Monthly Archives: November 2017

Organizing the causes of the Industrial Revolution

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Mark Koyama writes,

Consider some prominent views about what caused the British Industrial Revolution. At the risk of grossly simplifying matters we can put them into three bins.

…Third, there are those who argue that ultimately only innovation can explain the transition to modern economic growth. This is the position of the majority of economic historians. Label them group 3. However, this third group is divided between those who seek to explain the increase in innovation in purely economic terms (3a) and those who see this as an impossible task and argue that the answer has to be sought elsewhere, perhaps in something that can be broadly defined as culture (3b).

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The essay is about whether Rome could have had an industrial revolution. Recommended.

The Servant Aggregators

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Several years ago, I asked,

In an economy where some folks are very rich and many folks are unemployed, why are there not more personal servants?

Recently, someone pointed me to Umair Haque’s column from two years ago.

I’m going to call it a Servitude Bubble. For the simple reason that it is largely based on creating armies of servants. You can call them whatever buzzwords you like — “tech-enabled always-on super-hustling freelance personal brand capitalists”. But the truth is simpler. The stuff of the Servitude Bubble makes a small number of people something like neofeudal masters, lords with a corncucopia of on-demand just-in-time luxury services at their fingertips. But only by making a very large number of people glorified neo-servants…butlers, maids, chauffeurs, waiters, etcetera.

Dog walkers, Uber drivers, etc. My question was answered.

But it’s not just a few rich people with access to these services.

Telepresence

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I put up a short science fiction story on Medium about telepresence using augmented reality. You may wonder why.

1. Aaron Ross Powell put in a strong plug for Medium.

2. I remember when Robert Metcalfe once was asked what would be the Internet’s ultimate killer application. He replied, “telepresence.”

3. When I posted the other day about the shortfalls in technology relative to Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, it made me think of my own questionable prediction, Headsets, which I’m still longing for in a way. Think of this as an upated version of that essay. Sort of.

VDH versus Yuval Levin

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Victor Davis Hanson writes,

And yet, warts and all, the Trump presidency on all fronts is all that now stands in the way of the completion of what was started in 2009.

We are no longer in the late 1950s era of liberal reform. It is now a postmodern world of intolerance and lockstep orthodoxy.

Etc. I prefer Levin’s view of the world, but I recognize that I could be wrong about that. It would be interesting to see a debate between the two viewpoints that is empirical rather than merely rhetorical.

Bob Lutz thinks as I do

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The GM executive writes,

in 15 to 20 years — at the latest — human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways.

The tipping point will come when 20 to 30 percent of vehicles are fully autonomous. Countries will look at the accident statistics and figure out that human drivers are causing 99.9 percent of the accidents.

Lutz thinks that this will mean the end of the automobile as a household-owned transportation apparatus. Read the whole thing. Pointer from James Pethokoukis.

Two different problems in education

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I liked the distinction drawn by a commenter.

distinguish two situations. One, the student wants to learn about something, because she finds it interesting or wants to use it for something. She wants to learn and wants the knowledge to stay with her.

In the other situation, the student is not inherently interested and/or does not expect to use the information. The student may well want to learn enough for long enough to pass but doesn’t mind if all that knowledge just decays away once the course (or the test!) is over.

Right. The first situation calls for providing content and feedback. The second situation calls for providing reward and punishment (assuming that we know what is best for the student). Note that the reward can be psychic reward, such as the student feeling closer affinity with a teacher that the student respects.

Spotify >> Facebook

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I think that Spotify is much more satisfying than Facebook. Here is why:

1. The revenue model. Spotify has a free version that includes ads and a subscription version without ads. I have always hated the advertising model on the Internet. I much prefer the subscription model, but the subscription should give you access to a ton of stuff, not just one newspaper’s content or one record label’s music. Spotify gives me almost everything I would ever search for in music, and I am happy to pay the monthly fee to support that, to get rid of ads, and to be allowed to download music so I can use it on road trips.

