One brief excerpt from my essay on Life After Google.
I also think that decentralization is important for liberty. I once hoped that a decentralized Internet would enhance freedom. Now, I am inclined to see lack of appreciation for liberty as a fundamentally human problem, not a technological one. Decentralized computer architecture solves some problems, but it creates others.
Elsewhere, David Henderson offers extensive comments on the recent WSJ interview with Gilder.
From the interview with Gilder:
“Machines can’t be minds,” he says. “Information theory shows that.” Citing Claude Shannon, the American mathematician acknowledged as the father of information theory, Mr. Gilder says that “information is surprise. Creativity always comes as a surprise to us.
————
Shannon is right about surprise. He is wrong that machines cannot be surprised. A computer neural net can be surprised by a sudden change in stimulus, and it will re-configure itself. What machines do not do is initiate a hormonal response to surprise, they just consume a bit more electricity in the re-configuration.
This myth is back to consciousness, which is greatly over rated. We train ourselves with repeated trials, then get discomfort when we have to retrain. Training via repeated trials is simple, and there is not much more to consciousness than training.
I think an underappreciated part of this story is spam (and to lesser extent, malware). In my opinion, spam drove us from the decentralised internet and into the embrace of the walled gardens. There is no good decentralised solution to spam yet, and until there is, I think the walled gardens are here to stay.
I think it’s not that humans don’t appreciate liberty, but that chaos of spam forces us to choose a stronger form of order than we would consider ideal.
I tried to switch away from Google for email and blog hosting last year. I realised that Google had spoiled me. Spam messages got through the filter, and good messages were tagged as spam. After a few months, it got so annoying that I switched back to Google.
In terms of modern reality, I would say the 2008 Financial Crisis really has made a significant mood change to our nation in terms everybody is a lot grumpy than anytime since the 1970s. Most people are doing better than ever before but both elites, economic and political, and average people are a lot angrier than ever before. (Yes Trumpism is here but they were a lot of economically well off Trump voters.)
1) I know older capitalist are worried that the young generation embracing socialism but I am wondering why capitalism is not thriving for young people. People support capitalism a lot more when everybody is succeeding. Again why wages stagnant for decades.
2) I wish libertarians truly hate college debt but what are they doing about it. I see lots of how bad student debt is but nothing to make working class lives better. Student debt is bad but the job market is so competitive a college degree protects you when your job is automated at 35.
3) Again, I am hearing lots of moaning about family formation and marriage but I am wondering why people should rush in before 25. Maybe all societies should become Singapore where most families have 0 or 1 child. however, without a source of cheap labor doesn’t that hurt capitalism in the long run?
4) I am with you in general that the large internet companies are not going away and in fact will probably grow in power and money. (as they conquer international markets). At the heart of everything, it is remarkable that internet markets with low barriers of entry often settle on monopoly/ologopoly models so quickly and easily. I think learning systems is a pain and once people learn it, they want to learn a different one. The internet seems like the ultimate QWERTY keyboard reality. (Yes I know it probably better with manual typewriters where keys would often tangle.)
Finding it a bit hard to get too worked up about the wonderful world of the internet. The Gods of Technology can do what they want but if they annoy me too much I can shut off the damn machine. My life improved greatly when I deleted my facebook and twitter accounts years ago and I have no doubt it would improve even more if I just forsook the rest of the internet as well. So far the Lords of Programming have not been able to infiltrate my tomato patch. There is a public library down the road. I think it would be a lot easier to do without the web altogether than you might think. When the plusses and minusses hit a certain point, that day may come.
Your tomato patch isn’t an island. Politicians and journalists wage their campaigns and soon enough it affects you too. Journalists are obsessed with the idiocies on Twitter. People share memes on Facebook and a year later some destructive legislation has been passed because journalists and politicians get their talking points from clickbait and from viral videos.
Corbyn and Trump and Trudeau are all internet celebrities and it’s not going to be enough to personally turn your back on the world you live in because Twitter and Facebook are a big, destructive part of that world.
The tensions between optimization and robustness are fundamental problems across all domains.
Arnold Kling wrote:
“I am inclined to see lack of appreciation for liberty as a fundamentally human problem, not a technological one.”
I have always thought that American freedom was an historical accident. I call it an accident according to the human understanding of that word, since I believe that a higher power governs these things. Our ancestors were freer than we are, not by nature, but by the accident of being thrown onto a continent in which they were literally forced to be self-governing.
Of course, one can immediately point to the centralized governance of Spanish America as a reason why having an empty continent does not have to result in human freedom. But all this observation reveals is that the American historical accident begins even earlier, with a British culture that then produced the non-governance of its colonies, or at least a relative absence of governance. We’re not talking absolutes here, but differences of degree that produce huge differences in outcome.
I look at decentralized software the same way. The French invented Minitel, remember? A typical French solution: the internet as a government run kiosk. Then ask yourself whether there would have even been a personal computer revolution, or an internet, without America? The answer is no. This is why the present trend to a radical decentralization, in which there are no central authorities, is so radically important. A new continent is opening before our eyes that will again force us to be free.
Unless, of course, the centralizers can stop it. Or subvert it.
But they don’t hold all the cards.
“Now, I am inclined to see lack of appreciation for liberty as a fundamentally human problem, not a technological one. Decentralized computer architecture solves some problems, but it creates others.”
It’s actually the fact that in trading off between liberty or security, more people more often want more security — and are willing to vote for those who have plausible schemes to increase security. Even if those schemes, like socialism, have failed and failed before.
When you say liberty, note that people want both types of Freedom: to act, and do what they want (adult Freedom); AND to be “free” from responsibility, to NOT pay for mistakes, neither their own, nor those of others (child Freedom). The desire to avoid paying for mistakes allows them to support reducing the freedom of others to make mistakes. Regulations, like laws against drunk driving, are to reduce the amount of mistakes made, and the amounts that must be paid for the mistakes.
Similarly, while “There’s No Free Lunch” — everybody has had a lunch or hundred that somebody else has paid for, so for them, it WAS a free lunch. That’s what lots of folks are looking for; most are far more willing to pay with ad attention, which they can limit, in order to get Google / Facebook services.