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 for me to expand my influence. I'd be able to offer trade/transport of goods and the services related; I'd be able to capitalize fractional-reserve-banking to help bootstrap up my neighbors -- just not as far as me -- and so on. I would only for the first year or two rely upon direct production of goods, as opposed to becoming the financier to the production and transport of said goods. That's what step 4 was all about.
I would also, however, have to hide the efficacy and usefulness of my weaponry. I suppose I could sell leafspring crossbows to the guardsmen for other local plantation owners. The technical expertise needed to reproduce them would still be fairly high, and their rate of fire would be atrociously low (Even an expert crossbowman would take upwards of fifteen seconds to recock the bow.)
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,
I'd have to recruit smiths from other geographic areas. Not very difficult. I could also have journeymen upskilled somewhat more quickly, given the use of machine tooling and metalcasting. (Push comes to shove there's also tDCS to increase learning rates.)
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.
You keep insisting on this. I see absolutely no reason to take your insistence seriously. One or two weeks at most would be sufficient for them to "get the idea" of line assembly. It's a very simple concept. And I also don't really care if it gets out. Let it. The primary thing that I need to maintain technological secrecy on is the actual assembly of the air rifles. Everything else is an 'expendable' secret. Even that is too. And even then; that's why I'm keeping the guards present with orders to kill defectors or apparent defectors amongst the technicians. And said technicians won't have any real way of leaving the plantations -- so people would have to come to them. The guards would be kept under rotation to ensure bribery is less effective, and I could also implement other forms of information security (listening devices of various technical levels -- radio transmitters or secret listening tubes -- and other forms of spying. Honeypot traps to test the loyalty of both guards and technicians by giving fake opportunities to defect, etc., etc..) And lastly -- again, I think you're strongly overestimating the amount of time it would take to first notice the manufacture, second plan to adopt them, third achieve the stealing of the tech, and fourth manage to do so at any scale at all. Especially since unlike anyone stealing these techs, I would know what to look for and their value. Which means I could engage in secret sabotage and assassination to eliminate/foil early imitators.
Technological advantage isn't about secrecy. It can't be about secrecy. What it is about is the rapid leverage of gaps in technical competence. All of my efforts above aren't meant to stop the spread of the new techniques -- that's literally impossible. Instead, they are meant to impede their spread outside of my controlled areas of influence.
If I wanted to be especially absurd I could also use things like aerosolized oxytocin to artificially increase the loyalty of my guards and technicians to me personally. Plus, I could select guards whose children I'd saved the lives of. (Remember; I'm planning to use medicine to increase devotion/personal loyalty amongst the peasantry.) And so on.
It does, if you want your pistons to actually fit inside your cylinders once the smiths make each part separately..
There would not be any pistons. Are you simply not familiar with aeolipiles or other forms of turbine engines?
Did their mystery cults paint big targets on themselves, by proclaiming, "look, I've got a flying machine" ?
I find this inscrutable. What's your point? What are you driving at? Why is this a relevant thing to be saying/asking?
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.)
Fair enough, but this doesn't eliminate the problem of Avaritus, it just pushes it toward a later stage, and makes him a bigger player (since, by the time you encounter him, you will be a bigger player).
Many of the simpler techniques I'd want to get spreading out...
You seem to be assuming, throughout this thread, that your knowledge is unique, and so are yo...
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.