2. Better sorting. On Spotify, I use playlists, so that I know what I am getting. If Spotify were like Facebook, it would send me Israeli dance music when I’m in the mood for 60’s rock music.

3. Better filtering. If I’m interested in a friend’s travel photos, but she puts up ten posts about why she hates Trump for every post on travel, I get stuck wading through all the Trump posts. Spotify doesn’t make me worry about having to filter out lots of crud.

4. Better recommendations. Spotify’s recommendation methods include: “discover weekly,” a set of songs that have some similarity to what I listen to, and these are often good; playlists that are similar to mine, and some of these are excellent; playlists of other users, including one friend of mine who has some ones that I really, really like.

Facebook took of in part because it satisfied a desire for people to engage with their real identities, which allows you to do things that you cannot do on the anonymous Internet. But that is not such an advantage when you have smart phones to establish identity. Does anyone think that we’ll be using the “log in with Facebook” feature when we have smart phones with facial recognition?

I think that Facebook should try to become the Spotify of social media and provide users with capabilities that they would be willing to pay a subscription fee to have. If not Facebook, then I hope other companies try it.

Reality vs. Kurzweil’s expectations

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One way to track scientific and technological progress is to compare outcomes to predictions that were made by futurists. So I pulled out my copy of Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, written 20 years ago, which has predictions for 2009 and every decade thereafter. Are there predictions that he made for 2019 that came true sooner? Are there predictions that he made for 2009 that came true much later?

I will get into some specifics below, but some general points that occur to me from re-examining these predictions are the following.

1. Relative to his predictions, I can think of few “upsides” (something that appeared sooner or turned out better than predicted) and many “downsides.” Most of his predictions for 2009 have come to pass only in the past few years, and some are still remote. But to offer a more positive take, the fact that most of his milestones for 2009 have been hit as of 2017 is probably a better outcome than most other prognosticators would have been willing to bet on in 1999.

Roughly 50 percent of his predictions for 2019 now appear likely to be realized between 2025 and 2030, and the remaining 50 percent ought to be pushed back even farther.

2. I sense that a lot of progress that he expected has been held back by ergonomic issues. For example, language translation software may be effective, but people find ear buds and microphones to be uncomfortable. Similarly, augmented reality has been held back by the poor ergonomics of what goes over your eyes and ears. Collaboration across distance is not nearly as effortless as Kurzweil anticipated, even though software firms have put a lot of resources into “collaboration tools.”

Maybe more venture capital resources ought to be focused on finding breakthroughs in ergonomics.

3. Progress also has been slow in developing applications that react to the emotional state of human users. This is particularly important if computers are going to contribute outstanding value in education.

4. There is considerable cultural drag. Kurzweil predicted that by 2019 there would be parts of the road system dedicated exclusively to self-driving cars. One can argue that the technology is here to do that, but the culture is not ready to accept the idea.

I think that this cultural drag is becoming increasingly important. William Gibson’s saying that “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed” is even more apt than when he said it. Continue reading →

Stranger = Danger

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James Bridle writes,

Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level.

Actually, trying to excerpt from the piece is almost pointless. I needed to go through the whole thing to really understand the issue, and my guess is you have to read the whole thing, too.

Toward the end, he writes,

It presents many and complexly entangled dangers, including that, just as with the increasing focus on alleged Russian interference in social media, such events will be used as justification for increased control over the internet, increasing censorship, and so on. This is not what many of us want.

My take is this:

1. The Internet has always been vulnerable to frustrating forms of abuse. Email spam is still with us, for crying out loud. The main culprit is anonymity. TCP/IP was not designed to have the network identify the sender. Instead, to the extent that identity is resolved, it is by the recipient. So spam filters are the best you can do against spam. Getting rid of spam altogether would require a more expensive protocol that puts identity checks somewhere in the network, and it seems that the cost of transmitting all the spam and filtering it out is less than the cost of putting identity checks into the network. At least, that is my understanding.

