We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Michael Jennings quotes Douglas Adams speculating that curing all disease will leave us bored.
…total cures had a lot of unpleasant side effects. Boredom, listlessness…
A typical response to any suggestion of labour saving devices or increased automation or robots in factories is that this will lead to people being bored and not having enough to do.
Related, I think, to this, is the worry that if longevity technology works then the planet will be overpopulated and anyway who would want to live forever? Surely one would get bored. This is exactly what happened in the comments to a Gizmodo article about research into making stem cells from normal blood cells.
Live forever and do what? Continue to work six days a week to pay for your life-extension medical plan? That doesn’t seem worth it.
I propose that people will not get bored so easily. The removal of one set of problems simply makes the next set of problems more urgent. Humans are infinitely imaginative at finding problems to solve. There will always be challenges. I present as evidence Paul Miller who has taken a year off the Internet. He uses computers but does not send emails or read Twitter or surf the web. He writes articles for the Verge by giving them to his editor on a USB stick. He does not read the comments to his articles. People think he is mad and wonder how he copes. He makes interesting observations.
Without the internet, everything seemed new to me. Every untweeted observation of daily life was more sacred. Every conversation was face to face or a phone call, and filled with a hundred fresh nuances. The air smelled better. My sentences seemed less convoluted. I lost a bit of weight.
[…]
But now that not having internet is no longer new, just normal, the zen calm is gone. I don’t wake with the sunrise while chirping birds pull back the covers. I still have a job. I feel pressure and stress and frustration. I get lonely and bored. My articles aren’t always submitted on time. Sometimes my sentences aren’t good.
I’m just stock Paul Miller. No more Not-Using-The-Internet custom skin; I’m just myself. And it’s not all sunshine and epiphanies.
[…]
But I’m still Paul.
“I just wasn’t made for these times,” sing The Beach Boys. “Sometimes I feel very sad,” goes the refrain, and sometimes I do, indeed, feel very sad. But after switching myself to a pre-internet era, I can assure you “these times” don’t have much to do with it. It’s just, you know, life.
Not having the Internet has not changed Paul. He does the same things; some are easier and some are harder. This means that in the reverse, gaining the Internet will not change Paul either. His challenges will be different in some ways and the same in others. I think the same would be true of any other technology. There may be net changes in productivity but increased productivity does not lead to boredom.
I suspect the mistake made by those who fear solving too many problems is an assumption that nothing else will change either. If we are all perfectly healthy we will attempt the same feats that we attempt now but find them too easy. Of course this is ludicrous; we will attempt more challenging feats. If we can build everything we need today with robots at the push of a button we will get bored. Of course not, we will build more stuff.
If we can live for 10,000 years we will overpopulate the planet and run out of things to do. Of course not. We will probably only have children every few hundred years (plenty of time to develop hydroponics and colonise space) and in the meantime we can lead as many different lives as we like.
Wise words from Zed A. Shaw:
To me indoctrination is the enemy of education because it creates people who can’t think for themselves and can only function in the culture they’ve been raised. It makes them into little mental slaves that can’t question what’s going on and see the world for what it really is.
Instead I want people who will question the way things are, try to find out how things are really built, explore the world and build new stuff without worrying about whether they’ll anger some community. They can’t do this if their thinking is constrained by these arbitrary social norms that only exist to keep them in line with what the community wants, or worse what the leaders of the community want.
When you teach people social norms as if they are universal truths you are actually indoctrinating them not educating them.
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Then again, this is probably the reason these social mores are enforced and taught. Teaching social mores as universal truths keeps people dependent on […] use of them.
Keep in mind though I’m not saying teaching these social mores is wrong and should be avoided. I’m saying teaching them as if they are the universal truths is bad. I teach them too, but I teach them as if they are just arbitrary bullshit you need…
I am probably being unfair by quoting him so out of context. Shaw is writing about programming. But still.
Almost a SQOTD, but Guy beat me to it:
The technical and economic advantages of coattailing on the economies of scale of the trillion-dollar mobile-phone industry are astounding. If you want to understand why the personal-drone revolution is happening now, look no farther than your pocket.
