Land would be cheap and plentiful because it wouldn't be seen as a viable resource for crop harvesting.
Wait... where else would they harvest crops, if not on land ? They don't have hydroponics...
That said, it's entirely possible that I overestimated the value of land as compared to a patrician's salary, so you could have a point.
Nothing. Well, except that I'd be rotating the guards and so on.
That's just a recipe for more leaks, IMO.
Plus; nobody would want what they were selling, at least for the first few years. And by then it really wouldn't much matter -- I'd already have the ramp-up I needed to maintain first-mover advantage.
I think your timetable is at odds with your secrecy requirements. If you truly became wildly successful in just a few short years, as is your plan, then everyone would want what you have. Sure, many people would look for the secret magical golden apple that you stole from the Titans or something, but a few smarter ones would come after your peasants, artisans, middle-managers, household slaves, and anyone else who could have knowledge about your operation.
That's also one additional reason why I'd chosen a "backwater" or "rural" area to bootstrap in: there will be far fewer 'educated' men to deal with, and I will be able to ramp up -- initially -- in relative isolation.
Again, this strategy is at odds with your aggressive goals. Sure, you'll see a lot less industrial espionage, but you'll also have a much smaller pool of skilled, mentally flexible artisans to draw upon. Speaking of which:
A few months per project at most. Task specialization would be used.
This claim sounds extraordinary to me. It has been my personal experience (which, admittedly, is entirely anecdotal) that, in the modern world, training a fresh computer science graduate to become moderately productive on a real software project takes about a month; I recall reading somewhere that one to three months is the common figure. And that's just a CS graduate being trained to do what he studied for ! You are proposing to introduce entirely new concepts during the same period of time, in order to build complex (and expensive) physical objects, not software constructs. I think you'll need more time.
The schools -- the part where I mentioned '"skepticism, falsificationism, logic, mathematics" and birth control' -- are not vital or even very contributive to the plan as described.
Fair enough.
Also, I wouldn't be interfering with the power structure of any other religious group, so that's pretty much a total non-concern.
You would be, at the end of your five-year-plan. It's one thing to say, "I'm the chosen of Vulcan because I saw an eagle flying upside down once". Everyone says stuff like that. It's a wholly different thing to say, "I'm the chosen of Vulcan because he gave me all this divine hypertech, and look, it's fwackooming your magistrate as we speak". Priests of all kinds -- including those of Vulcan -- would take you seriously then, and I'm not sure if you want that.
Wait... where else would they harvest crops, if not on land ? They don't have hydroponics...
... perhaps I did not write sufficiently clearly. The land quality of the area is such that most who lived there would only be able to live subsistence-style lives. This is one reason why the land was a traditional recruiting grounds for the armies; enlisting was basically the only way to drag yourself out of poverty.
That's just a recipe for more leaks, IMO.
What can they leak? They're guards, not technicians. It's not like even if I had technical schematics t...
A recent discussion post has compared the difficulty of an AI destroying modern human civilization to that of a modern human taking over the Roman Empire, with the implication that it is impossible.
The analogy has a few problems: first, modern humans don't have much greater raw intelligence than the Romans, only a bit more knowledge and tools; an AI would have a genuine intelligence advantage. Second, a high-tech civilization like ours offers many more ways for a genius to cause chaos than existed in classical Rome: it's more plausible that you can throw a few existing technologies together to create a superweapon than that Ptolemy could have done likewise, and there's no ancient Roman equivalent to hacking a nuclear launch system.
But taking over ancient Rome might serve as an interesting upper bound on the difficulty of an AI taking over modern civilization. And it's a theme of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that rationalists should be able to come up with creative solutions to seemingly hard problems. So if Professor Quirrell offered it as an extra credit assignment, how would you take over Rome?
Here are the rules:
- You are thrown back in time to the year 1 AD. You can choose to arrive anywhere in the world, but your method of arrival cannot itself give an advantage (you can't appear in a flash of light in the middle of a religious ritual or anything).
- You do not start with Roman citizenship or any other legal record of your existence.
- You keep your original physical characteristics, including sex, height, and fitness. You will appear in period-appropriate dress of your choosing, and can't carry any artifacts with you. You may start with enough money to live a patrician lifestyle for a year.
- You are intellectually near-perfect. You know all human knowledge as of 2012. You speak fluent Latin (and all other languages of the day) and can orate as eloquently as Cicero or Demosthenes. You are a tactical genius of the order of Caesar and Napoleon. And you have infinite willpower and goal-directedness: aside from human necessities like sleep or food, you need never rest.
- You win if you either become Roman Emperor (and are acknowledged as such by most Romans), or if a state you control conquers the city of Rome. You lose if you die, of old age or otherwise, before completing either goal.