application. And I've no complaint about the supermarkets not wanting it used on vegetable crops, but it's got to the point where it's unusable on any crop grown for food.
Even organic crops.
And the suppliers outside the UK don't run under the same rules.
Posted by: Dave Bell | June 25, 2007 1:16 PM
To give an example of some of the silliness and shortsightedness of anti-GMO protesters and the general public, take a look at Triticale.
(http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/afcm/triticale.html)
It's a cross-species crop that combines rye and wheat, first developed in the 1800s. However, since it was a hybrid it wasn't fertile naturally. Later, they used a chemical agent to double the chromosomes in the plant, making it fertile. Essentially a new species was created long before we knew about genes or genetic engineering.
Some 10 million tons of it are grown in the EU each year, a far more haphazard method of engineering a new crop than anything done with GM organizisms people are upset about today.
Posted by: Andrew G. | June 25, 2007 1:29 PM
Charlie,
Okay, build a new stationary nuclear reactor in under 5 years. Or for that matter, at all. Also, not all the world has electified train lines, y'know.
Monsanto give GM crops a bad name thanks to their business practices. I know a LOT of geneticists who detest them.
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | June 25, 2007 1:32 PM
The main problem here to my mind is that there's yet to be demonstrable harm from the stuff, yet it still meets with opposition. What's the reason, if not paranoia?
Because for some unaccountable reason the American government's way of handling the affair has come to be seen as bullying, and some people oppose bullying on general principles. GM foods could be swathed in nutraceutical nanoimprovements which cured everything from the common cold to afterdinner flatulence, and having them forced down our collective throats on the grounds that they're-good-for-you-dammit would *still* inspire resistance among some.
People don't like being told what to do. Why is it so difficult for some Americans to understand this? Is it a side-effect of reading Heinlein?
Posted by: Adrian Smith | June 25, 2007 1:35 PM
@74 True-- should would have worked better there, because I was slack about doing the ten minutes of web searching to find the answer-- in the US, at least, the answer is no-- the FDA only considers the final product, and doesn't care whether the method of production was traditional or biotech.
The government's main argument seems to be that genetically-modifying crops hasn't seen the production of new proteins which might be toxic or allergenic, merely the shuffle of proteins from product to product. If you assume all pig proteins are safe and all tomato proteins are safe, then you can swap them out willy-nilly between the two, for example.
@78- (apologies in advance) Yes, the next thing you know the government will be shoving fluoride down our throats by putting it in the drinking water.
Posted by: C | June 25, 2007 1:57 PM
Charlie @ 74:
It's funny you should mention potatoes, because like all members of the nightshade family they do have a natural poison (solanine?) in them. It's what gives them a bitter taste if you leave them exposed to light until they turn green. There have be cases were selective breeding of potato cultivars has resulted in higher levels of the poison, making them unfit for human consuption. That's why potatoes are often tested for it today.
In theory you could have the same problem when breeding new strains of tomato or eggplant.
Posted by: Andrew G. | June 25, 2007 2:54 PM
77:Okay, build a new stationary nuclear reactor in under 5 years. Or for that matter, at all. Also, not all the world has electified train lines, y'know.
I'm sorry, but that's crack-smokingly stupid. Develop me a nuclear-electric locomotive within 25 years and..
Do you really think that making trains as complicated as nuclear submarines is cheaper than stringing a wire over the tracks? It cost £335 million for Don Heath's team to electrify the East Coast Main Line, and I doubt you'd get under that for *one* nuclear loco in series production.
Posted by: Alex | June 25, 2007 3:09 PM
Yes, the next thing you know the government will be shoving fluoride down our throats by putting it in the drinking water.
Fair enough when it's your own government doing the shoving, a little less acceptable when it's somebody else's.
Posted by: Adrian Smith | June 25, 2007 3:25 PM
@77 Flamanville 3 is supposed to be built in 54 months. We'll see.
Posted by: John Hughes | June 25, 2007 3:29 PM
Apropos @77, @81, that's a classic example of the "we must colonize space!" falacy -- it tends to ignore economic issues in general, never mind the very important question of "is this the most productive use of our money?"
If you've got an un-electrified railway network in this day and age, then -- sorry to rub this in -- you've got an inferior infrastructure problem and you really need to look at what you can do to upgrade the whole system, rather than fixating on a single very expensive magic wand (that may or may not work, but that comes with a huge price ticket attached and interesting and exciting side-effects if something goes wrong).
Passenger trains -- even the fastest Shinkansen and TGV train sets, rated for up to 300 km/h in service and 550km/h on test tracks -- don't draw more than 16Mw as a rule, and often a lot less (IIRC the current draw on a GNER InterCity 225 multiple unit starting from cold is 6Mw -- this is for a 500 seat, 480 ton 140mph express train). Freight trains may weigh an order of magnitude more, but they seldom go above 100km/h and they accelerate much more slowly. So we don't really need a modular power source that can produce more than 10Mw in a locomotive. Meanwhile when traveling at speed they're using an order of magnitude less power.
Aside from space-rated kit, the smallest nuclear reactors in general service -- naval ones -- start out around 50Mw and work up from there.
On the other hand, on any given day in any remotely developed country there will be thousands of train movements, if not tens of thousands, and many hundreds of locomotives are needed.
So. Which makes more sense?
(a) Add overhead electric wires and install a couple of big, centralized, 1Gw PWRs, each of which can accelerate a hundred trains up to cruise speed or keep a thousand of them running between stations,
or
(b) Build several hundred to a few thousand small 10Mw reactors, with all the maintenance and repair costs this implies (and the multiplier effect of the MTBF issue, only applied to nuclear reactors, means you'll be having reactor whoopsies on a monthly to annual basis rather than averaging one per two or three decades), which will be running at less than 10% of peak output for most of their operational lives?
Seems like a no-brainer to me. Science Fiction aside (and I've been guilty of committing ATOMIC POWERED LOCOMOTIVES!!! COOL!!! myself -- see "Singularity Sky"), nuclear locos are loco.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 25, 2007 4:27 PM
IIRC the current draw on a GNER InterCity 225 multiple unit starting from cold is 6Mw -- this is for a 500 seat, 480 ton 140mph express train
You see, this kind of thing is what we need in every boy's handbook to hypermodernity.
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