2. “On the Internet, no one knows your a dog” has always been both a bug and a feature. It is a lot easier to engage in abuse if you can remain anonymous than if you have to reveal your identity to get into the game. But if you forfeit anonymity, then you allow governments and corporations to engage in surveillance. You also increase the potential for censorship and stifling of opinion.

3. Facebook and LinkedIn created environments where you can share your identity rather than hide it, and that serves a real need.

4. In general, I can imagine a situation in which some regions of cyberspace allow anonymity and others do not. You will know that when you enter a region that allows anonymity that it will not be well policed. It will be like walking into a bad neighborhood at night.

5. It strikes me that the “fake news” problem on Facebook shows that it has been straddling both regions. Why is it easy to spam Facebook? My guess is that a lot of Facebook users would prefer a good neighborhood, so that either Facebook will get rid of anonymous content providers or lose out to a competitor who does. Same with Kids’ YouTube.

6. Some people are really against all forms of surveillance. They want the regions in cyberspace that allow anonymity to be almost ubiquitous. I think that is neither practical nor desirable. I lean more toward the David Brin approach to the problem of surveillance. But if the social norms and institutions support censorship and suppression, then the “transparent society” won’t work.

Andre Staltz on the new tech business environment

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I promised a post on this piece. Here goes. He writes,

GOOG’s goal is to gather as much rich data as possible, and build AI. Their mission is to have an AI provide timely and personalized information to us, not specifically to have websites provide information. Any GOOG concerted efforts are aligned to the AI mission.

Try a search for mortgage calculator. Once you scroll past the ads, what you get is. . .a mortgage calculator! It used to be that all you got were links to web sites. The new approach is very convenient if you want to figure out a monthly payment, but not so nice for all those web sites that put up mortgage calculators to try to attract visitors.

This suggests that Google has reached the cannibalization phase of the O’Reilly cycle. Staltz seems to think that it has. But if Google eats all of the revenue without sending you to anyone’s web site, then I presume people will stop putting up web sites. And in that case Google is going to have less new data to mine to produce answers to queries.

He speculates,

There would be no more economical incentive for smaller businesses to have independent websites, and a gradual migration towards Facebook Pages would make more sense.

Later,

There is a tendency at GOOG-FB-AMZN to bypass the Web which is motivated by user experience and efficient communication, not by an agenda to avoid browsers. In the knowledge internet and the commerce internet, being efficient to provide what users want is the goal. In the social internet, the goal is to provide an efficient channel for communication between people. … Already today, most people on the internet communicate with other people via a mobile app, not via a browser.

Some random thoughts:

1. For me, it’s starting to sink in that this is not 1997 any more. Smart phones are more closed and proprietary than was the Web. At this point, artificial intelligence and machine learning seem to be mainframe-like, favoring established giants, rather than PC-like or Web-like, favoring upstarts.

2. Google, Amazon, and Facebook may already have entered the cannibalization phase.

3. Content creators have always whined that they deserve more income. But the idea that “content is king” was baloney sandwich from the get-go. I can remember almost twenty years ago hearing Ted Leonsis (AOL) say that “convenience is king.” And now Staltz is telling us that the Web is just not convenient enough to cut it these days. Facebook is going to help us connect over mobile devices. Google is going to give us information directly. Amazon is going to enable us to order stuff without using a personal computer.

4. My counter to Staltz’s dystopian forecast is to suggest that effervescence is king. Effervescence in tech means that lots of talented people are working on stuff. Personal computers were effervescent in the 1980s. The Web was effervescent in the 1990s and early 2000s. The smart phone became effervescent when Apple encouraged app development. Cannibalization and walled-garden strategies kill off effervescence, and when you kill off effervescence, that leaves talented, driven people with a need to find an outlet. At some point, they will succeed, and then today’s giants will be cut down to size.