Category Archives: technology and the future

Facebook and moral dyad theory

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Ari David Blaff writes,

while valid concerns about app-tracking, facial recognition, and police surveillance remain a legitimate topic of political and journalistic interest, the other half of the debate is being neglected. The emergence of new cultural norms has seen citizens broadcast aspects of their personal lives that had hitherto remained out of public view. Missing from the latest eruption of public outrage targeting Big Tech and Mark Zuckerberg is an acknowledgement that we voluntarily agreed to surrender our privacy and that we may never get it back.

I relate this to moral dyad theory. We tend to simplify a complex situation by identifying one participant as having agency and the other participant as helplessly being imposed upon. So we think of Facebook the corporation as the former and the users of Facebook as the latter.

See my review of The Mind Club.

Hard tech and soft tech

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Noah Smith writes,

notice that China isn’t cracking down on all of its technology companies. Huawei, for example, still seems to enjoy the government’s full backing. The government is going hell-bent-for-leather to try to create a world-class domestic semiconductor industry, throwing huge amounts of money at even the most speculative startups. And it’s still spending heavily on A.I. It’s not technology that China is smashing — it’s the consumer-facing internet software companies that Americans tend to label “tech”.

He goes on to say that if you want your country to have a strong military capability, you need hard technologies–network hardware, artificial intelligence, etc. You don’t need Facebook.

when China’s leaders look at what kind of technologies they want the country’s engineers and entrepreneurs to be spending their effort on, they probably don’t want them spending that effort on stuff that’s just for fun and convenience. They probably took a look at their consumer internet sector and decided that the link between that sector and geopolitical power had simply become too tenuous to keep throwing capital and high-skilled labor at it. And so, in classic CCP fashion, it was time to smash.

Technology and the future

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Eli Dourado has a nice roundup.

Both Moderna and BioNTech have personalized vaccine candidates targeting cancer. Although called a “cancer vaccine,” the treatment is only administered once the subject has cancer—it isn’t preventative. The companies use an algorithm to analyze the genetic sequences of the tumor and the patient’s healthy cells and predict which molecules could be used to generate a strong immune response against the cancer.

He is optimistic about the Hyperloop. Peter Diamindis is, also.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The tone is optimistic. Years ago, I noted that the print publication that gives me the most optimism is Technology Review. The one that gives me the most pessimism is Regulation.

We can compare Eli’s post to what I wrote in 2005.

I wrote,

Is the new trend rate of productivity growth 3 percent or higher?

Obviously, it wasn’t. I was thinking about labor productivity, which is not the same as TFP, which Eli wants to look at. All productivity measures are dubious, in my opinion.

I wrote that cognitive neuroscience was the field of the future. I think I was wrong. It gets no mention in Eli’s survey.

I quoted the U.S. Department of Energy to the effect that by 2015 solar power would be competitive with traditional sources of energy. Eli says

The 2010s were the wind and solar decade. We observed stunning declines in the cost of both

I wrote about optimism regarding cancer therapy. We have seen some improvement, but “the emperor of all maladies” is still a formidable killer.

Finally, I wrote that mainstream media were losing attention as well as credibility. Actually, they figured out how to hang on to attention by dialing up the outrage and clickbait. They decided not to bother with credibility.

If I were a billionaire, instead of wasting money on non-profits, I would buy some land and try to build a start-up city. Build roads that work well with autonomous vehicles, and only allow autonomous vehicles–visitors have to leave their ordinary cars in a parking lot outside the city. Design and build an electric grid optimized for today’s technology. Make 5G available everywhere. Implement a set of protocols that allow all sorts of drones to operate without colliding with one another or with humans.

The key to a start-up city might be making it easy for people to interact with people from other cities. This could mean rapid transit in and out, or it could mean the use of augmented reality.

Perhaps in the future cities that have major impediments to livability will be at a disadvantage. It may prove easier to give people in other cities the amenities that they appreciate about NY or SF than it is for NY or SF to escape their downward spirals. Boston, Chicago, and Minneapolis will have a harder time convincing people to live with winter.

That is not a sure-fire prediction–it may prove no more prescient than my 2005 blog post–but I offer it as a possible future scenario.

Depopulation

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Glenn T. Stanton writes,

No fewer than 23 leading nations—including Japan, Spain, South Korea, and Italy—will see their population cut in half by 2100. China’s will drop by a stunning 48 percent. . .

. . .Another 34 countries will see dramatic population declines by 25 to 50 percent by 2100. Beyond this, the projected fertility rates in 183 of 195 countries will not be high enough to maintain current populations by the century’s end. That is called negative population growth and once it starts, it probably won’t stop. These scholars predict that sub-Saharan and North Africa, as well as the Middle East, will be the only super regions fertile enough to maintain their populations without dramatic immigration policies.

The article refers to a Gates Foundation projection.

Professor Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine and head of the Gates study, told the BBC, “I find people laugh it off… they can’t imagine it could be true, they think women will just decide to have more kids. If you can’t [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears.”