That is Chris Anderson in Wired writing about how automated flying aircraft happen to need just the same sensors and processors that are found in smartphones, and hobbyists and increasingly serious people like farmers surveying their crops are taking advantage of this.
I suspect his first sentence applies more generally.
This is a long and detailed review of a gadget which might be more at home on a specialist tech blog than on Samizdata, but it serves also as a snapshot of the world of mobile electronics, a world that is perhaps less encumbered by regulation than is usual, which might explain the rate of improvement.
By far the most exciting developments in consumer electronics right now are in mobile devices, in particular smartphones. System-on-chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia are cutting prices and transistor sizes while increasing performance such that a new generation of devices with significantly improved capabilities comes along about every 18 months or so. A lot of learning is going on about what kinds of devices work best. The original iPhone had a 4-inch touch screen and only one button. Since then physical keyboards have somewhat gone out of fashion, tablets have appeared in various sizes, netbooks have disappeared, ultrabooks have appeared, and phones have got bigger, in contrast to a few years ago when everyone was trying to make them smaller. The point is that no-one really knows which kinds of devices fit in best with people’s lives and which do not. With formerly successful companies dying out, capitalism is mercilessly finding out.
No company is having more fun finding out than Asus. They pioneered the netbook — a small, cheap laptop — with their Eee PC. They combined the tablet with the netbook with their Transformer series of devices by making the screen detachable from the keyboard. And just recently they have taken this idea to a new extreme by sticking a smartphone inside the tablet. → Continue reading: Asus Padfone
There is controversy over empty seats at sold out events at the Olympics. People who could not get tickets are annoyed to see them.
The way that tickets were sold is odd. I know people who applied for tickets in ony the events they were interested in and were allocated no tickets. I know other people who applied for lots of events and got tickets they were not interested in. It would not surprise me if some of those empty seats belong to people who decided against going to events they had tickets for because they were not interested enough. The tickets were sold this way to stop the prices getting so high that poor people could not afford them. The tickets can not be transferred for the same reason.
The trouble is that you either have a market or you have a lottery. There are no other choices, no matter how you try to dress it up. The trouble with lotteries is they do not allocate resources efficiently.
I recently had this conversation on Twitter:
Rupert Murdoch said something and I replied. Someone else overheard and I sent him a link to Madsen Pirie’s series of videos about economics. Well, how would you answer that question in 144 characters? Now one more person knows that there is such a thing as Austrian economics.
I am not surprised to encounter people who have never heard of it. “Economists” are presented as a homogeneous blob by the mainstream media. It is nice to be asked about it and to have the answer be appreciated.
I have been playing on my Asus Padfone (review to follow) with an app called Zinio, which lets users buy electronic versions of print magazines. It came with a free sample of the November 2011 edition of India Today. As far as I can tell the magazine is run and written by Indians. According to Wikipedia it is published in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam as well as English. So I imagine it provides some kind of snapshot of the opinion and thinking that is going on inside India, rather than an outsider’s view. The cover story was about cotton farmers who are committing suicide because they can not pay their debts. A boxout by Dhiraj Nayyar entitled “Government the Culprit” reads:
Rahul Gandhi has a straightforward explanation for why farmers in Vidarbha commit suicide. Speaking on the perils of globalisation on October 18, he said, “The farmer in Vidarbha drinks pesticide as global prices tumble.” The economics behind the suicides of cotton farmers in Maharashtra is more complex.
Contrary to Rahul’s claim, it is the Government which has done more to depress the prices of cotton than the international market has. The Government has imposed numerous restrictions on the export of cotton since April 2010. This has led to a decline in the domestic price that farmers get.
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The use of genetically modified Bt cotton has been at the centre of controversy, with activists blaming it for the plight of farmers. Evidence suggests that Bt cotton has been good for farmers. A position paper published by the Foundation for Biotechnology Awareness and Education, an NGO, quotes five independent academic studies conducted after the launch of Bt cotton in 2002, that say that Bt cotton has increased yields in India by 30.9 per cent to 63 per cent. The increase in profit to farmers, according to these studies, has ranged from 50 to 110 per cent over non-Bt cotton.
