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 that stealing them would do any good: they didn't HAVE technical schematics in those days. They'd have to not merely steal said schematics (which I wouldn't even create in the first place) -- they would have to also take someone who was trained in how to read them. You and I both know that it's possible to fabricate a CPU using photolithography on silicon wafers. Who can you sell the knowledge of this possibility to? What would they be able to achieve with it? Does knowing about photolithography enable you to read -- let alone DRAW -- an x86 chip core? I'm sorry, but I don't find your opinion worth even considering any further on this point. If you can't tell the difference between the kind of knowledge that comprises technical competence and the kind of knowledge that comprises awareness of technical competence -- I'm not sure why your opinion matters here.
I think your timetable is at odds with your secrecy requirements.
See the above. You're confusing awareness of new technologies with the ability to create them. These are not even remotely similar. I have already stated -- repeatedly, I believe? -- that I just don't care who knows about what I can do. I'm only preserving the secrets of how to actually do it.
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.
Déformation professionnelle. I do not require the technicians producing the goods to understand what they are doing. I need only for them to understand their one single piece of the process.
Furthermore, unlike software development, mechanical products are VERY susceptible to industrial line-assembly techniques. I would have ten or fifteen people -- a main blacksmith and his journeymen and his apprentices -- to work with for each given product. They would in turn become miniature factories to crank out their chosen products, and would be able to upskill/train others by including them in the line. This reduces vastly the technical complexity of any given 'piece of the pie'.
Further still; software engineering requires a whole swath of cognitive skills -- logical analysis, creative design, high working memory for retention of relevant details, etc., etc., that the rote assembly of parts simply does not require. I would be the one providing the designs for all of this equipment. The technicians and blacksmiths would simply be crafting the same design over and over again.
Think of it like coding the same quicksort algorithm over and over again, after being literally walked through it the first time keystroke by keystroke. Even a monkey could be so trained to code in relatively short orter. In the software world, this would be a useless thing to be doing. Not so for the manufacture of material goods.
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.
Honestly, no -- I really wouldn't be. The technical wherewithal of the mystery cults was significantly greater than the local populations possessed as it was. The aeolipile, for example, was used by mystery cults to automatically open and close doors. The first coin-operated machine was a holy-water dispensor -- (created by the same guy who made the aeolipile -- the steam engine -- famous; Hero[t]).
Everyone of any wealth either had a mystery cult of their own, or else belonged to a mystery cult of their own. And their membership was not mutually exclusive. The power structure of the polytheistic organizations of the day was absolutely and utterly alien to the priesthood of the monotheistic churches we know today.
The land quality of the area is such that most who lived there would only be able to live subsistence-style lives.
That makes more sense, yeah.
It's not like even if I had technical schematics that stealing them would do any good: they didn't HAVE technical schematics in those days... If you can't tell the difference between the kind of knowledge that comprises technical competence and the kind of knowledge that comprises awareness of technical competence...
You are compartmentalizing the facts too much, and missing the bigger picture. Put yourself int...
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.