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 into the shoes of your ambitious, greedy and moderately smart neighbour -- let's call him Avaritus. He knows that you have begun extracting wealth from what was formerly known as a financial Tartarus of a plantation. He knows that your peasants and smiths are now equipped with various hitherto unknown devices. He has no idea how these things work, only that they do. He knows that your guards can be bought (or otherwise influenced). He doesn't know what "technical schematics" are, but he does know what "trained personnel" are. If you were Avaritus, what would you do at this point ?
I'm only preserving the secrets of how to actually do it.
Are you building everything yourself, personally, or are you training people to do it for you ? If it's the latter, then your secret knowledge isn't hidden, it's just scattered. If your employees are capable of any form of communication, then the knowledge can be reconstructed. More on this below:
Furthermore, unlike software development, mechanical products are VERY susceptible to industrial line-assembly techniques.
That's true. But those techniques, in turn, are dependent on being able to crank out identical items to very high degrees of tolerance. Thus, at the very minimum, all of your smiths (and I doubt that your plantation would initially have more than a couple of smiths living there) will have to be trained to manufacture items to an absurd (to them) degree of tolerance, as well as in assembly-line techniques. This will take time -- more time than you seem to think -- and, in and of itself, constitutes a piece of secret knowledge that's almost trivially easy to steal.
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.
It does, if you want your pistons to actually fit inside your cylinders once the smiths make each part separately..
Everyone of any wealth either had a mystery cult of their own, or else belonged to a mystery cult of their own.
Did their mystery cults paint big targets on themselves, by proclaiming, "look, I've got a flying machine" ?
Put yourself into the shoes of your ambitious, greedy and moderately smart neighbour -- let's call him Avaritus.
Here the region I'd be moving into would play some effect. The plantations that did exist in the plains of Spain were geographically isolated from one another. Most of the people in the area would've been hardscrobble farmers barely living at-or-above subsistence. And them I'd be actually helping out by-and-large (by way of expanding my economic empire.)
Many of the simpler techniques I'd want to get spreading out; it would make it easier fo...
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.