This seems like sound thinking so far. I wonder why the Indian government would restrict export of cotton.
While Bt cotton is resistant to pests, it is not resistant to droughts. So crops still fail.
In normal course, farmers are entitled to a concessional financial bailout from the local administration or public sector banks. They don’t always get it. “The administration will only help if the farmer was using a seed approved by the Government. A lot of farmers use unapproved seeds”, says [agricultural economist Yoginder] Alagh. By his estimate, there are 20 large firms and anywhere between 200-300 small firms which sell Bt seeds. Most small firms aren’t Government approved but sell seeds cheap. Banks are usually reluctant to lend to indebted farmers because they lack collateral. That sends farmers into the clutches of moneylenders who charge between 25 and 40 per cent interest instead of the 7-9 per cent charged by banks. It isn’t Bt cotton that has failed farmers. It is the failure of back-up systems that has.
I am not so sure about this appeal to government bailout schemes. The implication here is that the government is wrong to favour seeds from certain suppliers. There may be rational reasons for doing so, such as seed quality, or there may be political connections with certain suppliers. I imagine that a free market solution, such as insurance or futures trading, would be more likely to make only rational and proportional restrictions. Could the government scheme be crowding out such solutions?
In any case, I am encouraged to detect a somewhat pro-free-market stance in a mainstream magazine in India.
I would like to think it means something that this story is in the Metro, a London free paper, but it is probably there only because the video of the robbers running for their lives is so funny. Other than where it appears, there is nothing unusual about the story. Gun use for self defense seems quite common.
3D printing is about to change the world, the news app on my tablet is telling me (as has Brian Micklethwait, for some time). Although the technique has been used for years for making 3D mock-ups, advances in materials mean that it is increasingly used to make the real thing.
But for years, the plastics and the metals that were used were just not robust enough to create a prototype that you could be proud of. They resembled paraffin waxes. They could create the parts, but those parts tended to be flimsy. Because the end product didn’t have structural integrity, the technology was really just for engineers who were creating a product in CAD and needed to see what it looked like in real life.
The revolution took place when companies like 3D Systems started designing radically new materials. (See the article Substance Before Form for more.)
They came up with nanocomposites, different blends of plastics, and different blends of powdered metals. They were then able to create a part that, if you held it in your hand, you’d think it was steel. You can throw it down on the ground against cement, and it looks and acts just like steel.
It’s impressive how the industry has graduated from flimsy, waxy plastics to very, very robust materials that can literally be used as a machine part, rather than just a prototype of a part.
The industry graduated from just being about rapid prototyping—i.e., this is going to be something that’s only an R & D function—to becoming a manufacturing strategy. We can make parts through this method, and the parts can go on the car, and the parts can go on the plane. They can also go in the human body, in the case of dental or medical applications.
Prosthetics is just the sort of area where one would expect 3D printing to take off first, because of the high degree of personalisation needed. Now it seems people are taking it seriously as a mass manufacturing method and investing their money in this direction. I expect this degree of personalisation will spread to other things, where it is merely desired.
A Slashdot post considers the value of an astronaut’s life:
…if you’re going to ‘give up four billion dollars to avoid a one in seven chance of killing an astronaut, you’re basically saying an astronaut’s life is worth twenty-eight billion dollars.’ He wrote about the same subject earlier this year for Reason magazine, saying, ‘Keeping astronauts safe merits significant expenditure. But how much? There is a potentially unlimited set of testing procedures, precursor missions, technological improvements, and other protective measures that could be implemented before allowing human beings to once again try flying to other worlds. Were we to adopt all of them, we would wind up with a human spaceflight program of infinite cost and zero accomplishment.
The very first comment:
Market economy to the rescue: As long as the kind of people you need keep queuing up to become astronauts, reduce costs. They are the ones whose asses are on the line, so if they’re OK with it, do it.
This makes sense to me. I wonder how the private space industry will handle this issue. Of course, there will be public relations and politics to consider.
In a Twitter discussion my interlocutor suggested that mobile phone companies were behaving like a cartel when it came to data roaming charges. I am not sure about that but in any case such arrangements are less stable in a free market than otherwise, because barriers to new entrants would be lower.