Have a Happy New Year.

Digital culture

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L. M. Sacasas writes,

Certain features of the self in an enchanted world are now reemerging in the Digital City. Digital technologies influence us and exert causal power over our affairs. In the Digital City, we are newly aware of operating within a field of inscrutable forces over which we have little to no control. Though these forces may be benevolent, they are just as often malevolent, undermining our efforts and derailing our projects. We often experience digital technologies as determining our weal and woe, acting upon us independently of our control and without our understanding. We are vulnerable, and our autonomy is compromised.

I describe the essay as a collection of loose threads. Many are interesting, but none are sufficiently well developed for my taste. Still, I think that the basic theme strikes me as increasingly important: our media environment is novel, and this has a significant impact on individual psychology and the culture at large.

Sacasas writes of our “re-enchantment” in this media environment, as we feel ourselves captive of invisible forces. He refers to algorithms as these hidden forces. But I think that the belief in systemic racism is another example of re-enchantment.

His thoughts on the anachronistic nature of fact-checking struck me as spot-on.

Whose course will scale?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

My fall semester teaching was assigned to be online even before Covid-19 came along. The enrollment for that class – Principles of Economics – will be much larger, with hundreds more students, but with some assistance, I expect to handle it.

Suppose that none of the top tier colleges can have on-campus learning in the fall. If a lot of students are taking courses on line, then they should be able to choose courses from colleges other than the one in which they are enrolled. As an online student, your best approach might be to take econ with Tyler, engineering from someone at Carnegie-Mellon, journalism from someone at Northwestern, etc.

The online course market could end up looking like the textbook market. The per-student cost should fall to about the cost of a textbook. The market structure will tend toward winners-take most. If Tyler is one of the winners, he could have a few hundred thousand students.

In the online environment, having a good traditional brand, like “Mankiw,” will not matter much. Your competitors have been focused on the online product and persistently iterating and improving it.

With on-location college, the school can foist on you an inexperienced teaching assistant who can barely speak comprehensible English and charge your parents a fortune for the privilege. I don’t think that model will be viable if colleges go on line.

[UPDATE: Read Scott Galloway’s take, which is somewhat different from mine, but is still based on the view that online education scales differently from in-person education.

In ten years, it’s feasible to think that MIT doesn’t welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000. What that means is the top-20 universities globally are going to become even stronger. What it also means is that universities Nos. 20 to 50 are fine. But Nos. 50 to 1,000 go out of business or become a shadow of themselves.

}

The medium is the mess

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Adam Garfinkle writes,

The deep-reading brain excels at making connections among analogical, inferential, and empathetic modes of reasoning, and knows how to associate them all with accumulated background knowledge. That constellation of sources and connections is what enables not just strategic thinking, but original thinking more broadly. So could it be that the failures of the American political class to fashion useful solutions to public- and foreign-policy challenges turn not just on polarization and hyper-partisanship, but also on the strong possibility that many of these non-deep readers are no longer able to think below the surface tension of a tweet?

If the printing press helped produce the Enlightenment, then perhaps the iPhone is producing the Endarkenment.

A transit utopia?

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Kevin Fisher says to build a city from scratch in order to have an efficient road system for self-driving cars.

The grid would have no intersections because the east-west grid would pass under the north-south grid. When the cars switch directions they would use a ramp similar to a freeway. In fact the whole grid would work like a freeway with no stopping or stop lights. All the cars would travel the same rate of speed so merging would be effortless. You could go from point A to point B without ever stopping. Without the stop and go of normal travel the travel times would be greatly reduced. It combines the practical grid layout of city streets and the speed of freeways, giving you the best of both worlds. The amount of traffic allowed on the grid at any one time would be centrally controlled by computer. This would eliminate traffic jams and any slowing of travel times. The pricing to use the system would be dynamic, if you wanted to travel at a popular time you would pay more and you would pay less in times with less demand.

He suggests putting the grid underground. And it would be very expensive to do that under an existing city, so you have to build a new city.

I don’t think the “field of dreams” model works for creating a paradise of any sort, whether it pertains to transportation or for libertarian utopia.

Crime caught on video?

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[Note: askblog had an existence prior to the virus crisis. I still schedule occasional posts like this one.]
Rafael A. Mangual writes,

the increased rate of plea bargaining in the United States might also reflect the impact of technological advancements on the likelihood of a guilty verdict. For example, it is now estimated that 80 percent of crimes involve video evidence, which is largely a function of the increase in the number of both public and private security cameras in use, as well as the increase in the use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) (which, by 2016, were used by nearly half of all law enforcement agencies in the U.S.). Interestingly, a meta-analysis of the literature on BWCs noted a study finding that 93% of prosecutors reported using BWC footage “primarily to prosecute citizens.” That meta-analysis also noted empirical support for the proposition that the presence of BWC footage increases the chances of guilty pleas (in addition to guilty verdicts, and the filing of criminal charges).

His argument is that technology is making it easier to prove guilt, and that is reducing the incentive for accused criminals to go to trial.