[ExI] intentional control lag as recreational device, was RE: simulation as an improvement over reality

spike spike66 at att.net
Thu Dec 30 01:45:06 UTC 2010

>... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg

>I am firmly in the Muwaaa{ha}^5 group. My colleagues at FHI have learned to
fear when my laughter echoes down the hall...

It's that whole Swedish accented maniacal laughter, which is a fearful thing
indeed.  Never mess with a mad scientist who has Viking ancestors.

>...But can teleoperation become so good that it reduces the instrumental
interest in moving a mind to the moon?

Ja, the notion is to use partially autonomous teleoperation to build the
human habitat.  It will take a while.

>...The obvious problem is lag...Anders Sandberg

Ja.  I had a notion of trying to create a car modified to accept steering
commands with a variable time delay, then race them around a cone course
like autocross racers.  That way we don't risk crashing, since it is on a
big flat paved surface, and it would be an interesting exercise, roughly
simulating driving while severely intoxicated.  

I have long thought it would be a great moneymaker to offer an autocross
cone course specifically to allow guys to drink themselves silly then try
actual drunk driving under controlled, legal and safe conditions.  The show
stopper is the risk the clients would besmirch the car by barfing.

Failing that, we could build a car which steers and throttles by wire, then
arrange to delay the signals by an arbitrary amount, so the driver would
need to look farther down the course and compensate in advance.  If we think
about the task the brain is actually performing when driving a time delayed
steering car, it is doing lead lag compensation feedback control in an
analog computer.  Now that is just wicked cool.  

No, beyond merely cool: it makes for an entirely new type of racing, with a
new class of champion racers, with a critically important distinction from
the traditional racing: the cars are not particularly expensive, nor are
they dangerous to drive, nor do they devour an extraordinary amount of fuel.
We could make these cars out of ordinary throwaway Detroits with engines
unmodified, the kind which the US "government" recently paid the proles to
retire prematurely in a misguided "cash for clunkers" scheme, which
intentionally destroyed a bunch of perfectly good cars.  Any old car would
have plenty of power to drive as fast as any human can control, with a
simple two second command delay between input and output at the steering
column.  Furthermore, it would be technically simple to do: I bet I could
build such a device me-self.

But I am still stuck on that notion of lead lag compensation with analog
wetware, oh my.


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list