Yes, said my interlocutor, look how well a free market works for Barclays, Enron and privatised rail companies.
If that is what people think free markets look like then no wonder we are having a hard time winning arguments. It is not just a semantic problem where capitalism has been incorrectly defined, though that is part of it. People really believe that rail companies are free to do what they please, and so are banks. There is some doublethink going on because the same people will talk about the failure of regulators.
It might be useful to point to examples of truly free markets. This is quite difficult as almost everything is subject to some regulatory interference. I like to think that we are not starving mainly because of free markets in food production and distribution, but there are all sorts of EU food subsidies and it can be argued that large supermarket companies have an advantage when it comes to planning permission.
I can think of examples from industries that I am familiar with. Consumer electronics are, as far as I can tell, almost completely free from regulation except for some safety and, lately, power consumption requirements. The rapid advances that have resulted are plain to see. The same is true of the semiconductor industry. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Nvidia are achieving ever more performance and making ever smaller transistors, and governments have very little to say about it, thankfully.
I can also think of services like web hosting and cloud computing which have very low barriers to entry and the result is a vast choice of very low cost products for consumers. All this is very nice because we can point to the freedom and the competition and the lack of monopolies, cartels and other unpleasantness, and all the wondrous things that have resulted and would not result if bureaucrats were present to make sure everyone behaved themselves.
There has to more that is free than the tech industry, though. What am I missing?
The following extract from Permutation City by Greg Egan covers several topics of interest to Samizdatistas and the commentariat. The “Copies” are fully conscious computer simulations of people who have had their brains scanned. The first speaker, Durham, is a biological human trying to persuade the Copy, Thomas, that in the long term he is in danger of being switched off, even though the computer he runs on is private property, by governments claiming the moral high ground.
‘…The privileged class of Copies will grow larger, more powerful — and more threatening to the vast majority of people, who still won’t be able to join them. The costs will come down, but not drastically – just enough to meet some of the explosion in demand from the executive class, once they throw off their qualms, en masse. Even in secular Europe, there’s a deeply ingrained prejudice that says dying is the responsible, the moral thing to do. There’s a Death Ethic – and the first substantial segment of the population abandoning it will trigger a huge backlash. A small enough elite of giga-rich Copies is accepted as a freak show; tycoons can get away with anything, they’re not expected to act like ordinary people. But just wait until the numbers go up by a factor of ten.’
Thomas had heard it all before. ‘We may be unpopular for a while. I can live with that. But you know, even now we’re vilified far less than people who strive for organic hyper-longevity — transplants, cellular rejuvenation, whatever — because at least we’re no longer pushing up the cost of health care, competing for the use of overburdened medical facilities. Nor are we consuming natural resources at anything like the rate we did when we were alive. If the technology improves sufficiently, the environmental impact of the wealthiest Copy could end up being less than that of the most ascetic living human. Who’ll have the high moral ground then? We’ll be the most ecologically sound people on the planet.’
Durham smiled. The puppet. ‘Sure — and it could lead to some nice ironies if it ever came true. But even low environmental impact might not seem so saintly, when the same computing power could be used to save tens of thousands of lives through weather control.’
‘Operation Butterfly has inconvenienced some of my fellow Copies very slightly. And myself not at all.’
‘Operation Butterfly is only the beginning. Crisis management, for a tiny part of the planet. Imagine how much computing power it would take to render sub-Saharan Africa free from drought.’
‘Why should I imagine that, when the most modest schemes are still unproven? And even if weather control turns out to be viable, more supercomputers can always be built. It doesn’t have to be a matter of Copies versus flood victims.’
‘There’s a limited supply of computing power right now, isn’t there? Of course it will grow – but the demand, from Copies, and for weather control, is almost certain to grow faster. Long before we get to your deathless utopia, we’ll hit a bottleneck — and I believe that will bring on a time when Copies are declared illegal. Worldwide. If they’ve been granted human rights, those rights will be taken away. Trusts and foundations will have their assets confiscated. Supercomputers will be heavily policed. Scanners – and scan files – will be destroyed. It may be forty years before any of this happens – or it may be sooner. Either way, you need to be prepared.’
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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